Trapper

Has anyone else been playing around with the latest pre-release of Home Server 2? I'm really enjoying it, the media streaming within a Silver Light app is particularly well polished for an early release. Never liked the original home server, did nothing for me. However the ability to stream my media library online from a couple of key clicks is fantastic. It even works from behind BGfL too - I see this being useful come the summer! Image below is a brief snapshot of it working from a remote location. Had to check it using a double terminal services session so it was very jumpy, and low res. For a Microsoft product based on the reputation of the first Home Server am I seriously impressed with this. I'll post some more screen shots when I get chance. Hardware wise it's running on a Core 2 Duo @ 2.20Ghz each core with 2GB RAM and 1TB HDD. Network is only 100meg, but that's all I need. It has a half decent Radeon x1950 GPU, but obviously this isn't required for the server side.

I used custom taskpad views of MMCs (such as AD) with delegated controls. This meant all the user could view was the locked down MMC which contained the Student OUs only, and the functions that I created an icon for (unlock, reset password) Even if this user did open his own MMC to try and access the whole of AD, by also delegating control he couldn't do anything. Give the user a separate logon script, and map the shares needed for the job (general apps, documentation area) and then restrict everything else down. If you have apps that can only be run on a server (say Print Credits), create them an account which when it connects to a TS session it launches your print management application, restrict the account to run just this application. For local admin we already have a group "Student Admin Group" which is automatically added to all domain machines local admin group. This is for the awful software that requires local admin access (ALAN testing and Alice come to mind), add the user into your equivalent if you have one so the user has local admin access to your workstations. That was fun trying to figure out after we removed Ranger! The key point I've found is to try and make it look as though you are trying to be helpful, and give the user easy access to everything they require, instead of making it appear like you are protecting the network and locking them out. Perception!

Is this an Exchange or Sharepoint based calendar? Sharepoint is easy, not too sure about Exchange, as we use MOSS for all of our calendars.

Aye cards are now locked to boxes for "premium channels", so that's Sports and Movies. AFAIK it still works for normal packages. I used to take my Sky card over to my Dads on a Sunday to watch the football, now I just take the whole damn box!

Joker.com for all mine. Not the cheapest, but you get a lot of options. Now signed up with my personal .net domain for another five years for about £20. I use one.com, I believe their German for my external web hosting. It's about £25 for a year with a .net domain, unlimited space, few SQL DBs,5GB transfer per month. Frankly I don't use it anymore, but for the money it's always useful to have. Hosting it at home off my Aspire Revo is fine, but I like to keep my ports firmly closed.

We're looking at doing this soon as well. I've had a play with Exch 2010 at home, and the basic config isn't hard at all. My only concern is migration 1500 mail boxes over - especially when some are running into the gigs of data. If anyone has actually done this, has MS provided us with a streamlined, stress free migration path?

I'm fairly close by in Quinton, about 3 miles from the Woodgate Exchange. When I was on ADSL2 with Be* I managed to sync at around 17Mbps. That's with some dodgy internal wiring too, so I could have got pretty close to the top. I'm with Virgin now, but I've left my downloading days behind, so only use it for browsing, some gaming and some streaming from BBC/4OD.

We use First Direct, and it's bang on. Then again I was Lloyds for 8 years, so anything is better! Seriously though, the First Direct web banking is spot on.

Hello Folks, After digitising the videos of my wife and her sister growing up taken by her Dad, we're looking into getting a camcorder for home. Can anyone see any real downside between either this £100 jobby (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sanyo-VPC-CG10EBK-Definition-Camcorder-Camera/dp/B001SAMTLY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1270666373&sr=1-2) or the Sony equivalents and the more standard £300 units like this one (http://www.amazon.co.uk/JVC-GZ-HD40EK-Definition-Camcorder-Internal/dp/B001DOVLWI/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1271284063&sr=1-6) I think the £100 unit will be more than enough, but I'm not really an AV nut so would appreciate some advice, especially if I'm about to make a cock up and buy something useless. Cheers, Matt

That's just embarrassing, to pull a u-turn on a cider tax by some angry bumpkins (That is a joke by the way, I'm sure not everyone in the West Country sounds like Phil Harding from Time Team, and listens to the Wurzles)

My Labour MP Gisela Stewart (Lab, Bham Edgbaston) (Her values are Labour, but she has a mind of her own, as her local leaflets tell us which I take to mean "I'm screwed") was absent. My Dad's MP (Lab, South Derbyshire) voted against it. He's retiring at the end of this Parliament, so one would hope he voted for the people rather than for the whip.

Which is why the power is with, and always has been with the whips. Most of them just turn up and vote as directed by the chief whip, no thought goes into the decision. I've seen some of the debates going on, it's pitiful when only four or five MPs turn up. This is what their paid for, you'd like to think that when serious decisions are taken all MPs at least know the background! At a local level things are better, I'm tweeting with my local councilor, who gets things done. It's rare to have a PM from a Tory saying "cheers dude"!

Photo of how it looks. The Acer Revo is here at eBuyer The Sumvision HDMI DVD/DivX/XVid player is here at eBuyer Both are connected using HDMI. I use the same cable and swap, I never thought I'd run out of HDMI sockets. Ubuntu works a treat, with some tweaking, however Flash playback, namely iPlayer and 4OD was very jerky. This is due to Flash relying on the CPU to process. The latest beta allows you to pass this processing onto the GPU, however there is not Unix or Mac OS support for this. On Windows with the latest Flash beta HD BBC streams are smooth. The external HDD is on the bottom shelf. The drive I bought seperately for around £60 and the caddy was £15. I only use USB on it, so if I don't get the unit with eSata it's even cheaper. As a side note I have major issues with eSata - machines tend to crash when it's used, so I stick to USB. I hate taking photos of high gloss shiney black surfaces, it just attracts dust!

The space station moving through the Northern Lights - well above them. I don't normally post images I find on EduGeek, but this one is startling!

I've been using an Acer Aspire Revo which is a dual core Atom with a 1gig of RAM and an nVidia Ion GPU. This runs Windows 7 smoothly. On top I use Xbox Media Centre, and have a 1.5TB external drive plugged into it. It runs HD wonderfully, the only downside is no internal DVD drive. I either stream across the network from my desktop, or I've got one of those cheap HDMI DVD upscalers which also play Xvid. The Acer box, with external drive and the little media box for DVDs cost in total around £250. I'd highly recommend a remote control or failing that one of those clickers to control the box if you're changing media.

Very nice. Far better than the way PhpBB went. I can't get my head round it on my old WoW guild forums - and I'm one of the admins! Not that there's anyone left to administrate these days

Server is a blade with a quad clocked at 2.6Ghz with 3GB RAM. This is also our primary DC running Server 2003 R2 Ent x86. The profiles are around 8MB, but I plan to drop that down further with some folder redirections during the summer. At the moment they are in the intermediate phase from full roaming, to mandatory, to super mandatory. At the moment only one year group is set as a super man, haven't seen any real difference. I've set one of our IT rooms to remove profiles on logoff, but I only did this yesterday, so the jury's still out. What I do know for sure is when a machine has over 100 local profiles cached, it doesn't half slow the damn thing down. I'm planning to run a shutdown script to remove all the local profiles, and then set the GPO to remove at logoff. When we had full roaming with Ranger, this was the main reason why we re-imaged all 500 machines each summer - to clear the profiles! With a working WSUS solution, and software being deployed via AD and manually when required I hope to avoid en-mass re-ghosting this year. Clients are all XP SP3. Logon time varies, but if the PC is new on a gig link directly into a core switch it can take as little as 15 seconds. If the PC is old, and plugged into an old 100MB switch which is then daisy chained to our core, it can take up to 2-3 minutes. If it's on the wireless and you have 15 students all trying to logon via the same AP, even with Ruckus working frantically to re-route the traffic it can sometimes take over 5 minutes. Our teachers are very good, and know to try and stagger logon times. Back in the old days when we had an unmanaged wireless system, with Ranger kicking in and full roaming profiles logon times on the wireless could take up to 15 minutes. Obviously the state of the local machine and network conditions at the time can vary logon times hugely.

Does Spiceworks do this is you have non-OEM custom machines?

To quote some of the most intelligent men who ever lived: Outstanding! I r here! Seriously though, you should meet a guy I went to University with. He is King of the Grammar Police - in the less PC days we used to call him Derr Grammar Fuhrer, and yes he could be that savage! - never drunkenly mix up there, their and they're on a BB forum!

Hi Kenny, What software did you use to generate that report? It looks great!

Hello All, Finally! This has been driving me mad for months, I actually dumped 7 at work six months ago because of this. When running a domain on Server 2003 when your desktop client is x64 Windows 7 you'll find IE will not pick up the proxy settings from the GPO. What I found today was the x64 version of IE was fine - however given the bad coding by some programs - in this case Genuine Advantage(!), it needs to find the proxy from the x86 version of IE. You can't change the settings manually as its all greyed out. Whack the following into a registry file and apply. From what I've read is that the setting is in two places in the registry and for some reason the GP only updates the x64 one. KB Article on this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952031 Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings] "EnablePunycode"=dword:00000001 "CodeBaseSearchPath"="CODEBASE" "WarnOnIntranet"=dword:00000001 "MinorVersion"="0" "ActiveXCache"="C:\\Windows\\Downloaded Program Files" "ProxyEnable"=dword:00000001 "ProxyServer"="" "ProxyOverride"="" "MigrateProxy"=dword:00000001

I'm very surprised my boss hasn't posted this photo. I got a new (to me, it's a 52 reg) Focus 1.6 Ghia in Mid-Jan as my old Ka was more rust than car, and the MoT guy laughed at it. I've basically only had bangers, so to get a top trim car, which someone had taken very good care of (scarily I've found the car on Google Streetview at the old owners house - this is one of the features of Streetview that scares me - anyway OT!) I became slightly protective of the Focus. Last Friday I was backing out of an industrial estate between a metal fence and a transit. I hit the transit. What was worse was he didn't have a scratch! http://i.imagehost.org/t/0898/IMG_1055.jpg My wife is currently in the closing stages of learning, so I'll wait until she has passed before getting it repaired. Now this is nothing about female drivers!! But my wife does like to get very close walls when reversing. Not that I can talk now anyway

Hello All, I've noticed that sometime between the end of August and now 02 have dropped the price of their 30 day data modem plan (3GB cap) from £15, down to a tenner. Just as an FYI, it's a very good price for the capacity. Although I last bought this for a week away, and found out that Sidmouth is not a 3G area! I find this very useful at work, as we do not have the option of bypassing the black list and filtering, and it also means I can SSH onto my home server. I've also noticed that you can also choose an option for PaYG tethering to a max of £2 a day. I was wondering if anyone has tried this as a pay monthly customer. I'm not sure whether this is a plan I could actually use, or whether the 02 website is having problems and giving me an option that is incorrect. The only reference I can find to PaYG data modem is for PaYG customers only, Confusing!

We use a DL 360 G5 as our Facility, ePortal and Truancy server. Steady as a rock, never had a problem with it. We have DL 160 G5 as our storage server for work area and shared drive. We chose thr 160 for this as it takes the 3.5" discs, instead of the 2.5"s. No idea why, it was a choice made before my time! Regardless those two servers are fantastic value for money, and more than stable for critical deployments. In fact we have a 360 with 8GB of RAM running eight virtual servers on Hyper-V, with no problems at all. Hope this helps.

Seriously though do you really want staff to be using the same username and password for ePortal and for their logons? Given the information which can be accessed on ePortal, I feel happier having that extra layer of security of a different set of credentials. The username is different for AD and Facility, and teaching staff cannot reset their own ePort password.