sahmeepee

Obviously if you read my post carefully I have clearly been misunderstood . It's rare to get a flood of visits on a post such as this via search engine results alone; it's not exactly the only post on here about Uniservity. It's also unusual to have such a split in opinion between new users and established users - almost completely polarised in fact. I think your second paragraph is a bit closer to reality. I would be interested to know what the http-referer was for the first page hits from those new users.. unlike the TES, on edugeek we know people with log files

I thought a normal ceiling tile of lighting (4 fluoros) used about the same power as a PC (roughly 60W). Am I close? That would put their consumption lower than the computers in a suite but on a par. Do any schools switch lights off with motion sensors? I've seen them in corridors, but I would think that a classroom with no movement for 5 minutes means a classroom with no kids in it!

I've done some work on this in our school (helpfully feeding my OCD streak). Something like shutdownertron is a good idea for your workstations. I use a script of my own, but it does pretty much the same stuff. Turning off servers is going too far IMHO as people have said above. There are some apps knocking about for controlling the power settings on your desktops, such as EZ GPO: EZ GPO : ENERGY STAR If you make sure Wake On Lan is turned on on the client PCs, having computers switch off a lot shouldn't get in the way of your general network admin tasks (patching/deployment etc). It's worth investing in a power measurement device or two to check what power your devices draw in standby and at full power. I've found CRTs turned off with the mechanical switch on the front which consume more power than a bigger TFT which is switched on! I think this is the model we've got: [ame=http://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Energy-Monitor-by-Brennenstuhl/dp/B000XSX1PA]Electrical Energy Meter PM230: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo[/ame] They are more accurate if you connect several devices at once with a gang extension. Other things to look at: Make sure that projectors are set to shut down when they don't have a signal. A projector will merrily use as much juice as 5 desktop PCs and doesn't use any less if it's displaying a mostly black screensaver! If your PCs are shutting down on a schedule, the projectors will follow soon after. Check if your aircon units have timers. Most of ours have timers which can be set just to switch off at certain times - no need to set them to switch on automatically. Put up signs reminding the hard of thinking that it's evil and wrong to open doors and windows when they have the aircon on. You can buy power distribution units which can be controlled over IP, but when I last looked they weren't economical for us. If you're being ultra-keen they might be a good idea for you. EDIT: Crikey, do you think the amazon ads are obtrusive enough?

I haven't bought Dell equipment from Dell for years. Their schools team is a complete waste of time. I spoke to a guy who covers a region in the south on their stand at BETT and he seemed very on-the-ball, claiming to stay in regular contact with all his schools. That hasn't been my experience at all. I now use resellers for all Dell gear and find they are much more competitive on price as well as service. MOst stuff I buy after getting quotes on SchoolQuote ( Home Page ) . If you want no-nonsense sales, try ringing Orchid (01332 360 099) and asking for Simon Hulland. He will try to sell you HP servers, but if you want Dell he can get them at a good price and it will be entirely painless!

Interesting that so many people have created brand new accounts to sing Uniservity's praises - it must be good!

Citrix have just announced a new version of their free Xen Server, version 5.5 The bullet points: * Consolidated Backup allows third-party backup vendors to interface directly with XenServer to provide full and incremental, in-guest, file and image backups of virtual machines. The new consolidated backup capabilities in XenServer also provide customers with the ability to execute full GUI-based snapshots directly from the XenCenter central management console. * Enhanced Conversion Tools make it easy to convert virtual machines created in the VMDK format (commonly used by VMware) into the VHD format (commonly used by Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V). The new XenConvert tools also make it easy to seamlessly convert between any of the common open virtualization format packages, including OVF (open virtualization format), OVA (open virtual appliance) and XVA (XenServer virtual appliance). * Enhanced Search enables customers to view and manage XenServer environments by a range of criteria including VM name, resource pool, location, server, storage repository, snapshot time, and network name – all from a single location. It also provides the ability to create custom views or folders. * Active Directory Integration makes it easy for customers to use their AD credentials to mange XenServer hosts as well as log and audit user activity. * Expanded Guest Support adds SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, Debian 5.0 and RedHat/CentOS/Oracle 5.3 to a growing list of supported guests that includes virtually every version of the Windows and Linux operating systems. The beta, as well as a 30-day trial version of Citrix Essentials, is available at Citrix Systems » Citrix XenServer: Efficient Virtual Server Software. The beta version of the new Citrix XenServer 5.5 is also available today and can be downloaded free of charge from Citrix Systems » Products » -- XenServer/Essentials » XenServer. The 5.5 version of both product lines will be generally available June 19. Linky: Citrix Systems » Citrix Upgrades Server Virtualization Product Lines for XenServer and Hyper-V

I'm guessing he means Microsoft Learning Gateway as opposed to the Learning Gateway User Group. It'd be handy if people would always use its full name too, as I was expecting a post about SIMS Learning Gateway and you let me down!

I'm hoping they've forgotten about it here so I can get all that junk off the server at some point. Sorry I can't help with your query though.. ours is sat on a WS2003 machine.

The old way was via the "at" command, which has now been replaced with "schtasks" The schtasks help (schtasks /?) isn't very clear, this is better: Schtasks - Scheduled tasks You can point it at remote systems too if that's easier than the GPO route.

Quick update: It looks like Redstone are out. Again, high quality BN reporting: Bolton firms urged to bid for school building work (From The Bolton News) RM vs Northgate. Fiver on RM.

It's a slightly baffling brief tbh. Surely if you're going into a school to investigate their provision (hypothetically speaking) you would use the information you had gathered to form the basis of your recommendations?! Are you supposed to be making up a set of fictional problems that the school has as well? Do a google search for the "BECTA Self Review Framework" if you want BECTA's advice on how a school should be focussing its efforts. It's done in a questionnaire format and gives you advice at the end. If you are just supposed to be giving general guidance on how schools should deliver their ICT provision, the current govt view is that it should all be outsourced and schools shouldn't worry their pretty little heads about it.

I set up an asterisk box at home a couple of years back using a vmware player appliance. I really just wanted to have a play with it, but didn't have any concrete plans to implement it in the near future. I'd be interested to know a few things from those that are using asterisk in schools so that I'm better informed if the school does want to change from our now unsupported old-style digital PBX to voip goodness... How much space is required for a reasonable amount of voicemail/user? Do users have access to any of the web interfaces for configuring their number? Do your users have access to their voicemail from outside the school? If yes, can they also access it out of hours? Is there a password policy for protecting voicemail boxes? How separate is the voice network? i.e. Did you just set up QoS? or give it its own VLAN? its own switches?? its own trunk datacabling??? Sorry for asking so many noob questions, but it's a little outside my normal field!

I was thinking of building that into our login logger database, but instead I decided to extract the MAC addresses from DHCP. When I run our wake-on-lan script (WoLLOP) it pulls all the MAC address / hostname pairs off our DHCP servers then uses that list to look up the hostname I've entered, so it just runs like: wollop computername Your method is nice too! I do something similar. From hometime onwards a script repeatedly loops through all PCs, shutting down any that have no explorer.exe running (i.e. not logged on) and have been idle for more than 20 minutes. Late at night (about 23:30 I think) a different script runs with a psshutdown -f. I calculated that it's saving the school well over £10,000/year versus the laissez-faire approach.

The name sounds familiar... are they the school that made a SLG-like web portal for parents?

After putting all those IPs up it might be an idea to move this thread to "Security" for the sake of those schools who haven't blocked them all. Our council filtering blocks all direct access to IP addresses. For the most part that's OK, but unfortunately it wipes out google cache in the process. From what I can tell their regex is a little too loose so it blocks any address starting with a number which can cause occasional problems. Looking at that list I would be tempted to block the entirety of 72. , 209. and 216.

If you're looking for something "better than Frog" then I'd save some time and cancel your Uniservity appointment. You can take a look on www.School-Portal.co.uk* to see the VLEs of all schools using Uniservity. Is it unusable? No. Would I be surprised if it's "better" than any other VLE? Yes. Judge for yourself though.

We have shown staff how to add a shortcut to the school bulletin in the bar on the left. Q) Why do that when there is a bulletin feature on the front page? A) (polite version) The bulletin feature on the front page is too long-winded, unless it's been improved in March.

What is the filename of the new installer? What is the benefit over the SIMSinst pictured? AFAIK Capita are still working on their deployment system which should remove the need for a manual install. I gather it's looking pretty good.

Ha! We have some cameras on DM Network Viewer and it is pretty awful. If you want to capture an AVI from it you have to queue up the footage, then tell it to start recording, press play and then press stop when enough footage has been captured. Yes, it's a digital system and you have to record an AVI in realtime! Bizarre.

What, they aren't promoting from within?! Someone tell partnerships for schools!

I use Synergy here all the time and recommend it highly. It even knows my monitors are at different heights. Occasionally the shared clipboard falls over, but restarting the service on the "server" PC seems to fix it.

Presumably because he wants to have access to the feature for administrators but not for users. That's how we have it to reduce the likelihood of them firing their user areas into the bitbucket.

To me that document says you are not covered other than for the following people... Students & staff, plus: • Prospective students • Alumni (student and faculty/ staff) • Student and faculty/staff of collaborating academic institutions or government institutions. ..which leaves your parents and governors out in the cold. These are the people who should really know their stuff on UK Educational licensing of MS software: Education Large Account Resellers - Education - Microsoft UK

Disabling and re-enabling shadow copy should do the trick then. To check if the space is freed up after you disable shadow copy, look at the free disk space on the volume before and after. It's hard to look at the shadow copy files themselves because they live inside "System Volume Information" which only the SYSTEM account has access to by default.

In case anyone here is faced with using the AQA DTT for their MFL speaking exams and it won't work, here is my quick guide based on a support call and some fettling: Extract the zip into a suitable folder under c:\program files\ Give users modify access on the folder and its contents. The part of the DTT which detects if you have an Internet connection is not capable of understanding proxies, so you can't tell it where your proxy server is or feed it credentials - it just tries to access the sites directly via HTTPS. If your proxy server set up is similar to ours that may mean adding an additional rule to allow computers on your LAN to access: aqa.maps-ict.com 78.136.38.131 aqademo.maps-ict.com 131.227.202.55 ... via HTTPS (port 443). I then tried logging on to the live version with the exams officer's AQA credentials. First time I got the message: On subsequent attempts I get the message: Clicking OK doesn't drop you out of the software, but instead leaves you at a screen saying: As you may have guessed it never makes any progress and sits there forever if you leave it. It turns out that this part of the DTT does understand proxy servers, so you need to tell it an account to use and where you proxy server is. The dialogue which allows you to make those config changes is only available once you have logged in to the desktop tool and downloaded your school's data... which you can't do until you have entered the proxy settings. Chicken and egg. Luckily (I think?) AQA aren't too bothered about security, so they store those proxy settings in plain text in side an XML file: c:\pathtoAQAsoftware\config.xml Initially it will look like this: https://aqa.maps-ict.com/services/ Data false It needs to look more like this: https://aqademo.maps-ict.com/services/ Data true 0 AQAACCOUNT AQAACCOUNTPASSWORD PROXYPORT PROXYNAME Authentication type 0 worked for us, but you it might not work for you so maybe a little trial and error is in order. Because passwords are stored in plaintext it might be worth creating an account purely for the AQA software with a password you don't use regularly and then disabling the account when it's not in use. If you deviate from the instructions above, it will likely cause the "unspecified error". In that case, simply move/delete the contents of: c:\pathtoAQAsoftware\Data\ and try again. If that doesn't work, just move/delete the entire software folder and make one from scratch from the zip.