IT_Man_Dan

Ok, I've now got it working on Windows 7, All I did was run all updates on my Win 7 workstation, make sure sims was up to date and then when it ask for the connect ini file, I went to the location by typing in the full network path and then just double clicked on the connect.ini file and hey presto! :-)

I've just installed it on Windows 7 but I'm just trying to get it to run. I'm logged in as domain admin with local admin rights to workstation. At first it had the date error but after I reset that to defaults and tried again it ran the installation. Regarding the redirecting to the relevant drive that your sims is installed on, If you're installing via simsinst then click on settings and change the 's:\sims' to the full network address of your sims install eg '\\yourserver\simshare\sims' and that should solve your issues of not being able to point sims to your server install. After installing it I copied the upto date sims ini into the windows directory then attempted to launch sims.net, it asked where the connect.ini file was so I pointed it to I:\sims and clicked ok. then it just shows the normal desktop and nothing happens, no login screen or error message. I've tried putting in the full network path to the connect.ini file but had the same results. How frustrating. I'll have a play and keep you updated, meanwhile I might just install it in XP mode until I can get it running correctly through Windows 7. Regards Dan

Afternoon all, I'm having problems installing HESK 2.1 on my IIS 7. I've set it all up and got it to work but when you click on 'go to admin login page' I just get an HTTP 500 error! I assumed it to be permissions so set iusr to have full control of the contents of hesk21. This is winding me up big time and I'm rapidly loosing patience. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards Dan

Ok, We've opened up 1 of the laptops and there appears to be three antenna cables. 1 black, 1 white, and 1 grey. The grey one wasn't attached. Any one know what these different antennas are for? We tried unconnecting the white antenna cable and connecting the grey and it seems to be a bit more stable (at school, yet to try offsite).

Morning all, We've just bought alot of Dell Vostro 1520 laptops with Xp pro 32bit SP3 for all our staff with Intel 5100 AGN wireless cards on board. First problem I noticed was that to get wireless N to connect in school on our (Linksys WAP4400N Business series Access points) we had to turn of the wireless card and then turn it back on for it to connect correctly, failing to do so would result in it hanging on Assigning Network Address. After doing that it seems to connect no problem to the wireless N from then on. Then we took one of the laptops off site to a normal home broadband connection using a SKY Sagem F@st router wireless G (I know they're rubbish but that's all we had!). The laptop would only connect when within 2 metres max of the router. Other peripherals using G connect to the router with no problems yet we can't get this one to play ball. We've updated to the latest XP 32bit driver for the wireless card and am using windows to manage our wireless connections. As you can imagine the brown smelly stuff has hit the air conditioning and we are panicking due to the fact that staff are expecting these to be ready yesterday.... Please help. Have any of you had this issue? It seems many people on the net seem to have the same problem. Thanks in anticipation! Dan

Hi Guys, I'm currently redesigning the school website and am looking for a decent scrolling marquee / news ticker script that pulls the information out of a seperate html document. I'm wanting to use it on the main page to show current news etc from the school with links to different topics. It needs to be cross browser compatible. Any help much appreciated. Dan

Morning all, We have decided to use SIMS profiles next academic year to produce the students academic reports. I'm just about to start setting it up ready for use. Has anyone got any tips or known issues that I should know before I begin? How easy is it to use? Cheers Dan

I used to have Ergo's at the school I used to work at in Essex about 6 years ago. From what I can remember the first generation were shockingly built but I think they've improved since then. Regards Dan

Cheers TechMonkey, That fixed it, I'm allowed to have a dense day! It's Friday :-)

Mornin all, I've recently setup spiceworks on one of our servers, it really does look like a useful tool that I wish I'd discovered earlier. One question. At the moment I access spiceworks from a firefox browser on my workstation which works great, however, whenever I close the internet browser on the server that it's installed on I can't access spiceworks from anywhere even though the tray icon is still there when I check the server. Any ideas? Cheers Dan

Good morning all, Me and my colleague are very frustrated and need urgent advice. I was wondering if anyone knows what the average pay scale is for an ICT Manager and a SIMS Manager / senior technician in a school in the south east region? The reason I ask is because every other school in the region both posts seem to be on a salary scale up from us. Also is it a general thing that IT support staff only get four weeks holiday a year (which can't be taken during term time) because several people working in the same position have questioned me as to why I work the holidays and say to me that they're not expected to go in during the holidays unless there's a big project on. Please advise. Regards Dan

Good morning all, I've got a problem that is driving me nuts.... I've got an openVPN connection setup on the server using UDP 1194 for Sims learning gateway. It worked fine for about a week but now randomly drops connection every minute or so meaning SLG won't work. I've tried running the openvpn connection on my XP desktop and it runs perfectly without the connection failing. On the openvpnGUI log it comes up with the following message about timeout Wed May 13 10:04:25 2009 [server] Inactivity timeout (--ping-restart), restarting Any ideas please???

We host our own email etc and it doesn't matter. We've gone for the hosted version of SLG and as another user said it just requires a VPN link from your sims server so the proxy shouldn't matter. Regards Dan

Hi Kieran, wow you're ahead of me. I'm still getting the scripting error with employee field. Did you not get the scripting error? Regards Dan

Hi Richard, Thanks for your response. I saved the script in notepad. I've tried re saving it using different encoding but not joy :-( Regards Dan

Mornin, I've followed the following steps to enable Employee ID in ADUC. Modifying the Active Directory Users and Computers Shortcut Menu Now that we have the script created, we need a way to call it from the ADUC GUI. To do this we will need to edit the Properties of the user-Display object. The following steps will facilitate this functionality: 1. Open ADSI Edit (located in the Support Tools folder of the Windows Server 2003 CD) 2. Expand the CN=Configuration node and navigate to CN=DisplaySpecifiers, CN=409. Select the 409 node in the left hand pane. 3. In the right-hand pane, select the CN=user-Display object. Right click and select Properties. 4. Select the adminContextMenu attribute and click Edit. 5. We now need to add the value that will be used to create the additional menu item and direct it to the employeeID.vbs script. The syntax is very important. Be sure to include the comma at the beginning and after the menu name (Employee-ID). Add the following syntax to the Value to Add: line: ,&Employee-ID,\\servername\sharename\employeeID.vbs 6. Change the servername and sharename items to reflect your current environment and then click Add. 7. Click OK to accept the changes and close ADSI Edit. 8. Allow some time for replication to populate the changes throughout the directory. 9. Open ADUC and select a user. Right click on the user and notice the new menu item now available. 10. Select Employee-ID to launch the script from within the ADUC 11. From here we can either enter a new value for the employeeID attribute for the user or hit Cancel to leave the current value intact. (Note: If no value is present in the field, then the attribute value is empty for that user.) That’s it; we have extended the schema functionality to expose a hidden attribute for editing via the ADUC interface using VBScript. If the popup is not visible, be sure replication has occurred and double check that the path given in ADSI Edit is valid. This opens up almost endless possibilities for modifications without knowledge of C++ or advanced coding languages that will enhance functionality of the ADUC snap-in for your administrators. The script code: On Error Resume Next Dim objemployeeID Dim objUser Dim objTemp Set objemployeeID = Wscript.Arguments Set objUser = GetObject(objemployeeID(0)) objTemp = InputBox("Current Employee-ID: " & objUser.employeeID & VbCrLf _ & vbCRLF & "If you would like enter a new number or modify the existing number, enter the new number in the textbox below") if objTemp <> “” then objUser.Put “employeeID”,objTemp objUser.SetInfo If Err.Number = “-2147024891″ Then MsgBox “You current account does not have permission” & VbCrLf _ & “to modify the Employee ID attribute. Please” & VbCrLf _ & “log on with an account with appropriate permissions.”, 16, “Permission Denied” End If Set objUser = Nothing Set objemployeeID = Nothing Set objTemp = Nothing WScript.Quit It shows Employee Id when I right click a user but at the moment when I click it i get a scripting error message (please see attached error message image). any ideas, am I just being stupid? Cheers Dan

Good morning all, Glad I've found this thread. I wonder if you can help me with getting SIMS.net timetables into moodle. Firstly here's a brief summary of my setup. I've got moodle setup using LDAP capture to create the accounts. My AD and Sims.net are totally seperate and don't talk to each other. When we get new students' they're manually created in AD, or batch creation with a csv file. Basically I want to be able to pull student timetables across from sims but don't know the best way to go about this. If I was to follow this document integrating moodle and sims etc would it do what I want it to do? Am I right in thinking that when a student or staff was then added to sims it would create a user in AD automatically? I realise I'd have to populate the employee id field in AD with the students upn number and staff's staffcode. I'm just a bit confused. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards Dan

Ok, Update on our SLG situation. The Helpdesk got back to me yesterday and resolved the issue with my user account, I'm now setup correctly as siteadmin. The slg also seems more reliable since that change and I haven't been kicked off :-) I've now signed off the installation and have got our training booked for the beginning of next month, after that I'll give HOD's and a few parents access so that we can test and tweak it before letting all teachers and parents have access in September. Cheers Dan

Mornin All, We recently purchased a Hosted SLG and have had a few teething problems with the setup so far. Admitably the first problem which delayed us by a week was with the VPN dropping every few seconds and we found out it was caused by our ISP not configuring the Firewall correctly when being requested to do so. Other than that, a Month after install I'm only just able to login to SLG today as the installer mislaid my password and then we had to contact the helpdesk (On headed paper with SLT signature) in order to get it sorted out. Now that I can finally login the system seems to randomly not let me login and when I do get in I have only been setup as a teacher instead of site admin so I have had to contact the helpdesk again and am waiting for a call back. I was just wondering if any of you guys with hosted SLG's have had or are having similar issues? I'm beginning to regret purchasing it, I just hope that once these issues are ironed out the system is more reliable than it currently appears to be. Otherwise I won't be popular with SLT... Thanks for listening to me rant.... Grrrr!!!! Regards Dan

Good Morning Everyone, I'm in the process of installing moodle for our school and have so far managed to get it setup and authenticating users from MS AD. In AD we have users in two OU's which are called 'staff' and 'students'. I want to be able to automatically enrol users onto courses and assign roles depending on whether the user is a student or teacher. For example if little Johnny the student (student OU in AD) logs into the site it will automatically let him access courses as a student, whilst if I log in (staff OU) I'll have teacher rights to all courses. I hope this makes sense and that someone can help. cheers Dan

Don't worry, sorted it. :-)

Hi Guys, My moodle is authenticating using LDAP. For some reason it's not pulling the country data across from MS AD. I've tried setting the value to "co", "country", or "Country" but still have no joy. As the country is a required field it won't let the user do anything in moodle until that's filled in but I've also locked it so they can't manually input it. Please help! Regards Dan

Hi, I've just set up an inhouse web server to host our school website on. I was wondering what the best way of redirecting visitors to a different server would be should the internet connection drop? I either want to be able to direct users to a page on another server explainging that the site is down or have a mirror copy of the site on the other server that is used when our server's unobtainable. Would I be able to use a php script to check the status of the server and then redirect to another server if necessary? Any help would be appreciated. Regards Dan

Good Mornin, I'm building a new VLE for our school using moodle and am learning as I go. So far I've got moodle working on our web server and am successfully authenticating users using LDAP. We have an Exchange 2003 server at the school and users use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to acces their emails. I was wondering if there's a way in which I can have it so that when a user signs into moodle it provides a link so that they can check and use email within the moodle platform without having to sign into OWA seperately? This would just make it easier for the end user. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in anticipation. Regards Dan

Mornin all, I'm in the process of setting up moodle to use as our VLE. I've been searching the net to find a way to import icals into moodle, Moodle currently has the ability to export the calendar but not to import one into moodle. As we currently have our school calendar in outlook I really can't be to type all the events into moodle manually and would love to just be able to sync from Outlook to moodle. I've found one guy who's written a vb script to do it but was wondering if any of you have succeeded any other way? Any help appreciated. Cheers IT Dan