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Oh yea loads. Comment banks, you may be lucky but I ended up writing or at least editing them for nearly every department purely because the staff can't do it properly. If you have say 50 seperate sentences for science then you will have to manually go into each one and thats just for one subject. Teachers cannot share classes in Reportmaster so you have to set up a new class for them or get them to write half the reports and give them to the staff that is on the report. The remote side of it does work where you write at home then sync the reports in school but again staff will struggle with it and I've seen many lose their reports and then come to you for miracles. Staff cannot access the same reports at the same time, you get locked out. You have to send the attendance and exam results off to Carn so they can be packaged and sent back to you to import into Reportmaster. Scary if you have less then a week before the deadline for printing and then you must ensure everybody is out of Reportmaster to do the import. Very hard near the deadline. It's difficult to delete staff or classes if Reportmaster thinks they are still in use when they're not. It is a little prone to errors, some serious some are not, again you must send the errors to Carn for fixing, sometimes this deletes reports already written. I will say the support is pretty good and they do get back to you fairly quickly. If it was more reliable I would say its OK but it's not flexible or integrated enough and there's too many little bugs that crop up and its always at the time when the reports need to be printed. Any use?

What build 32 or 64bit????

Valid points and sensible. I think the problem a lot of us have, are old existing servers/networks and the chance to upgrade/rebuild. This chance doesn't come too often for many of us and we want to make the absolute best of it knowing it could be a decision that will be final for several years to come. I dare say that there could also be some pressure thrown in the mix with head staff and governors expecting minor miracles. It's a toughie for sure. Do you play safe and go for 2003 with untold support from all quarters with rock solid stability and guaranteeing a job well done or jump on the new 2008 with less support, largely unused in schools but with some great features and basically future-proofing yourself for some time to come. Don’t know what I’m going to do yet.

I'm in a similar situation, at the moment we have 3 servers all Win 2000 with exchange 2000 as well. I need to make some big changes and I'm looking at Server 2008 but not sure what version, 32 or 64bit. I know Exchange 2007 and HyperV are 64bit only, are there other factors I need to consider ? the future is looking 64bit to me.

I would but its for 100 kids or so over 2 weeks and there's no way the pc's can handle Virtual Machines.

Hi, Some pupils are about to take some tests that are to do with Btech I think. Most requirements are ok to do apart from set the date and time. Here's the list Change the desktop to a specified colour Set the desktop image to a specific logo Set the Date and Time <----- Set the volume control Set the screensaver to Marquee with text Save to floppy disk or a memory stick Is there a way to allow access for pupils to set the date & time. Thanks for any input

I don't know about the 3000 I have the 1500 models The only way I could share the UPS between servers was by using apcupsd This was recommended by many techies on another forum I can't remember. http://www.apcupsd.org/ Stick it on all your servers. A bit fiddly to set up but its a useful piece of software. Better than powerchute in my humbliest of opinions. Good Luck

Funny enough ABTutor Control built-in filtering has pretty much stopped all naughtiness here. Use dansguardian (IPCop) at home, faultless.

Not sure what you're trying to achieve here. We have CLEO vpn access and we have routing and remote access disabled although we don't have ISA. I don't think you need to do too much at all on your server. If you're Trinity in Carlisle then you're welcome to pop over to me at Newman to have a look at our setup.

Must admit Dell replaced my knackered hard drive within 4 hours by courier.

Just to let you know how it went. First as suggested by cookie-monster I restored the data on the drives (1 drive 2 partitions). Went ok apart from some areas in Program Files, mainly Sophos I think. Then went for the system state and rebooted. Again went ok. Now I have the Domain Controller back up and running. I didn't go the veritas route but I did use the list as a check point so thanks for that. Exchange seems happy as well. I do have niggly problems now such as windows update services not working and sophos on clients not picking up updates from the enterprise which is hosted on the domain server. Big test will be when school starts next week. Thanks everyone.

No, its just a single scsi drive

Hi, Hope you all had a great christmas. Came in this morning and the Hard drive failed in our domain controller. Dell sent a new one out immediatly. I have never repaired a server to this extent before so I would like to know if there are any gotchas to look out for. We have exchange 2003 on a member server which is unaffected. Would I be right to install OS then add active directory then apply the backup.?

You're spot on PiqueABoo!!!! I couldn't see any shadow copies but I restarted the Volume Shadow Copy Service and just like cillit bang the dirt is gone. Thanks to all for your help.

It does seem like shadow copies although it is disabled and there are no 'Previous versions' tab on folder properties.

They come up as system files, here's one 31{3808876b-c176-4e48-b7ae-04046ebcc752} I'm just puzzled why there's so many of them and it appears they delete themselves after a set time. They've probably been there all along.

Yes it is a dc (child) with no GPO applications apart from Office 2003 and no shadow copies are enabled although it does run backup exec.

Hi, On one of my servers we have a logical drive E:\ at 53GB capacity. I noticed it was getting a bit on the low side and ran the utility windirstat.info/ It has picked up 30 system volume information files which are 500-600MB each. The earliest one is from the end of October up to today. I would like to know what these files are and why there are 30 of them. Is it safe to delete them? the old ones anyway. Thanks

From here http://www.techsoftuk.co.uk/DOWNLOADS_drivers.htm you may be using a different machine to ours. But this driver worked for us. Sorry for the delay

Touch wood (ahem) we're ok here, but I did re-install the drivers from the website.

Its a goddam nightmare! Over the top really, but if you browse on Capita forums you'll see many posts on the issues of PDA's and mobile SIMS. Updates seem to make it fall over and even Capita get the details wrong as witnessed on the September Update. There are some that have it working ok, I did for a while, but when it goes wrong you are largely in the dark along with many others. I really can't recommend it.

I've got a vmware box to play with so I'll try it out on that first. Much appreciated

I think I get the idea, Current set up is as follows Home (shared) --->Year7-Year13, Staff (shared) --->Staff folders. If I enable Transverse on the shared folder Staff and knock off the Staff Users permission for read/write etc they should still be able to alter their own folders and not alter or see anyone elses??

Thanks for the replies, its something I've inherited and would like to expand further. Not familiar with Transverse Folder, I know its under effective permissions but I'm not sure of its usage.

Cleo is just our Internet Provider. Since my last post, everything is not quite fine Internally. Using the Run box you can browse to any staff folder and modify at will. Something else for me to sort out. Cheers