SteveBentley

Is expecting a student to travel to the library to consult "dead tree" based resources significantly different to expecting them to travel there to consult electronic ones?

Well here (I work at a Uni) the general advice is yes, use the internet, but verify the material. I know the library here are keen to make the distinction between using the internet to access good reference sources (online copies of journals, industry body websites, newspaper archives) and some random blog. Have to say I was slightly shocked when, shortly after starting here after graduating, I was first let into the secret of what this kind of exercise is known as - they call it a FOFO... ":censored: Off and Find Out"

Leaving aside the social aspects, pedagogically I'd tend to say that "look up XYZ and cross reference a variety of sources" is a much more valid piece of work and will probably require a visit to the library for all students rather than just the few without internet access at home. The assignment as presented is an invitation to take a wikipedia article on XYZ and rewrite it in your own words. The slightly more discerning student might take a look at the references on the wikipedia piece and quote a few relevant chunks from those.

Set permissions on the folder so it is readable by everybody, but only administrators have modify and create. Make a new subfolder with permissions for everybody who needs to write data to the temporary area, and shift everything into there. Place a READ THIS BEFORE SAVING ANYTHING HERE.txt file in that parent folder in which you outline your data cleaning policy for the share. I'd be inclined to automate the clean-up rather than relying on you remembering/having time to do it periodically so that there can be no "but I've left stuff there for weeks before and it didn't get deleted" arguments when somebody loses something.

Use regmon to find out what it does actually do to the registry, cook up a suitable .reg file and put regedit /s path-to-your-file.reg in the login script.

Personally I think lookup tables in Excel are an abombination, and if you need that level of complexity you should be using a database. I'd use both excel files as linked tables into an Access database and create a query that pulls the fields you want from each of the tables (spreadsheets) and has a where clause that matches one or more common fields from both tables. But that's just me

Thanks for the input. The Capture and Deploy images came from a colleague in another department who set the WDS server up for me. Unfortunately he is on leave at the moment so I can't ask him for some help. The disk in question is bog standard IDE, so I assumed drivers wouldn't be an issue.

I've taken an XP image from a PC (after sysprep-ing it) to my WDS server. When I come to install the image I get a message Windows cannot clean disk 0. The specified disk does not exist. The error occured while applying the unattend answer file's setting. Error code 0x8030025 I get this even on a known good disk in the PC the image was built from. There's a worryingly small amount of info on the web about this - anybody have any ideas? cheers Steve

Get the electricians who cocked it up to make good the cable they damaged? Many electrical installation firms also do data installs, or would be able to subcontract a data installer.

A second vote for the sympodium or promethean equivalent - I'd expect that a board big enough for your hall will be too big for anybody to reach the top of to write on!

What is the audience for this presentation? Does the person who dumped this on you actually have enough idea about IT to know what the title is supposed to mean? I have visions of that title being a Buzzword 2.0 compliant version of "Why should we upgrade to Vista and Office 2007"

Yeah - open one file, open the pages sidebar, then drop the icons for the other files into the sidebar.

Do them seperately and merge the PDFs in the Pages view of Acrobat (full version, not reader)

Set the scheduled task to launch on startup, but in the Settings tab, there are: Only start the task if the computer has been idle for at least [ 30 ] minutes If the computer has not been idle that long, retry for up to: [ 600 ] minutes Then it should shutdown if, within 10 hours of being started up, it does nothing for half an hour it will run the specified task (eg shutdown).

psshutdown run from a scheduled task on the machine, so nobody needs to be logged in.

appeared again recently with the dodgy positioning so the X was unavailable, FF3 on XP. Earlier post was from FF3 on vista.

I just had the Symantec one position itself so the close X was invisible.

How about a best of both worlds situation - set up a blog script that can generate RSS feeds?

We have some kit from ICS which links PCounter to mifare, a bit flaky to be honest - I managed to kill the whole lot when importing a .csv with all the mifare numbers into PCounter. Twice.

Depends a lot on how the network is being managed, but the DHCP server should be able to give you a list of which addresses have been allocated and which are in its pool.

My old school had such a system since 1986! Not sure how they've done it now they've just moved into in their shiny new build though.

I'll chip in with ping -a [name] or look it up in the DHCP server

Thanks for the help guys, our network guru has turned on portfast and it's working perfectly.

The machines which are connected via the hub work. I've tried disconnecting the hub but that doesn't bring the other machines back to life.

I've got a WDS server set up, authorised as a DHCP server, and its IP set as a helper in the "real" DHCP server. I'm finding that all but half a dozen of the machines in one of our labs are failing to pick up DHCP under network boot (but the DHCP client in Windows works fine). These half dozen machines are connected to a workgroup hub rather than directly to the switch. Am I missing something here? cheers Steve