sahmeepee

I would go with a generic Data Protection Policy that they have to adhere to so that you're not duplicating your effort. I'm going to be doing one for our school over the next month or so (bit startled to find we didn't have one at all!), but from what I've seen there are dozens of them to plagiarise on the intarweb.

*taps foot* still waiting for this to appear in SOLUS. There's usually a message on Supportnet if it's not going to be released on time, but nothing so far today. I like to at least have it downloaded on time so that we can put it on even if the LEA plug the hoover in and cut off our internet access. Also, I noticed a fantastic bit of news on supportnet today: Basically, the PDFs are going to be accessed from a share instead of slung around your network. Surely a good move 'cos I've never met anyone non-technical who's ever RTFM for ANY software. On the downside it does get us a little further away from being able to stop mapping a drive for SIMS (S: in our case; N: in the example). IIRC it's only Nova that was holding us up on that front. Presumably they could change to a UNC path at some point or make them load out of DocStorage.

Although the Sage helpline isn't free, it is pretty good, so it's usually worth giving them a tinkle. I've had some fun and games getting Sage Payroll to do what I wanted it to in the past and they've usually got me back on track.

RMB: I agree totally with your post and couldn't have put it better. I put that argument to our head almost exactly as you did (book example included) and he gave me his support, so I'll be putting something out to staff via our IT forum and possibly the staff bulletin.

You may also be able to get a good deal through a local apple purchasing consortium. I don't have any details unfortunately, but I know there is one around here (the Northwest) because a school nearby was using them to buy a suite of Macs. Also stick something on schoolquote/myibc. It's a very easy way to get a lot of quotes in for large purchases and often turns up bargains.

You could tick the box in the offline files settings that says "encrypt offline files to secure data". Don't do it via group policy in XP though, because although the setting looks like it's worked there is a bug which means the data is actually still unencrypted on the disk.

Our BECTA-approved VLE (name withheld for obvious reasons) allows pupils to put pretty much any javascript into their eportfolio pages, which renders other security problems fairly irrelevant as any visitors to the page are vulnerable to having their session cookies stolen.

According to BECTA (who know everything, natch): (their emphasis) Becta Schools - Leadership and Management - Data protection - Information security guidance for schools They aren't 100% clear on what they mean by secure, but if you don't enforce strong passwords OR use https I think you'd have a hard time describing it as secure. That's not a criticism btw - I know our new VLE will be insecure, but I doubt there is anything we can do to change that other than lobby the provider.

It's definitely fixed as of the May re-release - we were in the same position as you where ticking the box borked other stuff. Nobody should be running that version of the May release now AFAIK - it was pretty buggy as I'm sure Phil will concede.

There's a commandline utility called lsgrab which will do it if that's what you're after. I have a batch file in my quicklaunch I can click on which will prompt me to enter a computer name and it then grabs the screenshot to a jpg and shows it me. Here's the script portion, which also needs the sleep utility from the resource kit to work properly. I've put my admin username into my shortcut to it to save some typing. @echo off REM Grab a screenshot from a remote PC REM screengrab [adminusername] [hostname] IF "%1" == "" ( SET /P varAdminUser=Enter your admin username, e.g. sahmeepee: ) ELSE ( SET varAdminUser=%1 ) IF "%2" == "" ( SET /P varHost=Enter the hostname, e.g. computer69: ) ELSE ( SET varHost=%2 ) REM make a local directory to store the images if not exist c:\screenshots\nul mkdir c:\screenshots REM if we already have an image from this PC, delete it if exist c:\screenshots\%varHost%.jpg del c:\screenshots\%varHost%.jpg REM grab the image, cd variable is current directory runas /user:canon-slade\%varAdminUser% /noprofile "\\admin-file\public\ict team\Scripts\GrabRemoteScreen\lsgrab.exe /c:%varHost% /p:c:\screenshots\" REM nasty goto loop to wait for image to be created :tryImage REM has the image been created? if exist c:\screenshots\%varHost%.jpg ( REM display the image with windows preview start rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\System32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscreen c:\screenshots\%varHost%.jpg goto exitScript ) ELSE ( REM give the command a little longer to run and try again sleep -m 250 goto tryImage ) :exitScript

We have had a teacher get in touch about video conferencing with our 3 European exchange schools this very week. ATM we are looking at using Skype rather than wait for our LA's videoconferencing vapourware to emerge. Our testing in the office and with a local school was fine, so I'm pretty happy it'll work. You're brave if you want to take on remote support though!

Depending on your MS licensing the teachers may have work-at-home rights for Office already (not for windows though afaik). Our policy on unmanaged laptops is the same as Torledo's and it would take quite an investment of time and money to change that.

I once saw a delivery from CPC which came in a large box (approx 2'x1.5'x1') full of plastic air-cushions, all to protect a ........ car sponge. Genius.

For simple one-offs like that we usually use GPinventory. It just runs a load of WMI queries against PCs in OUs you specify. Nice and quick, lightweight and can export its results.

I've bought in some Logitech "U96" mice. They're full-size, OEM, 3 button, scroll, optical, usb mice in black. The leads are long (nearly 2m) which is something we sometimes struggle with on budget mice. You can pick them up for around the £4 mark IIRC (see the link for up-to-date prices).

You would want it segregated as a minimum (so just VLAN it on your switch so it's not seeing all the other network traffic). Ideally it would have its own gbit switch, but it's probably not strictly necessary if money is tight. I'm not sure you'd want to set up QoS to bias towards it - would you really want to give some large file transfer to your SAN priority over other traffic going through the switch your servers are on? It wouldn't seem to make much sense and might give a worse experience at the user's end - I guess it depends what you're storing on the SAN though. With all that said, ours is on a dedicated gbit switch and it works nicely. As far as heavy iSCSI use hammering CPU, I ran some file copies which were running at the limit of the server's gbit NIC and the CPU wasn't more than a few percent higher. That's on a 4 year old server. I was using a standard NIC and the latest MS iSCSI initiator software. I would expect you'll be pleasantly surprised with iSCSI performance.

I agree entirely with this setup for the best quality ripping if you use it in secure mode. Modern drives should be able to rip securely at about 6X, which takes less time than fixing all the errors in a freedb tracklisting. No need for a 3rd party app to add the tags though - EAC will do that for you during ripping if you set it up. Hydrogenaudio.org has all the info you'll ever need on this topic: wiki entry for EAC and LAME config, wiki entry for EAC cdrom drive setup

Posting code is fine, but you might want to use the code tags in the post editor to keep the formatting nice. As for the idea of going off IP address, I think you might be safer trying to ping a specific IP address on your network as that's much less likely to give a false positive than going off 192.168.* which many home routers will be dishing out. Rob van der Woude's awesome site has this handy code snippet for testing if a server is pingable in a batch: A well known way to check if a server is still "on the air" is PING server | FIND "TTL=" >NUL IF ERRORLEVEL 1 ECHO Error pinging server In Windows 95/98/NT this will result in 4 tries from PING to detect the presence of server. When checking large amounts of servers, some time could be saved by a fast check, followed by a more thorough check only when the first check fails. PING server -n 1 | FIND "TTL=" >NUL IF NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO Next PING server -w 3000 | FIND "TTL=" >NUL IF ERRORLEVEL 1 ECHO Error pinging server :Next HTH!

We have Promethean although my last place has Smart. TBH it used to be that Smart had better hardware (i.e. no pen to lose) and Promethean had better software. I think that gap is narrowing now with multitouch options from Promethean and apparently improving software from Smart. I would say it doesn't matter greatly as long as you buy the same make throughout as the biggest problem is probably getting staff to get the best use out of what you buy, i.e. training. Promethean do have an online training course you can do for free, delivered via Moodle, as well as some paid-for advanced courses which might be a bit much for most staff. Their ActivStudio software really is good though and allows all sorts of clever magic since v3 came out.

Reminds me of a Toshiba laptop we had with a known fault where the BIOS bootup password set itself to a random string. Tosh were aware of the problem but it was too old to do anything about it on warranty. After much digging about I found some pinouts for a Toshiba BIOS reset tool, which is basically a parallel cable with specific pins wired together. 30 mins of arsing about later and I was in! I must admit I was very skeptical beforehand though.

We have Promethean although my last place has Smart. TBH it used to be that Smart had better hardware (i.e. no pen to lose) and Promethean had better software. I think that gap is narrowing now with multitouch options from Promethean and apparently improving software from Smart. I would say it doesn't matter greatly as long as you buy the same make throughout as the biggest problem is probably getting staff to get the best use out of what you buy, i.e. training. Promethean do have an online training course you can do for free, delivered via Moodle, as well as some paid-for advanced courses which might be a bit much for most staff. Their ActivStudio software really is good though and allows all sorts of clever magic since v3 came out.

Problem with your username maybe?

You can check that sort of thing with a dsquery: dsquery user -stalepwd 1000 -limit 0 1000 means they've not changed their password in 1000 days. 0 means that you'll get all results back instead of it truncating to the first 100. If you want meaningful names back, try: dsquery user -stalepwd 1000 -limit 0 | dsget user -samid -fn -ln (You'll need the windows adminpak installing if you haven't already got it on.) UPDATE: damnit, beaten to it!

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We use SRPs too, with the default set to deny access. We then use path rules to open up specific directories. The basic rule of thumb to apply is: if they can write to a location, it shouldn't be excluded (i.e. permitted) in your SRP. We have had to make a few small exceptions to that for problematic software (IIRC Solidworks likes to extract an executable and then run it from the user's own temp directory) We also use USBDLM.