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Nothing. There isn't a problem with the actual players talent and level of ability. That could clearly be seen in the Champions League Final when 10 of the 22 starting players on the pitch were English. The problem is making them work together as a team. In all fairness all home countries in recent years have over achieved and maybe this is the result of the Premiership hosting the talent from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. This includes England, reaching the Quarter Finals of three successive tournaments, when did that last happen ? The players have to become better to break through. The young lads play against the worlds best in training and practice games once they break into the reserve team. Surely that helps them. I imagine Ashley Cole loved going into training against Thierry Henry everyday or David Beckham learning a thing or two training alongside Eric Cantona. My view is that I want to see entertainment as a paying fan especially with the prices these days. I don't blame those prices on the players either, the chairmen make a massive slice from TV but don't hand a rebate out to the real fans. Anyway, I'd rather see that over 38 games than the 6 games to final at Euro 2008. I'd rather my club won something (not that they have for a while) rather than England.

Yeah I checked a few postcodes and it seems okay. Virgin currently have an offer on to take make it £10 cheaper if broadband is ordered online so that could pull it down to the £110 but then there is a £25 installation fee.

Our deputy head is getting a bit anxious. We have been allocated a pot of money available for a while now that could be used under the 'Computers for Pupils' scheme. It has earned over £1000 in interest for whoever is keeping hold of it. We seem to be hanging on for the LEA to come up with some idea about the connectivity side of things. The school is located 2 miles away from where most pupils who are eligible live, so that rules out wireless systems. We have 60 students who are eligible. We have received £10,000 capital to fund whatever improvements are required in school, somewhere between £400 and £500 to spend on each of the computers and around £110 per student for internet access from home for 12 months. Now the £110 doesn't seem to be enough at the current moment. BT broadband comes in at £200 for 12 months when you see through the latest offer. Virgin Media is £120. Most of the parents can't afford that kind of difference as the school struggled with attendance when the bus fare went up 40p a day. We have our Moodle running smoothly and it would seem that these kids are missing out at home as they remain part of the 'digital divide'. The deputy head doesn't want to wait for the LEA anymore so we are looking for the best broadband supplier who might do a bulk deal for 60 different addresses. I am looking for anyone who has taken out a bulk deal / got a discount on broadband.

I'm also on Scale 4 and full time working in Preston. I don't have the qualifications for this scale 3 job Before January I was previously on Scale 3 at around point 14 working pro rata that was £12600 or £15120 if I'd have been full time.

I use pxe linux and thinstation. There is a Thinstation Image Builder that creates the whole config for you online. Just find a tftp server to run on windows, change a few dhcp settings and bingo. Make sure you put the ip address of the server you want to connect to in the thinstation config file BEFORE you build it because I have problems if I dont.

This might be a crazy idea but is something I have thought about doing. By allowing remote access from home to your school servers the students could access whatever software you decide to use in school. They could also access and store their files in school. The benefit of this is that kids don't all have different versions of the software and are familiar with what they are using. I think the LEA would have to be pressed a bit more into allowing students to work from home. Currently the LEA is happy with staff using remote access, so I can't understand the problem with students logging in because they don't create as many problems as staff do. This then only limits the kids who don't have an internet connection, but I guess they couldn't afford office either or maybe even a home computer. On another note I found a problem transfering documents from openoffice into ms office. Sometimes the images included don't appear although I'm guessing it was down to me placing the images with precision on top of other things. I'd be interested to read your document Ric especially if it points the way I want it to.

Missed the presentation on Thursday, but my deputy head has just told me the basics. I have a similar idea to Mr T to use wireless, however our students live 2 or 3 miles away so it would be big task to get a wireless network erected nowhere near the school. Does anyone think this is feasible ?

I use normal default user profiles stored on the terminal server. From what I have seen when this happens, its not the actual servers being overloaded as the CPU and network usage in task manager for both DC and terminal servers is relatively low. As a first step I shall try the reboot at the end of the day.

I have a problem with my terminal service clients. It occurs when staff are synchronising their laptops (thats for another thread !) and the network traffic is high, therefore slowing the connection on the network. The connection between the thin clients and the terminal server is fine, its only when the gpo settings are being transferred that there is an issue. The screen hangs on applying settings. The terminal servers are on a switch with their clients and have no interference from other sources. But the main AD server is on the core switch alongside the NAS box. I currently have 100mb switches and have been considering upgrading them soon. Should I promote my terminal servers to AD servers to speed up the login process ? Or is there another way to cache the gpo settings to the terminal server. Thanks

There are package differences between Kubuntu and Ubuntu, I think Amarok, Kopete and the rest of the KDE suite are the big differences. Synaptic is not installed by default but the package manager is "adept" on kubuntu. Its under systems, however I replaced it with Synaptic because its a lot better.

I was looking for Christmas presents and obviously got bored so I decided to look for something for myself and came across 3 Skype WiFi phones. At first I thought it was quite good calling people over wireless networks as the 3 houses I will be at, my workplace and uni all have wireless networks. However, I was very disappointed when I learned that the handset didn't support text messaging, seems a bit of a draw back and one reason for me not to change as I don't want to have to carry two phones. It also appears that despite being able to make VoIP calls they don't have web browsers... might as well buy a PSP. Has anyone purchased or at least seen one of these in action ? Dabs http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?quicklinx=44L7&engine=froogle&keyword=NetGear+Skype+Wi-Fi+Phone&v=2#infoarea Skype website info http://www.skype.com/help/accessories/compare.html Netgear http://www.netgear.co.uk/extra/b_skype_wifi_phone.php

Its really more of a Linux v Windows thread than Ubuntu v Vista. More appropriately it should be Edgy v Vista. I use Kubuntu at home, Ubuntu on the laptop and Windows in school but only because I have to (even then the thin clients boot with PXE linux) Kubuntu Dapper (With latest KDE) > Edgy > Vista > XP

Does anyone boot with PXE network cards and Windows ?

Currently my clients boot from floppy to discover DHCP on my Windows Server. The DHCP redirects my clients to another Windows Server where a tftp server is running alongside terminal services. The TFTP method works from floppy disk. But now I am trying to boot from a PXE network card. Basically I need a PXE file somewhere in between the DHCP and TFTP and was wondering if it was possible to host this file on either of the Windows servers, host a pxe file on my linux cachebox (open to public but protected) or would I need a seperate linux server ? Is it as simple as copying the pxe.linux file from ltsp ?

Yeah, but I bet that doesn't happen on Wikipedia or Britannica. I put "martin luther king"+encyclopedia into google and it didnt come up with any sponsored links on page one either.

Wouldn't know where to begin with KIX. Here is what I have now. It still lets users open programs before clicking yes, but it does stays in the foreground. Const EWX_LOGOFF = 0 Set obj = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") intButton = MsgBox("Do you agree to this policy ?", 4 + 32 + 4096 + 65536,"Corpus Christi Catholic Sports College Student User Acceptability Policy") Select Case intButton Case 7 strMessage = "You clicked the cancel button." WshShell.Popup strMessage, 5 , "Corpus Christi Catholic Sports College Student User Acceptability Policy", 64 Set OpSysSet = GetObject("winmgmts:{(Shutdown)}//./root/cimv2").ExecQuery("select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Primary=true") For Each OpSys In OpSysSet OpSys.Win32Shutdown EWX_LOGOFF Next End Select

I agree that it will be annoying, however a few years back when I was at college I had to click accept everytime. If a student who hasn't accepted, logs on as a student who has accepted, then the they will never need to accept, therefore they can lawfully claim they never broke the agreement. Any more advice about modal stuff, like an example script I can look over ?

Here is my pop up vbs script for logins so that users have to accept our new policy at logon, if they refuse they are logged off. The slight problem is that users can continue working in the background and don't actually have to click yes on the policy. Const EWX_LOGOFF = 0 Set obj = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") intButton = WshShell.Popup ("Do you accept the user policy ? rest of policy to be added", , "Corpus Christi Catholic Sports College Student User Acceptability Policy", 4 + 32) Select Case intButton Case 7 strMessage = "You have rejected the policy and will be logged off." WshShell.Popup strMessage, 5 , "Corpus Christi Catholic Sports College Student User Acceptability Policy", 64 Set OpSysSet = GetObject("winmgmts:{(Shutdown)}//./root/cimv2").ExecQuery("select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Primary=true") For Each OpSys In OpSysSet OpSys.Win32Shutdown EWX_LOGOFF Next End Select Anyone know if I can put a system pause/freeze into it so that no other programs in the background will work until yes/no is clicked ?

I haven't had any problems with my solution so far apart from the teachers being restricted. Primarily the cachepilot is used to block the internet by putting a password on it. I could have a password for every child and assign them to groups, but they'd log in as each other and change each others passwords (but now they can't do that due to the hosts file so maybe I will) The caching element is hardly used, only for school website, but I think that its something that the teachers should be doing incase our internet goes down for an usual length of time.

A while ago I realised that our students who have a general login of student could access the cachepilot login screen. This meant they could log in if they knew the password and change it which would cause general confusion. I knew it would only be a matter of time before they worked their way onto this because of the teachers using cachepilot in class rooms. However I forgot until yesterday and today I'm trying to block out that page. Using group policy I turned off "Bypass proxy server for local addresses" and that disabled me from accessing it, but unfortunately not them as they have the configuration script to load cachepilot set as "http://wwwcache.cleo.net.uk/". I then tried adding cachepilot to the black list on the cachepilot but that didn't make a difference as the cachepilot is classed as local internet. I also tried to make the cachepilot site restricted using internet explorer options to set the security to maximum levels. But the students could still login. There is one option that does work, changing the hosts file to 127.0.0.2 cachepilot but I think that would block out the teachers if they use the same computer as students. I was hoping there was something a bit simpler that people knew ?

Unfortunately I think you might have missed the boat. There was one going at Moor Park in June. Most schools seem to have advertised the position early and have themselves sorted for September.

I had another network company from Rochdale come in today and they said everything was fine for the thin client infrastructure, apart from maybe wanting to change from the hubs to switches. Always get the 2nd and 3rd opinion

I don't like Securus myself. It gives too many fake reports, It picked up a Star Wars site as racist because the term jar jar was used. Then it constantly comes up with "lik" as sms because year 7s can't find the E key. Sure I can increase the security level but the best thing it has come up with so far is some year 9 lad typing "dildo" in google. I didn't think it was worth bothering the pastoral officer. Securus put in an box running there server which I felt was pointless as it could have been stored on the DC. Despite not being the best programmer in the world I don't think its actually that hard to actually program yourself. All you have to do is scan the RAM for certain combinations of characters.

Do you have a 6 week summer holiday coming up ?

I looked at the current setup in my cab and it seems that the hubs are all daisy chained together. The wiring it seems doesn't follow the lights and has its own trunking.