EHS-James

Well back ups and thus restoring legit files is no issue, I could as suggested copy everything to one of unbacked up NAS we have just so something isn't lost in the 2 week cycle we run. Like has been said for various issues be they coursework, teachers, slt, deleting and banning is just not proving too effective, which is why I think being annoying towards their little collections could win the battle for a while at least, and if it's automated I can just run it every so often. The Kazoo option sounds hilarious. Audit wise, yeah can't remember the last time that happened so I am treating it as somewhat pending.

Thanks for all the suggestions. In a logical world a shared drive where they could just dump music so it wasn't the same songs times 400 in each profile, heh. Don't think fair use would cover that Will be trying the sweeper today, but deleting just the boring option hah! Def guna flange/distort some of the bigger offenders.

My copyright infringement > than yours! Heh. Our govt likes to pour money away, maybe they will pay for the broadcasting rights for us. We're only a school of 600!

Emails aren't a bad idea, but we have a lot of photography students who we typically allocate 1gb or more to. Banning is nice in theory, until a typically unsupportive/ignorant/non-understanding teacher and/or SLT say they should be unblocked. We have a good AUP but it means diddly squat when it can be so easily undermined by people in positions of authority, who quite often don't/wont plan a non ICT factor as a back up for such cases. Frustrating! But that's why I was thinking of a more subtle annoying way of doing it. I'll certainly however check out the above link, could save oodles of time!

Hi all, trying to think of some good ways to deter kids from storing music on our system, short of continuously deleting it. With music/media etc a blanket ban on music files wont work, it would just interfere. I figured the best way would be to create some sort of batch to search for and replace all mp3s with some lovely Rick Astley, and hopefully pester them to keep it on their phones/usb etc. Alas my script skills are a little lacking. Couldn't seem to find the necessary tools in Goldwave, although I did find some easy options like fadeouts, reversals, flanges etc to distort and generally ruin the music. What do you guys do?

Not sure, I thought they were one of the few people given outright access to the source. I was under the impression it's a mod but not in a drag-into-the-jar variety. Don't count on that as 100% authoritative however. Either way intercepting the login packet from within the client is childsplay, hence the ease of piracy related to MC and why so many extra authentication plugins exist for Bukkit. Haha I'm excited to not have to do that anymore. Especially when 90% of the gameclub actually own an account.

I recently contacted them regarding this and their answer was as follows: Reason being our provider is over zealous and won't unblock on their end, so no matter our config anything (frivolous) that wont authenticate to the proxy (such as MC) gets blocked. Previously we had to use one of the modded clients, can't wait to upgrade to this both for my games club and possible educational use (not a teacher so can only suggest they use it hehe)

It might be worth waiting a few days, as Bukkit just did the multiworld upgrade, and while it has been mostly smooth many addons still aren't updated for it, and some errors do occur, a bad addon could cause corruption of your main world when a command gets put through to the wrong one, with hell bleeding in and other weird stuff. The best addons and worst bugs should be sorted by even as soon as then end of the week, next week at latest. I can offer you a zip of the latest previous versions prior to the update, but not until I get home.

Hi all, my boss sent me this thread so I thought I'd chime in! *(Warning, possible wall of text incoming!) Love MC, been playing about 4 months when I can pull myself away from WoW.. Just before christmas I started an after school games club which while exploring other games, game maker etc, largely centers around minecraft. The kids just love it. Some already played and some were new. We have a pool of around 20 people now who dip in and out when they can. Some of the changes lately made things a bit unstable so I had to turn off animals and monsters, giving them about 3 weeks of pure build/exploration (one week of manic PVP action) and they are starting to really dig in (lol) and get bases built. I'd post a screeny but right now the map is fairly empty because of the bugs, we made a new one. However I'll try and give some tips for anyone either thinking of playing or just wanting to get more from it. On a technical side: MC can be very ram heavy, needs a good GB to run stable, though if you can dedicate 2gb+ then you wont have as many issues with slow down or 2step lag. A person standing alone requires about 50-150mb of ram each. most of the load is associated with opening the chunk, land generation becomes moot after a while. So a minimum would probably be 75mb ram per person at max capacity however if it was busy that might be too low, if everyone were to run out and cause a lot of land to be made. Clearly a fast harddrive is better, a seperate one for the server from windows best still. The maps are saved as a lot of little files, so fast random seek time and burst is a better option than purely high throughput. This is being rewritten, soon a new map format will be deployed which will make it several large files instead. (Hopefully this wont kill old maps) Server Management Side: Bukkit is brilliant! Far more stable already than Hey0 and a much better mod format for the large numbers of plugins. WorldGuard and WorldEdit (Bukkit plugins) are superb. They allow you massive control over your map. Select a region and define an owner, or group of owners who are the only ones who can build there. Judicious use can help the kids make a safe area, but don't give them too much safety, after all, that's no fun. However it does allow them to build something and not have it griefed. You can also use it to save/protect anything they make which is particularly awesome. Most importantly for WG is the disbale fire/lava spread option, and the ability should you choose to disable the use of any item/block you may desire. So no forest fires destroying the entire world, no massive lava pools lagging up the surface etc. You can still catch fire, spread it to other people, die to it, but it wont ruin the world. Creeper nerf. This is a debateable option, some like it, some do not! Creepers still kill, and explode, but 5 seconds after the server will rebuild the destroyed area. Personally I love this option. Makes them far less frustrating but still dangerous enough. Essentials (Bukkit plugin) is the other mod I use. It does what it sounds like! Adds some great commands that the kids can make use of. Adding colours to names, /sethome and /home (like a hearthstone in WoW) as well as the /spawn command, so they can build a base and actually make it their home. They love that. In game mail (actually I disabled that) is possible..too much to list really. The /kit command is great, you can define item lists to grant to players on command (with a chooseable cooldown) such as basic wooden axe, spade, some candles etc. Enough to get them going but not enough to warrant relying on it. The other great thing about Bukkit is it fixes the railcart bugs, making it much much easier to design tracks, shows how much ram each person is using, how much was freed up when a player leaves etc. It's just all around great. Had no stability problems, this week we had 18 people playing and it didn't crash, with mobs, monsters, the works all running. We don't even have it on a great machine, just an old P4 with IDE ( o.O ) looking to upgrade it sometime. It's dedicated so not too much of a problem yet. I'll leave my stories of playing the game for another post as this is already long enough now! Oh and before I do leave it, a guy took the linux TinyCore distro and trimmed it down a bit more, loaded it with essential MC admin tools and called in MineOS. It's overhead is a mer 50mb ram leaving the whole machine to the server. I'm trying it out on another machine today, will let everyone know how it works out. The potential is nice though, and it's meant to be easy to virtualize and give a ramdisk etc. Using a ramdisk can lead to immense speed boosts, especially regarding chunk load time, but being volatile you have to be certain it is 100% ready for the hammering of many players!