Trapper

My fancy new PC is dead at the moment. Core i5 at 3.20 GHz eacher. 8GB of DDR3 RAM. No SSD, though I chose a nice 24" HD monitor instead 1x 250GB Drive for OS, 2x 1TB drives in RAID 1 for data. I left work on Friday, and the damn thing went to sleep. Lukcily the office manager was still in and she turned it back on. Last night I stupidly installed MS Network Scanner. And guess what? It's probably sat on a screen saying do you want to reboot now? GUess what? I can't ping it, or access it. The software has obviously turned the NIC off until restart. So there goes my brilliant idea of installing all the software onto it remotely this weekend. I'm really cheesed off about it!

Has anyone else noticed that Samantha Cameron looks a lot like Lois Griffin from Family Guy? Or is just me?! http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100516112623/familyguy/images/a/a5/Lois_Griffin.pnghttp://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/06/30/article-2009645-0CCD158000000578-493_634x455.jpg

Hi All, When building a new image for a Tempus branded Foxconn P4 board whatever version of the RealTek (SoundMAX) AC'97 drivers I install causes the PC to reboot. As if you've hit the reset button. I've used drivers from Driver MAX, direct from RealTek, from Foxconn and all these inbetween. All cause the same reset. I've used Double Driver on the same model with the base Tempus image on it, but it's missing files and refuses to install. Googling has come across A LOT of this, but no real solutions. Any ideas folks?

Home Desktop

Hello Birmingham Schools, With the coming discontinuation of Facility CMIS I was wondering what other Birmingham Schools are considering doing? I've had a look at SIMS and it all looks fairly standard (you use one MIS system and all that), but I like the idea of Progresso, and lets be honest sooner or later SIMS will probably release a cloud system. I know SIMS has a presence in a very large percentage of UK schools, but I've also heard the cost implications if we ever become an academy. What are other schools thinking of doing? One final question about SIMS - Does it have an equivilent of ePortal (web based system for staff for reporting and attendance)? /Traps

Hello, For some reason since Monday night my LiveEdu box isn't checked the associated POP 3 account that I set up (BGfL Zimbra). All the settings are correct, it just hasn't run a sync for two days. Even trying to force it doesn't work. Any ideas folks?!

Why are you charging students. AFAIK schools can't charge them for curriculum use - or are you private? The most I've ever done is bill departments for all their printing from their budgets, but for the kids as long as they aren't messing around the school takes the hit.

My advice is just do it. When I started here I threw up the idea of monitoring printing and quotas. The SLT did not take to it - all staff are too used to being able to print unlimited colour, and our students need to be able to print bright colourful work. I set up a trial of Print Manager Plus and set it to monitor all network printer jobs and put some very soft limits on staff (no more than 10 copies and 50 pages) and a bit harder on kids. At the end of month I told SLT that I'd just been monitoring the situation and that we'd effectively spent £800 that month on printing alone. Students were randomly bashing out 20 pages at a go and then binning them, and that staff were being very wasteful and printing a lot of personal stuff and not paying for it as they should. I was then told to buy the software immeadiatly and report back to the Head each month. The software paid for it's self within weeks and I've knocked 75% of our consumables bill. Whether it was just the fact that they didn't realise how much was being wasted and the stats shocked them, or it just timed well with the budget being released I don't know. But it works. One of the deputy heads a few weeks ago actually came to me and requested, without any prompting, that I should cap her account at 5 copies as she kept making mistakes.

I have some great tickets - it's called a HD TV.

Job Vacancies Good pay packet - I thought that job at that salary didn't exist after Single Status.

Avoid Sony at the moment. Apparently the recent Brava range is terrible.

Another free cert vendor: GeoTrust founders offer free SSL ? The Register

Luckily at my old place we had a complete Polycom system from back in the mists of time. It still worked, we ran two VC sessions one with the National Archives (WWI tommy talking about the trenches) and another at the Met Office. We had a massive problem with the first one that it kept lagging out, almost constantly. A year later though and the LEA seemed to have sorted it out. Word of advice don't film it! The National Archives were... displeased.

Joomla now. Hoping to move it to Sharepoint, use another site in our farm for it.

But do not use tactics one company - who shall remain nameless - did and that was to speak to me on the phone. I told them that the school had on site technical and leadership staff employed directly by the school, and everything was fine. They then sent a letter direct to my Head - now luckily all his letters unless marked private are opened by the office and the spam sent direct to the right person, so I got it - stating that many similar schools used their service, and that two things made sense to schools using their company: 1) They had a large pool of well trained staff, who undoubtidly could do a better job than anyone employed directly by the school 2) Their services were much cheaper than directly employing staff, and that their technicians were so good that two days on site for them was better than five days on site employed directly by the school as "technicians work in mysterious ways". Basically hinting that we all sat on our arses all day and played FreeCiv!

If you enforce it yes.

I've got a mixture of boring LEA standard: SchoolName-SVR1 AdminSvr1 and the slighty more inventive SchoolNickNameDC02, MOSS1, ISA1 etc Frankly I've never used more inventive and personal naming convention as 1) I won't be here forever and calling my servers Archer, TPol, Trip etc after a TV show would annoy my successor, and 2) Mild embarrasment!

Ouch. Perhaps it should have stayed Vaporware. Sadly enough I've been playing the original with Atomic Pack and high-res textures and it just wasn't the same. Perhaps there was *something* about it when you were 15 and the internet was not as broad as it is now.

Nice one Gareth, already contacted my LEA. Luckily enough I found our original domain registration cert in a box to be shredded a few months back. Good save on that!

I've just checked mine and my last place purely out of interest via the Nominet WHOIS and the address details are incorrect. Apparantly my school is in Buckinghamshire not Birmingham at UNKNOWN!

ABTutor Control can also logon machines remotely.

Another +1 for IPSCA here. Installed the cert for Sharepoint 2010 on IIS and ISA 2006 and all works fine in IE. They still haven't installed their root CA into Firefox's repository yet, well over a year since it was last discussed. Frankly I think the other cert vendors ought to follow this lead and allow free certs for educational establishments. We are not using the cert to facilitate eCommerce to make money. We use it to secure student data for teaching. A non commerical, not for profit free educational cert should be mandatory. I used to use StartCOM at home when using Exchange. However they need to send the validation email to your TLD. Which in my cast is either hostmaster/postmaster/[email protected]. I did ask back at my old school whether they'd pass the emails on so I could a free one for portal.school.bham.sch.uk but they refused. I assume they believed I could then issue certs for all schools under the TLD. I didn't realise you could get a wildcard cert from IPSCA. I just choose portal.schoolname.bham.sch.uk. Frankly with ISA you can push everything through on one address anyway. Anyway no more cert errors! I do miss the old days of self signing. It was frankly funny to hear a friend tell me about when she was scammed. She said that the website had the "Padlock" icon to say it was secure, so how did she get scammed? I told her that her credit card details were sent securely, just direct to the scammers! I assume thats why in IE7+ self signing certs give errors.

Sounds like it's the back room Link2ICT/SB staff not schools so it'll treated like any normal commerical outsourcing.

Well it's a shame if this is true and coming to pass. Although it's sometimes a rocky relationship I really appreciate the knowledge these guys have, and that for certain types of call you always end of with the same guy and you can develop a rapport. Far better than a guy reading a script on the otherside of the world.

I really hope it's none of the good guys in third line like <> who do a fantastic job when the case gets through to them. I wonder if this is why Bridgit left (the Head of the technical side)?