sahmeepee

Out of interest, does... Tools > Options > General tab: "always allow use of recognizable media without prompting" ...have any effect on this problem?

Interesting. Being able to store recorded TV shows on a network (xvid/whatever) would be good, but I guess that would probably not be covered by this because it has a separate licensing scheme.

And the release zips aren't very imaginatively named if you need the 2006 version. I really hope your SIMS database version isn't that old?!

The 3Com Network Supervisor is free, although they do have a pay-for version (never seen that running). The web page for it implies it's not free, but I think you can have it free with any qualifying switch. Linky: 3NS The DHCP script is based on one by Chris Pratt, from here: http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=4850 (mine was the version 2.0 script) It said not to edit it, but I did a fair bit (erk, sorry) so I'm not sure about redistributing it! I used blat.exe to make it send emails. This is the batch file (dhcpcheck.bat) that runs every 10 mins on one of the DHCP servers: cd /d [color="Blue"]c:\scripts[/color] cscript //nologo [color="Blue"]dhcpchecker-DC1.vbs[/color] > %1 cscript //nologo [color="Blue"]dhcpchecker-DC2.vbs[/color] >> %1 REM This checks if DHCPCheckOutput.txt has anything in it to send: if %~z1 GTR 0 blat %1 -to [color="Blue"][email protected][/color] -subject "DHCP Alert (New Lease)" -server [color="Blue"]yoursmtpserver[/color] -f [color="Blue"][email protected][/color] It's run with the command: C:\Scripts\dhcpcheck.bat DHCPCheckOutput.txt For simplicity at the time I just made two vbs files, dhcpchecker-DC1.vbs and dhcpchecker-DC2.vbs, which poll the logs on different DHCP servers. You will probably want to change all the bits in blue. Hope some of that makes sense!

Woo, I get top billing! Thankee

I'm looking at a Jetstor 516is (16 bay SATA/SAS, iSCSI, rest of spec is on google) array and an Infortrend EonStor 16bay SATA iSCSI array at the moment. They both have dual, redundant, hotswap fans/psus etc. and you could get BOTH of them (before disks) for your budget. They will both take drives up to 1TB each, giving 14TB RAID6, but the Jetstor can be attached to 3 more "JBOD arrays" giving you 4*16 drives. At the moment I'm undecided between the more expensive Jetstor which has come recommended from a friend who uses a fibre-channel one in a commercial environment and the cheaper Eonstor. Then there is the Dot Hill 12 bay option, which is in between the two for price, but works out most expensive per-bay. Too many choices! The S500 is surely nothing like £6000 with only 4*250GB SATA disks in it though.

I've had just about every problem known to man with this blasted software, both with ALAN and the GCSE Biz pilot. It is, for now, working. Here's what I've learned: SERVER END When it says your username and password are wrong as in post #7 above, it's odds-on that isn't the case. After you try to log in and it doesn't work (see post #7 above), it doesn't actually try when you put your username and password in again! It looks like it is, but it's stopped making requests to the internet. You can check this in ISA monitoring. You will need to exit the server software and restart it. It uses basic authentication with your proxy, so you'll need that enabled in ISA. According to the helpdesk you sometimes have to go to Add/Rem programs and use the "repair" option after changing proxy settings. (that actually worked on my call to them, when all settings were perfectly well configured and it was still barfing) If you have problems connecting to the web interface of the ESM server software, try pointing your browser at: http://yourserver/ESM.Startup.MainFrameset?sw=1280&sh=996 (or your choice of screen res) CLIENT END The clients only talk to the server, not to the internet. If you don't see a tally chart on the first page of the demo test, but do see everything else, it's very likely a permissions issue on the Promissor folder on the client. The tests have a time of day next to them in the ESMServer management window, but the clients ignore it. If you get an error about "admincom.dll" I would completely uninstall the client from the PC, reinstall it and fix the Promissor permissions before you first run the client software, although that didn't work for me every time (hence we had to give up on our ALAN pilot :/ ). Overall, I found it a tad fiddly!

If you have 3com network supervisor installed and you can run a scan while the machine is connected, you will be able to see which switch it's connected to and walk over to them. Also, you can take the MAC address from the DHCP list and pop it into this: http://coffer.com/mac_find/ to give you a clue about the manufacturer of the laptop (although sometimes it will be the NIC manufacturer). I have a script which emails me when new DHCP leases are granted, so on the rare occasions when this has happened I've had a fighting chance of catching the perp.

I too preferred my old account manager, Joel. The most recent 2 haven't been as good on price and ring too often.

Lithium: you could probably buy our whole CDServe for the cost of a new hard disk if you want it! I don't see what they can do that daemon tools pointing at an ISO can't. Maybe our CDServe doesn't have the features of the newer ones..

*makes mental note not to blow a load of money on "more reliable" SAS drives* Maybe I should be looking at SSDs instead...

There are 2 in fact.. The normal user one is the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (aka FAST) - plug a cable into both PCs and set it going. The beefy one is the User State Migration Tool - that's for moving loads of people in a domain environment, typically if you're replacing a load of office PCs with new ones and the lusers want to keep their pictures of bunny rabbits/puppy dogs on their desktops. I imagine they've jazzed it up a little in Vista - 3D animations of a new computer eating an old computer's soul etc.

You could do it with a batch file (your choice of scripting language). I would probably do it with plain old commandline batch: dsquery group -name "ICT Team" | dsget group -members | dsget user -display Of course it can be tarted up, HTML-ified and shoved to a shared location on a schedule etc. Alternatively, you could spend a bit of time on it and build an ASP page which has some ADSI query magic in it to return the same information.

There's this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vixynet/ which is used by these people: http://www.videoconvertx.com (handy for the filtered folk) In their words: This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online. It is using a compressed domain transcoder technology. It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.

I figure I may as well dredge this thread back up from the bottom of the swamp as create a new one... Has anyone got a working MSI for the "administrator" software? If so, can I have it?! Presumably it would need customising with the correct share location for it to work. We've got tests due on 25th and 26th Feb and it's taken almost a month to get the information we need out of Edexcel. Our exams officer was on hold with them for about 2 hours in total before getting a human. She then shrieked at him, "DO NOT PUT ME ON HOLD. DO NOT TRANSFER ME. YOU WILL SPEAK TO ME!". Ah, how I chuckled. They then told her that we shouldn't have faxed anything to them (despite the specific instructions to the contrary on their website) and that we already had all the information we needed (err, nope ). I now find that everything about the Business pilot seems to have evaporated from their site and I'm typing in URLs from memory. Thanks Edexcel. You suck.

I've not met a single teacher yet outside of our SLT that knows anything about BSF. This is presumably to lay the groundwork for a "surprise! free goodies!" launch.

I can see Health and Safety kicking off about that idea. Laptops are only suitable as a temporary desktop replacement, and when you're looking at "universal" access it does imply that pupils might well be using the laptop for most of their day, which would make them DSE Users in the h&s parlance. The eeePCs are probably worse than normal laptops for overall ergonomics with their diddy screen.

You can also get more information about active windows shares on your server from Computer Management (start > run... > compmgmt.msc)

Assuming it's not changed since I last used it, this actually uses VNC in the background. I had a problem with it not managing to delete the temporary folder it created when it connected to some PCs. It seemed like one of the vnc dlls was still in use, but I didn't have time to get to the root of it.

I've bodged this script together: dsquery user "OU=Staff,DC=blah,DC=sch,DC=int" -limit 3 > userlist-output.txt for /f "tokens=*" %%i in (userlist-output.txt) do @echo ------ >> groups-output.txt && dsget user %%i -q -L -samid -display >> groups-output.txt && @echo ------ >> groups-output.txt && echo Groups: >> groups-output.txt && dsget user %%i -memberof -expand >> groups-output.txt && @echo ------ >> groups-output.txt findstr -iV "dsget" groups-output.txt > groups-output2.txt move /Y groups-output2.txt groups-output.txt notepad groups-output.txt "OU=Staff,DC=blah,DC=sch,DC=int" would have to be changed to the full path to your staff OU. I'm not sure if you need the adminpak installed on XP to have access to dsget and dsquery. 2003 should have them by default though. It will expand group memberships, so if they are a member of GTP-TRAINEES and that group is a member of TEACHERS it should list both. That means it can be slow to run, so get it working nicely then change the limit from 3 to 1000 and go make a brew.

That's pretty much it.. you'll want to make sure your clients are all updated and working as well before you do the big evil migration 6.83 -> 6.85 worked OK for us, but as always, make sure you have a working backup before you do an FMS upgrade.

Our DD-WRT APs report that data and signal strength back to "RFlow Collector", but I'm not aware of any generic software assuming you have multiple APs using the same SSID. You may be able to get a list of connected devices from the web interface of the AP. It's clunky, but might be worth a go.

The browse time in Websense is defined by a user-configurable interval for how long a page should take to read. Each night, at 2am by default, it calculates all the browse times from the page hits and writes the results into the database. The exact rules for browse time are available in the help for the database admin tool. Assuming you're on the most uptodate version of websense (6.3.1), it goes like this: Basically, any time you hit a page a 3 minute session is started because it assumes a gap of any less than 3 minutes constitutes continuous browsing. As John Condon says, you can change from browse time view to hits view with one click. That will show you each hit for you on that day in "time sequence" order. Different people have different levels of detail stored in their databases - our database is currently at a rather chunky 20GB - to balance storage space against more detail. I would question how meaningful the browse-time-by-hostname is in itself. If I'm on edugeek.net it also seems to log approximately the same browse time for http://www.edugeek.net for that day, presumably because the site is giving me data from both hostnames. These times are then added together despite running concurrently. As people have said there is also the question of banners etc automatically reloading, which Websense will see as new activity. Finally, the aggregate data doesn't tell you how much of the time was spent during working hours. You really do need to see the time sequence data to make a fair assessment. It can be exported to PDF directly within the page via the PDF icon near the top-right of your screenshot.

Acer also did it until recently (presumably they've stopped now they've gone Vista). Their official word on it was that it was because you can't change an NTFS drive to FAT, but you can do a "convert c: /fs:ntfs" to convert FAT to NTFS. I'm not sure of a good reason for wanting to go back to FAT, but there you go!

I'd forgotten about that hotfix. Although it presumably does work, the downside is that for laptops which are already deployed it's an order of magnitude harder to apply the fix than just to manually set the policy. "This symptom occurs only if the user logs on interactively by using the keyboard." L to the O to the L!