Trapper

After having been told off for finding out what our budget is for next year - BY GOOGLING(!) Birmingham Schools budget and going to the BGfL page hosting it all - is this information supposed to be public? I assumed either it's open only to schools on the Grid - so all staff could see it, or that the Council legally had to publicise it. Some folks in finance take the view that I've "gone snooping" and "hacked around" to find it!

My major problem with the strike is that the NUT are playing the "poor teachers" card. Underpaid, overworked and not respected. As a member of support staff in a school in the past I've also been underpaid, overworked and not even given token respect by teaching colleagues. If they think they have it bad, I wonder how they view TAs and the lower graded support staff? I'm lucky in my current school. I am paid well and respected, but we've all worked in schools where teaching staff have considered us to be something they've stepped in.

ABTutor Control is cheap and very handy. Change the GPOs to stop the staff member from removing inet history or deleting the Temp Inet Cache.

No ideas folks?

Next to no one in and my techie is off sick. Man I'm bored.

Oh and I've heard a whisper that a lot of Heads have complained directly to Link2ICT about the recent Zimbra 8 cock ups - such as missing emails from official sources. The cynical part of brain wonders whether the timing of this thaw in relations has any relevance to this?!

Seriously - They need to seriously make a lot of headway quickly. For far too many years Link2ICT and EdIT have treated school IT staff like something they've found under their boot. It still continues, especially with sales. I've now been bypassed completely and our account manager calls my Business Manager monthly to sell things.

Always the old fashioned way of creating a new Outlook profile, connecting the old account, copy to PST. Create a new profile for the user with 0365 and open and copy the data from the PST. Rinse and repeat. It'll take somewhere from an hour or two to forever depending on your number of mailboxes, but it will work.

Oh and the VM OS is Server 2008 R1 (yes, ugh, Release 1)

Since Sunday night for some reason at around 11pm (I'm assuming it could be the Attix5 Java Backup client) one of my VMs looses external connections. All the IP details are correct and if connected to the same VSwitch as other VMs they work fine. Tried all the usual things. Thought I had it cracked when I just created a new VSwitch using an unused physical NIC (single NIC, not teamed etc.) but it's just done the same thing. If I delete the VSwitch and recreate, it starts working again. Any ideas? It's a HP DL360 G8 running Server 2012 R2 GUI.

Worth a trip down memory lane. August 2001 is worth a look - http://www.8bs.com/cgi-bin/magsel.cgi?http://8bs.com/othrdnld/acornuser/AcornUser0108.zip - I'm mentioned in it! PD section, !ShortCut application

Got a few knocking about in drawers. They were part of the core infrastructure. Now use fibre modules in switches. All CISCO of course, the LEA pushed them onto the school before I started, and all nicely locked together so you can't replace them.

All the tech's I've worked with have also gone down the familiar path and remained in schools: Tech to Senior Tech to Middle Manager and either after moving to another school for more money or as part of an internal promotion as the school converts or grows get kicked up stairs to a strategic IT role. This is pretty much my plan in the next five years. Either at my current school, or look elsewhere after the new builds have been finished.

Why am I wasting a Saturday night trying to get the freeware Acorn emulator (RPC_Emu) to work with a network connection to copy my thousands of old Acorn software titles over to an R-Pi. Even though I know most of them will not work as they have either used a 24-bit only C compiler, or very old ARM code. The worst part is the error is with the RISC OS !Boot sequence. Older versions from Acorn and Pace barely work, newer versions from RISC OS Ltd hang when loading the network drivers. I'm now trying to get the latest commerical release of RISC OS 6 to work. It loads the NIC driver, but my !Boot sequence is from a previous version. I have the ISO of the correct one, but the damn thing hangs on copying large files. It's either give in (never!) or use RISC OS Open on the emulator. I've been trying to get this sorted for almost a decade now. Ever since Windows corrupted all of my Acorn filenames and types. Someone shoot me.

I've read from MSFT that from Vista onwards the full format command actually zeros the drive... Anyone actually tested this? Seems easier than setting a PC aside for Boot'n'Nuke.

Silly old buffer, gave legitimacy to the militant tendency and kept Labour out of power for a generation. However his morals and ideals are now very much of the mainstream - nationalisation of large public structures, unilateralism etc. I feel he would be an excellent Labour leader for the early 21st century, and it is a shame he was born a couple of generations too early.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]23380[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]23381[/ATTACH]

Now this drives my wife mad, but I did learn to drive in the country with exceptionally bad, if non-existent street lighting. You were taught to stick your full beams on and quickly turn them off when you see a car coming. If you've been doing that for most of your driving career, it's difficult to get out of the habit. Especially on poorly lit side roads.

..........

Hi Folks, Due to a cock up during virtualization (Sophos SafeGuard stopped working!), and most of my staff now banging on about needing access to our shared drive from home (as they are too lazy to copy any files they need!) and being given VPN access via our LEA - the question begging is: Do we need need to encrypt laptops anymore? Previous they were encrypted for three reasons: 1) our SEN assessment software requires a local SQL db loaded with student info for remote working. If they have VPN they can work on the "live" copy on the server. db is not installed. 2) Encrypt H: offline cache. This is encrypted twice, once by Windows and then by Sophos. 3) Catch all failsafe if they store anything random on C:\... and laptop is nicked. Now if I disable offline sync and force Desktop re-direction to a network drive I would assume the requirements for laptop encryption are rendered moot? No local db installed, no ability to save on C:\..., VPN access to connect to network resources? Memory sticks - They all get them, but with TrueCrypt. Obviously that would continue. Whadda you think?

Now VirtualBox supports WDDM drivers to accelerate the fancy stuff?

Hi Folks, I've been playing around with the free version of Veeam backup which is really quite something. Just the ability to schedule a daily copy of the VHDs to another server whilst live is extremely useful. Just got a couple of questions: 1) In free mode you can only schedule a copy operation (copy the VHDs) not setup a full VeeamZip job? 2) No incremental backup, so each night the VHDs on my remote backup server will be overwritten? 3) No live migrations? Can't say move server X from my production Hyper-V host to a backup host on my admin server? 4) Is there EDU pricing on the Standard edition? £600 odd is rather pricey for a single live Hyper-V host with four non-business critical servers. 5) Additional Hyper-V question - I assume there is no way to migrate a VM from Hyper-V on Server 2012 R2 to Server 2008 R2? I believe the inability for these version to talk was a proactive (but weird) decision by MSFT? So I'd have to create a new VM and use the existing VHD?

We use SafeGuard, works fine and you can prove with the console that a laptop is encrypted. For memory sticks we use Rohos Mini Drive as it's free and has it's own file view/editing application. Did not use SafeGuard as our 50 teaching assistants received the memory sticks, but did not have laptops so they couldn't be encrypted with Sophos SG. One thing I will say for SafeGuard is please replace the HDD with an SSD. On older CPUs such as Gen 1 i3s with no CPU hardware encryption with a spinning rust disc is is dreadfully slow. Swapping for an SSD dramatically improves performance (better than unencrypted spinning rust).

I'm in the middle of P2V'ing one of my servers which contains Safeguard (along with a couple of easily transferred bits and bobs) and a DC as the hardware is exceptionally close to failing. Server old, donated and out of warranty etc. I would prefer if possible to demote the server from being a DC and move the applications to a fresh VM - current server on 2008 R1 so I'd like to upgrade. Now regarding SafeGuard from what I've read I can: 1) move the db to a new server 2) Create a new client config package 3) Run the client config MSI on an already encrypted laptop and it will start talking home to the new server - assuming it has the old db. I'm not entirely sure if this will work, and I'm also not sure what would happen with moving the Safeguard db if the server's FQDN changes. Hence why at short notice I'm virtualising a physical DC!

I have been advised to remove this. Simply said rather annoyed that standard practices end up with schools under MIS support with software which is several versions behind current.