sahmeepee

With the 2500 and 2550 (and possibly others) you also need to take into account the cost of replacing the drum. On the 2550 IIRC it's around £80 and does a realistic 8,000 pages of mixed mono and colour pages (the quoted value of 20,000 doesn't account for colour pages taking 4 "hits" off the life of the drum). I find the values HP quote on toner life are usually within a hundred sheets or so of the correct value. So that's an extra penny on each sheet. Our paper is about £1.60/ream so that's 1/3 of a penny on each sheet regardless of the printer.

Importantly, setting up EFS to protect offline files doesn't work if you deploy it via GPO - you must apply it manually, at least in XP. From the article linked above: "One limitation of the encrypted offline files database is that files and folders will not be shown as an alternate color to the user when working offline." ^^ that is highly misleading and I'm sure would give many people a false sense of security. Whilst testing it I went to the length of using a disk editor to manually check that the data written to the sectors was indeed NOT encrypted when the policy was applied via GPO. It did do a good job of disabling the GUI to make you think it had applied properly though.

LMAO! Priceless! Who the hell are they?!

Steering clear of .local is definitely wise if you're starting from scratch. There were some posts on uk.education.schools-it about it a few ice ages ago. Our LEA uses a domain hierarchy the same as our external .sch.uk one, but with .sch.int instead. Let's hope .int doesn't get allocated for "international"!

It's a machine policy so it should automatically apply at the next reboot assuming you don't have any connectivity problems. We've not experienced any issues with it here. Try running RSOP.msc on a PC that hasn't picked up the setting and have a poke around the machine half to see what gives..

I quite like this quote: from here: http://www.storagesearch.com/d2dhistory.html

As you might have gathered from my post, we had it available through SOLUS. You could try getting the 6.85 release from Capita on CD. When you do "update and run solus" from the start menu, does it offer an option to log in to SIMS and FMS or just SIMS? We have to provide credentials for both and then it will check for updates to both. Also, if you log on to Supportnet there's a sticky on the front page about upgrading your FMS to SQL which may have the info you need.

...and if that doesn't work, try changing their access rights on their home folder from "modify" to "full control". It fixed a similar problem for us many moons ago, although I can't remember the exact error message (it's before we logged calls)

If you aren't a single site then your LA support team should be helping you with this. Who do you actually pay money to for SIMS? LA or Capita?

Can we have a *cry* smilie please? How about 'usability', 'flexibility' and 'accessibility'. For a bonus -ity I'll take 'security'.

If you want to ghost it onto different hardware, you will have all the same problems you would have normally doing that. If you just mean you want to dump the ghost image of C onto a NAS for storage then put it back onto a bigger disk in the same hardware it should (in theory!) work. With one DC in a standalone domain you should have no problems with replication. Nobody will be able to log in while the DC's offline though!

They could simplify it by not requiring an external connector for home use if you have a schools agreement. We pay them enough already and they want to sting us to the tune of £1500 effectively for the privilege of using OWA out of school ours. I'm glad I've not opened our OWA up for external use (a political decision from SLT rather than a technical issue) - I definitely would have been caught out by this and I know several schools which should be paying for this already but aren't. I would guess that the majority of schools and possibly some LEAs who use OWA for external access are in this position.

Nope, all useful info..

You could run RSOP.msc on one of the affected machines and then post the relevant sections of the results..

I made separate batch files for shutting down different sets of PCs, but they all take this format: @for /F "eol=# tokens=1,2 delims=," %%i in (X99.txt) do @ping -n 1 -w 750 %%i |find "TTL=" >nul && @shutdown -s -m \\%%i -t 0 -f -c "shutdown batch (run by %username%)" & @sleep -m 750 & @echo %%i shutting down... X99.txt contains a list of your computers in this format: #FQDNs and mac addresses of X99-01 to X99-03 # X99-01.domain.blah, 0011760d57e9 X99-02.domain.blah, 0011760d57d6 X99-03.domain.blah, 0011206a3012 (the mac addresses aren't required for this, but I use the same text files for my wake-on-lan scripts. You will need a copy of sleep.exe if you want this to run through steadily rather than blasting through the whole lot at the same time. Also, it needs to be run as a batch file. Running it from the commandline as is will not work because of the escaped (doubled) percent signs.

When we were installing SIMS to a client PC from our test server, we found that the installer complained like mad about not having modify or better on various folders on the server (under X:\sims\). We tried granting bits and pieces, but ultimately it needed pretty much the whole lot. Normally we would be running the installer as a user with domain admin rights anyway, but it's a little puzzling that it demands write access to locations it's reading from.

@boomam: If you have another DC running, then any changes made to AD whilst the iffy DC is offline should be replicated without problems when it comes back up. It's only like turning it off and on again really. The danger comes when you restore a DC to its original state MUCH later (longer than the tombstone lifetime). That can cause problems because the iffy DC will show objects which have been deleted ages ago as still existing and the good DC will believe it, because by that time the good DC will have removed all records of the objects ever existing.

I recently read some guidance on the 2006 TUPE regulations (PDF) (now you know why i didn't post in the hobbies thread ). It's in fairly plain English, considering. The exemptions to do with economic factors are seemingly quite open to abuse by employers, but I'm not sure how it's panned out in court. Also, recent case law is in the favour of the employee (see this blog posting about TUPE). Between the lines there is a hidden warning against taking a promotion from RM (say) if it isn't worth much - you will be signing away any beneficial terms of your original employment.

Going off my mate's experience with his N95, lack of battery life is the main problem with it. If he uses it for web browsing for an hour during the day it won't last until he gets home at 6pm. Even if he hardly uses it for internet gubbins it struggles to make it to midnight without getting its fix of electrons. The other problem he has with it (as do most N95 owners from what I've heard) is that the GPS really doesn't work. Maybe they've fixed that in the pimped version.

Our fire safe is made by a company called Phoenix. It's pretty small inside the inner safe, but I reckon you could cram about 30-40 DAT tapes in there. I'm hoping to move away from tapes soon (to remote SAN setup) so the fire safe may well become the liquor stash in anticipation of nuclear attack/ofsted inspection.

Our LA seems to be looking at this separately from the main primary and secondary school VLE. I went to a technical meeting with some LA bods and some consultants from the company which is supposed to be organising the single-sign-on set up for it. Of all the schools in the LA, only 2 showed up - me and someone I dragged along from another school. With apathy like that I have serious doubts about the infrastructure being set up in time. From what I could gather they were thinking that individual schools might have their own VLE (read: moodle) instances with pupils connecting to courses from different schools via a customised "portal" (gak) front page. Why not have a central 14-19 moodle instance? I'm guessing because they don't want to take on the maintenance and would rather the schools did it. Hooray.

I've not had any problems applying these file and reg settings via GPO to whole OUs. If the files don't exist on the machine, i.e. if SIMS isn't installed, it'll just do nothing. Search for the other simsperm threads.. I'm pretty sure I've posted our GPO settings for this in the last few months. EDIT: bottom of this one: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/showthread.php?t=12268

253.0 is verboten! you can do 252.0 or 254.0, but not 253, because of the way the bits fall. A quick cuttypasty from a recent thread:

Thankfully the former. You'll see it installing it before the logon prompt appears when the machine next boots after you set up the GPO (in the same box where it says "applying security settings" or "preparing network connection" etc.) Once you've set up the software in the GPO, open up the settings and have a poke around - there's not much to see. Possibly the most significant setting is the one about removing the software when the PC moves out of the "scope of management", ie. out of an OU with that policy on. You might want to think about using DFS to store the MSIs on the network. If you don't and you decide to change where they're stored (i.e. a different UNC path), the software will be reinstalled on all machines. Obviously make sure there are sufficient read permissions on the share with the MSIs in. Can't think of any more pitfalls.. like you say it's pretty easy

There was a recent Gartner report suggesting that one of the biggest ways of wasting money at the moment was buying into gigabit-to-the-desktop and by extension I would say for most schools that means 10Gbit backbones too. Whatever you do, run some monitoring before buying into new kit and cabling. It needn't cost anything. You can run Windows performance monitor against multiple workstations/servers at once to analyze their network usage. There is free software around to monitor utilisation on switches and backone links. Generally speaking your servers are likely to benefit from 1Gbit connections, but it pays to be informed!