Trapper

Hello, Are there any LEA schools who've recently tried to use Open Reach? Open Reach need to drill at hole at two of our three sites, and at our third site pull and existing cable out and replace it. EDSI - effectively the landlord for Birmingham schools, is insisting on targetted asbestos surveys. Even if the general site Abestos report lists no abestos anywhere near the drill locations - or even worse where a cable installed just four years ago needs pulling out! I'm re-posting this in General as well in case any other LEA's have come across this. Thanks, Matt

Hello, Are there any LEA schools who've recently tried to use Open Reach? Open Reach need to drill at hole at two of our three sites, and at our third site pull and existing cable out and replace it. EDSI - effectively the landlord, is insisting on targetted asbestos surveys. Even if the general site Abestos report lists no abestos anywhere near the drill locations - or even worse where a cable installed just four years ago needs pulling out! I'm re-posting this in General as well in case any other LEA's have come across this. Thanks, Matt

Hello, Who do people use for WEEE disposal these days, and do any still do it for free (with a proper waste transfer notice!) Cheers, Matt

Thanks for the advice folks. Millgate won in the end, due to their better pricing. I did have another company come back offering to match, but I tend to go with stuff like this your first quote is your best quote.

What does everyone use at home for their AV solution, or is the built in Windows solution good enough? I've used everything under the sun from McAfee before he went gun toting mad in the 90s, to NOD, to others I can't remember, had Kaspersky on a 2 yr 5 PC deal but since then I've been a bit naughty and used our work Sophos, by treating my PC as an off site staff laptop and updating using the external server. I'd love to say my guilty conscience has forced me to change, but we're moving away from Sophos so I can't do it anymore! Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Now a lot of smaller firms that I used to quote from have been gobbled up by Capita, what firms do you folks use for your EES licensing?

We currently have an old centrex style system. This worked fine when we were a single primary school. Now we have three sites, over 200 children and the doesnt work. At the new sites were given (and had no choice in) a hybrid system. This ran each copper line to a comms cabs and you patcheda room network port into it. The cliet end of trhe network socket had an RJ11 to RJ45 coverroe to use a stanrdard phone. THe problem we have is: * All three sites are sperated by about 1/4 of a mile each * We are a BCC maintained special so no will touch us. * Virgin refused to help * BCC offered their to range CISCO system. Boviously our concerns are running several conncurrent IDSN lines (and whether we'd ever break even) or if the industry is moving to IT only what happens if our internet line goes down? I'm currently on a phased return so please contact via between 10am nd 2pm at the moment.

Well that makes me feel old! Be assured

Hello, If a school had migrated all it's data (H: drives, Shared, DSL stuff, basically any document) from a physical RAID array to a MS VHD what could be the consequences of that? My pre-1999 thinking on suck issues causes an immediate reaction of "WHAT IF ONE BYTE IS CORRUPTED! HOW WILL YOU ACCESS IT!!!" etc. Is this becoming common and best practice?

I would! Thanks

Hello Folks, Can anyone unravel this for me? We have Paxton Net2 fobs (the blue stripped ones) which we use for door access across our three sites. I've also been rolling them out to use with our signing in system (Inventry) and now PaperCut for print management. The big problem I have is having to manually enroll everyone three times - once for Net2, then physically presenting the fob to Inventry with auto-code on and finally on the photocopier after entering their AD user/pass they again need to physically present their fob. This works, but it takes forever. Ideally I'd want to have their fob ID in their Active Directory record and then sync that across to PaperCut and Inventry, which I know is supported. However all three systems give me three totally different fob IDs! Net2 is like this: 12340005 Inventry is like this: 123ABACA PaperCut is like this: 12345678900 Help! Is it possible to work out some algorithm so the Net2 code can be translated into Inventry and PaperCut speak, or is this just a total non-starter?

Anyone else having the same problem? I've got it across all three of my sites. Pinging eduproxy.bgfl.org goes to 10.120.232.50 and times out. I've got round it by changing GPP to remove the HTTP proxy and use the transparent as that is working fine. Really quite odd!

This dude is awesome - capturing frame by frame the entire BBC Domesday Project laserdiscs! Domesday Duplicator – Domesday86.com

Has anyone else had trouble connecting VPN this weekend? vpn1-3000.bgfl.org just isn't pinging.

I used a GoPro to time lapse a portakbain block being lifted on top of an existing building.

I stopped dealing with MISCO when Phil Endicott left.

Able Archer 83 the closest we ever came to Armageddon. It'd consider it even worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis. At least with Cuba the executive of both nations made the final call. With Able Archer 83 if a more obedient officer was on duty instead of Petrov the Politburo would have launched their first strike weapons.

On a scrounge for my Acorn A3010/RISC PC. Does anyone have a working serial port external 56k modem lying around in their mancave? It would need to be a hardmodem, but I believe all external modems were hardware controller. If I remember correctly the softmodems didn't actually have any of the hardware to dial they just used the sound card to create the audio signal and piped it down the phone line. There were no softmodems made for RISC OS, but there is a couple of free hardmodem stacks still around. I just want to get my Acorn A3010 online for some retrofun. Although I have a mini-podule NIC for it, as it is an A3010 I'd have to take the IDE expansion out to fit the NIC. Even then the NIC is only 10-base2. I have an old HP switch with 10 RJ45 ports and one BNC but I just can't get it working. There is no option to add USB to an A3010, nor can I run a HDD without the interface (although someone has hacked together onboard IDE functionality by running some new traces via the ROM chips). Sadly it won't work on mine as unlike the production versions of the A3010 mine is a very early model. Most A3010's use an ARM250 SoC - the first major ARM SoC silicon released. My was manufactured before the ARM250 was ready so they added a daughtercard called "Adelaide" which plugs into the ARM250 socket, but contains four separate chips for CPU (ARM2 slower clock than ARM250, but you can upgrade to ARM3. ARM2 is 8MHz and ARM250 is 12MHz), Memory Controller (MEMC1a), I/O Controller (IOC), Video Controller(VIDC1). AFAIK only serial port modems work with RISC OS 3.1x not parallel port versions. I can't use that anyway as my Zip 100 and External CD ROM use the parallel port. Trust me to also have RISC OS 3.10 in ROM rather than 3.11. What is the one major problem in 3.10 which meant a quick end to production and rolling out 3.11 quickly? The serial port driver and module is foobar. I have to softload the update over it, as the price for RISC OS 3.11 ROMs are extortionate. On eBay it's around £20 and via the only supplier left CJE Micros they want £40! Thanks in advance. If anyone has any Acorn kit sitting around either at work, home or mates they want to get rid of to a good home. I will gladly negotiate for them. Better if in the West Midlands so I could drive to pick up and save My Herpes (sorry My Herme's) cost and potential damage! Ta, Traps

Any other schools having problems with their centrex lines? Virgin ran some maintenance last night which was expected to end by 7am. One out of my three sites have no dial tone and the numbers ring as engaged. It's also the secondary site where the vast majority of the kids and staff are! Link2ICT are doing their normal stellar job of keeping me informed with the progress of this P1 job!

They won't do it. Unless you push it through something like Forefront TMG over port 443. They refuse to open anything on port 3389 even with a change request signed by the Head.

From what I've heard Advanced Learning were very unhappy when most of their Birmingham schools moved to SIMS due to the hard sell from account managers, it being cheaper(!) and portrayed in far more positive light. So annoyed that they've gone after school who have moved from Facility CMIS to SIMS to make sure if we even need to read the CMIS database using the Facility application we have to buy a one year read only license. This wasn't the case up until a few months ago, they were happy to let us do it free. Hasn't really worked considering I've virtualised my CMIS server and keep it off. If we ever needed some data I would turn it on and use SQL Studio or MS Access to find the data. From what I've heard by Link2ICT is this will take years, and Capita will probably end up staying just with a new name, new corporate structure and very new money.

Hi Folks, Any schools out and around Brum/West Midlands that have CRT monitors and/or TVs lying around that are working but waiting for the skip? This is for a private project involving Acorn and Amiga hardware, so I'm happy to chuck a tenner into your schools trust/fund raising body to take them off your hands!

Luckily my wife's trust upgraded to Win 7 last year. From other contacts I have in the NHS the cost problem is due to the hardware. They have thousands of PCs with extremely obsolete hardware that just cannot take an install of Windows 7. What can they do really? No money to replace all the workstations, but are required to keep the core job of keeping people alive running along. Now if only someone had promised an extra £350 million per week to the NHS.....

Exactly what I'm doing now. Patching! Luckily all my clients are Win 7 and above with WSUS kicking updates out. The only server I'm worried about is a core installation of Server 2016 running Spiceworks as Sophos don't have an AV client that works with 2016 core yet.

No one?