sahmeepee

I just installed this for our Head of ICT on a free trial. It's pretty basic, VERY BIG ICONS, msi installer. Unfortunately it needs local admin rights or a permissions change on its program files folder to run properly (otherwise it crashes). I guess it's par for the course to sell educational software without doing any testing first! I like freemind, but I think it probably does need a more simple interface for the younger ones to get anywhere with it.

You could try posting the pdf on here as well if you like.. if it's an ad I can't see that you'd have a confidentiality problem

Did your computer make an annoying screeching noise before connecting to the network? *hides*

I would be tempted to make the batch and kix files both do some basic logging in the short term to see if either or both are running at all. I suspect that if they sometimes get some, but not all, settings set then the kix script is running for everyone. In kix, you can run an action and assign the return code to a variable. I think the syntax is: $ErrCodeDefPrint=SetDefaultPrinter($strPrinter) You can also write events to the Windows event log, so you could follow each line as above with something like: $ErrCodeDefPrint = "Default printer mapping result: " + $ErrCodeDefPrint $RC = LogEvent(4,1004,$ErrCodeDefPrint,'KiXtart') You can use this dll to make the events a bit easier to read, but it should work ok without. Then you just need to examine the event viewer for an affected session to see what failed and how.

Not publicly! Cover 7 is the .net version and it'll be hitting a rather large Program Files folder near you soon!

It's blocked at our LEA and I'm not altogether upset about that - I think most schools would block it for kids. If a member of staff needs a video off it that day, I can point them at: http://www.videoconvertx.com which isn't blocked. Then all they need to do is find the youtube URL by googling (with "site:youtube.com"), plop it in and PRESTO! a portable youtube clip in a more friendly file format.

I read that they are looking to bring in Powershell in core in a later release which, you guessed it, is not available in SP0 because it needs .net. Presumably that means that .net is on the way for server core..

In other news: bear defecates in forest; pope believes in God

He means unicast will use more bandwidth than multicast if multicast is set up correctly. There's some more info on setting up managed 3com switches for ghost in this recent thread: http://edugeek.net/forums/showpost.php?p=158731&postcount=18

Our place is just the same. Every so often, someone moots the idea of digital signage, it gets written into the school's development plan and an edict comes down from on high to "get some quotes". When asked where they want the screens they don't know (reception is tiny) When asked how many screens they want they don't know (unless "between 1 and 10" counts as an answer) When asked what they want to show on the screens they don't know. When asked who will be producing the content/updating them.... Presumably video conferencing doesn't have enough wow-factor nowadays and we need a new white elephant to sink good money into. Each time I dutifully prepare quotes and estimate the cost of providing power and data to random locations in our cramped rabbit-warren of a building and nothing ever comes of it. The topic has come up about 5 times now and sadly it's about due for another airing. A friend in a nearby school has had the same problem. They all sat down for a meeting about the idea. Weighed up all the pros and cons. Decided there were far more cons than pros. Then at the end of the meeting the head uhm and ahhd and said he still quite liked the idea! Argh. If you need an easy device to use as a reference price, try the Samsung 400PXN and 460PXN models. 40/46 inch LCD screens with built-in ethernet, flash memory and onboard windows to handle all the processing of different filetypes. Not too expensive and means you can send data to them over a switched ethernet infrastructure instead of using CAT5 as analogue cable like most of the solutions out there.

Haha, not knocking yours! I've hacked something together with batch files in the past when somebody started turning important equipment off after hours. If you schedule batch scripts to run as a different account from the one you're logged on interactively with they run invisibly in the background. Probably not very efficient, but sub-1k

We've had some problems with SIMS memory usage going skyward in the last few days, but we're taking part in a trial/beta and it's that module which is the culprit in this case.

I'd also avoid running it on a webserver if possible. We have IIS serving up some intranet web apps on our ISA box and although it's possible it does complicate things.

The backtrack liveCD is rather good on the security testing front.

When they say a software HBA, do they not just mean an iSCSI initiator like the microsoft one? Also, the only difference between how the diagram in post #1 was cabled and how I'd read to do it is that the two switches weren't connected: from "Get to know iSCSI SAN components" It made sense when I first read it, but I'm finding it hard to see a scenario where the cable connecting the 2 switches together saves you though.

If you have ISA 2006 you can set up all sorts of connectivity tests - ping/http/dns or even just arbitrary ports.

I think I read that VMWare can do this, but Hyper-V can't. I think Microsoft have some sort of rapid save-state-move-restore-state tool, but it's not quite the same thing. WindowsITPro have an article about Hyper-V in the current edition, available here: http://www.windowsitpro.com/Windows/Articles/ArticleID/97857/pg/1/1.html

It'd be good if this thread and thread 5232 could be moved to the "Security" forum.. not much point doing this trick other than as an attempt to bypass restrictions imo.

Another vote for Sage Payroll here. Like Pete, Sage for paying staff via BACSIP; FMS for paying suppliers via the oldest and most tortuous route possible: dot-matrix-printed, tractor-feed cheques signed individually, twice. Has anyone set up BACS for paying suppliers in FMS? Any idea what it costs extra and what the process is? This aging OKI needs to be given the heave-ho and BACS in FMS is step 1!

We use FMS for school finance stuff and Sage Payroll (I think the name's changed now) to pay staff. The Sage side of it is OK, although the updates come about as often as FMS ones do. Their phone support is good, and it should be. I read a few years ago that they make a third of their income from phone support.

This did get me thinking... I've luckily never had to get back into a DC which has been locked out. The password reset tool has no chance in that scenario because there's no local account database on a DC for it to tinker with (or there is one, but it can't work its magic on it). Other than an AD restore I'm not sure what can be done to recover a DC in this situation. You can fix the domain admin password if you have the local admin password for the DC (aka the directory services restore mode password) with this method: http://www.nobodix.org/seb/win2003_adminpass.html but what happens if you don't have that password? I can imagine a situation where the DCs were installed a long time in the past and the local admin passwords aren't what you thought! (if you aren't sure of yours, the password can be changed whilst you have control of the DC with method #4 on this page) Of course I wouldn't advise only having one domain admin account, but I do wonder if there's a way out of the predicament... just a hypothetical scenario to tool myself up for the apocalypse!

All my servers are up to SP2 - the only thing to check as far as I can remember is disk space - Windows will do its usual thing of backing up everything from system32 to your uncle's tax records before it even considers applying a SP

It could be that RTFs aren't associated properly.. maybe try associating them with Word? You could also try running filemon while the error occurs to see if there are any NOT FOUND errors for .exe files which look like the culprit.

But that's advice for schools considering moving to Microsoft's School Agreement, and not of much use to many schools which are already in the agreement. Unfortunately this excellent guidance from BECTA came about 4 years too late. I seem to remember BECTA blowing their trumpets about the excellent deals they'd got for us on schools agreements not so many moons ago. The pricing hasn't changed much for desktops over the last few years judging by our payments to The Man.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. From looking at their website, any ERA-licensed establishment can pass ERA material on to another in hard-copy form as long as they don't charge anything more than media/postage costs. From their website: I'm assuming the rest of freeview is fair game too. It also says you have to: I guess that could be done with a virtualdub script or something?