srochford

I don't disagree with you but I suspect that the majority of the population quite like having a long break at Christmas and you're unlikely to carry them with you. I appreciate that you can see that you're being forced to take a "religious" holiday but I don't think that there are many people who see it like that - it's just a time for people to waste money, have parties, see friends etc and anyone trying to change that will be seen as a killjoy :-)

Set PHP to use paging (not the same as setting the maxpagesize) the code below is vbscript rather than PHP but I hope it's reasonably obvious what's going on. Key thing is that you specify how many results you want returning at a time (page size is set to 100 here). That doesn't mean you only get 100 results; magic stuff just happens in the background so that when you do a "movenext" it either takes a record from the 100 it just got or it fetches another 100 from the server. In general, it's a bad idea to change the maxpagesize because it doesn't scale - you're potentially putting a huge load on the server (think about what happens when there are 10,000 or 100,000 records to return) for no real benefit. Set oRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE") sDNSDomain = oRootDSE.Get("defaultNamingContext") Set ocommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command") Set oConn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") oConn.Provider = "ADsDSOObject" oConn.Open ocommand.ActiveConnection = oConn sBase = "" 'find users with email 'sFilter="(&(objectClass=user)(mail=*))" sAttributes="distinguishedname" sQuery = sBase & ";" & sFilter & ";" & sAttributes & ";subtree" ocommand.CommandText = sQuery 'return records in groups of 100 - user doesn't see anything but it avoids stressing server. 'by default won't get more than 1000 records back so if more than 1000 records must set this ocommand.Properties("Page Size") = 100 'how long to wait for results; if not returned in this time then script will give up ocommand.Properties("Timeout") = 60 'don't store data locally; if query run again then will re-visit server ocommand.Properties("Cache Results") = False oCommand.properties("sort on")="samaccountname" 'execute the query against AD and get a recordset Set oRS = ocommand.Execute 'check - did we get any results if not oRS.eof then 'yes, so process all of them Do Until oRS.EOF 'code like this means you can have any number of fields; process each in turn for each sField in oRS.fields 'write the returned value wscript.echo oRS.Fields(sField.name) next 'next record oRS.MoveNext Loop else 'we didn't get any records so just give warning wscript.echo "No records found" end if ors.close

Oops! Log files present mean that you have no backups that have worked. When you back up the Exchange store the final part of the (automatic) process is to delete those log files. If the log files are present then you do not have good backups. Assuming that you are using an Exchange aware backup, check its logs to see what it's telling you (and look in event viewer - you'll see a message at the point when the backup takes place and it will also tell you that the log files are deleted) If you delete the log files and the system fails (eg hardware failure) then you are going to have real problems recovering.

When the last pope died, a student at the college I worked at wanted to download everything that had ever been published about him. She was convinced that there would be a conspiracy to remove it all from the web. the only problem she had was that she was trying to download it on to floppy discs ... (well, that's obviously not the only problem she had but it was the only problem she could see!)

Isopropyl alcohol is available from RS (and probably loads of other places that sell cleaning stuff) Part number 448-180 is a 2.5l can of it for £16.00; they also do 0.5l and 1l containers. Can I be really pedantic and say that the "proper" name is isopropanol or (perhaps better because it's a bit more descriptive) propan-2-ol :-)

The specs look exactly the same so I'm not sure what extra you're getting for your money. If you look at the unterminated fibre from Videk it's a much more reasonable price so it looks as if they're just charging silly money for the termination. It used to be really time consuming (= expensive) to terminate fibre (lots of polishing and so on) but now it takes seconds so the charge isn't really justifiable any longer. I'd give Videk a ring and see if they can reduce the price; if not, I'd buy from one of the other companies.

Is ISA trying to force some kind of authentication? This will definitely fail. Second Life is a complete nightmare to get working behind ISA and the company has absolutely no interest in helping (one of my former colleagues did get it working eventually with ISA 2004 but then the set of ports being used changed and it all fell over again!)

Take a look at the W3Schools site on CSS. This allows you to make very quick changes to sample code to see what happens and gives lots of easy (I hope!) to follow examples to get you started. The other thing that might be worth playing with if you're using Windows is Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express (free!) which also tries to make CSS easy to do. Stick with it because it really is worthwhile!

"At My Mother's Knee" (Paul O'Grady) is the only book ever to have been given a good review by Private Eye. Not sure what that tells you but it was only a fiver in Zavvi last weekend so I bought it but I'm afraid I haven't read it yet so I can't tell you how good it is :-)

I don't know anything about SIMS but error 5 normally means "access denied" Do the users have NTFS and share permissions to write to the files/folder? if not, can you try changing that? I'm pretty sure that the old version of SIMS used dBase files (extension will be .dbf) - if so, you should be able to read the data with Excel or Access if it's just a case of recovering old data.

The nice thing about the Viglen Omnino is that they're basically a standard PC built onto the back of a monitor so if something fails, there are no weird components to have to replace. We've got some of the 7800 ultra small machines; they do look good (unlike the HP web site which does not ...))

I wouldn't worry about it just because there was a rant in the paper; pick up pretty much *any* tabloid paper *any* morning and you'll find that there is someone ranting about something - frequently with no real reason except that big scary headlines sell newspapers.

Getting new switches won't help if there was nothing wrong with the old ones! The fibre being old doesn't matter (as far as I know, fibre itself has a very long life) but it's possible that the end gear has failed. I've seen media converters apparently slow down and this is where you need to know what your "good" traffic rate is. For example, if you can schedule a task to run at (say) 0700 each day copying a big file from senior to junior and store the times it takes then you can easily see if something changes with time and deal with it. Load balancing might help but if response is good at one end of the link but not the other then it doesn't feel like that's the problem. Using DFS is a good idea for other reasons - it does give you some resilience if a server fails, for example, and it makes it easier to keep consistent names for shares (because they are \\\ instead of \\\)

I'd agree with PeterH - it feels like there's something wrong with the link or the switch. Can you get some throughput numbers when no-one is using the system (copy a big ISO image, for example, directly from server1 to server 2 to get a speed within the junior school and then copy the same file from the server to a machine in the senior school). If the link is supposed to be (say) 100Mbit and you don't get that speed then investigate why. Try copying between two machines in the senior school - again, this should give you a feel for what your network speed is in that building. What you're trying to do is find out which bits are OK and which bits aren't - you can then focus on those. How old is the fibre link? if it's a few years old, it's possible that it's got 10Mbit end gear and that will be a real bottleneck!

It's not really about whether it's "harsh" or not - it's about whether more gritting is needed than has been needed in previous years. As @contink says, councils have to try and forecast what they need based on previous years - they don't really employ crystal ball readers. This year there have been a few more days when grit is needed and it runs out. The alternative is having stocks left at the end of winter and equally wild tabloid headlines about councils wasting money buying grit which they don't need. @jinnanotonix comments on snow chains etc - most people in the UK don't have them because most of them time they don't need them so they're a waste of money. There's always a balance to be struck between spending enough money to cover all eventualities and not wasting money. @AngryTechnician's comment about the green dome shows that at least one council has decided that the extra cost of storage is worth it. (Perhaps London could borrow the O2 dome during the winter next year???)

Grit runs out because you can't sensibly store it - the salt washes out of it if it gets rained on and it doesn't make sense to keep it in big dry warehouses (it would massively inflate the cost of storing and using it). We just need to get used to the fact that every 10-20 years things will go wrong and there's nothing we can do (for a sensible price) to prevent them.

Surely that's not true? If I request file abc.doc from the server, then the server will send me that file - not some compressed version of it. If this wasn't the case then you wouldn't be able to use compressed files with clients which can't read NTFS (eg Windows 95, 98, Linux etc etc) and they work just fine!

OK \\computer\C$\users etc :-) but I take your point about the managed desktop - it can make life much easier!

You do know you can do that anyway? Just browse to \\machine\c$\documents and settings\\desktop

You can still keep your existing home page. Let's say the home page is called "index.php" and that's picked up because you have IIS set to use that as default. You change IIS so that it uses default.asp as the default page. All that page does is get the ID and call index.php - users see nothing apart perhaps from a very quick URL change. If users have a short cut to http:///index.php instead of http:// then just adding code to index.php to check if you have a username and, if not, doing a quick call to default.asp The javascript idea is good but I don't think you can do it - you need to do something like reading environment variables or making shell calls and I think pretty much everything like that is blocked by the browser for security reasons.

Local profiles are only the better option for users who don't roam - ie have their own PC (some staff?) but can be a pain if you want to have settings which move with the users. They can be changed with basically only beneficial impact on users - look up "folder redirection" and make sure that "my documents", "application data" and "desktop" are redirected. if you do this, profile size will drop dramatically because only a few folders now roam. If you do go for folder redirection, you might look at setting up mandatory profiles to go with this. this allows some settings to roam with the user (basically anything in app data, any files on the desktop etc) but not stuff stored in the registry (so desktop colour settings etc won't roam) Whatever you do, however, don't turn on folder redirection for all users on the same day - every set of folders will have to be copied from the C: drive to the server folder and this could have a severe impact!

I've not used adLDAP with PHP so can't comment on it but it looks as if it should work :-) Are you running PHP on IIS? If so, could you change the home page to be an ASP page; that can then use integrated authentication to find out who's there and then that ASP page can call the "real" home PHP page and pass the user to it. You can also set something in every PHP page to say "is logon user set?; yes - carry on; no - redirect to ASP code to find it"

I think what you want is called userenv debug logging - details on the MS web site it feels like a server problem unless you've perhaps made some change to all the workstations (permissions tightened on c:\documents and settings? - unlikely because that would mean user X would never log on) Dodgy network cabling or switch? Can you run wireshark? What you're looking for is excess traffic (and for this you really need to know what "normal" looks like; loopbacks on a switch can cause symptoms like this and you'll see masses of traffic. Lots of it is "normal" but just retrying and retrying) Failing disc on the server? Anything logged in event viewer or disc management tools? Run performance monitor on the server - what does the disc queue look like (should be <1 for normal working; anything more suggests the disc is stressed; then need to find what is causing that stress)

I like Faststone image resizer It does lots of other stuff besides resizing (and it's free :-))

Why "snicker at their ignorance"? From what you've written they've not shown any ignorance - they've asked for something perfectly reasonable (given that they already have that access inside school, why shouldn't they have it outside school? It's possible to argue that teachers shouldn't have blanket access at all but that doesn't seem to be the point you're making)