srochford

it depends on the type of wireless network device you go for. If you just buy "standard" off the shelf APs and stick them in a room then they will fight with each other. If you go for the Aruba, Cisco, Trapeze etc type systems then the central controller can do very clever things to adjust power levels so that the APs don't interfere with each other. this also means that even if you've got 2 APs close to each other, the laptops ought to pick up the one they're closest to and play nicely. I don't like the idea of one big point for a set of rooms (as in button_ripple's original post) - if that point fails then you lose everything which is surely not a good idea!

Not an MSI but silent install is documented here. Appdeploy is often a good site for finding install tips

I don't know that you can't do it with 2 IP addresses but it's much easier to do it with two ports. When you set up the listener, tell it not to use port 3389 for listening but (eg) 5001 for the first, 5002 for the second and so on When an external user goes to connect they connect to address 1.2.3.4:5001 or 1.2.3.4:5002 etc You then don't "waste" IP addresses and it's all fairly straightforward.

Can you fit a new big IDE/SATA/anything drive inside the server? If so, it's trivial to move the store onto that new drive and that will buy you time while you setup a new server and move the mail across to it. there's a Microsoft KB article which details the process You really want to do this ASAP, even if it's only a temporary fix - I'm amazed Exchange is still running at all with so little space and it certainly won't be happy!

Internet is reliable here but I'd guess we're not connected to LGFL so that doesn't really count. Can download from Microsoft etc at > 10 Megabytes per second so nothing to complain about. Food and drink is expensive in the tourist areas but I think it's as cheap as anywhere if you get off the tourist trail. "normal" shops are pretty much the same price all over the country - you've just got more of the very expensive shops here. What London has that few other UK cities have is pretty good public transport - £3 to travel all day on the buses (starting whenever you want, not just off-peak) is not bad in my view :-)

clonezilla is fabulous - easy to set up and works really well. This document shows how to configure a server for multicasting etc

I suspect it depends on how they try to portray themselves and the "vision" they can give the rest of management. If someone only ever talks about layer 3 switches and the advantages of admx over adm files then they're unlikely to have a place at SLT level. If they talk about how ICT can be used to help learners, improve learning and to support teachers and teaching then that's more likely to make an impact.

found this old thread because I thought I'd previously posted something about using HxD; can't find that but found this instead :-) Don't know if you ever found out what he's doing. The stuff you've posted is hex (it's just not the hex of printable ASCII codes - eg 48 65 6C 6C 6F F6 would be Hello). thought it might be hex codes from a bit of machine code; debug lets you type the numbers in and will then show you the matching assembly code but this returns gibberish. what I suspect he's got is a program which reads this and decodes it in some way - either simple substiution (so B6 means A, 79 means B etc) or by doing some maths on it (easiest is XORing each value with some constant because the process is reversible)

Yes :-) Even if you don't allow that, how are you going to stop them from running programs they write using VBA in Word etc? I always think that the thing to do is make sure you have a secure system in terms of file/folder permissions and then not worry too much. The kids have much more time than you and will find ways round many of the things you can do. As far as I know, if you have NTFS permissions correct then there's no way they can browse folders they shouldn't, delete files which shouldn't be deleted and so on. Not sure if this would be in your remit, but if you can make available sacrificial machines for kids to use or set up VMs that they can use then you can let the ones who want to learn use these without having to worry about what they do. Past experience suggests that a busy, interested child is much less risk than a child who is blocked from everything and then spends time trying to break those blocks.

When you get error numbers like "1260", go to a command prompt and type: net helpmsg 1260 in this case it says "This program is blocked by group policy. For more information, contact your system administrator." I suspect you've allowed access to "script.vbs" but this isn't what's needed - you need to allow access to cscript.exe or wscript.exe (probably best to do both if you're not sure which is the default script host on your machines) Think of the VBS file as being a document opened by an application. If you want someone to open DOC files, you don't allow access to the specific DOC file, you allow access to winword.exe - the same is true here.

"Desktop" is just a folder - if that folder is in "my documents" and "my documents" is on the network then job done, no stress, everyone stays happy :-)

Why not just redirect the desktop to \desktop (or other suitable networked, quota managed location)? That way the users save their files where they want to; you have them where you want them and everyone's happy?

If all the pupils in the class are in a security group then you could script this: The code below assumes you're looking for a form called "form7a" and you want a set of shortcuts creating in C:\temp\shortcuts - amend as appropriate. It queries AD to get the distinguished name of the group; having got that, it gets a list of members and for each member finds the home drive and then creates a shortcut for each one. If you don't have the pupils in groups based on forms then I think it would be worth doing; it makes all sorts of things easier! sGroup="form7a" sRootFolder="c:\temp\shortcuts\" sFolder=sRootFolder & sGroup set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") Set oFSO=wscript.createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") Set oRootDSE=GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE") sRoot=oRootDSE.Get("DefaultNamingContext") Set oConn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") oConn.Provider = "ADsDSOObject" oConn.Open Set oCommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command") oCommand.ActiveConnection = oConn oCommand.properties("Page Size")=100 oCommand.CommandText = ";(&(objectCategory=group)(name=" & sGroup & "));distinguishedname;subTree" Set oRS = oCommand.Execute if not ors.eof then sDN1=oRS("distinguishedname") else wscript.echo "No such group" wscript.quit end if if not ofso.folderexists(sFolder) then ofso.createfolder(sFolder) set oGroup=getobject("LDAP://" & sDN1) for each oMember in oGroup.members sDN2=oMember.distinguishedname set oUser=getobject("LDAP://" & sDN2) sHome=oUser.HomeDirectory sName=oUser.DisplayName set oShortcut=oShell.createshortcut(sFolder & "\" & sName & ".lnk") oShortcut.description="Home folder for " & sName oShortcut.targetpath=sHome oShortcut.save next

Wow! I'm amazed at the negativity I'm reading here. It seems as if Edugeek is now solely used by people who see their jobs as making it difficult for anyone to use ICT in school. How on earth can you expect teachers to be able to use the systems if you don't allow them to make basic changes to the OS? How can it be difficult to allow users to reset the screen resolution - just reset it at logon or reboot. How difficult to allow users to changes icons on the desktop (or whatever you call the "home" screen)? - just reset them at logoff/on. The same goes for almost all changes that a user might make - this is nothing to do with being OS specfic. If you use Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix to do your job then you're going to want to make changes to the settings and schools ought to be showing their students how to do this and coping with the fact that they do. As (fortunately!) several people have said you can do almost all of this with VMs and just a few bits need physical machines. You either do that with a sacrificial standalone or with machines where you make sure that things are reset when the user rebooots. I always thought that the "edu" bit of Edugeek's name was there because this site is supposed to be something to do with education. I'd guess I was wrong and I'm rather sad to find that.

AMT is "really useful" but not very easy to get to grips with. If you have MS System Centre Operations Manager or System Centre Essentials then there's a management pack to let you communicate with the AMT stuff. Key thing is that you get a second "lights out" communication channel to the PC - as long as it's got power and is plugged into the network you can remotely manage the machine. This means that you can power it up, go into the BIOS, watch it boot off the network, use a CD in your local machine as if it was in the remote machine and much, much more besides. As an example, user phones up to say "my machine won't boot; it just blue screens". You can reboot it, "insert" a Windows PE (or Bart etc) CD and get into a recovery environment. You can then copy off the files from the machine (or make a ghost image of it) and then reboot and do a fresh install. All this happens without you leaving your desk. You can also do things like monitoring just about everything remotely, run virus scans, force updates and so on. Some of this is possible without AMT but you just get much, much more! One problem I can see (and it can be a big problem in a school!) is that if someone unplugs the machine from the network or turns off the power at the wall then you're still going to have to walk down and deal with it. The other issue I know is the need to give a secure password at the start and (I think) to get a certificate on the machine so it knows which management machine it can trust (and your little darlings can't remotely take over machines and format the drives!)

The other thing which is really useful is cmdlines.txt. There's an MS KB article which refers to how you call it and if you search the MS web site you'll find lots more stuff about how to use it. The downside of the runonce stuff is that it runs after the user logs on - you can also set autlogon so that may not be a big deal - but cmdlines.txt stuff runs much earlier (I think during the mini-setup process rather than after that has finished)

By far the easiest way to do this is with group policy. If you can't use group policy then run the batch file used by @Box but as a machine startup script rather than a login script . That way you don't need to use the admin password (which I really wouldn't recommend; the login script, complete with password, can be read by any of your users)

Profiles was pretty much sorted out with XP - it's just that most people don't seem to read the MS docs on how to do it! If you have thousnds of files being copied at logon/off then I suspect you're not redirecting (eg) application data. If you do redirect the folders rather than include them in the roaming bit then there are not many files/folders which roam. What would you put in place of UAC to tighten up security? Mac OSX, Linux and Unix all have something similar and there is certainly a need to have something which stops users from accidentally installing viruses etc. Why does it matter how many files are in the Windows directory? One of the big criticisms which has been made of Windows in the past that it is too monolithic - having lots of small files means that you separate out the functionality (one dll/exe file per discrete function). Have you used Vista's search? just start typing the name of the thing you want in the search box and it will find it (doesn't help if you don't know what it's called and not everything can be found - eg "system restore" can be found but "system protection" can't) If Microsoft did make Windows "simpler" you can pretty much guarantee that the bits they leave out because I don't want them would be just the bits you need and so on. Vista's "add features" section does give pretty fine granularity about what is/isn't installed and I'm sure that could be improved. The registry is daunting. I don't know if it would be possible to just hide sections that you're not interested in (or don't have rights to edit - a bit like access based enumeration on the file system). The favourites part could probably be improved - if you could hide everything but favourites then it might help. Ultimately, the registry is a huge database and needs to be a huge database. Even if you replace it you've still got all that data to store - at least with the registry it's all in one place. I think I prefer this to many files under /etc in Unix but that's just a personal preference :-)

Unless I've misunderstood it, journalling is about letting the system manager keep a record of all (or some) emails moved through the system. It doesn't give the user a way of keeping hold of their emails so that they can go back and pick up something they sent/received 12 months or more ago. There are archiving systems which do work centrally - essentially, the user still sees all their email in Outlook but the older messages are moved out of the Exchange store and into (say) a SQL database

No - you can't work with PSTs except using Outlook - it's another reason to avoid them (they really are the work of the devil :-))

Change the order by so that it says ORDER by surname, forename If you have 2 John Smiths that still won't work so you need to include the unique ID - ORDER by surname, forename, pupilID

vista has a whole raft of repair options - most are automatic and will fix "easy" problems but if these don't work eventually you get offered a full repair - this basically reinstalls Vista but keeps all the settings etc If you just need to get files off the drive and don't mind reinstalling once you've done that then you can do that fairly easily. Boot the Vista DVD and then just press Shift F10 - you'll open a command window. If everything is in one folder then just copy that folder - perhaps to a USB external drive or the second partition. If the files are scattered and you want to browse around then download A43 file management program - this runs without installation (eg from a USB stick) and will allow you to browse and find whatever you need.

You really need have to have a policy for how long email is retained before you can set a sensible size limit. That needs to be agreed by senior management and then adhered to - good luck in making it happen :-) While it's easy to archive, it's not always easy to work with archives (if you keep them on the C: drive, how do they get backed up? If you keep them on the network you are likely to have speed issues; Microsoft strongly recommend against using PSTs on network shares although this might not be that important for a static archive) If you can get users to not have big attachments in email but to email links to files on shared drives then that will massively help to keep mailbox sizes down. Sharepoint may help in doing this (but it depends on the culture of your establishment); again, you need management buy-in for this to work well.

They're not "called theories"; they generally *are* theories! Some stuff in science can be proved - eg if you add an acid to an alkali then you do get a salt and some water. Other things can't be proved; we're just pretty sure that they're true but they're still theories! I'd like to think that a good science classroom is about discovering new things as far as the pupils are concerned. Of course other people will know them already but I think good science teaching is about encouraging people to investigate, to ask questions and to learn.

It depends on how and where it is taught. There's no problem with teaching it in (say) reglious studies or philosohpy (or even English) - you are showing students that people have a wide range of beliefs and you're showing that you can respect a person even when you disagree with their beliefs. I don't think it should be ignored in science but I think it should be on the lines of "some people believe that the world was created in 7 days (etc) but most scientists don't believe that and this is the evidence they use ..."