srochford

Weird! The good news is that at least you have got warning. When I've had electrical feeds replaced they normally run in the new cable next to the old one and then just swap over. It might take 5 weeks to dig trenches etc but it's just a few hours of outage.

Every PC is visible to the internet ... (eg I'm sitting at phws325-002.ph.ic.ac.uk - you should be able to do an NSLookup for it and I think it will respond to a ping)

We are getting ready - most of our machines now have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Our mail gateways have IPv6 addresses and the infrastructure is moving forwards. The biggest change Ipv6 will bring is the end of NAT and the security that that can bring but I think we're still quite a way away from that (are any "home" ISPs yet using IPv6??)

yes - you can do this kind of thing with AutoIT but it's not always easy. It may be worth checking to see if the program can be started in a way which won't reboot. For example, if you're installing an MSI then you can do: msiexec /i somefilename.msi /quiet /norestart this installs the MSI quietly (no user interface) and doesn't reboot at the end.

As the other Steve says, you can do all of this. Let's say that you know none of the machines have yet run the cleanup program and that you can have a machine startup script. In that script (a batch file) you put something like this: if exist %windir%\97flag goto end start /wait \\server\share\board95cleanup.exe echo 97 removed > %windir%\97flag :end [code] What does it do? The first line checks to see if a flag file is present - if it is, this means that this process has already run so the program just ends. The next line does the work - it assumes you've got a share called "share" on a server called "server" - edit that to match your setup - and in that share you've got the cleanup program. the Start /wait just makes sure that it doesn't carry on until the program has finished. The last line writes some text to the flag file - this then means that the program won't run a second time. You could extend this - if you've got the new installer program in a suitable place that could run in the same way as the removal.

You shouldn't have to untangle cables if the cable management is done properly - you just unplug the 48 cables from the switch and the management holds them tidy while the switch is swapped. Similarly, the phone patch leads shouldn't be going across things - only ever go horizontally and vertically. In our cabs the phone patch always goes at the bottom and the (green) cables will them go from the patch panels feeding the sockets across and down to the phone patch panel.

You don't seem to have any vertical cable management? Also, is there any room to grow? I know you'll be absolutely certain now that that will never be needed but if things change and there's no space to grow then it's way more expensive to change it later.

We run this script every night to clean up. The check at the start is to exclude certain machines (the ones in lecture theatres) The next section uses a WMI call to get a list of profiles other than the "special" ones (localsystem etc) and delete them (this is what you see when you go to the control panel and delete profiles) This will sometimes leave bits behind so the next step is to get a list of folders which shouldn't be deleted by reading the existing profiles from the registry - this list is built in a dictionary. To this is then added things like "public" and "default". The script then scans c:\users and checks each folder it finds against the dictionary. If the folder isn't listed then it gets deleted (because it doesn't need to be there) const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002 set oDic=createobject("scripting.dictionary") Set oReg=GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\default:StdRegProv") Set oWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2") set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") on error resume next 'are we on an AV machine? if so, quit - leave profiles alone in theatres if ofso.fileexists("c:\windows\av") then wscript.quit Set colItems = oWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_UserProfile where special=false and loaded=false",,48) For Each oItem in colItems sSid=oItem.SID Set oUserProfile = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationlevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2:Win32_UserProfile.SID='" & sSID &"'") oUserProfile.Delete_ Next 'now clean up directories not attached to profiles 'and profiles not completely deleted by first step 'build a list of the directories used by profiles sPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList" oReg.EnumKey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath, arrSubKeys For Each subkey In arrSubKeys lRc=oReg.GetStringValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath & "\" & subkey ,"ProfileImagePath",sDir) sDir=lcase(sDir) oDic.add sDir, subkey Next 'now add the "fixed" profiles lRc=oReg.GetStringValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath ,"ProfilesDirectory",sRoot) sRoot=lcase(oShell.expandenvironmentstrings(sRoot)) sRoot=sRoot & "\" oDic.add sRoot & "public","public" oDic.add sRoot & "all users", "all users" oDic.add sRoot & "default","default" oDic.add sRoot & "default user", "default user" set oFolder=ofso.getfolder("c:\users") for each oSubFolder in oFolder.subfolders sFolder=sRoot & lcase(oSubFolder.name) if not(oDic.exists(sFolder)) then 'orphaned folder so delete it ofso.deletefolder sFolder, true end if next

Yes (lots!) - http://www.microsoft.com/uk/about/map-reading.mspx

I'm sure you can stop things working but WHY??? I know that there are some things users can do which can mess up the machine but what can they do by seeing a list of running processes??

Why does it matter? If they see the processes tab then they could attempt to kill a process but unless they started it running they'll just get access denied.

Have you tried changing drivers? There are several available and it may be that a different driver will help. Also, how much RAM is installed and do your client PCs know that (if the PC thinks there's more or less RAM than is actually available then I'd guess it could send the image in a format that won't work) Not used Kyocera for a while but used to find them excellent - certainly their drivers were dramatically better than HP (and the running costs are lower than HP) @webman - the pick up rollers are essentially consumables. You can buy spares from (eg) XMA for about £5

OS is RHEL 5.6; kernel is 2.6.18 and accessing it just using the normal console. Is find that much different across Linux versions?? I can find man pages from 15 years ago which look pretty much like the current one!

I want to find all occurrences of a particular file on a Linux machine but I don't want to search a particular folder tree (it's huge and I know the file isn't there - I'm looking for float.h files) I can do: find / -name "float.h" and it works but it takes a very long time. I could use: locate float.h | grep \/float.h$ and this works except that I know the machines being used for this don't have an up-to-date database for locate (don't ask ...) so this won't work. What I think I need to use is -prune in the find command but I can't work out how to do it. find / -name float.h -prune -o -path '/home' looks like it's working but it isn't because if I do find / -name float.h -prune -o -path '/home' 2> /dev/nul so that it throws away all the errors then I can see it's listing files in the /home tree. In case anyone's wondering, this is a teaching exercise - the students have been told to find all the C compilers on the Linux VMs. I know the answer (I put them there!) but they've been told that each compiler will have a set of header files including float.h. What appears to a bug in VMWare Player means that if they scan the entire filesystem (including several directories which are actually NFS mounts) the VM grinds to a halt and takes out the Windows network stack on the host machine!

It really is down to the individual head/deputy/whatever. I worked in a school in North Tyneside a frighteningly long time ago and the head there was very good at raising money and getting "stuff" My first day there I went to a meeting when he was trying to raise money for some new project. He'd got an agreement from (I think) BT that if he could raise £12.5k they would match fund. He then went to British Gas and said "if I can raise £6k will you match fund" and they said yes. Eventually, he'd got matched funding from a whole raft of businesses so that the school ended up having to find about £500 which then snowballed to £25k

You sad bunny! You really do need to get out more :-)

If you can do Linux then take a look at ZoneMinder: Linux Home CCTV and Video Camera Security with Motion Detection It's pretty easy to set up, works with most IP cameras and, of course, it's free :-) As @mbk201 has said, there are regulations governing CCTV - eg people have a right to see the recordings you hold of them so you need to make sure that if someone comes into school and says "I want to see xxx recording" that people know what to do and how etc.

A bit more detail - you just want the single line: for /f %%i in (drive.txt) do set drive=%%i

You can definitely do it with VMWare Server and Player (both free) and Virtual Box (also free) so if you get stuck with Virtual PC then just use one of the other virtualisation products. This is a good way of building the image - it's what we do.

Don't think there are any websites around that are that old but if you google me (eg: uk education schools it newsgroup steve rochford - Google Search) then you'll find some of the high quality info I used to post on usenet :-) Actually, Default.asp is still live and at least some of that dates back to 2000 so I suppose that makes it quite old!

Actually, "slow gal" sounds like we're back with the discussion of whether women are any good at running :-)

I thought I'd heard that their comments did say that no women understood the rule but I could be wrong; if they're just saying "that woman doesn't understand" then it might be reasonable (although I've read comments that her decision was right - I certainly can't judge because I have no idea what they're talking about!) There's no absolutes in the "men are better than women at spatial awareness" - it's not the same binary decision as "men are better than women at making sperm" The same is true for running. I'm a man but I run pretty slowly (actually, I don't run at all - those who've seen me will know that I don't have a runner's figure). I also don't have terribly good spatial awareness so I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of women who would be much better at being a referee than I would be. Saying that "woman X can't be as good a referee as man Y because she runs more slowly and has poor spatial awareness" is not sexism. Saying that "women can't be as good as men at being referees because they are poorer at running and spatial awareness" is sexism - it's suggesting that all women are poorer than all men which simply won't be true for something like this where they will be a continuum of ability.

That's not sexism. Sexism is about treating men and women differently when there is no difference between them. The way men and women compete in different sports is similar to the way you have different weight bands in boxing - you don't put a heavyweight in the same ring as a featherweight, for example, because there is a real difference between them. Sexism is suggesting that no woman can be an assistant referee because women can't understand "offside" even if you can find 1 woman (or even many women) for whom this is true.

Me please.

Only problem is that it should be spelled "Ayers Rock" - not sure how well the mis-spelling works (and shouldn't it be known as Uluru??) Having said that, going with your own name may be no bad thing - it's done no harm for Dell or Hewlett Packard (although whether a Wozniak Macintosh would have been a success we shall never know :-))