OutLawTorn

Been playing Tabula Rasa lately... using the surname "Caedus" on the Cassiopeia server (West Coast US based). For those who don't know, its a sci-fi based mmorpg and it uses a common "surname" to link your characters (This is because you can clone youself at any time to create new characters, so if you have a level 30, but want to try a new path, you clone it and then skill up, you don't have to start from scratch )

One solution we have used is to attach an old "dead" webcam to the roof in one corner of the room... vandalism dropped rather significantly after that one We have an intranet package that can reset AD passwords, and it defaults to "MYpassword4" whenever we reset a student password. There are quite a few students now who can remember that, but can't remember what they change it to... even tho a lot just change it to MYpassword3 or MYpassword5 ... might have to consider changing the default... a variation on muppet sounds good

There is a program i use regularly called Web Album Generator. It sounds like it might do the trick http://www.ornj.net/webalbum/

My favourite is when a student comes in: Student: i *lost* my password Standard Response: Where did you see it last?

Quackers, is this you, too? http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Quizzes-and-Puzzles/Question496435.html

I generally use Tahoma, although i don't mind Calibri (default in Office 2k7). I remember being told somewhere (some aesthetics discussion in college or high school or something) that generally Serif fonts (eg Times New Roman) are meant to be better for printed text as the little serifs (the taggy bits that hang off the ends) make it easier for your eye to read from one to the next, whereas sans-serif fonts (eg Arial/Tahoma) are better for headings or on-screen text as they are much clearer.

We have a school principal who uses Outlook for email/calender. Currently he has two accounts, one is a Department of Education and Training based address which he uses for all of his email, and one is the internal exchange server which he uses for internal emails and shared calender. Using Microsoft's PSTBackup utility, we can export his PST file to the backup server on a regular basis, and the exchange server is backed up daily. However, we also want to have his calender backed up with his PST file, as further protection. While we can export his calender from his Exchange account to his existing PST file, its a manual process we or he would have to perform regularly. Does anyone know any easier way of achieving the same task? Preferably not using third party software.

A few things we usually have included in images: USB Drive Letter Manager (specifies what letters are assigned to usb drives) Media Player Classic (Similar to media player 6, plays most formats while using small memory overheads) Web Album Generator (great for staff and students to make picture albums for webpages)

The easiest option would be to run delprof. It can be run as a logoff script, or i tend to have a batch file set up that runs it remotely. Alternatively, i have the following to remove all files and folders from a directory, you might be able to modify it to suit your needs. Const LocalDocumentsFolder = "Q:\public\" set objFSO = createobject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(localdocumentsfolder) on error resume next for each fldr in objFolder.SubFolders if not isexception(fldr.name) then objFSO.DeleteFolder fldr.path, True end if next Dim fso Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") fso.DeleteFile "Q:\public\*", True

At one school i had a PC that had frozen while a student had tried to save a document to their network drive. They simply left it and walked away, yet it seemed that in the process of freezing, it managed to cause similar symptoms as a loop. Reset the PC and it was all good. It sounds like you've narrowed it down to the one switch, now you just have to see if there is any particular device or port on that switch causing the problem.

I'm still at the age where i can eat whatever and it doesn't matter... i still try to monitor what i eat, just not religiously or anything (i keep my Maccas intake down to three times a week )... Despite that, i still keep pretty active... I've refereed soccer for the past 10 years, so spend ~3-6 hours per weekend doing that (including trials, finals and champion of champions, thats from february to october)... when soccer finishes, i then referee an outdoor 6-a-side comp during summer... then all year around fit in the gym twice a week (doing a combination of cardio for fitness and weights for bodytone)... The trick is to do a variety of activity... if i've had a big weekend of soccer, i won't spend too much time at the gym on cardio, i'll focus on weights instead... but in the off-season i focus more on the cardio side of things... on top of that managing what i eat when as well... i tend to hit the carbohydrates on friday and saturday nights, but then stick to meats, fruit and vegies during the week to balance it out... (Note: i'm only 24 tho )

Don't you mean Silicon Heaven... where all the calculators go....

One thing to consider could be to use VMWare Converter to take virtual images of existing servers, and run them on VMWare Server... that way you could be experimenting with AD and so-on, however you'd have to make sure that you change domains or ip addresses or the like to not cause any collisions with the real server... you could even "argue" that by making virtual images of the servers, it allows for an emergency backup in case of hardware problems? The best bet is to make use of the downtime to push other developments... old PCs can be turned into a terminal client by installing 2x or windows 98 and replacing explorer.exe with mstsc.exe, which could mean rolling out more desktops to staff/classrooms? or make a cut-down windows xp build, that can run on older hardware to achieve the same? Perhaps investigate ways of increasing the use of data projectors, or smart boards, or better power saving methods, or increased backups.... anything that saves money is usually a good thing to look into, too... Perhaps desiging an intranet to distribute daily notices or timetables or the like? If you come up with a useful idea and write up a proposal of what and how, then perhaps you will be able to implement it as well? Especially if you can show you fit it in around your other tasks... in terms of training, there is often a lot of "free" courses that are run by various companies, from VMWare to Microsoft... it doesn't hurt to dig around and do some of them, even if they only are used as a "come to our free one, get the basics and then we'll try to sell you the really expensive course to give you a deeper knowledge of the same thing"...

we use a VB script to redirect the Desktop to another location (in this case the students h: (home) drives). This means that it forces their desktops to use their network storage space (which includes quotas). Dim ws Set ws = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") ws.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\" & "Desktop", "H:\Desktop" ws.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\" & "Desktop", "H:\Desktop" The main catch is that anything existing on the desktop will stay there, so won't appear and will need to be copied/moved or deleted.

PC System Shock 2 Syndicate

One of the schools i work at is having a lot of problems with their user drive permissions. Something/Someone has removed a lot of the permissions and we need to re-add them to what they should be. The directories are set up in the hierarchy: Students (Shared) >2007 (year of graduation) >Username The permissions we want to set are as follows: Students Directory Administrator (Full) System (Full) Staff (Read) Students (Read, This Folder Only) Yeargroup Directory Administrator (Full, Inherited) System (Full, Inherited) Staff (Read, Inherited) Year Group (Read, This Folder Only) Individual Student's Directory Administrator (Full, Inherited) System (Full, Inherited) Staff (Read, Inherited) Student (Modify, Owner) We can easily set the permissions for the student and yeargroup directories, but if we try to then reset the student directories to inherit the permissions, it will clear everything, leaving us to have to individually re-add the individual student's permissions to their own directories, and then re-make them owner. There is an existing script that uses cacls and subinacl to change the permissions, however it just comes up with "access denied" errors. The existing script is as follows: for /F %%i IN ('dir /b /ad /od') DO call :process %%i :process echo y|"C:\windows\system32\cacls" Q:\Students\EduUsers\2008\%1 /T /e /g %1:f "C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\\subinacl" /subdirectories Q:\Students\EduUsers\2008\%1 /setowner=%1 Just wanting to seek either what we need to do to get this batch file working, or another alternative that can reset the permissions for us. Cheers, Steve

We are having a similar problem at the moment, however the pcs are using a wired connection. Most of the time they load the staff user drives properly, but intermittantly it doesn't. I've gone through and all staff have access to their own directories and nothing else, so their data is secure, but as some reports software uses U:\1_reports, as this doesn't exist it causes problems. Usually if the staff member logs off and back on its fine the next time around :S I've tried the "wait for network" setting, and will have to monitor how it goes.

can you migrate the usernames and passwords accross to 2003 domain, and then just make the NT server part of the new domain (not as a DC). The older files can then be accessed, and you are still using one username?

Hopefully they did better than one other time an Englishman went up against Croatia... Graeme Poll in the world cup, Australia VS Croatia, 3 yellow cards to one player, because he wrote down that he booked the australian bloke who was at the far end of the field at the time??? then awarded a penalty and did not extend time to see it through...

The music faculty at one of the schools i work at have a large number of mp3s that they use for various things... they want to try and sort the music into more usable format (rename the files and sort into directories by artists and albums and so-on). As they sometimes use the music on mp3 players, they also want the id3 tags updated too. Does anyone have any software they would recommend that can download cddb details of the albums, update the id3 tags and allow the files to be renamed into whatever format they decide upon? it would also have to be easy to use, otherwise the job will come back on me to sort it for them

On the server we have the following hierarchy for user directories. Drive Root --Users ----Staff ------bob.brown ------sue.lee ----Students ------2002 (the year they started, and it follows the grade through) --------john.smith --------tom.smith ------2003 Staff and Students are both shared. Staff has Change permissions on the Staff share and Read permission on the Students share. Students have change permission on the Students share. We then have a general Students AD group which has read access to the Students directory (the directory only, not any subdirectories or files). There is then an AD group for each grade (eg "Students 2002") which then has read access to the appropriate year directory (similar to the students directory, they have permisison on the directory not the subdirectories and files). The students then have modify access to their own directory (modify not full, so they can't remove admin permissions from files) which is mapped (using the \\servername\students\ share) via a startup script to U: drive (the directory is named the same as their username). The permissions allow students to view the subdirectories, and narrows it down to only their own directories as it gets further on. As the drive is mapped, unless they know enough to type in the server path they only see their own files. If they do know how to use the unc paths, they are locked out of everything else.

I work for a company that gets contracted in to multiple schools. I am one of ~6-7 technicians varying between "1st" and "2nd" level roles, however the documentation at some of the schools is lacking yet others is really thorough. As each school uses an intranet system that our company has developed, part of that is an IT support section (manage job request queue, etc) that has a section for documentation. We are slowly working at developing a standard school outline, with all the basics (servers, network, ip addresses, id card printing processes, etc). Generally the same technicians are at the same schools, but we are working to a point where any one of us can walk into a school and know what is where relatively effortlessly. Its ASP based. If anyone is interested, i can send them the documentation templates that we've got so far. We're still working on it, and there are some sections that are a bit more school-specific than others but most of its pretty general.

Most of ours have moved away from linerider, and are playing Armadillo Run off USB drives or trying to run it off their user drives. Funnily enough, it never lasts on their user drives long (which sucks for them, since they have to re-do the same levels over and over again).

http://www.spiceworks.com/ Not sure how much it does to map network hardware, but it does other infrastructure....

Could you create a dns alias that points the old server name to the new server, and then phase the old one out once the new one is stable? you may have to tell the old server to not register its name in dns under the tcp/ip settings. Not sure if it would work or not, just a possible suggestion?