sahmeepee

Or if that doesn't work, get CyberNerd to send them for you

This page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnscrpt/html/WebErrors2.asp says: I haven't tested that, so caveat scriptor, but I guess you could use the stuff on that page to pull some information out about the error and process it.

You could also try Northern Realisations in Bolton: http://www.realnorth.co.uk Mapping goodness: BL3 6NR Telephone: 01204 365911 They do auctions/ebay/recycling from schools etc., but I notice they have an HP4000n in their next auction so you may be able to get what you want from them if you give them a tinkle.

The Acer extended warranties with accidental damage cover aren't too pricey really, but registering the laptops for their warranty is an exercise in bureaucracy and seems to be deliberately designed to put people off. Hopefully we won't need them after all!

ChrisH: I made a single-user vbscript which did this sort of thing all-in-one so that I didn't have to mess around when a new pupil came to the school in the middle of a school year. It's quite handy for quickly creating test accounts too. On top of the basics, it made the home folder, set permissions on it and created a share on it (as well as setting all the properties of their account I needed e.g. group memberships*). I did some bits of it by calling cacls.exe and rmtshare.exe with WshShell.Run rather than pure VB, because I didn't have any great plans on distributing it to anyone else. The only thing I never got round to was creating their mailbox in Exchange, because that needed more advanced veebee voodoo. If I look at it again, I'll probably use this: http://www.joeware.net/win/free/tools/exchmbx.htm because laziness generally wins against elegance! If you want the code, PM me - it's so heavily customised for our particular setup that it wouldn't be much use as a starting point for people, but you might be able to lift bits you like. One feature request would be to let the csv file have column headers, so that you could make some parameters optional. It's worth bearing in mind though that a lot of properties of user accounts can be done in bulk in WS2003's ADUC by multi-selecting so there's not much of a time-saving aspect after you consider that you have to generate the csv file in the first place. *yes, I know that isn't technically a property of the user account!

Did someone mention that you *have* to make people sit through a copyright/license warning at the start of the video? Are you still putting those on the start of your videos and have you looked at a way to stop people skipping it? To me it's a pointless exercise as the kids don't even read the things they're asked to, but I know my management bods would be quite hot on "doing it right" legally-speaking. Presumably the streaming method gives you more control over that aspect, but may rule out using some of your Buffalo gear.

Wow. I'm amazed that I've never seen that before - that could come in very handy. If anybody wants to download it it's at: http://tinyurl.com/fttyx (There's no installer, just run the .exe) Quota software could still be an issue, but having quotas in place is less important than having printers. Thanks!

ChrisH: If the problems are due to both servers answering to the same hostname, you could just implement it as an emergency measure - when printserver1 goes down, set up an alias in DNS to point clients at printserver2. From a management point of view I can see that as being very unwieldy though, because you'd need to have all your printers configured identically on both servers. For any new printer or change in printer config, you'd have to repeat the process on your backup print server. Yuck. If you have print quota software you might need to mirror its settings regularly and/or pay extra license fees on it. My best effort for a printserver plan B (beyond a spare identical server and good backup software) is to run the print server as a virtual server and back the files up to somewhere off the server. At least that way, it can be run from another server quickly if yours explodes.

How have you gone about this? Are you using PEAP with Microsoft IAS for example? Are you running Windows/Linux/Netware/somethingelse at the server end? I'm interested in doing whole-site wireless at some point (and the pressure from staff will undoubtedly build over time), but I'm not willing to do it with weak (read: WEP) or no :!: security as I know a lot of schools have. The current wireless gear we use (only 2 consumer-level APs) is set to use WPA-PSK, but it took quite a while to iron out the wrinkles and it doesn't scale up very well because of the manual entry of passphrases.

Apple Remote Desktop 3 is supposed to have some new features specifically aimed at remotely managing deployments etc. I've not looked after macs for a while now so I'm no expert, but it might be worth a look if imaging isn't an option. http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/remoteadministration.html Presumably you can use the remote computer's root credentials to carry out your admin tasks if necessary.

Presumably you could print things to flashpaper, which comes as part of the newest Macromedia suite. I'd guess that more people have the Flash plugin than have ActiveX. The authoring software doesn't seem to be available on Macs, but the output files will work fine in Mac browsers. You won't have to pay inewspaper to host your files either. Here's an example output from macromedia's site: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashpaper/frontdoor_doc.swf That's full size, but you could embed it at any size in a webpage. If you don't qualify for educational licensing, it's £49+VAT per copy or £469 for a 10-pack.

In case anyone uses Websense here: It seems they've recently added another protocol to their list, "Kuro". As is always the case (why?!!) it's been added enabled on all protocol sets, despite it being in the P2P category. Amazingly, even new protocols in the proxy avoidance category get added as allowed and not logged! Same goes for new categories, even sub-categories of "Security PG" (a paid-for addon category you may not have) which has recently got a new "Potentially unwanted software" category btw. Perhaps this is one for the FFS! forum! Long story short: it might be worth taking a look at your filtering to make sure you don't have any nasty surprises looming.

14(+2) physical servers, 530 clients, ~1900 humans or similar 2 x DC's (+DHCP+DNS) 1 x Exchange 1 x ISA+Websense+WSUS 1 x SIMS 1 x FMS 1 x NAS 2 x Fileservers (i.e. normal WS2003 instead of storage edition) 1 x Applications/shared storage/SQL Server/print/cruft 1 x Sharepoint/classserver 1 x Terminal server (gradually on its way out) (not rackmount) 1 x Cashless catering database server (not rackmount) 1 x MOM2000 (not rackmount) +(2 x IP Camera servers (not rackmount)) =14(+2) The camera servers are servers, but we don't really manage them as such: they're more like appliances. I can't really get any more servers because I struggled to do that list from memory as it is!

I just ran the GNU strings utility against my Sophos setup.exe to see if I could see which commandline arguments it would take and look what came up! N:\>strings -n 6 "c:\Program Files\Sophos SWEEP for NT\SETUP.EXE" | findstr pans Get a load of this, you steaming great pansy What's that about?!

Quoth Geoff: I do exactly the same as this (for staff). Very occasionally they plug them in without asking, but I monitor for it! Kids plugging their laptops in receive a bollocking. Quoth NetworkGeezer: I've been aspiring to this for some time now. My thinking was that giving them access to a separate wireless network of that nature would reduce the temptation to plug in and be much easier to keep sanitized. I'd still be wary of allowing internet access though, unless it was filtered stupidly harshly, because without logins there's no accountability (as i see it).

You can disable the security tab in a GPO. Like most GPO settings it's only taking away the interface rather than the right to change perms. User config>Admin Templates>Windows Components>Windows Explorer>Remove security tab They don't need full control on files to save by the way, they only need modify, but by default they'll have full control over files they make.

You can uninstall the tests by running the .msi again on the workstation and choosing remove. (The tests and DPS also have their own entries in add/remove programs too.) To get rid of broken practice test data on the workstation, you'll probably have to remove each test and the DPS, then delete the QCA Testing folder in Program Files. Then just reboot to reinstall if you've deployed via GPO.

That works in NetOp, but I can't speak for Net Support. As soon as they log back on they'll rejoin the class. There used to be a bug in NetOp (and some of the other alternatives I think) where kids could kill the client agent off, but they've fixed that in the most recent version. (I won't detail how to do that here in case people are still on the old version and their customers are reading!)

Haha! Nice one. Mine said "Please turn off the projector when you leave. The Projector Fairy is on holiday." I think I like yours more.

I haven't tried it to be honest.. the few offline machines that have AS2 installed get a local install (we don't have many so it's not really an issue). Synchronising shared flipcharts full of large digital photos could get annoying quite quickly - I guess it depends on what your teachers are producing. At least they'd be getting the stuff produced in-house though (if your teachers can be coerced into sharing that is).

Looks good. In that scenario, can the user (a normal user) drag an exe file into their start menu and then run it?

Actually I've got to hold my hand up on this one. I thought we had it fixed, but alas no. The tests appear in the list, but when a pupil tries to use one they get a msgbox: "Unable to load the Test. Ask your teacher for help" Obviously the teacher then asked me for help and I looked skyward Will probably do an add/remove programs uninstall tonight and manually wipe out any lingering folders then reboot and see if the GPO method works 2nd time round. Failing that we'll do manual installs. (Grr!)

Its been ok so far (Centos), anyone point me to a postgresql/tomcat keepalive script? I set mine up to stop and start Postgres and Tomcat each night on either side of the backup as it mentions (briefly) in the docs. I suspect this might also improve the reliability of the APS unless you are hammering it heavily on a single day. The scripts for stopping and starting are just: @REM Stop the APS services net stop tomcat net stop postmaster and @REM Start the APS services net start tomcat net start postmaster If you want to do that remotely rather than scheduled, take a look at the sc command.

Just in case anybody else has the same problem as we did... We have a classroom of PCs with the latest DPS version installed via GPO and then the three example tests installed on top of that as per the documentation. However, on 2 of the PCs there were no tests to pick from in the list when the pupil started the DPS. I checked: C:\Program Files\QCA Testing\Delivery Point System\TDS\Tests on the 2 duff workstations and they had the tests there just the same as on the working PCs. Eventually I found that: C:\Program Files\QCA Testing\Delivery Point System\TDS\Config\Components.xml on the 2 broken PCs didn't have any tests listed inside , whereas the working machines had three some stuff items. Because the Components.xml on the working machines was always the same, I copied a working one over onto the broken installs and the tests appeared fine in the list next time. I still can't find any reason why it would do a faulty install on 2 of 28 identical ghosted PCs, but that's life. HTH someone!

Yeah, sorry if my post was a bit offhand. You'd obviously have to look very carefully at this. You could specifically disallow temp and your browser's cache folder or block everything on C:\ then open it back up folder-by-folder. It definitely takes planning and testing, e.g. you may have problems with blocking shortcuts in the users' docs&settings (e.g. their own start menu) from running if you get it wrong.