indiegirl

Our Exchange 2k3 server's not playing ball... well, it hasn't since yesterday afternoon. I've made no changes, nor has the NM, but suddenly all outbound mail is sat in the queue not sending. Internal mail works fine, and we can get mail from outside-in, but not send inside to outside. The queue complains that "destination server does not exist", however we've verified with our ISP that it does and that their server's up. I'm thinking that it's to do with the connection between our mail server and the ISP's, has anyone seen this before and what else could I check?

Yesssss.... I think I might've answered my own question though - it appears to be a permissions thing on the Mailbox Rights option in Exchange. As an administrator, I have the power (that's very He-Man / She-Ra esque)... but I've since tested it with 'lesser' accounts, and they can't send on behalf of others. Phew, panic over (I had visions of bullying-by-email abound).

If - in Outlook 2003 - when writing a new message, you hit 'options' and 'from', it appears that each user has the capability to send mail pretending to be anyone else. Does anyone know of any way to lock this down - to remove the 'from' button from the options? It doesn't appear to matter whether or not you have access to that person's mailbox, you can still send mail on behalf of someone. Any ideas?

Try Schools Connect - I've used these in the past, and they removed 40odd of my 15" CRT monitors (plus a few old shells of P2s) in the summer and didn't charge me a penny. I got full certification through the post a few weeks later to confirm that they'd be recycling them, and everyone was happy. Usually you do have to pay to get stuff recycled, even these guys will charge for some things. http://www.schoolsconnect.co.uk/educationalsection.asp I think they're UK-wide, but can't confirm (nor find anything on their website).

The problem is that you can spend hundreds on anti theft devices which the little b*ggers will continually find ways around... you have my sympathies... We've just bought 'Wobbler' devices (http://www.checkpoint.uk.com) which are goiing in our machines in a vain attempt to stop things walking. If you haven't heard of them, they're ear-piercing alarms which will only activate when the machine is turned off and motion is detected... at 120db for 20mins, I don't think I'd want to carry one very far (we've tested them in the office and they make one's eardrums hurt). This is on top of our caged windows and doors in the IT Suites, and the SmokeCloak machines.. they still try and get in though...

I too had dismissed the BIOS rootkits, and am still pondering on how (if it is a rootkit kinda issue) it's on there in the first place... Norphy: of course, I did know that... I'll get VNC on there later and see if that helps (after I've attacked it with a different graphics card) I've successfully booted into Safe Mode with it, so perhaps there is something funny going on refreshrate wise... I've got a GeForce 5200 (this is off the top of my head, the machine's old!) and a LG 17"TFT...

Strange thing I found though was that I've made no changes to the machine, and was running it happily all day Sunday. Will try VGA mode, I pondered on refresh rates, but when RDC'ing onto the machine and changing the refresh rates, surely I should get an output through the monitor? I wonder if there's been a recent video driver update through M$ - although my machine isn't set to auto-update... The monitor's fine though because I've plugged it into other machines and it works suitably with the same resolution I was running on my home machine. I'm going to take a crabby old graphics card home with me tonight and try that. @Wesleyw - yes, I ran the fixmbr, which told me that I had a corrupt or unknown MBR and despite fixing it and rerunning fixmbr, it says the same thing. This one's really got me scratching my head... think I should've bought the wireless router at Christmas after all instead of using my peer-to-peer wireless...

I've put this here as it's about my own PC rather than a school's one... The Father-in-Law sent me his PC across from Bristol last weekend, complaining that it booted OK, but "the screen goes black and I don't get any icons". As I'd just moved house, I left it for a week, turned it on this weekend - all booted fine. The only thing I noticed was that running an AVG scan returned an error reading the MBR. Other than that, I cleaned it up (physically and OS-ly) and it's running fine. Last night, I booted my own PC up - it went through POST, displayed the XP (Pro!) splash screen on loading, and then when it went to load the desktop - my monitor went into standby (so that's the black screen then) and would not come out. Tried a diff monitor - the same. Managed to remote-desktop onto it from my laptop - ran an AVG scan - MBR errors. Before I go on - the FiL's computer has not been connected to my home network at any time. I haven't used any USB keys between the two. In fact, the nearest his computer has been to mine is about 1ft in the spare room! Now, is this a nasty MBR virus I'm seeing - but why the hell would it stop the desktop from displaying? I'm racking my brains over this one... The only common denominators are: Both machines have a *cough* version of XP on them (the same one) Both machines have AVG Anti Virus (or did, I've since removed it and put Avast on for now) Uncommon: My machine has an nVidia separate graphics card, the FiL's is onboard graphics. The motherboards are different manufacturers... Any ideas???

We use Exchange, but we used the M$ Office Customization setup and we store an Outlook.prf, which is copied over onto the user's machine at startup and should* match the user details when Outlook's opened. *I say should, but it throws a wobbly when we have students with the same name. Our setup needs a lot more thinking over, mind. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011402581033.aspx Possibly a tad more info here, if it's useful to you...

Thank you.. it took some finding, but that seems to do the job!

Office 2003... Is there any easy way that we can implement a change of macro security settings for the likes of Access and Excel without having to visit every machine in the school?

Nice idea, but if I panic and don't know what to do when a fileserver stops serving files... I don't think I'm really up to speed to be a NM... One day, one day...!!! (getting some M$ qualifications under my belt would be a good start, methinks)

It's an HP Proliant DL380. The NIC Agent errors came directly from the event logs... I'm not going to worry about it for the time being, no-one's reported any other errors since I rebooted it, so I'll keep my fingers crossed and look into the NIC Agent thing when the NM returns from his sick leave...

I couldn't browse the server from \\ip or \\name I hate restarting servers, but that's what I ended up doing.... and all seems fine.. I'm not being hassled any more, so that's a good thing on my part! On startup, I have had NIC Management Agent errors, the suggestion was that I should reinstall the agents. Anyone seen this before??

I think it could be - but how should I check... is it a service I should restart?

I've just had people lose connection to our Fileserver. Literally, all students lost the ability to browse My Docs (we redirect My Docs to their logon 'home' profile folder). Looking at the Fileserver, the IP connection is fine. From every machine that isn't accessing the document folders on the file server, I can ping the server itself, but as soon as I try to browse to it, it reports that it can't find it. It smacked of a TCP service stopping, but I've checked that, and all services are fine and running. Should I try restarting any? Any further suggestions before I strangle the next student to ask me when they're getting their work? Incidently NM is off sick today - always the case! TIA - muchly!

I can only echo the AV thing. We use Sophos and have excluded our mapped SIMs drive (usually S.. although we use a diff drive letter) from the scanning process for all groups in Sophos. Startup times went from 45mins to 45 seconds on our Student Services' 1ghz PIII. I've never been thanked so much in my life

I got a Logitech wireless (RF) keyboard/mouse set (LX700 - I use them at work and find them comfortable and actually not bad on battery life), and a set of 2.1 Altec Lansing speakers from my OH. Not bad really... mind you, I did buy the OH a Nano (shyed away from the video iPod for the very reason that I'd have spent Boxing day converting everything). As usual, the OH's parents bought each other techie presents, one being a wireless router - and guess who spent the 27th December evening setting it up when I should've been in the pub???? Happy New Year everyone!

Not to forget the resetting of students' passwords - at least once, if not twenty thousand times a day!!!

For those of you running SIMS.net, you should exclude your mapped SIMS "setups" folder within SAV Policies, otherwise you've got about 70mb being pulled over to be scanned by SAV... and then it runs the SIMS update check. I had users complaining that SIMS.net was taking up to 45 minutes to load (on v old machines) because of this. One exclusion and everyone's happy again.

Hmm, that must make myself and the NM here the least appreciated lot going. We have zilch. Zip, diddly squat, nada, nowt. A few 'thank you' messages in Christmas cards (yes, we have a few christmas cards each), but nothing else. Term finishes today here, we're supposed to be in Wed-Fri next week (I've booked hols)... I'm not back until the 4th Jan... bliss ;-)

No major rush, I managed to find a VB script on the web in the end (it ended up being a rush job.. as usual!) that pointed me to when a user last logged in, the machine they were on became irrelevant. Damn year 11s (supposedly on study leave) coming in and logging on as staff... and the staff member had the cheek to tell me that he must've "hacked into the system"!!! He's being hauled over the coals.. and on the last day of term, silly boy...

Wes, that'd be super - anything would do to start... cheers!

That's not a pig sty.... I feel I'm going to have to take some video of our genuine pig sty to rival yours. Windows........... you have a window............ I'm soooooooooo jealous (whilst our office is twice the length of yours (about the same width), we don't have any natural daylight at all. It's very odd) Oh, and I use VLC Media Player, which seemed to run the avi with no problems.

AD on Server 2003, I've Googled this with a few snippets of information but nothing that's come up with the full answer. Basically, I need to know when a user last logged on, and the machine name of the logon point. Is there a script or two that could do this? TIA (as usual! I seem to request a lot but contribute little... :oops: )