disco_samurai

Yup same here, I've had a ticket open since February that the engineer tried to fix and just seems to have given up on, not responding to requests for updates. Had another ticket open for 2 weeks about locking down a VPN app and when I got a response from an engineer he just emailed me a knowledge base article on 'How to Unblock a Website'... very useful. Will be looking at moving away from Smoothwall when our renewal runs out.

Thanks J, that worked perfectly (and also fixed Siri which wasn't working either). Mucho appreciated! N

Afternoon All We've just installed a new Smoothwall S8 box and after some early teething troubles we seem to be getting into a stable state. One issue I'm having though is with our Apple Cache Server that we have running on a MacMini, under our old UTM device (a Meraki MX model) we had to whitelist it to get it serving all iPads. However since the Smoothwall install even though I have added it as a filter exception and configured the firewall rules to allow it access the cache function is not working at all. Just wondered if anyone else had been able to get this up and running and can share any tips? N

We've been looking at this ourselves and it seems like a good idea, how long have STONE been installing these for Charli? We are a bit reticent to be guinea pigs Has it been installed in many schools already?

+1 recommendation from me for Foldr, its amazingly easy to setup and can cope with most of the weird and wonderful ways different apps try to save things. I can honestly say the iPad trial at my school would probably have died on its arse without Foldr, the teachers love it. Mike Turner at Minnow is a really decent guy as well, he was happy to extend my trial whilst we made a final decision on it. Neal

Hey all We are looking at getting some new Promethean boards in the coming months and a lot of the companies I deal with are telling me that both SMART and Promethean seem to have turned the corner and are now pushing the touch screens over the old school projector/whiteboard combo. I've seen a lot of the marketing bumpf for the Promethean Activboard Touch panels and I just wondered if anyone had had any personal experience with them? If so what do you think of them? For our budget range we'd probably be looking at the 65" model and I'm a bit concerned it will appear 'to small' when compared to the 78" whiteboards we've already got? The sales people are telling me that they would be fine and are HD crystal clear etc etc but then they would say that! In an idea world it would be great to see them, I wonder if any other IT Techs based round Manchester already using these boards would mind a 5 minute visit from myself to have a look? (I would bring biscuits of course!). Cheers Neal

Afternoon At our school we don't have a 'proper' intranet system so for us Spiceworks Helpdesk was a good starting point. With this in mind I changed the users homepages to be the IT Helpdesk Portal and put aload of handy links in the right hand side component section. We also update it with a daily event sheet and we stuck a telephone number list on it. I sold it to SLT with the following arguments - Lets users report small problems that they wouldn't normal bother to come track you down to fix - Gives you an idea of the workload in the IT department - Gives the users a far better idea of what the situation is with their jobs (make sure they get an email when the job is closed so that they know what was done) - No jobs are 'lost' as can happen with conversations or emails etc - If one of the techs is off on holiday or off sick everyone still has visibility to all the job requests - Its basic professionalism to my mind, takes the IT Department to the next level standards wise - Gives you some auditing capability i.e. who requested what website be allowed on the filter? Who wanted access to xyz folder? - Plus its FREE There was a bit of resistance to it at first but we kept plugging away and I had my techs consistently ask the users (in as nice a manner as possible) to use the helpdesk rather than emails etc, after a month or two its become standard working practise now. Hope that helps! Neal

Afternoon all Does anyone have a simple way of controlling which icons appear on the Taskbar on Windows 7? I know they appear in C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\ once you have set them but you can't just add these to the Default user directory to copy into new profiles. I want to replace the IE and Media Player icons with others of more use, I've found a few threads on the net like this Add Quick Launch / Desktop Icon locations to Default User profile through registry changes Which give this as the instructions reg load HKU\ntuser.dat c:\users\default\ntuser.dat reg import taskband.reg reg unload HKU\ntuser.dat rem (Microsoft Word.lnk, Mozilla Firefox.lnk) copy /y *.lnk "C:\Users\Default\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\" taskband.reg looks something like this (I shortened the 1st 2): Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_USERS\ntuser.dat\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband] "FavoritesResolve"=hex:d2,02,00,00,4c,00,00,00,01,14,02,00,00,00,00,00,c0,00,... "Favorites"=hex:00,7c,01,00,00,14,00,1f,80,c8,27,34,1f,10,5c,10,42,aa,03,2e,e4,... "FavoritesChanges"=dword:00000009 "FavoritesVersion"=dword:00000002 "FavoritesRemovedChanges"=dword:0000004b But I've not done much fiddling with the registry so I'm getting a bit lost! Any help (in slightly plainer English) would be very appreciated! Neal

I've been doing a lot of work on this at the moment, if its not working check the Error Log, if Windows isn't able to apply the Start Menu because of permissions etc it does actually flag it up in the log (as I found out about 2 days later than I needed!) Neal

Thanks for the advice! I spent the morning looking through the device expecting something complicated only to find that the project engineers had blocked all the google sites manually instead of unblocking them during the project setup as the school had requested...... Enough said! Neal

Evening All I've just moved to a school that has a new Meraki MX80 Firewall doing the web filtering. I'm not getting much help from the company who installed the solution and its causing us all sorts of issues with HTTPS connections I wonder if anyone has any experience with this device (I've used Smoothwall previously). For some sites (all of the google https services including google drive etc) it immediately returns you a page cannot be displayed error and whilst Youtube is supposed to be filtered you seem to be able to just avoid it completely by going to the https version. Before I start getting into the settings on it I'd appreciate if anyone here has any experience with this box as to what I should be looking for and what kind of things to check? Mucho thanks in advance if anyone can lend a hand, I want to spend some serious time with the Meraki setup at the moment but you can imagine just a few weeks into the job I have a tonne to do! Cheers Neal

Cheers guys,quality thinking!

Hey dudes We are just getting some iPads into our school and I have been configuring them with Apple Configurator which has gone pretty well so far. The problem I am having is that each of our iPads has to be assigned a Static IP address (for web filtering reasons) and each time I plug the iPad back in for a refresh or for a new app install the iPad switches back to DHCP and I have to manually type the static IP back in. This is rapidly become a pain in the ass, the more iPads we get in, is there a way to set Configurator to either leave the IP settings alone or to set it so that it pre-fills the static IP settings? I've looked through all the profile options and nothing jumps out! Any help would be greatly appreciated Neal

Hey mate No I gave up in the end, I tried a few workarounds like you mention but never got it working properly unfortunately!

Its weird but with this error even if you choose say a pen from the SMARTBoard sidetoolbar it still won't work when you try and use it within Powerpoint. Did some more tinkering today, completely removed Office & Smartboard software from the machine, removed all leftover files etc then reinstalled them both... it still fails to load the SmartInk Powerpoint add-in. Neal

Hey thanks for the advice I just checked one of the machines involved and it did have Flicks enabled, however disabling it didn't resolve the problem (thanks for the tip though). I've logged a support request with SMART (since their crazy telephone number for UK support doesn't seem to work in any combination I can see!) Neal

Afternoon all! I'm having a right drama with Powerpoint and the SmartInk software at the moment, wonder if anyone has experienced this? Our school has approximately 100 SMARTBoards and we run the SmartNotebook Version 11 on all of the PC's (Windows 7 32 bit) attached to them. We rollout the Smart suite of programs over the network, for the last year or more everything has worked fine with the system. However approximately 4-8 weeks ago a problem has begun occuring across the school when using the SMARTInk software with Microsoft Powerpoint (we use Office 10 here). Teachers began to report that the Smart pens were no longer working within Powerpoint instead they were defaulting to the Microsoft Ink settings (i.e. the pens wouldn't draw anything they would just move the cursor around the screen) Upon further investigation it appears the the SMARTInk add-in is not loading up correctly on Powerpoint (it still works fine on Excel and Word). When I check the add-in section of Powerpoints options it shows as inactive and despite setting it to load on startup it still will not load. One interesting thing I have noticed that upon doing a fresh install of the SMART suite of programs the very first time you load up Powerpoint and go to the add-in section for the Powerpoint Smart Ink add-in it states "Not loaded. A runtime error occurred during the loading of the COM Add-in." this only appears the very first time you load Powerpoint. I reiterate that the Smart Programs still work fine with Word and Excel it is only effecting Powerpoint and we have made no changes to our machines in the last couple of months (outside of MS Updates). I've tried all the obvious things like reinstalling both office/smart programs, I even downloaded the latest 11.3 version of the SMARTBoard apps and tried installing them... same result... everything works fine except in Powerpoint. Any ideas would be much appreciated! Neal

Just a straight copy and move will do it mate, off your C: back onto your WDS server. I'd keep a copy of your old boot.wim just incase something didn't work out right! Cheers Neal

Right cracked it! I found a Windows 2000 driver for the network card on the net, injected that into my original Boot Image via the Deployment Tools command prompt and it now connects to the WDS server fine! Thanks for all your help with this, I'm definately going to look into setting up the MDT stuff its much easier to see whats going on. Cheers chaps Neal

Hi Ben Yeah I replaced the boot image after making the changes, I took the boot image offline on the WDS Server first replaced it then brought it back online. At one point I even restarted the WDS Service just to be on the safe side that its definately using the new Boot Image. I'm having a tinker now with MDT and having injected the drivers into the Boot Image using that it seems to be working (at least its getting me to the stage where I have to choose a task). Just need to wrap my head around adding my pre existing images. The guides posted by Matt are really handy actually and its definately easier to update the boot image this way than using the command prompt. I'll let you know how I get on. Cheers Neal

Hi Matt Yup I've added the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the Driver, I've added both versions for Windows 7 / Vista / XP as well. As far as I can see theres no LAN drivers on the CD that I haven't injected now! Cheers Neal

Afternoon All We've recently purchased several PC's with the Asus M5A78L-M motherboard at our school. When I'm trying to deploy one of our Windows 7 images via our WDS server I'm getting an error message stating that I need to install a compatible Windows PE network driver (this is AFTER connecting to the WDS Server but before choosing the image). I've not had this crop up before but with this being a new model motherboard it was kind of expected (its packing a Realtek 8111E PCIe Gb LAN onboard network card). I followed the instructions which talk you through injecting a new driver into your Boot image (as below) these instructions are from sysengineers . net =============================================================================== In this example the following environment setup was used. Latest WAIK installed on a laptop. WAIK provided commandprompt ran as adminstrator was used. # first create a directory called C:\wim md C:\wim # Next grab the boot.wim from your WDS machine or the windows install CD. pushd \\wdsservername.domain.ext\REMINST\ copy \boot\x64\images\boot.wim c:\wim\ # Create a mount folder and mount the image. md c:\wim\mount imagex /mountrw c:\wim\boot.wim 2 c:\wim\mount #next plug the driver into the image using dism dism /image:C:\wim\mount /add-driver /driver:C:\dell\drivers\R280807\windows-7-x64\E1k6264.inf The driver should be installed afterwards. # Commit all changes imagex /commit c:\wim\mount # Unmount the image imagex /unmount c:\win\mount. =================================================================================== This whole process seems to work fine and I injected the Windows 7 driver off the Motherboard disk into the Boot Image without a hitch. I tried to image the PC but got the exact same error message again. I've now injected EVERY LAN driver from the Motherboard DVD into the Build Image and again I'm still getting the error that no network driver can be found. I've restarted the WDS service and tried a few other things I've found on the net (pausing the network boot for a minute or so before letting it connect to the WDS Server) but nothing seems to work. This is the first time I've had to do this so I'm not sure if I'm missing something? My boot image is increasing in size so its definately taking the drivers into it fine as far as I can see. I can't find any other drivers on the net that I can try to inject either. The boot image works fine on the older ASUS M4 variants just not these new ones. Has anyone got any ideas? Its really frustrating me and we are looking at getting more of these PC's over Halfterm/Christmas. Thanks in advance for any help! Neal

Hi All I am trying to setup a screensaver for our schools Windows 7 machines that will activate over the logon screen if not in use. I want the screensaver to be able to pull images off a network share so that we can update it with events ongoing in the school. Now I know that Windows 7's screensavers use Direct3D support which is not available pre-login so I have taken a copy of the Windows XP Slideshow 'ssmypics.scr' from a Windows XP machine and put that on the Windows 7 machine. I then configured the screensaver as per these instructions I got from insidetheregistry.com "for those of you that want to have a logon screensaver of photo's here is how to do it with Windows 7 you need the XP photo screen saver. ( you can use another one but it can't use D3D. and the settings may be in different places) to configure this screen saver you need to edit the registry. This is where windows will look for the settings in the registry for this specific screen saver HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-19\Control Panel\Screen Saver.Slideshow Note S-1-5-19 is the "Local Service" account [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-19\Control Panel\Screen Saver.Slideshow] "ImageDirectory"="C:\Path_to_Photos" Please note that this folder needs to be readable by everyone or at least the local service user. you can add more options to this screen saver. To do this log-on as a user and set the settings to the screen saver through the control panel for your ssmypics.scr screen saver and copy the registry settings in HKEY_USERS\*(YOUR USER SSID)*\Control Panel\Screen Saver.Slideshow to HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-19\Control Panel\Screen Saver.Slideshow - Local Service account To tell windows what screen saver to use during the logon screen you have to edit this key HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop" So far so good! Now when I set this up to point to a folder on the local machine this all works fine, the screensaver is displayed over the logon screen after 60 seconds. However when I change the Image Directory to point to a network share (using the UDP server name) the screen goes black and there is just a small line of text saying "There are no pictures found in \\servername\imagefolder'..... and believe me the pictures are there! Now I'm guessing its a problem with permissioning on my network share preventing the local machine account from accessing the pictures, I've given Everyone full permissions and even tried adding in the the computer account of my test machine with full permissions but so far nothing. I've seen a few other people ask questions on Experts Exchange and here on Edugeek and get as far as me (one of them had the same issue with the black screen/permissions) but they were never updated with answers. If anyone has any suggestions on how to alter the permissions to allow the required access I'd be extremelly greatful! Cheers Neal