Roberto

I'm a bit further south than Northants, I'm in Bedfordshire. Cost of living is far from cheap here. Of course it isn't exactly cheap anywhere these days... Given my skill-set and experience, I know I'm expensive but lots of people think I'm worth it. Long story short, by the time you balanced the cost of the commute against the wage increase, if I won the highest paid of those two jobs, and assuming the salary offer was somewhere in the middle of their posted range, I'd be at best taking home the same as I do to be an assistant netman now. As I said, good jobs there, but not exceptional.

at the risk of sounding controversial, I don't think those pay grades are all _that_ impressive. Not bad, maybe, but (as Indiegirl replied) remember London Weighting; nothing to get excited about either.

Apple seem pretty free and easy on this - they don't want to be ripped off but they don't want to upset customers either (If only Microsoft could copy this from Apple). I just walked in to the Brent Cross store with my ID card to prove I really did work at the college, and they simply ask if you teach or supervise students. I managed to say "yes" and walked out with a MacBook at edu staff discount price, no hassle. You've told students to stop messing around in a corridor before, at the very least, surely? Isn't that supervision?

First things first, what happens if you open disk utility and choose to repair permissions on the OS disk?

Rather than spending ages trying to fix this, might it not be easier to backup the account data, create a new account and restore the data... Can you change the account's password when logged on with the account itself?

Bad news, I know but they might be just as worried about this as you are - maybe it's you who'll end up with that one job?

No answers to this I see, I thought I'd replied. IIRC if the experience of editing Apple PList files seems oddly inconsistent, that's because it is. Some of them seem to be 'simple' XML files, some of them are 'compiled' or compressed or some damn thing XML files. On the Apple support tech course I was told never to edit them directly, always with an editor tool. I've occasionally had to ignore that advice and not had problems so far, but I suspect it's still good advice. If you install the Apple developer tools, XCode and the like, I think theres an editor in /developer/applications/utilities

Isn't that error related to internal file I/O in sendmail, rather than to network transmit/receive?

iPhoto, iTunes and (I think...) iMovie are/were standard parts of OSX. iPhoto and iTunes have to be, as they contain part of the "expected" functionality of the operating system, similar to the Windows media player and the picture viewer and camera wizards in Windows. Other than that, iLife is not a standard OS component but rather part of the "Hardware Bundle" you get when you buy a Mac, or a seperate purchase. I certainly didn't get iLife bundled in when I purchased my iBook, which was when 10.3 was a new release, but iLife got added to the hardware bundle sometime during the lifetime of 10.3 because it came bundled with our very first Mac Mini purchase here at teh college, which arrived just before Tiger was released.

Yes. You must be upgrading an existing licence. No. And I don't believe Linux counts for the competetive upgrade.

At the risk of being controversial, I'm not sure this is reasonable. What does the 'lowest you can possibly do' mean? I believe some companies have offered us computers at below cost price before now in order to get our business and drive us away from our current supplier. We said "No, thanks" to that. Making it that cut-throat will impact on warranty & support, and in the sort of operation we all have, the user's confidence in you and your system can live or die by the warranty support you receive. Driving prices so low that companies go out of business or are unable to meet their warranty / support comittments only makes sense if you're certain that you won't ever need to go back to that supplier for further business or for any kind of support.

We had to put them in the email blacklist here as they simply didn't stop sending us emails. They also kept calling up despite being told we would refuse to do business with them, sometimes to complain that they couldn't send us email. So my reason for unhappiness is spamming. Sending us spam is a great way to never get our business ever.

We couldn't make it work with IIS when we looked at this a little while ago. We also decided we weren't interested in running a new server service which we knew nothing about either, so we refused to install the software.

Thanks Indiegirl. I'll take whatever chances I can get. I think most of MK is quite commutable. I live in Bedford and work in Luton now, so it's about the same really!

I think i'll be hearing that a lot! oh well.

I know I might be priced out of most markets, but I'm after a new challenge and the best way to make sure I don't get is to not ask, so I'm asking. I'm looking for a job with appropriate challenge and remuneration for an experienced Systems / Network engineer type with about 15 years IT Industry experience, about 9 years of which are in education. I'm looking for a job with either (or preferably both) Windows and Apple machines. No RM connect (or at least no long term ties to it) as dealing with that festering heap is one of the reasons I'd like to move on from where I am now. Location: Something that can be commuted to from my current home in Bedfordshire, but I'd consider relocating for that proverbial dream job. While I'm dreaming, I'd also like a winning lottery ticket, and a pony. The pony isn't for me, but would make a nice gift for someone I know.

Personally, I'd buy whatever the rest of the school is using. It doesn't look "good" politically if you have nicer (or even just different) kit than your clients, and it always helps improve your support for your customers on all kinds of levels when your experience of the system is as close to theirs as possible.

I got SUCH a look from one of our teachers the other week when he remarked "The little darlings are back soon" and I replied "Soon...? I thought you were all back last Monday!" We usually reply to things like that with "How about NO!". We only make changes like that during a break.

Just to be clear about this, if this is all hosted on the same IP range, does the FQDN point to the same actual network card from both external and internal clients? Does it definately fail auth when being accessed by FQDN internally? Do the netbios / wins name of odyssey and the FQDN point to the same network card "internally"? Where is "internal" and "external" delimited? On the site or at the hosting company's external gateway to the internet at large? E.G. Are they routing onto the internet directly or onto a MAN/WAN? I'd be looking at the IIS logs AND the event viewer at this point. That would show where the exact breaking point is.

Having had a think about this for a while, the following spring to mind as worth checking if you have not already. First, what is the exact error message you get. Is it from the server? Or from a proxy between the home user and the web server? Have you defined host headers as a requirement for reaching the site. Do you have redirects in place? Can you check the HTML links in the page code? If so, do any of these re-direct to the intranet 'http://odyssey' internal address rather than to whatever appropriate FQDN or IP address you're using for external users? Assuming IIS logging is turned on, you should be able to extract the host/server conversation for one of these connection attempts to see what exactly is happening. It should be possible to see from that at what stage things begin to fall apart. Incidentally, if you're logging in with your Active Directory credentials, I _do_ hope you're using SSL at that point.

If open source were a panacea then why did Apache take between 3 and 33 hits? My point was, and still is, that when you actually look at the hard info on IIS 6 the "legend" of IIS being useless doesn't stand up the way it did with previous versions. We're supposed to be in the education business after all. The OP made a choice which is supported by the currently available figures, and carping on about it doesn't help. Anyway, I'm done on that subject, because turning the thread into a IIS vs Apache or Open Source vs. Closed Source thread wasn't my intention and I've got about as much interest in those topics as I have in the Exclusive Sky Sports channel's feature on olympic nose-hair growing.

8O :? http://secunia.com/product/1438/ http://msmvps.com/blogs/bernard/archive/2004/06/10/7882.aspx 3 IIS 6 vulnerabilities might be 3 more than you'd want in an ideal world but I think it compares pretty well with Apache, for example. http://secunia.com/product/9633/ http://secunia.com/product/73/ http://secunia.com/product/72/ I've never had an IIS server of any version that was under my control exploited, personally.

I know we're under a lot of pressure to get things done yesterday and if possible to spend less on it than most of the students bring in for lunch money, but sometimes you (or perhaps I should say your manglement) have to accept that some things are difficult and will just take time and effort and resources. A 'layman's guide to MSIs' would be up there with 'Brain Surgery for Dummies'. No matter how well you learned the contents of that latter title, I still wouldn't want you performing surgery on me! We bit the bullet, spent the £'s and purchased Wise Package Studio AND paid for someone to go on the course. Cost a lot but money very well spent.

Do you still see this issue when you run the copy of Active Directory Users & Computers that Exchange 2003 itself installed? In the Exchange System Manager, open Administrative Groups / Your Organisation Name / Servers and right-click the server and choose properties. Click Directory Access. Does the list of DCs available look sensible? If not, step through each part of this dialogue and make sure that 'Automatically Discover Servers' is selected, then stop and restart the Exchange Services. Download the Exchange Best Practices tool http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=DBAB201F-4BEE-4943-AC22-E2DDBD258DF3&displaylang=en and also the Exchange troubleshooting tool http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4BDC1D6B-DE34-4F1C-AEBA-FED1256CAF9A&displaylang=en ... run them on the Exchange server and see what they say.

I think you'll find that this 'legend' does not apply to IIS 6 in any shape or form. In fact if you just want to sit down and count numbers of vulnerability patches for each product (flawed I know, but people seem to like doing it) you'll find it compares favourably to Apache. I'd certainly agree with worrying about data protection. In my experience though most breaches of data security / integrity of that kind tend to come from human error - What price the foolproof security system when all your teaching staff log into it and walk out of the room for half an hour leaving confidential personal student information up on the screen. Or (my favourate this one!) check their emails and read confidential ones on a computer connected to the classroom projector!