Paid_Peanuts

Memory Sticks are not getting assigned a drive letter within Windows XP. This is occuring on all machines, they have the following drives: A: or B: which is assigned automatically regardless of wether the machine has a floppy or not. C: D: If the machine has a CD-ROM E: If the machine has a second CD-ROM F: Mapped network drive for network applications H: Users home folder M: SIMS mapped drive-staff / other hidden apps share-students T: other hidden apps share Y: Year drives mapped drive Is there a way of forcing USB memory sticks to use a certain letter or letters in the case where 2 are used at the same time? All machines are Windows XP running 2003 native AD setup. Thanks in advance.

Hi, here is the scenario: Three of us in ICT here, Seconday school 1850 pupils, 200 staff some 750 machines. Over the summer holidays between the three of us we had 8 days off! Now we all want to take October half term off. However we have been told we can't all be off at the same time... We have to outstanding work to complete nor do we have anything happening over the October half term. Does anyone else think this is unreasonable?!

We have no copy of 'lessonmonitor.mdb' on our affected laptops nor is it on the ones that are working... so that rules that out. Any ideas as I'm not sure Capita know either.

EXACTLY the same here - any ideas yet on this patch?!

Yeah this is why Skype and Google Earth are appearing everywhere!

No one else found this? I have been playing around a little more today and even if you prevent access to the C: drive within group policy it still allows the end user (student) to install google earth...

Appologies if this has already been covered! Google Earth - you download it as an exe file, however it seems to create somesort of msi file which will allow non administrators install onto any machine... Has anyone else experienced this and if so have you managed to prevent this from happening? The same happens with Skype - if a user has the install file they can install this too without needing access rights.

How is everyone doing with so little time before students and staff are back in? We have been working 11-12 hour days recently trying to get as much as we can possibly get done. Very few things are actually complete and will be complete by Wednesday next week when the students arrive back. Good job i've only had 1 days holiday this holiday (all year actually) otherwise half of what we have already done wouldnt have even been started!

Both you and I know what shared drives are for - however people using them in the manner they were designed is a step too far in our place. Every thing important is stored in someones H: drive somewhere. I suppose its just a case of educating the end users.

Scenario: Every member of staff has their own H: drive. Currently there are members of staff i.e. Support Services Manager who periodically needs access to all admin H: drives in someone’s absence. In such cases we have added them to the security settings on the folders as and when. So there is probably about half a dozen people that have or want access to other peoples H: drives as well as their own. Are we in breach of any data protection acts by doing this? Do we need to gain the permission of the person whos H: drive it is the staff members are accessing? Or because they are an employee of the school are we allowed to give anyone access to their H: drive? How do people do this at their schools? Comments and advice greatly appreciated.

Just change the Subnet mask to 255.255.0.0 Thataway you will not need to change any ip addresses and you gain more

Here is our current situation: As a large secondary school we are not deploying a campus wide solution for wireless. We refuse teacher laptop access to any wireless 'hotspots' we have. These 'hotspots' are only for our 3 trolleys of wireless laptops that are assigned to departments. We have 9 AP's to date currently Netgear WAG102. This summer decisions have been made to install an additional 2 trolleys making a total of five. This is the direction the SMT are taking to fulfil the ICT requirements for other departments around school. So the number of wireless laptop trolleys we have will only ever go up. Installing additional AP's here and there is going to get messy! Currently all AP's are not running over PoE - which they are capable of. So what I want to do is: 1) Install PoE switches in relevant cabs to power AP's 2) Install AP's which will load balance (15 laptops per trolley) and play nice with each other 3) Have some sort of central management so when we grow this wireless implementation it can scale as suitable Can anyone suggest which PoE switches, AP's and what software/hardware we need to centrally manage all this? I look forward to the ideas and suggestions people have for this. Thanks in advance.

Thats an interesting take on it - I wounder if the head would think about it that way...

I am pretty sure the business range of equipment from Linksys are built to a much higher spec than the home equipment. For example when i watch my Linksys SRW2048's boot through the console port it resembles the boot process of a Cisco 2900 switch! I think the Linksys has the same fundamental internals as the Cisco! The only difference being the Linksys has a cut down number of features only really accessible through the web GUI and not command line. I presume they have done this to stop people from buying Linksys instead of Cisco...

Nice to know other people use the main classroom pc with SIMS without issues. Next step is to convince the head to let me implement it...

I have found through experience the following switches to be very reliable and about as cheap as you will find anywhere: Netgear GSM7212 - 12 port managed Gigabit switch (12 auto-sensing 10/100/1000 Mbps ports / 12 Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP*) fibre interfaces) Linksys SRW2048 - 48 port 10/100/1000, 4 shared Small Form-Factor Pluggable fibre interfaces Both switches operate within our server room and have performed reliably since the word go. For those who’s budgets aren't Hugh then I would certainly recommend these.

I have found through experience the following switches to be very reliable and about as cheap as you will find anywhere: Netgear GSM7212 - 12 port managed Gigabit switch (12 auto-sensing 10/100/1000 Mbps ports / 12 Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP*) fibre interfaces) Linksys SRW2048 - 48 port 10/100/1000, 4 shared Small Form-Factor Pluggable fibre interfaces Both switches operate within our server room and have performed reliably since the word go. For those who’s budgets aren't Hugh then I would certainly recommend these.

I have finally convinced the head to install a pc in all teaching rooms to drive the projector and smart board - enabling easier transition for teachers when they have to move from room to room. As currently they have to carry a laptop round all day. However the head is insisting that staff only access SIMS.NET from their laptop using a different network point elsewhere in the room. The concern from the head is using SIMS.NET lesson monitor and potentially displaying any sensitive data on the screen for all the kids to see. I have explained the projector can be switched off, they can freeze the screen or alternatively they can unplug the projector cable from the machine/wall. Asking staff to still carry round their laptops from room to room seems like a poor use of resources. DOES ANYONE ELSE USE SIMS ON A PC WHICH DRIVES THE BOARD AND PROJECTOR? If so how do you make sure that staff do not project SIMS up for all to see?! Has anyone had any instances where this has happened?

Can anyone advise me on the best way to proceed with our backup solution. Here is our current scenario: Server with curr home dir = 160Gb on the same server - department drive = 70gb seperate server with staff home dir = 30gb What would be the best way to back all this data up every night? I was looking at the Dell offering of a Dual Magazine Tape Autoloader PowerVault 124T - would this suffice and backup all data quick enough? We start the backup procedure at 6pm every afternoon, it has to be complete by 7am the next day for start of the school day. Currently we backup from disk to disk using Backup Exec 10d and archieve to tape at end of each week what we cant fit on the server any more (3mb free last week out of 1.5Tb!) Would be nice to know what people think and how they would do it.

I am currently investigating our AD setup. Now although we run a native 2003 domain our implementation leaves somewhat to be desired. We currently have two separate domains, one for curriculum and the other for admin. Over time these two domains have overlapped to the point where it is becoming an absolute nightmare to support. We have staff with unrestricted access to the machines – not locked down via GPO at all. I want to scrap both domains and consolidate into one domain for both admin and curriculum. Has or does anyone else run just the one domain within a secondary?