sahmeepee

Our VLE (not going to name it right now) trumps most of these problems. Currently each person only has an allocation of 30MB so there's no chance of uploading anything bigger via Java or standard form-based upload. As for security holes, these things are seemingly all (except Moodle, natch) chock-full of insecure coding - a testament to how chucked-together they are. In our case, the wysiwyg editor in html mode allows you to insert arbitrary javascript which they even treat as a selling point ("look at all these cool widgets you can copy into your page"). You can also put your own code into event handling on objects, e.g. include an IMG that doesn't exist and put code into the onerror attribute which then runs. This can be used to pick up the user's login cookie and send it to a 3rd party site. All that is required for it to run is that the visitor views your page. If the guy who made the myspace worm got his hands on the site it would be blown away in minutes.

Here are the pagefile recommendations for Server 2k3. Obviously if you have a RAID setup, be aware of which volumes are truly on different physical disks. (Summary: keep a pagefile on c:\ if that is your boot volume - it will allow for memory dumps to be created create a 2nd pagefile on a separate physical disk to improve performance if possible create a separate volume on the separate disk which only stores a pagefile)

We used some wordsearch generation software from here: Wordsearch Generator - Wordsearch Creator - Wordsearch Maker It actually has a naughty-word scanner to avoid that problem. I must admit I had a childish chuckle reading the text file with the rude words in. In the OP, the user had actually guessed the offending letters (look at the URL)... just a coincidence they appeared in the right order. Reminds me of that amusing carol vorderman/countdown photoshop job.

It depends what you want to end up with, but the actual job is very easy.. just remove the profile path from all the accounts and they will get local profiles instead.

Whereabouts is your school? Do you know which cashless catering systems they're intended for use with?

I actually made a post mentioning her blog back in January. It seems that she's come round to the idea of BSF in that time and relieved herself of any guilt about making her network manager redundant. PS I like the irony of the first "similar thread" beneath this one being "ICT Technician (Temporary/Hackney)"

It's better in some ways, but saving your counter settings is still a tad lame. I went on a Microsoft course where they said you can't save the settings from perfmon - not true: you can click the button to copy the counter settings to the clipboard, then paste them into a notepad document and save it. To restore the settings (e.g. after a reboot), copy the text out of the notepad doc and click the paste button in perfmon. Bing!

The patch is spurting forth from my WSUS server right now. Not sure when it was issued, but sync your server and it should appear. Separate patches for IE6 and IE7. Not sure if they've released a patch for IE5.

As a quick update, I disabled the XML island stuff overnight and now Outlook Web Access is pretty much borked! It seems it's needed for replies and setting high importance and possibly for sending mails at all. Not good. Luckily reverting the setting is quite easy. So thus far I've not found a suitable fix. Let's hope the patch comes quickly!

Well we tried disabling that on a virtual PC, but unfortunately it reliably kills mail merges (between word and excel) and probably anything else of that nature. SIMS itself ran fine although we didn't test any report generation etc. The XML data island fix is much less likely to break stuff so I'm going with that on our admin and classroom PCs until this out-of-band patch comes out tomorrow and we get it deployed everywhere: Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for December 2008 Using web browsers on servers is even more wrong than normal at the moment!

I would start with: findstr /? ...if you're looking to use native windows tools to replicate grep functionality.

Well they aren't making a fix, they're doing a day-to-day update to their product's most fundamental function. By their own admission the fix is far from watertight so I'd be very wary of relying on it. I would be much happier with a client-side fix for this than hoping the smoothwall rules are accurate enough and stay accurate as variants emerge. (This is not a dig at smoothwall who are obviously doing what they can) From some experimentation with this demo of "XML island" functionality (which has nothing to do with the exploit code) it seems that putting a deny entry on the following registry key breaks the link between IE6 and MSXML3.dll: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{379E501F-B231-11D1-ADC1-00805FC752D8} I can't see why the Microsoft Advisory is suggesting people empty the contents of that key and subkeys instead of just setting an ACL entry. I suspect it's going to be a fair bit easier to remove that deny entry via GPO than to reconstruct a bunch of registry keys reliably. @Tom: There are some screenshots of a malicious version on the websense blog which it would be interesting to compare with your filter to see if it would pick it up: http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Blogs/3263.aspx

I don't have any SIMS-generated xml files to play with at the moment, but you may be able to find a common xml element which always contains the "meat" of the report. When I just made a test xml file in Word 2003, the tag contained all the goodies. Presumably it's not impossible to write a regular expression to extract just those bits of the files, concatenate them all together and then stick all the extraneous Word xml guff at the top and bottom. You might need to do some voodoo if you want to maintain a page break between them or somehow get them apart again after your tweaks.

A small mono laser printer will cost you about 2p/sheet for toner and about 0.3p/sheet for paper. A large mono laser works out at about 0.8p/sheet for toner. With your CLJ, the black toner is cheaper per page than the colour. Also, if it's anything like the 2550, a colour page counts for 4 "hits" on the drum, whereas a pure mono page is only 1 hit so you can use that in your calculation (on the 2550 a drum has 20,000 hits, so 5000 colour or 20000 mono). I think the web admin on the 2605 gives you usage on each toner individually, so you can work out roughly what proportion of pages are black-only. It might be quite high even if there is a mono printer in the room. We have a 2600n sat next to a mono printer and the config page currently reads: Page Counts Total Pages Printed: 2928 Color Pages Printed: 2465 Total Mispicked In Printer: 0 Total Jammed In Printer: 0 ... admittedly some of those pages may be blanks.

You can use Windows performance monitor to monitor the performance of remote PCs. Just do: start>run>perfmon remove the 3 default counters right-click on the graph to add counters choose your remote xp machine choose a relevant counter (e.g. total CPU) choose a relevant counter (e.g. disk queue length) (...repeat as necessary) click close

We're looking at disabling oledb32 temporarily via group policy or maybe zapping the registry key they mention in the advisory (to clobber "XML Island functionality"). Not sure what the impact will be yet... virtual machines are go! Anyone tried SIMS/FMS/MSAccess after any of these workarounds?

A lot of our apps are on a site license that wouldn't allow use from home over TS anyway... they're licensed for the physical site. Even some of the file-based resources are license that way so they shouldn't go on the VLE.

I still had someone trying to sell it to me quite recently. Seems like they've relaunched it since they were last pushing it 18-24 months ago. God knows where the SSAT get off with all these commercial companies they keep pushing at^W^W endorsing to schools. If it's not IMJack it's some (non-free) network auditing service. TBH IMJack looks a bit chucked together.. I'd be aiming a bit higher than that!

...and the bad news is - your cost per page has almost certainly gone up in the last month or two. HP toners are up massively in the last month (approx 10%) and the toners for their new printers are ridiculously expensive: their low end mono printers like the P1005 and P1006 cost around 2.33 pence per sheet! That is up from about 1.7 p/sheet we were paying on the old LJ1018s a year ago. Toners for those (12a) are now approaching 2 p/sheet. We have a daily print limit for kids which they can extend just by asking (but i suspect it cuts down on frivolous waste) We restrict classroom printers so they can't print web pages and emails directly (must copy the text they want to word etc) We restrict classroom printers to a maximum number of copies (to help teachers get over their photocopier phobias) We restrict classroom printers to a maximum number of pages/job (because that 168 page PDF from AQA can probably go to reprographics too) I sometimes charge departments for their toner rather than billing it centrally if the printing logs suggest they have been using the printer as a photocopier. I suspect replacing any ink printers you have with toner ones will save you money in the long run although I've not run the numbers on it in a long time. We use Pcounter for our print control, but there are quite a few similar products out there.

It looks to me like you might be missing a Perl developer and possibly someone with some Ada and Fortran knowledge. Did I miss any? () Seriously though, the MIS idea is unfortunately not realistic. It has been discussed on here before at great length and the reality is that schools have become increasingly reliant on their MIS systems to allow them to do the things government asks of them, not least produce increasingly regular reports of a host of pupil and staff statistics to specified formats. No homebrew effort could hope to keep pace with the requirements - for perspective, the module of SIMS which is used to arrange cover teachers was recently revamped; the development cost was more than your school's entire annual budget. The VLE idea is maybe not in the right ballpark, but is at least in the right galaxy. VLEs are often poor and it's baffling to me how shonky the end-user experience is, never mind the experience for the administrator. Unfortunately your school is very unlikely to let you have access to any sample MIS data for data protection reasons so your integration testing will be tricky (only real data has the magic fairy dust that reveals bugs!). If your IT Support people were on side they might set up an instance of SIMS with the dummy "Green Abbey School" database for you to test against, but I suspect from your other postings about continually attempting proxy avoidance and "shut[ting] down sims via the active directory" () that you may have burned some bridges. If you are truly opposed to spending your time trying to customise or improve moodle (I'd be interested to know why) then you should at least look to its feature list as a shopping list of the things you would like to implement. I'm sure you could add your bonus features in no time after those are done. That might seem like I'm being sarcastic, but if BECTA's list of approved VLE suppliers had all been through that exercise thoroughly I think schools would be in a better place today. You also need to understand the sad reality that people do not always buy into the "technically superior" solution even if it is readily available to them. There are a bazillion other factors involved, some of them legitimate; some of them dubious. So you could produce the greatest VLE in the world... and give it away for nothing... and bring round free hobnobs to any school that takes it on... and they still might choose the pile of poop VLE you have at your school. The most constructive suggestion I can make is: create a multiuser blogging system. Yours won't be the best in the world - accept that. There are too many to count out there already. But you can make something usable quite quickly and improve it steadily over time. There is also some scope for splitting the workload amongst your team and a reasonable possibility of your school making use of it, because it isn't critical for their day-to-day operation.

On the issue of separate subnets, I'm aware of a couple of local schools that have multiple subnets although I can't see the benefit myself. Historically I believe subnets were used to reduce the amount of broadcast traffic seen by each PC (because the subnet is effectively a boundary to broadcast traffic - a broadcast domain) and to increase security by restricting traffic flow (because your routers/layer 3 switches act as passport control between subnets). Especially with a school as small as yours the amount of broadcast traffic will typically be negligible. We have a lot more kit on a single subnet and the broadcast traffic is almost nothing. Even if we had a split site with a poxy 10mb link it wouldn't be significant. As far as increasing security - others have said it - there are plenty of tools at your disposal in a standard Windows network to restrict access to the things schools typically worry about. Any gain you might get in security could easily be turned into a loss by the increased administrative burden you are put under, meaning you have little or no time to monitor, maintain and update your security measures. Think of the numerous scenarios where staff might want to access the same resource from both networks. Think of the hassle of them having to pick the right PC to perform a particular job (in general that is what we are trying to move away from - surely it should be the person's identity that determines their access rather than their location) I have taken part in network merges at two large schools and I believe staff at both would say the merge led to a much smoother ICT experience.

Some shortlists announced recently: Blackburn with Darwen and Bolton Council (Bolton is aiming for wave 7; value c. £130m for Blackburn, £400m in total): Balfour Beatty Education (formerly Transform Schools) Balfour Beatty Construction and Balfour Kilpatrick - construction Haden Building Management - facilities management RM Education - ICT cruft BDB Learning Partnership details sketchy on this ("a Laing O'Rourke and John Laing consortium") Catalyst Education Bovis Lend Lease - construction Vita Lend Lease - facilities management Redstone - ICT with the final decision set to be made on 16th September 2009. Full timeline available at the end of this BSF PDF. (source BUILDING SCHOOLS FOR THE FUTURE: REVISED EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST AND PROCUREMENT OF THE LEP, sorry FOSSils: it's a Word doc!) Rochdale (a wave 4 authority; value c. £200m) AURA Learning Communities Sir Robert McAlpine (Construction) Robertsons FM (Facilities Management) Telindus/Core (ICT) Galliford Try/Equitix Galliford Try (Construction) Galliford Try FM (Facilities Management) RM (ICT) Inspired Spaces Carillion (Construction, FM and ICT) with support from Ramsey’s [sic ] (ICT Partner) (source: Building schools for the future shortlist announced) based on an earlier document that means the only consortium weeded out by Rochdale was: EMEYE Willmott Dixon and GB Building Solutions – Construction MITIE Group – Facilities Management Capito – ICT Capito is a real ICT Services company, not a typo for our favourite company!

Part of me wants to ask for this thread to be wikified/stickified; the other part wants these blasted badges to go away forever!

We are a large secondary and we only pay about £6k/year as a single site, although we don't have much in the way of extras which is where a lot of the expense is. LM in particular was approx £2k setup + £2k/year licensing last time we asked. The price rises in the last few years have been a tad steep, typically around 10% which is obviously way beyond inflation. Things like IEP writer and I think Profiles' comment banks are extras too so it can add up. I'm a bit baffled that a school can have enough pupils and addon modules to reach £15k though.

It does say the "remote host" so the setting probably isn't on your end. Can you send large emails between users hosted on the same server? Try one at 9MB and one at 11MB - I think the default for Exch2003 is 10MB. If you get the error with every external recipient I would guess that your LA is routing (or not) all your mail and they do in fact have a restriction in place.