sahmeepee

or zamzar.com if you're too lazy to install software

Maybe I should be posting this in the jobs forum Solution Architect, Education ICT, Leeds BSF - Leeds, West Yorkshire - CWJobs/2464 - 43077035 - CWJobs.co.uk "£50-55k basic + car + to 20% bonus + pension + BUPA etc" "An opportunity for a high calibre Solution Architect to move into the education sector and help improve the life chances of millions of children by providing Leeds schools with innovative technical solutions that will enhance learning." ... "Previous education sector experience isn't essential" I think we could all apply for that one.

Your common sense is not welcome here boy! At the time I was working in that area (6 or 7 years ago) I think they were Torex and EMIS (sp?). Not sure what they were like from a user's point of view as my knowledge of medicine ends at Alka Seltzer.

Google already do this in a way with their Google SMS service. You can ask it things like the population of Spain and it will come back with the answer. Obviously it's only an approximation... Google's not that good.. yet!

Hi Matt, Did you get anywhere with this? We don't have to do it very often, but an automated process would make it a little less painful. You missed a step by the way: rename the zip to reflect the Capita case number. TBH it wouldn't take much to knock it up as a batch file: 7-Zip has good commandline options and although FileZilla's are rubbish, PSFTP's seem fine. Next time I have a spare few hours, i.e. probably never, I could also do with automating the process of moving our live SIMS data over to our SIMS test/training server.

I have an automated shutdown script I made for our school. Whilst mine is designed differently, it does have some of the features mentioned above so maybe I could share my experiences: For detecting if anyone is logged on, you simply have to check for the presence of explorer.exe. If it's not running, then nobody is logged on (unless you have replaced the Windows shell - unlikely I would imagine) I was wary of shutting down computers that had just been turned on, e.g. it's parents' evening and they want to turn on a room full of computers and log onto them, but they start turning them on 5 minutes before the script is set to run, so they shut down again straight away: annoying! To combat that, I check if the Windows screensaver is running and if it has been running for more than x seconds it will deem the computer to be idle. I don't want to log off a computer if it's still logged on in the evening, because someone might be working on it. Apparently they don't all leave at 15:35:01, who knew?! So I just run a separate script at chucking out time (23:30) that does a forced shutdown on all classroom PCs. I allow office PCs to stay on overnight if they still have a logged on user, simply because the energy saved for that small subset of computers is less than one teacher would expend if I euthanised their Word doc.

Thanks for this... we've been using Windirstat for ages and I'd never even noticed it was open source! I had even mentioned to my colleague that we would be able to give kids access to Windirstat if it had less options! For info, if you want to run it from a batch script like the one you include in the zip, it's usually better to run it using start: start litedirstat c:\ That way the script will carry on executing in the background rather than pausing until litedirstat.exe terminates. I wonder if it would be possible to pop up some instructions in front of the window whilst it is scanning as the Windirstat interface might need a little explanation (i'm thinking of a situation where I launch it automatically at logon for pupils who only have a few MB free in their user area).

Our staff can get on slightly more than pupils, most notably their home email. Pupils can't access webmail because we get a lot of cases of bullying via email so it makes sense to channel all email in school through a route that we can manage. Until the LA blocked them, our staff could get on Facebook, Youtube and iPlayer. IIRC we had all those blocked for the kids. Staff don't seem to be too bothered about FB (it's a mixed blessing having it available 24/7 IMHO), but they do miss the educational benefits of Youtube and iPlayer. Luckily we can use zamzar.com to get Youtube videos on a one-off basis. Obviously I can see the reason for blocking incredibly bandwidth-hungry video sites when capacity is finite and would rather lose Youtube than suffer slow speeds on every website. On your first point, there are currently other ways than RM to run a school network, but unfortunately that seems to be changing.

I can see how that is much more elegant (ahem!) So without resorting to 12 pages of VBscript ... @echo off REM Take down your particulars: set IPUpdaterHostname=www.yourschool.sch.uk set IPUpdaterUsername=yourFTPUsername set IPUpdaterPassword=yourFTPPassword(Leave blank to be prompted) REM Extracting the IP address: ipconfig | findstr "10.[0-9]" | findstr "Address" > ip.txt for /F "tokens=15 delims= " %%a in (ip.txt) do echo %%a>ip.txt REM Uploading the IP address: if not defined IPUpdaterPassword set /p IPUpdaterPassword=Enter your password: echo open %IPUpdaterHostname% > IPUpdaterFTP.txt echo %IPUpdaterUsername% >> IPUpdaterFTP.txt echo %IPUpdaterPassword% >> IPUpdaterFTP.txt echo put ip.txt >> IPUpdaterFTP.txt echo quit >> IPUpdaterFTP.txt ftp -s:IPUpdaterFTP.txt REM Tidying up: del ip.txt && del IPUpdaterFTP.txt set IPUpdaterHostname=&&set IPUpdaterUsername=&&set IPUpdaterPassword= If you want to hard-code the settings into the script you can trim those 4 lines near the top of course It's only a couple more lines to add a text file lookup so it would upload your location instead of your IP address.

It might be worth running wireshark to see if you are getting any inbound packets at all.

To some extent, although the government do periodically change their minds about what is worth recording depending on the prevailing wind direction. As an example I heard that at one point they wanted to know if pupils had a parent in the military, presumably to check how moving around a lot affected their performance in school. The MIS would need to be altered to reflect the new requirement - it's not always simply a case of pulling out a different set of fields. They have had to do that here with the suppliers of clinical systems software for GPs. (Are GPs called GPs in NZ?) The market was similar to the MIS market in schools - 2 very large companies taking up ~90% of the market and then a long tail of smaller companies. The companies fought tooth and nail to escape interoperability requirements because it reduced their lock-in capability. My cynical side suspects that the government's obsession with lining the pockets of private businesses meshes well with a system which is woefully inefficient and ultimately leaches money from the taxpayer into %MISVendor%'s bank account. If an open source system was to keep up with changing government requirements, there is one organisation very well placed to produce it: the Government! Unfortunately they aren't allowed to set something up which would compete with private industry (see also: BBC Jam), but that's a topic for another rant!

Obviously instead of just doing an echo it could do: wget http://yourhost.sch.uk/mapMe.php?ip=%%a No pootling about required!

If you want a DOS version to pick out the first 10.x.yy.zzz line, how's this? save this as ip.bat then run it. THe commands won't run properly directly from the commandline because of a weirdness around %%s @echo off ipconfig | findstr "10.[0-9]" | findstr "Address" > ip.txt for /F "usebackq tokens=15* delims= " %%a in (ip.txt) do echo %%a del ip.txt

Doesn't look entirely portable!

Generally accessing SIMS data direct from the database is frowned upon by Capita unless you contact them and become a partner (£££) etc. Their main reason for not supporting it is that the schema is subject to regular changes and they don't want people constantly having to fix their secondary applications. Your best bet is the CommandReporter dhicks mentioned. It can be scheduled to periodically extract (but not insert) data using any report you have set up within SIMS. Exports to XML iirc.

We swapped freemind for VUE - much quicker to use and more intuitive unless freemind has come on a lot. For screen capturing I like Wink for detailed stuff, but CamStudio is good for more basic requirements. For playing back video we use MPC, but VLC is as good.

And what stops someone setting up an AP which looks exactly like a FON AP, but actually just collects FON passwords?

Does the shortcut point to a mapped drive or a \\UNC\path ? I would try accessing the software directly rather than via the shortcut (may not be possible if you are quite locked down). If that works, but the shortcut doesn't, try either recreating the shortcut or using filemon to diagnose the problem thoroughly. Similarly for the printers - can you add them manually? Do you get an error message? What language is the login script written in? Does any of this stuff work as an admin, but not as a teacher? That will rule a permissions problem in or out.

It looks like the Bolton bid has been accepted (at least in part). Hard to tell the details from the BN's rubbish reporting: £82.9m schools plan gets go-ahead (From The Bolton News)

As I understand the GPL, as plugins are discrete entities you can license them how you like. They would only be forced to be GPL if they were somehow merged into the code of a GPL product (which is a contradiction in terms really when you're talking about plugins)

Bit less than that.. more like $12500, so about £8500. Still needs to drop a load and become useful in some way

After my fair share of BETT shows, I would say that small/remote stands need to make up for their handicaps by: Having enough people with them who know the product well enough to answer questions. That means having lots of info to hand like prices, delivery times, educational merits, case studies (if you have any), that sort of thing. Having those people stood at the stand as much as possible (maybe take food/drink with you if you can). It's amazing how many stands are completely vacant for long spells. I guess that bit might be a tad boring on day 4, but it's surely worth making the most of the opportunity. There was a guy who bought 100 of those "laser keyboard" thingummies late on a Friday one year I was there and he could easily have passed that small stand by. Stopping anyone who shows a flicker of interest and chatting to them! It can be a bit tiring as a visitor when this happens, but it is par for the course and you really DO need to do it on small stands if you don't want to disappear in the fog of advertising brochures.

What make are your switches? With 3com kit you can use their free network supervisor software to map out the connections between any IP devices that are on at the time (so at least all your switches and servers)

Are you making a windows application in VB or a web-based asp/asp.net app in vbscript/vb.net?

I do these in Excel as well. It's not very sexy, but seeing as the names come out of SIMS as CSV and need a bit of manual checking over (wacky names with apostrophes,spaces,ridiculously long double-barrellers etc.) it's a good fit. The final columns in the script build commandlines for pasting into a big batch file. I think mine relies on "dsadd" and then I run some scripts which quickly set all the ACLs (search the forums for "subinacl") and set up the shares ("rmtshare") All microsoft tools, but annoyingly none of them come with XP: they're available in adminpak.msi or the resource kit though. At some point I will move everything to powershell... it's growing on me slowly! Nice and easy to code GUI tools in it as well