sahmeepee

Unanimous support for a Microsoft product: am I in the right place?! Just to check: I'm looking at buying a piece of software called SIMS.Net, has anyone had any experience with it? Thanks for the advice guys, looks like it's going on. Disk quotas should take care of any stupidly big files.

Ashok, Maybe stacking your switches where possible would reduce the number that the RADIUS server sees. With our 3com kit i think we can stack upto 8 switches into 1. I guess it depends on your switching kit and the layout of your cabinets though. Well done for tackling 802.1x for your wired connections by the way. It's definitely a project I'd be interested in doing at some point. At the moment I'm a bit put off by the complexity of making port-by-port exclusions for "dumb" devices like printers/photocopiers/EPOS.

Congratulations Towen. From my experience with 70-291, my advice would be "overlook nothing". With the other exams they tend to focus on the most important areas of the curriculum to make sure you have the basics down. Without going into NDA-busting detail, I'd say that 70-291 doesn't have that bias and dredges up a whole load of obscure stuff that you might've assumed you wouldn't need to memorize. I'd make sure you've read every bit of exam prep material you can get your hands on so you at least have a chance of dragging answers from a dark corner of your mind. Nearly there, keep on keeping on!

Has anyone used this: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx (Microsoft Photo Story 3) From what I can tell it imports images and audio files, lets you apply transitions/effects and then spits out Windows Media Video files at the other end. Someone in English has asked if we can put it on their PCs, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else has any experiences. Obviously the video files could get out of hand if the kids create 20 minute long presentations with music, but from what I've seen the files are about 2MB for 90 seconds which is on a par with Powerpoint.

That's interesting. When I tried it, the root CA I'd created wasn't copied down by default to the client, so I popped it into a GPO which seemed to work. Maybe it's something to do with my root CA being "standalone" rather than "enterprise"? Or not giving it enough reboots? I'll try it without the GPO again at some point. Yes, you can only have 50 RADIUS clients with standard, but that means 50 access points per IAS server, because you set the server up to look at the AP not the (laptop) client. If I get to the point where I have over 50 APs I wouldn't be too phased by sticking IAS on my other DC as well. If we get over a hundred APs I'm changing jobs .

@Ric_: we've installed the WPA2 patch from Microsoft. Are you saying there's a way of enforcing WPA2 via group policy? We're using laptops with the 2200BG cards in and the Intel tools seemed quite good, but pure Windows seems to be working fine with computer authentication so I decided to remove a variable!

I'd tell them you have a new system in place where you tell it in plain English exactly where the folder is and how you want it setting up, e.g.: I want the o:\office\payroll folder setting up so that only Jenny in finance and SLT have access The system works via emails to [email protected]

towen: 70-290 isn't bad at all if you spend plenty of time on it. The bad news: 70-291 - the WS2003 version of the 70-216 exam E1uSiV3 took - is still a complete bastard! I was the only person at my test centre to pass it and I got exactly 700 marks. It's also by far the least useful of all the MCSA exams I did.

You might also want to speak to the Data Harvest people. We needed to use USB on new laptops for Sensing Science software and they warned us that not all serial-USB convertors are made equal and many won't work. They also sold serial-USB convertors, which made the skeptic in me suspicious! I bought a cheap serial-USB convertor to test and sure enough they were right, so we bought a load of theirs at about £5 or £10 more. I won't say they worked straight away (XP drivers and science software equally cr''p) but we did get them working.

We got this working properly at our place this week. Having never touched the certificate authority stuff in anger before it took a lot longer then it should, 90% of which was head-scratching time. I am in the middle of writing this up and I'll wikify it as soon as humanly possible. Our setup: WS2003 on a DC with IAS and Certificate Authority & a standalone Root Certificate Authority (CA) set up XPSP2 on the laptops Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT v23 SP1 firmware (I can't express how good these are for under £40 each) We are using PEAP - the clients trust the server because of its secure certificate; the server trusts the clients because they are domain members (MSCHAPv2 auth). As mentioned earlier, you can limit which computers are allowed in by putting the allowed PCs into a security group. We push out our Root CA's certificate to the laptops via group policy (connected over a wire) so when they connect they trust the server certificate we push out straight away. Some comments on the rest of this thread: If you need to authenticate users as well then yes, but I'm assuming that anyone logging on to one of our laptops with a domain account should be allowed access. If a laptop gets nicked, I'll take it off the domain. The problem with doing the dual authentication is the timing: It logs on as a computer at first Applies computer GPOs The user logs in It starts applying user GPOs AND It disconnects and tries to reauthenticate as the user at roughly the same time! I've read a few posts suggesting that this makes a balls up of GPO application. Long story short: if you don't need user auth as well, set the policy to computer auth only. Then they aren't recommending Windows Server 2003 SP1. You can set all this stuff up using WS2003 SP1, but the one thing you can't do is tell the clients to use WPA2 via your wireless group policy - WPA is the best you can do until SP2. There may be a reghack for this: I might phone BECTA to ask . WPA is "secure enough" for now though, and when WPA2 is added to Group Policy it's just a quick policy change to deploy it, assuming your router allows WPA and WPA2 at the same time. EDIT: sorry for the long post!

From the linked page at http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/sections/learningplatform/ I didn't realise there were so many dairy farmers in London. Still, that looks like quite a useful feature. :-k

how much do they charge been looking into getting rid of a load of old ICT equipment. Free, free as the wind. They might charge for seriously crap stuff but you can give them a tinkle first to check.

I would imagine it can be done through VBA or VBScript. This Google Groups thread may be of use: http://tinyurl.com/h7whw If he's doing the spellchecking himself I think some sort of VBA macro in Word would be best although it's not going to be much quicker than just opening loads of files and spell-checking them one-by-one. Hopefully he's aware of how much work he might be doing.

I don't think WEEE has been implemented in the UK yet, so tip em in the skip while you still can! (joke) We send ours to recyclers: http://www.dataiqrecycling.co.uk/whatwecollect.html They've been good - arrived on time and helped us load up the van.

webman: I think securus goes a bit further than a keylogger because it reads any text written to the screen (unless it's written as a graphic obviously) so it'll pick up window titles and the text of dialog boxes etc. I spoke to a NM from my neck of the woods today who'd trialled it and he gave me almost exactly the same report as Pear. The "lik" thing it didn't like at all. His install of it was totally swamped with false positives.

I have had the wand waved at me. I was expecting it to be much less cool-looking! It looks more Star Wars than Harry Potter to me. How much do they cost in small quantities?

We have Arcserve here, but I'm slowly moving to an NTBackup-based remote disk backup. I find the Arcserve interface terrible and totally over complicated TBH, but then I think that's the case with most enterprise backup progs. See if you can get a demo first - I'd show you round ours but we're many miles away. I used Veritas about 3 years ago on Win2k I think and I remember it being more intuitive than Arcserve. Sorry if that's not what you wanted to hear. If you don't have a problem with the interface I think they do "competitive upgrades" from other packages such as Veritas so you might want to look into that.

The licensing for PVS Licenses breaks down as: upto 249 pupils - £75 upto 749 pupils - £125 upto 1,249 pupils - £175 upto 1,999 pupils - £300 upto 2,999 pupils - £500 upto 7,999 pupils - £1,250 ex VAT per year. Unfortunately they don't let you copy the video. It has to be on a legitimately purchased VHS tape or DVD. You can't show it via any sort of "video diffusion" system - so no fancy network streaming!

We've had demos of a few systems and we're soon going to have a demo from a company called Wireless Fidelity: http://www.wireless-fidelity.co.uk I've seen a Powerpoint about their system and it looks quite good. It uses a server (or beefy workstation) connected to your existing network and a load of tiny WinCE devices attached to your plasma screens. There's a scheduling app which lets you push out different stuff to different screens. The formats it supports are surprisingly varied: HTML / Flash / MPEG 1/2 / DivX4/5 / JPEG / MP3 / AC3 / Word / Excel.... From the blurb it suggests that the WinCE devices are actually reading the files rather than a streaming video of what the files look like, so unless you're chucking loads of MPEG at it your network shouldn't choke. Governors seem to be pushing the idea, but I couldn't see much point for the cost. But then there's the advertising revenue...

Presumably this is for Exch 2003 although it doesn't say: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/tips/outlooktip01.asp That suggests it can't be done unless there's some 3rd party product for it.

Can't you pass the year into the login script as a parameter: Open up ADUC and find all your year 7 (say) users. I think you've said that you have an OU for each year, so that should be easy. Select all the year 7 users > properties > profile tab Set the login script to e.g. "loginscript.bat year7" In the login script the parameter will be available as %1 so you can do some IF statements to get the desired result. If you pass in "7" instead of "year7" you could even use the greater than/less than comparisons in the IF statement. NB I've never tried this 'cos we use KiXtart for login scripts and it has all this stuff built in. Go KiX!

see also: http://www.theopencd.org/

I think schools with a Schools Agreement have to pay for a Windows desktop license if they buy any new Macs even if they don't have XP on.

You might like to lean on the backup situation as it sounds like they probably don't have one! If you can show them roughly how your time is spent firefighting with their current setup (e.g. 20% of your time redeploying broken apps due to lack of security / 25% of your time trying to get current software working on unsupported OSes or outmoded hardware) that might be good. Then highlight the things from the other school that you would have time to bring in. If you're after money, I'd say the most important thing to impress on them is that IT investment has to be part of a continual program - that doesn't necessarily mean it'll cost a fortune, but spending a lump sum once then sitting back will do them no favours.

I tried that about a year ago. I hope it's a lot more user friendly nowadays because I couldn't for the life of me compile any kind of SCORM resource with the damn thing. If I'd showed it to a teacher in that state I think they'd have had an aneurysm!