richardp

Hi, yes you are going to need a mac server to do what you want, although you don't need to go to the expense of an xserve. Get a mac mini and a copy of OS X server and if you can manage it a copy of Apple Remote Desktop also. You then will be able to restrict the users access, map group shares, remote control macs, specify proxies and update server etc... from the OS X server while still using AD for authentication so you don't have to recreate your users. Richard

Hi, I did have 16 imacs dual booted but we had quite a few problems with them such as the time getting out of sync randomly and the headache of imaging them, that we ended up taking the decision to revert back to just OS X until the problems get sorted out. Especially as we just purchased another 14 nvidia based ones. I tried deploying MSI packages before we abandoned dual boot and never got it to work through Active Directory. Richard

I do exactly this with a cambridge audio amp which accepts hdmi, component, optical and coax digital inputs plus the normal left right stereo intputs. All I have to do is select the correct input on the amp for the ps3 / virign box / htpc etc... Coupled with some mourdaunt short speakers it really out performs and "PC" surround sound system by a mile. Have a search arround as there are some really good deals on amps at the moment. Richard

Hi out of interest does Windows 7 licensing still work in the same way as Vista requiring you to have a license service running all the time ? richard

Hi, are you using a proxy server such as a cachepilot for safari? If so this has something to do with the authentication method used I think. I believe it can handle only one way of doing it so when we login here on a windows computer the cachepilot can read the AD info and not prompt for authentication. However if the same user logs into a mac and runs safari they are prompted for username and password. I am not sure how to resolve this at the moment as it is not top of my list. On a somewhat related note I would look at using a different browser on your macs, safari is ok however it has a bug in it (even in V4 !!) that prevents it from accessing https pages through a proxy. Have a look at camino or firefox etc... Richard

Hi, as far as I can remember this is how the setup is supposed to work when the OD is bound to the AD. On your OSX server the overview page for the open directory service should have LDAP Server as "running", the Password Server as "running" and the Kerberos "stopped". The reason for this is that the OD should be bound into the AD Kerberos Realm and not one of its own. Hope this sheds some light Richard

Yes the DroboPro by default uses a single drive for redundancy but by simply ticking a box will use two drives. I have ordered one to replace a dead hp tape autoloader (which was very expensive at the time), it was going to cost us approx £2500 to replace the tape drive plus approx another £1000 for new tapes as we could not get the same tape drive. So we went for a drobopro for £850 plus 4x 2Tb hard drives at £150 each so a total of approx £1500.This gives us 5.4Tb of usable space, plus we can add another 4 harddrives later on, especially when the price drops.

Have you considered the new drobopro ? 8 diskbays, iscsi, dual disk redundancy ... The unit without disks is approx £850 ex vat then just add as many 2tb drives as you need. You can also remove all the installed disks as a disk pack which can then be stored off site.

Assuming you have some network ports in the store room where they used to be, why not just plug in a laptop and transfer some large files backwards and forwards to the servers and see if you notice any difference. A significant number of packets that have to be retransmitted will end up slowing down the transfers. I used to work in manufacturing on a very large site and we used fibre optic connections but only between different buildings. Anything within the building just used cat5e with no problems at all and some of the cable runs were quite long. To be honest even if you have some slowdown it is probably best to move some or all before they burst into flames as the heat will be doing them no good at all. Richard

I work for a CLC so we have a wide range of kids that come in and use our facilities. Datalogging seems to be popular with primary schools, we use data harvest easysense qadvanced boxes with various sensors but mainly temperature and light gates. They also tend to use powerpoint or smartnotebook for writing up the experiments etc... We also do a lot of green screen work with primary schools to create all sorts such as the typical weather forecasts but also things like Tudor News broadcasts etc... We use either Premiere Elements or full Premiere Pro even with primary kids. We recently purchased new desktops with touch screens which the kids really like to use and on the whole seem to use sensibly moving to the mouse when necessary. Touch screen works well with young kids (especially those so young they can't click a mouse button etc..) when using some of the 2Simple software. Another really popular one is lego mindstorms robots, we take part in the first lego league with a selection of our primary and secondary schools. We get them started with some training for the staff and host our local heat. The kids really seem to enjoy it, they even give up break times and work after school and even during holidays !!! We have some primary schools buying more kits so more kids can get involved. We also have HD sony vid cameras which cost a fortune but for most things something like the flip video or a still camera is all you need otherwise you end up with powerpoints with huge video clips in them making them way too large, especially if they are to be posted on your learning platform etc... Richard

Hi, I have just done the exact same thing for 30 imacs and I had no problem renaming them after imaging them. How have you done the imaging ? I imaged directly from one mac to another using carbon copy cloner and a 800 firewire cable. Both of them were off the network at the time of imaging and renaming. They were also not yet joined to either a windows active directory or mac open directory domain, I did that after I had renamed the target imac. If you are joined to a domain you may need to unbind before you can change the name. The only other thing I did was to enable the root user account. In Leopard go to the "Open Directory" utility then "Edit" and select "Enable root user" then just enter a password. Hope some of that helps Richard

It comes down to budget and what kind of disasters you are trying to plan for. I used to be the network operations manager at a manufacturing company in the late 90s early 00s before I started working in education. We used an open vms system that had a cluster of 3 physical servers (one of which was as far from the other two as possible) plus a seperate scsi based storage device for all the data. This system would automatically compensate for any server that had a problem so that the users would not know anything was wrong unless all three servers died at the same time. It worked flawlessly for years until we replaced it with a new unix based system running on rs6000 servers. However on top of that we also had a contract with a disaster recovery company. If we had a major fire or a satellite fell on us we would call them up and they would arrive on site with a number of containers the same day. These containers would have the same servers and client computers as we had installed and act as offices for staff. All we needed was our most up to date backup tape. Now obviously that cost a fortune, can't remember the exact numbers but £30,000 a year would be about somewhere near the mark. Plus we had to test the system once a year by going down to their offices in Birmingham and restoring out system from tape. If the main focus is to avoid down time due to hardware failure then clustering / virtualisation / raid / disk and tape backup / offsite replication/ generators/ ups etc... are the areas to research. Vandalism or burglary etc... may lead you down the path of spending money on better security. Some people don't even have their servers in a locked room !!! Destruction of the site is a whole other ball game, not much point in spending £100,000 on spare servers and switches etc... stored offsite (don't forget client workstations) if there is no school to work in. The only way to be 100% safe is to have a whole other school sat idle waiting for you but even that would do you no good without reliable frequent comprehensive backups. Richard

Hi, no expert in virtualisation but I do know there are some limitations on doing this with exchange server. Have a look here for some more info about that. I have been thinking along similar lines as you however I do not personally think that virtualisation is the ultimate answer. Don't forget that by doing what you propose you would end up with a single point of failure for your whole system as you would have only one physical server. One blown motherboard or faulty cpu and thats the whole system down until it is fixed. I would say that a similar setup to what you have already is more sensible and gives you more redundancy. 2 well specced servers running your services plus a large san for storage. I think virtualisation has its place, for example it is great for testing new operating systems or trying out new software etc... But surely a server powerfull enough to run the virtualisation software plus 3 installations of win 2008 (I assume) plus the software services (exchange/antivirus/wsus etc...) should be capable of running one installation of windows 2008 plus all the software services ? Also don't forget you have to license each installation of windows 2008, sometimes per processor ! Richard

Hi, Here we use RMs Kaleidos at all but one of our Secondary Schools, I can't remember what the other secondary is using but it could be Blackboard. For our Primary Schools they currently use Netmedia but are in the final stages of selecting a new platform. The front runners are the new one from Netmedia (although not really finished yet to my knowledge) and Uniservity. Richard

Hi, Ergo AS1, goes upto Core 2 Duo 2.8Ghz / 4Gb Ram / 320Gb hd / onboard graphics (intel gm45) / hdmi out / vga out / eSata / card reader / firewire / 19" widescreen tft (touchscreen optional). It is basically a laptop attached to the back of a tft screen, so ok if something goes wrong and you don't have an onsite agreement it may be harder to fix. However it does mean that the footprint is very small, they are VERY quite and they claim the running costs are very low. I would certainly recommend including them in any demos or trials you enter into. Richard

Hi, I just purchased a Sony 40W4500 (40" LCD) for similar reasons. I can say having used it for approx 2 weeks now that it is worth the money. Standard Definition TV looks great and is much better than I expected. PS3 games look fantastic with no lag that I can see. Blu ray films look excellent and are definitely worth the extra cost over dvds, although upscaled dvds also look a lot better. I have a HTPC hooked up to it also and the desktop is very usable at 720p, good enough to use as a monitor even. A really good source of info is AVForums.com and I would recommend thinking about purchasing from john lewis as you get free delivery and a 5 year guarantee (they will also price match so long as you match against a store that has a proper shop not just online) plus a 30 day no quibble returns policy. Richard

Hi if you are already using IPCOP then why not try using OPENVPN which is free and integrates into IPCOP. OPENVPN is an open source SSL VPN solution which if I remember correctly can be setup in either "site to site" or "roadwarrior" modes. I have tried it out in "roadwarrior" mode and it seemed to work really well, once setup it was much quicker to connect than MS VPN. Richard

Hi, it sounds to me like it is running as a light weight access point rather than an autonomous access point. They are available to buy configured as lwapp or ap and have different model numbers to reflect this. Did you not get a console lead with it, if you did you can plug that into it then into a com port on a pc and use hyperterminal to monitor the bootup which should tell you what is wrong. This should allow you do do at least some config also I think. I believe it is possible to convert it to an autonomous access point by uploading the cisco operating system to it but I have not needed to do it so I cannot advise on that really. Richard

Hello All, Last week I had an out of warranty poweredge 2850 server die on me. It refused to boot into windows which I thought was a problem with the boot sector. However I tried the chkdsk - fixboot but I could not get to the recovery console as it always hung. No errors were reported at all, no lights no messages on the little screen nothing. I think I have managed to prove to myself that it is not the disks but in fact the onboard Perc 4 raid controller. I would like to prove this a bit more by connecting the scsi backplane to a spare adaptec ultra160 scsi card I have but the cable in the server is to short to reach the back of the case. I realise that the disks and raid controller are u320 and the spare card is u160 but they both use 68pin connectors which I understand are compatible but would run slower but would prove to me the disks are ok. Basically can anyone recommend somewhere to get a round 68pin to 68pin internal scsi cable at least 50cm long as I am finding it really hard to find one. Thanks Richard

Hi, dont use CC3 just vanilla windows. Make sure you have the latest version of the software and board driver (3.7) as this seems to work much better for non priv users. All I do is install as domain admin then make sure the driver can see the board correctly and put the icons in the all users desktop folder. On a side note they are releasing version 4 in January which is quite a bit different in look and concept I have been told, they can't really talk about it at the moment before the big launch. Plus it is still being worked on so that January release may well slip. Richard

Hi, yes we have used this for a while with a couple of secondary schools in my LA. Once it is setup it works quite well and makes the whole process easier. The new version allows you to have more than one audio track which the old version did not. If you do not have your own webserver then at a cost you can rent some space with softease. The only thing that came up for us was that you really need to vet each podcast before you let the students upload them oherwise you may end up with some questionable content. By adding a password to the publish function then they cannot do the final step of uploading. Best thing to do is download the trial version and give it a go. Richard

I used to do this where I worked before in industry. We had a VAX cluster running OpenVMS for our manufacturing and financial system. What you might want to consider is that although the OS will continue to work fine if you down one of the servers for maintenance, you have to remember that any hardware resource within or directly attached to that server will no longer be available. So on a basic level the hard drive in the downed server will no longer be available and therefore none of the data etc... stored on it. We used a stand alone disk array for data storage which meant that if one of the servers failed etc... the other server could continue without any problems and the users would be unaware of any change as all data was still there. The costs as mentioned above are higher as well as making setup and maintenance that bit more complex. Richard

Hi, it sounds to me like you are not updating the "default user" profile within "Documents and Settings". When the user logs in for the first time their profile is created from the "Default User" profile folder. You need to create a new one and copy it to the folder. Do the following and it should get you further forward, I am doing this from memory as I am using a Mac at the moment so I may not be spot on with the names of things etc... Install the software as administrator (local or domain) then login to the PC as an account on the domain setup with the same settings as your normal user account. Run all the software you have installed so that it does all the prompting etc... and configure it as you want. Then restart the PC and login as the administrator account. Go to the control panel and run the "System" control and go to the "Advanced" tab. Go to the "Profiles" tab and highlight the profile of the account you used. Click on the "Copy to" option browse to the "Default User" folder (make sure you have set the admin account to view hidden files and folders before this) and select it, then set the permissions to "Everyone". As I said this should sort things out however there are still some programs that seem to require "My Documents" as the default. Some need to have their ini file (if they have one) edited. You could always redirect the "My Documents" folder to a D: drive partition (if you have one) or to a network share etc...

I have 3 projectors suspended from the ceiling in our auditorium with vga cable runs of approx 40m, one of the projectors is high definition. I do use some splitters / boosters which if I remember correctly where purchased from lindy. We have no problem with image quality even on the high definition projector projecting onto a 4m square screen. The other two projectors are used together for a stereo 3d system which again works perfectly. It sounds like you have some dodgy cables to me as I would have thought that you should see something coming out of the projector even if it was a really bad picture. If you have to use a booster then I would try and get the best one you can as cheap ones usually end up giving you a naff quality picture. richard

We have no IT education department within our LA only a corporate one. Until recently they were almost completely focused on corporate matters with little understanding of school requirements. However with the recent appointment of a new network manager who is willing to work with the school tech teams things seem to be changing for the better.