sahmeepee

My particular favourite was the paper they did on open source software use in schools (Open source software in schools: a case study report). In true BECTA style they managed to confuse open source with free (as in beer) software. The BECTA definition of Open Source included Star Office, ProDesktop, Crocodile Clips and IrfanView! In order to maintain their reputation for high quality research, they used a massive sample size of 9 schools on which to base their study. According to the email I had back when I complained to BECTA, the study cost £18,000 to produce. Bear in mind that the vast majority of its contents were factually incorrect. I was also told: Ha! Is that the most weasel-worded capitulation ever? Genius. This is a prime example of why I feel BECTA should have been shut down years ago. They have very little clue, they have zero rigour in their approach and yet they remain arrogant enough to tell schools they are right to spread misinformation. Shutting down BECTA may well be the only good thing the next government does.

We have this solved for Windows+IE guests, in that we set some DHCP options so that the clients get a wpad.dat from the ISA server. We then used GPOs/login scripts to stop our non-guest (managed) PCs from using "automatically detect settings" and manually specified the address of our proxy server as you are probably doing already. Non-windows+IE guests don't seem to pick up the autodetect settings stuff reliably, so we have to tell them to enter the location of the wpad.dat file. This works fine for iphones/ipod touches. Android phones are currently sadly still too dumb to allow access via authenticating proxies.

(I know this is an old post) You will get those errors from time to time during the scan. They can be ignored - they just mean that there is a big chunk of binary data being scanned without any carriage returns / linefeeds in it. If the scan turns up nothing, there may be nothing to find! Yes, that's possible, but it's not something I'm going to post on here, because I can't be certain that it won't kill valid excel files. I did make a version that (reversibly) tweaked the data in the files to disable the SWF by corrupting its header. The most devilish part being that the pupil could see the SWF content very briefly when the file opened and then it'd just go white. Muhaha.

You might have thought that. An alternative viewpoint would be that the app had gathered in quite a lot of cruft along the way. I know from looking through the tables in our SIMS database that there are at least seven tables which relate to Welshness - I'm not sure how many tables there are in total in the latest database version. Some elements of SIMS perform poorly after updates and are later fixed by applying reindexing patches released by Capita.

About the job: Working in a very large state secondary school with very well behaved pupils (honestly!) you will provide general ICT technical support. We are currently looking for a technician on a temporary basis, most likely until the end of summer term 2010, although there may be the possibility of the role becoming permanent. The school has a single WS2003 AD domain with around 700 XP clients and 2000 users. Servers are mostly WS2003, with one running 2008. The move to Windows 7 on the desktops is scheduled for summer. MIS is SIMS.net with direct support from Capita. Pay may be negotiable depending on experience, but is likely to fall in line with Bolton's standard ICT Technician pay scale unless you prefer to work self-employed and bill on an hourly rate. We are looking to take someone on as soon as we can get their CRB processed. Hours: 37pw About you: Ideally good (1+ years) experience of IT support in secondary schools Familiar with AD, XP, SIMS, Office 2003 Microsoft certificates by no means an essential, but mention them if you have them 2 good references from previous employers, including your most recent/current. Next steps: Please PM me with contact details urgently to register an interest. I need the PMs ideally before midnight tonight. Apologies for the short notice, but we are working to tight deadlines.

I copy the most up-to-date quicklettertemplate in during logon. They have write access to the sims program files folder as per simsperm.bat, but can't browse to the folder because of GPO settings. It's never been a problem for us, because the template doesn't save into program files by default - it all saves to the DMS now anyway. Try removing their write access then installing the client. HINT: It shouldn't try to write to every bleeding folder under s:, but it does. As far as simsperm goes, it's OK but not perfect. SIMS still does some incredibly stupid things which need manual intervention to sort out. Off the top of my head I can think of: c:\windows\omrconfig.ini - a file created at the point when you first try to save OMR settings. Typically this will be way after installation and under a normal user account. Therefore an EPIC FAIL awaits. Why they can't consolidate all their bad practice and drop it in the program files SIMS folder I don't know. c:\pdoxusrs.net - Used by FMS. Again not created during install and requires write access by users. You may notice that it looks like it has something to do with a Paradox database. You may wonder what on earth an 1990s relic is doing in FMS which is now a wizzy, modern, MSSQL-based application. Me too. It's still needed though.

Sadly Promethean have yet again made this a per-user setting, which suggests that they think teachers should be cleaning projector filters. HINT: Most projectors have had their own on-screen filter timer warnings for, ooh, a few years now...

We use a Samsung MagicInfo screen to bring in web content and it works fine, but our screen's IP address is assigned via DHCP unfortunately. It doesn't cause any problems for us as the MagicInfo software doesn't need the screen's IP address to work - they discover each other on the network themselves. Have you had to set up the proxy settings in the screen's browser? That was required to get it working for us.

That's not really what network bridging is for. As the name suggests, bridging is for joining together different LAN segments. In Windows you might use it to bridge a wireless LAN on one subnet to a wired LAN on another for example. Microsoft explain it surprisingly clearly here: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/hnw_bridge_install.mspx?mfr=true I'm not sure what the outcome would be if you bridged all four connections.. it may do what you want it to or it may go horribly wrong! Generally you should be able to set up teaming in the options of your ethernet card drivers. Depending on the manufacturer, they might have an icon in the systray, or possibly an applet in control panel which will let you configure it. It will then provide the fault tolerance and combined throughput you are after.

If anyone is still trying to do this manually for any reason, the silent switch is actually "/s /v/qn" (note the single space as I think the spacing might matter). Full commandline is therefore: Activdriver_x32_v5.1.2.7_setup.exe /s /v/qn

For my next trick I will be telling you about the high levels of hydrogenated fats in your biscuits

School phone message hoax | Sunshine Coast News | Local News in Sunshine Coast | The Sunshine Coast Daily

also, run filemon but filter it to only show errors

Ohohohoho.

...which works great until viruses like Conficker get cleverer and stop just guessing at weak passwords. Also, you are relying very heavily on none of your machines being even 1 critical Windows update behind. If they are there is a risk that a virus could exploit it and infect the PC regardless of Windows account. Apparently there are even embedded printer OSes being compromised by Conficker. Obviously there are many millions of ways of tackling these problems, but if you can stop rogue devices from being able to send data over your network at all you're putting up a pretty big barrier.

I couldn't agree more! I don't like having my DHCP scope cluttered up with unmanaged laptops, especially as I currently get an alert when any new leases are given out and it's going to be difficult to tell the difference between PCs plugged into a wall socket and PCs getting a lease through DHCP. Presumably it could be done with a separate router, but it would be neater if it was handled by the ZoneDirector/APs

For those looking to disable the all-new, more aggressive filter warning in ActivDriver version 5, here's how it's set: When the ActivMgr executable which sits in your systray loads up, it looks in two locations for a file called Activmanager.ini in %appdata%\Promethean\ and %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\Promethean\ Typically there won't be a file in All Users and, annoyingly, even if there is one it is overridden by the settings in the user's %appdata%. This means you might need to delete any existing settings files in people's profiles before putting your settings file in All Users. The settings the file can control (amongst other things): Disabling the filter warning Disabled: projector.use=false Enabled: projector.use=true Setting how often the filter warning pops up Monthly: Fortnightly: projector.warningPeriod=1 Weekly: projector.warningPeriod=0

It may well do it, but Capita recommend using dbattach as it runs some other stuff as part of the backup process I think. I forget the details but it's something to do with how they store the SIMS user accounts in the master database. They may not support you for free if your backup fails to restore properly and you've not followed their published guidance so I wouldn't like to chance it. For my nightly backup: I delete the old backup, run the command below, 7zip the resulting file and then back that up along with all the other gubbins under s:\sims and the docstorage. DBAttach /Server=YOURSIMSSERVER\sims2005 /Database=SIMS /USER=SA /PASSWORD=YOURSAPASSWORD /AUTO /BACKUP /PATH="F:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup\RemoteBackup\SIMS-DB-nightly.bak" As a side note, if you use FMS you should now be backing it up at the same times as you back up SIMS. It uses a different dbattach.exe.

Sadly DHCP wasn't really made with security in mind. AFAIK, the only way you can really achieve this using DHCP is to give all your clients static IPs/reservations and then assign any "rogue" devices an IP address way out in the nether-lands so that they can't communicate with your managed clients. It's not a 5 minute job!

Still not working, but it does look like an LA issue. I'm not getting their blockpages at all at the moment (just timeouts) but it is behaving the same as other sites that they definitely do block. I'll PM you some info that might be of use.

Ha! I made that feature request on one of their blog postings! It was only about a month ago, so they've not had much time to act on it yet. Fingers crossed!

see also: DT-171 Temprature Humidity Datalogger 16000 readings at an interval you specify. Every 10mins would yield over 100 days of logs. £50

There is a self-study pack available here: ITIL V3 Foundation e-Learning Package - Buy Online at the ILX Group Store for the foundation level. It's £369 and includes the price of the exam which they reckon is £100. NB The terms say you can only use it to train one person!

Also, many (all?) of the stored procedures SIMS uses currently only make use of one core at a time. "SIMS being slow" and database timeout problems are typically a single user running a single report/routine for a very long time on one core while the other cores sit idling at a few percent utilisation. With 8 cores you will probably have a lot of idling and I'm not sure if SQL 2008 is going to change that. I'm not sure if 3 disks in RAID 5, partitioned up to do OS and SQL across the RAID set is a particularly recommended setup. With SAS disks they should be plenty fast enough to deal with what you throw at them though, so probably not worth worrying too much. dhicks: I believe that the SQL upgrade is going to be necessary to take advantage of the reporting engine in SQL 2008 and allow Capita to ditch their current reporting system.

My last school has had it installed. Again, the IT people were kept out of the loop, management paid over the odds for it and it's been a pain in the backside. The people from life channel wanted some sort of remote access to it, so the box had to be firewalled off from the rest of the network. I'm not sure that prefab content has much impact on kids unless the production quality is truly exceptional and full of pizazz. Content relevant to the school is much more engaging IMHO so I'm pushing that as much as possible with our new signage. Currently it's only got photos and school news on (and, grudgingly, a BBC news ticker!) but we should have some pupils' videos on very soon.