srochford

If you're just starting to learn how to do imaging and you've got 2003/2008 server then I think that it's well worth skipping RIS and going straight to WDS - it's much better and you're going to have to learn it eventually :-)

I can't ping the burgessoffice web site so I'd guess their server is down. The TfL web site appears to be working fine. ASP.Net writes quite a lot of JavaScript to the client page - if you've centrally turned off JS then I'd expect forms to not work (eg the sorting you get on some web pages) and I'd guess that you might get other weirdness.

I've not seen the Citrix solution before - it does look good but it looks as if it's just an automated way of remembering all the passwords (it talks about pre-provisioning secondary credentials). Anything with Citrix in the name tends to be expensive (but you do get what you pay for :-)) so other solutions might be better. Lots of software can have LDAP authentication - Moodle does, for example, and it's relatively easy to do it so it ought to be an option in other packages (I think the MIS system we use has an LDAP option although we're not using it at the moment) I'd guess it's worth talking to suppliers to see if they can do LDAP although it's going to be much harder for things external to you - handling secure collection of usernames and passwords isn't always easy and this is where Shibboleth comes in. If only I could understand where I start with it (but we have registered as an IdP so I'd guess that almost counts as a start!)

With Server 2003 I seem to remember that ntdsutil will try to do a "nice" transfer before it does a sieze just in case the old server is still there. I don't think I've ever tried bringing back an old server after siezing its roles (sounds painful!) - I'd guess i should try it to see what happens :-)

Not sure what you want to do this on but if you can use Internet Explorer on Windows then you coudl install PDFCreator as a printer driver and then use a script like the one below (make sure the PDFCreator is set as default printer first) Basically, it sets a few variables so that the PDF Creator will print without prompting for filenames etc and then it loads each file named in the list at c:\temp\urls.txt (just a plain text file, 1 URL per line). Once the page is loaded it gets printed. You don't have any control over things like fitting to page etc (although I suspect you could - this is left as an exercise for the reader :-)) but it basically works. const OLECMDID_PRINT = 6 const OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER = 2 const PRINT_WAITFORCOMPLETION =2 Const HKEY_CURRENT_USER = &H80000001 Initialise set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") set OFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") set oFile=ofso.opentextfile("c:\temp\urls.txt") do while not ofile.atendofstream sURL=ofile.readline PrintPage sURL loop oFile.close sub PrintPage(sURL) Set oIE= CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application") Do While (oIE.Busy) Wscript.Sleep 250 Loop oIE.visible=true oIE.ToolBar = false oIE.StatusBar = false oIE.Resizable = false oIE.Navigate (sURL) Do While (oIE.Busy) Wscript.Sleep 250 Loop wscript.sleep 1000 'just so you can see the page sFilename=replace(sURL,"/","-") sFileName=replace(sURL,":","-") oShell.regwrite "HKCU\Software\PDFCreator\Program\AutoSaveFileName",sFileName Oie.ExecWB OLECMDID_PRINT, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER, PRINT_WAITFORCOMPLETION,0 oIe.quit end sub Sub Initialise Set oReg = GetObject("winmgmts://./root/default:StdRegProv") sPath = "Software\PDFCreator\Program" lRC=oReg.SetDwordValue(HKEY_CURRENT_USER,sPath,"ShowAnimation",0) lRC=oReg.SetDwordValue(HKEY_CURRENT_USER,sPath,"UseAutoSave",1) lRC=oReg.SetDwordValue(HKEY_CURRENT_USER,sPath,"UseAutoSaveDirectory",1) lRC=oReg.SetStringValue(HKEY_CURRENT_USER,sPath,"AutoSaveDirectory","c:\temp") lRC=oReg.SetDwordValue(HKEY_CURRENT_USER,sPath,"AutoSaveStartStandardProgram",0) end sub

We've got some 8Gb sticks from either Dabs or Hills Components. they work fine but it does seem possible to mess up the partition table so that you get a single 2Gb partition. In the end, I've used Linux to wipe the partitions and start again - could also probably have used a Gparted Live CD to do the job.

In the field properties, add \@ "d-MMM-yy" to get 15-Jul-08 etc Your field will look something like this: {datefield \@ "d-MMM-yy"}

I'd guess for the same reason that for the past 30 years or so schools have been videotaping schools programmes to watch at a convenient time! This is just the 21st century version of a video player :-)

One other thing to bear in mind for the future is that MySQL security is more finely grained than (say) Microsoft SQL Server. If you put the sa password in with MS SQL then you get in. With MySQL you can specify which machines a user can connect from (this can help to make it much more secure - even if a user knows the admin password they can't use it when they've hacked your webserver; they need to hack the db server as well) this can mean that a username and password which will work when you type them directly at the MySQL console won't work when they're in a PHP page running from a different web server.

@jsnetman - doesn't that hide everything? I only want to hide the ISA client icon (other icons are useful!)

Other key thing to check is where your php.ini file is - sometimes you'll edit the file in c:\php but php is actually using the one in c:\windows. The phpinfo() function will tell you which you're using.

It's the file format used by ImageX - the MS deployment tool. It's a bit like a Ghost image file (.GHO) but more versatile. One of the things which can be done with it is to include multiple machine images in 1 WIM file. When they are created, ImageX does "single instance storage" so if you have (say) a staff and student image in the same file, the chances are that a lot of files are common (the whole of Windows, for example) so the image file is much smaller. If you install WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit) then you get the ability to mount a WIM file so it appears as a folder on your local machine - you can add files to it, edit files, remove files, work on the registry etc etc. I think it's brilliant :-)

Contact a Microsoft reseller (Pugh was mentioned above - we use them; Mike Young is the MS expert) and they will tell you the best way of doing this. It's hard to work out what's best (eg although you want to get XP, you can't do that so you'll have to buy Vista and downgrade) and you also think about what you want to do in the future. For example, if you are just going to buy this and don't envisage adding more MS software in the next year or so then the School Agreement may not be a good idea. If you want to be able to upgrade to Windows 7/ Office 14 when they come out without paying more then you want software assurance. You might want to go with one of the annual packages even if they look a bit more expensive because it means that you pay the same every year - this means that you don't have to worry about suddenly finding lots of money I wouldn't worry about the problems of getting Office 2007 onto the machines - it can be a pig to deploy unless you use one of the "big" deployment tools but as you're going to have to reimage then just include Office in the image and the deployment worries go away :-)

If you look at the drive size then this is your quota value (eg if you allow 100Mb then the server drive will appear to be a 100Mb drive rather than a 4Tb drive etc) Don't think you can get the quota shown explicitly (but could be wrong!)

I can't find a way to turn off the tray icon (and I've tried - there are lots of people out there who have also struggled and failed.) I think that the setting *ought* to be in C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Firewall Client 2004\management.ini, like this: [TrayIcon] TrayIconVisualState=1 but I can't get that to work reliably!

You could argue that he's done nothing different from what you do when you take backups. Provided that he keeps the data safe then there are no real issues (and depending on what the files contain there may be no issues anyway - a set of Geography essays with the name "john smith" on them probably don't constitute personally identifiable data) If he came to you on 1 October (say) and says "can I see the work for person X" would you still have it? Do you make clear to staff that you would still have it? Do they know how long you keep it for and will make it available?

If this was in the "FFS" forum about a teacher keeping passwords on a post-it note there would be riots breaking out by now! Perhaps it's time we introduced to the idea of a database - they can be used for storing structured information in a secure way and they can also be backed up :-)

I see the smiley but, actually, that is the mark of the best kind of teacher and can indicated that they are fully confident in their own subject. If you think back to your own school days, I suspect that the worst teachers you had were those who came in, read from their notes and left (teaching has been defined as the transfer of knowledge from the teacher's notes to the pupil's notes without it passing through the brain of either). The best teachers were those who could come in and respond to questions in an unplanned way or change the lesson to suit the environment. One simple example from my own career. When the internet was fairly new in the public eye, a year 7 class asked "how do you make a web page" and I just scrapped the planned lesson and got them making web pages (using notepad and learning HTML tags). I think that was a great success but it was completely extemporized :-)

I've not been involved at all in BSF but is there no possibility of going to work for the managed service providers outside the school?

I couldn't possibly comment :-)

If you want to learn a few more words (big and small) then check out A Word a Day - you can sign up for the mailing list (very quiet; just one email per day!) The ability to extemporize is very useful in all sorts of situations - I don't always like doing it but, provided I'm going to talk about something I vaguely know, then I can do it :-)

I don't know what you specc'ed and what they specc'ed so it's not possible to say who's in the wrong here. It's quite possible they haven't got a clue and have just specc'ed the cheapest thing they could find on Ebay or they could have looked at what other schools are running successfully and chosen that.

I would have thought that the key thing to do is to find the model of the hard drive (go to properties of the drive in Explorer and then the hardware tab) When you know that, go to the manufacturer's web site and download the data sheet. This will tell you the safe working temperature. If you're inside that temperature then you don't need to worry; if it's not then start to worry :-) the fan isn't directly designed to cool the hard drive, but if it's not cooling the CPU properly then the excess heat will spread out in the machine and this will lead to the HDD over heating.

Agree with sysman_mk - Gadwin is brilliant. Allows you to set defaults for capture so that you don't end up with massive BMPs etc worth trying to let people know about how they can shrink the images in the document but not everyone will bother/remember/be able to do it :-) Another alternative which will help is using the DOCX format - this zips up the contents which helps to shrink bitmaps.

Going way back into pre-history (ie Lan Manager and Windows NT 3.5) the "normal" practice was to put things you wanted to replicate into the netlogon share (because there wasn't anything else!) Old-timers like me, just carried on doing that - mandatory profiles go in the netlogon share still - but there isn't any need to do that and you can set up any replicated folder to do it. I can't see any reason not to have a share called "profiles" and put mandatory (and roaming if you want) in that location.