K.C.Leblanc

November the 12th, high noon.

One small question. Where's the air con?

Even if something like that exists I'd imagine it would fireback all sorts of security warnings. Probably best to include instructions. Another option might be to put the whole system behind a smoothwall express and use transparent proxying.

Excellent stuff, I have to say it does look very rock and roll. How many roadies have you got booked?

3 members (Junior Technician, Deputy Network Manager and ICT Manager). About 650 students 11-16 and then about 400 in a shared sixth form (technicaly half of them are our students). About 50 classrooms throughout the school, all with smartboards. 6 ICT suites, plus music and DT ICT areas with bother have other 20 pcs each. 6th form study area with 20 PCs. Teacher laptops for most full time teachers (probably about 70 or them). Loads of servers at the moment, we're moving to virtual setup. Wireless throughout most of our buildings (mostly unmanaged at present). Probably about 40 office computers. Printers in every department office. The summertime is primarily used for big infastructure upgrades. This summer we added 2 new ESX servers and a SAN. We also vlaned our selves off from our partner school (which was project we lead), and finaly started using DHCP. Installed 20 pcs into our music department.

The whole team is full time here. I don't know how we'd manage otherwise.

WB, good luck with the coffee van.

I'd start by unscrewing the socket and seeing if there's anything connected. It does seem odd they'd install a double socket and only connect one.

Firstly make sure your switch's ip address is one in the teacher's range, not the student range. (With vlans it's very easy to cut yourself adrift. Make sure you've got a serial cable handy, just in case.) I find the web interface easiest for vLans. Access it from one of your teacher pcs. Go to configuration > VLAN Configuration. Click add a new vlan, call it students and give it the id 2 (they'll already be a default vlan with the id 1.). You should now have two vlans listed (the default will be your teacher vlan, you can use the add/remove button to rename it). Click modify on your student vlan and select all the ports with student equipment attached. Set their mode to 'untagged'. This will completly cut off the two networks from each other. It will basicaly be the same as having two separate switches.

We bought one of the first linux powered Asuses to have a look at, we've also got a current Acer Aspire One Pro (with XP pro). The Acer is much better. I'd say the biggest problems are ergonomic, which might not be an issue when it's being used by little kids. I spend several hours doing shell stuff on the Asus (I'm hopeless with Linux) and it by the end of it my eyes and hands were suffering. The Acer has a slightly better keyboard, but it's still tiny. The screen is a vast improvment, but still quite small. I think the biggest problems will come if you envisage several children working round the same netbook. They don't have much grunt but for web and office work they'll be fine. Just make sure you tell management via email that they won't be anygood for graphic/video editing (not that I'm implying school management would procure equipment and then expect it to do something they were told it wouldn't ). Bare in mind most ship with XP home, if you don't have a school's agreement you'll have to budget for an upgrade to pro.

I'd avoid the 3600 (you won't get a new one anyway). We found them utterly brilliant, and ended up with about 15 of them. Within the space of a few months a bug has krept in that causes them to just go 'offline'. Tried everything to resolve it. We've started phasing them out or using them as standalone printers. HP's line is they're host based and shouldn't be used with a print server. You should have work stations printing direct to the printer's IP. Oddly HP have moved away from host based networked colour lasers, now even the £150 jobby claims to be PCL.

Email,

Terry Pratchett might well have a couple of them http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00091/pratchett2_wright_91488s.jpg Terry Pratchett with his double-row of six computer screens

It's a matrox product so it won't be aimed at the games market. It's probably intended for the finanical sector. One graphics card should have enough grunt. At the end of the day there will always be a market for products that save you having to open the box. Even if they cost more and don't perform as well.

You have to do it using the command line. Cloning and Copying VirtualBox virtual machines Stuart’s Notes

Microsoft offer free express versions of many of there languages. Including Visual C++, C# and Basic. You could also look at Free Pascal or FreeBASIC. Another option would be to setup an apache server and let them play with PHP. EDIT: We're using Scratch, seams to be very popular. One girl used it to do her RE homework. Much to the confusion of the RE teacher. It's not an MSI, but does have a silent install. I think it only requires the files in program files, a startmenu shortcut and a registry entry to associate the file type. You could knock up an MSI in minutes using advanced installer.

I've never used 2600, but the 1022n has a bug in the web interface which causes it to only work in firefox. What happens if you pint or telnet it?

I think this calls for a Failboat http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1212/1272549006_294f713d3c.jpg

I've not used it, but I've heard good things about open DNS. Most people reacon it's best to configure your router redirect to it for DNS instead of using the ISPs DNS. You can then set an unfiltered DNS for your own PC. The only issue I can see with it is I expect you can get round it by using IPs instead of DNS names. OpenDNS > Solutions > Home Network The most powerful option would be some sort of Squid/Linux/Dans Guardian mabob. But this will need a dedicated machine and a bit of work to setup.

OEM licences are linked to the first computer they're used on and die with that computer. They are intended to be sold with computers, not on their own. I would speak to some licencing specialists like pugh. Your best option will be to get some windows 7 licenses with downgrade rights. I'm not sure you can do this with the retail version or if you have ot buy then through one of MSes licesing schemes.

It's either that, or he'd told one of his favourite Roy Chubby Brown jokes.

If you really really really want to do this one option to consider is leasing a networkable photocopier. Modern ones can be used as both network printers and scanners. I'd personaly go with the LIDE option. On the older ones I've managed to install the drivers remotley by using their silent install and PSEXEC.

Ebuyer are out of stock, here's the badger. Computer Shopper: Product Reviews: Sumvision Cyclone Micro

There's a tiny Sumvision one with an HDMI output on ebuyer for about £25. I'll see if I can find it.

Quite a few people round here have had issues with smartboards that have been resolved by adding a powered USB hub.