Sirbendy

What happens if you try to ghost or install XP? I used to get all sorts of errors with our motley Dell set. I ended up "pre sysprep" setting the image base back to "standard PC" hal (no ACPI), installing no drivers except for the standard XP ones, and using the BMSD option in sysprep..not had any issue since. That said, I'm going to ghost a GX110 in a sec, as the Library is empty and I'm itching to deploy the latest "quick 'n' tiny" build image to an old clunker to see what it does.

Mmm...2.0 tuned Perkins Prima TD..heh...good fun. Mate had an ex-plod Maestro with one of those in..excellent on the motorway, and serious fun at traffic lights..

Multi core machinery - more power for less space TFTs USB storage XP over NT4 Wifi access Remote management/VPN from home I'm duty bound to say "more female techs", as my missus was a schools tech not so long back (at 19)..she's now a well paid webdev/designer at 22, and is happy to be out of it. That said, when I worked at the council (17ish, for a few years on the mainframe and off site support), I was working with a female Analyst/Tech..1996/7ish, I'd say. Damn good she was, too.

Our NM is also our data manager..heh.

I do most of my own work on mine, and I frequent the Vx owners clubs. I enjoy engines and whatnot, and before I did computing as a job, I worked in a Mitsubishi dealership repairing anything from tractors to lancers..but that was a long time ago, and not on my CV or anything. I keep myself to myself TBH...all the staff know is I live local, I drive cheap cars, I don't drink or smoke, and I enjoy a laugh and have a distinct leaning towards hardware repair and electronics over software, and a love of experimenting with things. Danged if I know how I got my "if anyone can do it, he can" rep.. Everything seems to come to IT eventually. Same as stripping and patch wiring burned out PCBs in CD players - "ooer..wires..go to IT". Unlock a mobile? "IT". Laptop full of sunscreen? "IT will strip that down, wash the boards and rebuild it to A1 spec with no data loss, sure as anything".. The autobox tutorial was due to the fact that SAAB and VX Autoboxes don't seem to be too dissimilar, and the staff member had never owned one before, but I have.."what does the "S" button do? Or the "W"? Is "S" the snow mode?"..no, it's the "Sport" mode..which is why you had so much fun last time it snowed.. The Renault was possibly because I've owned 2, and I was chatting to the teacher about it because she's had loads of issues with it..or it may have been because it's the "all dancing" one with the computer screen and "Running Diagnostics - complete - Press Start" malarky. The Astra alternator one was almost certainly down to me owning a MK3 Astra as well.."it won't start, here are her keys - see what you can do with it". Seems i'm less an IT tech sometimes and more a general tech..heh.

I drive bangers...heh..Had 2 Maestro Autos, currently got this: http://sirbendy.jemjabella.co.uk/images/cars/astra/astraback.gif A nice, very tidy 102k Astra 1.6 Automatic. It's an ex-motability Merit spec, so electric nothing, basic of basics. Suits me! 2 week tank as well. I was considering the estate - it seems to be a common "techie" theme, but it's got plenty of hauling room anyway. The most expense I've had was a £260 head gasket change and full service after we did a landy-esqe "ford crossing" with water coming up the bonnet. The rest is just £25 tyres, and £15 services.

Our main access doors from outside are fob based..SLT have them. We mere plebs have the access codes for the Keylex code locks on the lower door. All our ICT suites have the external doors codelocked with a pushbutton system..works quite nicely, and if the kids find the code we can change it in 5 minutes now. We specified that as an integral part of building our suites (actually, we wanted electronic, but it was a tad too pricey at that point). I used to work at Shropshire Council...virtually every door was keycard locked. Ace for running back and forth loaded with paper, as the doors would open in advance. Unless your card fell off or the battery died, in which case you ended up like a garfield toy against the mainframe room door..

It's not that I mind..heh..but so far this last year I've had to do: a battery removal/recharge/alternator fix on an Astra (not mine - mines in A1 shape) 2 jump starts 1 jump start that turned into a "fight the onboard computer for the right to start the car" with a Laguna (resolved by doing the "turn off, count to 10, welly the throttle and turn key whilst threatening car with a pickaxe" routine) 1 "book my rover in for a service somewhere local" and "can you reset the service indicator" and a crash course in "managing your automatic gearbox and onboard systems" for a member of SMT Creases me up.

Oh dear, yes. The "Spare copy" thing..we get it for both XP and Office. We just hand out OpenOffice instead. As to the "immediate resource needed" bit...we get that a fair bit. We refuse to do it, unless it's urgent. "Can we have a projector, speakers, remote pointer and someone to operate it in the theatre in 10 minutes please?" "Nope." "...?" "Prior Notice."...we just stick a copy of OUR T&C in their face and say "forward planning, please." They are getting the message now. Much like the occasional "can you do "X" job please?" at 5.14.55pm, when we finish at 5.15. "Well..let me think about it.....ummmmmm...*click to 5.15*..no, come back tomorrow, we're closed. Tata!"

There's another. "if your car won't start - go to IT and request help. Technicians can fix anything FAR better than your Vauxhall/Renault/Rover dealer can, using only a paper clip, a rubber mallet and the toolkit all techs carry in their boot..that "Sevice overdue" warning is only an advisory, after all." or maybe: "If you don't understand the onboard computer displays in your SAAB 93/95, go and ask the technician to explain them. They can even explain the buttons on the gearlever. One computer is much like another."

It's not a cleaners responsibility to do that either...it's ITs responsibility, same as cleaning out the PC chassis, and wiping down screens/keyboards/mice IMO... We just do ours on a floor by floor rota, once a month. Stuff the warning messages - some of those are just hopelesly pessemistic.

I suppose that's a possibility.. P4/Sempron/Athlon single cores aren't in their first flush of youth. VMWare WS download is..what though? 80mbish? VBox is 17.5mb..size and code might play a role..

Damnation. IIRC, BT and Wifi are both on 2.4Ghz, are they not? Block one, kill both..not feasible.

"But, I can't do that..i'm a TEACHER..."..heh..you can't expect a teacher to manage a room..OMG..be fair now... I sometimes get asked to scan the CCTV for some piddling infraction like a child hiding the projector remote, or on one occasion getting a paper plane in the back of the head (and it was a bloody good shot too, we saved it for posterity)..and you see either: 1. Teachers sat at a PC doing their own thing, while the class goes to hell 2. Teachers assisting one kid, oblivious to others running/buggering about, throwing things, leaving the room etc 3. Teachers just standing around doing little or nothing to enforce law 4. Teacherless classrooms where they've nipped out(!) 5. A big post-it slapped on the camera saying "SOD OFF!" or, rarely.. 6. A well controlled lesson with good kids, as opposed to the usual candidates for the "daily happy sunshine bus for little people who lick windows". We usually change passwords to "muppet". Serves as a point. We have speculated about charging for changes though..hmm.

Heh...I have a bluetooth USB doodad in my PC, ever since a kid lobbed it through my door and said "this pendrive is S.....".. Plonker. He never wanted it back. It's funny how many kids had bluetooth phones from christmas though...they all come up. Some staff too! I'm glad BT isn't on on my IPaq...the kids were BTing dubious material (of another student, say no more but pass the the puke bucket, please) around last week...and other kids were heard to say "I never thought of taking pics of myself...oh yeah..!".. We've had incidents of it before...notably "look Sir - porn on my PSP" etc..but they now know BT is available and out of our control.. Am I correct in stating that there's no commercially sold bluetooth jammers yet..?

Heh..OK. Might be a bit long though. Our LEA (Telford and Wrekin) have always said "laptops on the network - OK. AS LONG AS they have a full "schools workstation" WinXP "build" (OS, AV and apps/settings) as any school machine would. Now, this never worked particularly well. Plug the laptops into the school network and login as your school user, and it's fine. Then it starts to synchronise your data with your user area on the server, and vice versa. Then you could take the laptop home and log in using your cached school credentials. Now, as I say - it never worked well. You could log in, but it'd slow right down...as a school machine will if you pull it's LAN cable out. It'll run, but like a 3 legged donkey. Drives missing, update servers unavailable, and so on. if you used a new feature in office, it would ask for the disk as the network wasn't there, and so on. it was a pain in the bum for YEARS. Staff would bring them back and say "hard disk full (sync folder ran to GBs)", or "too slow", or "unuseable", or "crap". So we started to install the laptops as standalone XP ones instead and told staff "DO NOT plug this into the network..transfer files on USB drive". That worked better..XP was quick, Full installs of office ran with no issue. Happy. THEN..I demo'd VMWare to the network manager who I share my office with. I was tinkering, and a few months before, TAW had decided in our case to relax the "one LEA workstation build for all machines, issued by TAW" regulation. Normally, their "build guy" makes one sysprepped XP image with schools software etc on, and schools get issued with it. One image, across thousands of random desktops and laptops, full of primary school and secondary software. Not ideal, and it hit a 6gb ghost file size before I said "enough" and aquired a copy of Ghost explorer to reverse engineer the image. I did all my testing and experimenting under VMWare Workstation, and NM saw that. Incidentally, I've got my latest image fully finished at 1.8gb, and speed/stability wise it knocks the LEA build into a cocked hat. So, he asked me "Can you actually USE that VMWare machine as a "real" network machine that anyone could use..? Will it work on the domain?" etc.. I demonstated that it'd work perfectly, and was virtually indestinguishable to a "real" machine from a users viewpoint. We then decided next time a staff laptop came in, we'd install VMWare Player on it, and give them a copy of this virtual workstation, to see if we could combine the "real" PCs speed and flexibility of being standalone XP, with a virtual PC that could log on in the building and access all the resources etc, as a "normal" schools machine would. The best of both worlds, with the inconvenience of neither. We trialled it with a deputy head, on her dual core HP laptop. It worked perfectly - she could use it standalone at home, and once in school, all she had to do was start up the VM. We've since rolled it out to the head and other deputies, and to any other teacher that requests it. Some teachers have older single core laptops that baulk at VMWare speedwise..our LEA issued Ergo Ensis laptops are unuseable with it - for those, I keep a mirror copy in Virtualbox format and give them Virtualbox. Setting up folders shared between the physical host machine and the VM means staff can drag data back and forth between both easily - they like that. We've since shown this to the LEA/TAW team, and they've OK'd it..in fact, they're starting to use it as well.. It's better for us, and better for them from a security and remote support viewpoint, as all our VMs are remotely controllable as a "normal" PC would be. As an extension to this, we have a Poweredge server that runs Server 2003/VMware, and hosts 4 virtual "netsupport" room control machines for teachers to use for password changing to control their rooms application and internet use via RAdmin, as well as hosting 3 "Remote access" Vms for people like the head and accounts manager to VPN into from home and work on with full access to our system without any extra bulk on their machines, and a Server 2003 VM that runs our french testing software. All 8 systems on there run 24/7. It's eased our workload by giving staff access to print controls, password changes, student areas and Netsupport without us having to promote them to admin levels (don't give the monkeys the keys to the plantation), allowing us more time to concentrate on the "root" of the network and management. It's made our SMT and teachers happy because they can work at home as well as they can in the building without issue, it's saved us expenditure on some base unit's we'd otherwise have had to order, and the energy costs of that. We've agreed to look into buying another Poweredge as well for more VM testing..we want to look at Server08, and I'm sure we can find LOTS of other things to use it for..heh. VM work is just so nice though...if it goes wrong, just delete the VM and restore the backup copy..no reinstalling, no anything. We hope that in the new building, we get the chance to virtualise most (if not all) of our servers..cost wise and maintenance wise, it seems to be a good solution.

Yep..we both got that in here..we tell them to e-mail us problems so we can get them at home, and then VPN in and RAdmin to our machines/print servers and try to sort it via mail. You can do without coming back to that.. "The english printer won't print..".. Can we ping the Jetdirect? No. Why? Bloody english hippies have unplugged it so they could have the radio on..gah..

I have real-world experience of it absolutely flying on single core/older rigs whilst in heavy use for "normal" admin tasks, where VMWare server/player/workstation made it drag like a seals behind, yes.. In the dual core world, there's less in it. However, I run a "non-domain" single core sempron 3000 as a daily hack, with 1gb RAM. Frequently have 10-12 apps/windows running, plus that if I'm doing a build image or testing something/changing passwords that needs a domain. VMWare really drags the machine down. Same happened on my old single core home rigs, and my partners laptop. Startup/shutdown times also suffered badly. All XP as host OS. VBox still has a hit, but usually only if I'm thrashing the nuts off it with a sysprep followed by a ghost or similar..the "bare metal" host is still useable though. In "Normal" usage, VBox seems to have no noticeable impact on the machine and will happily sit minimised on my taskbar. I have a virtual Domain Admin box running in VBox sat on our P4/3000/512mb CCTV-intranet server...it's a match in speed for our VMWare Server hosted VMs on the Xeon in the back office. Doesn't hurt the CCTV app or apache either..VMware used to lag something awful on it. CPU now sits about 70-85% usage, which is OK, with a memory usage of 675mb. I now do all our builds in VBox. If I went multi-core, I'd reconsider VMware maybe..but since it does the same job and is fairly tiny, Vbox wins for now. We also hand it to staff with "older generation" laptops, who want the "standalone but with workstation" capability. It's SUCH a nice way of doing it..no more "domain and non domain logins", no more synchronising, no more slowdowns "off network" for the host machinery..just plug in, fire up the VM with shared folders, and off they go in the building. On my new home Athlon X2, it's flawless even with games/Photoshop CS3 running on the host. I have a virtual Ubuntu, virtual Server03R2 and Virtual domain/VPN workstation on that.

If you want a lighter virtualiser that VMWare, try the freeware VirtualBox.. I run my VMs in that..it's less demanding than VMWare.

I can relate to all of those.. Our password changes are usually: "Surname?" "Louise.." "NO. SURname?" "Louise Smith.." "NO. NO. NO. Your SURname is your LAST name. If I say SURname, you answer SMITH..OK?" Yes, I'm THAT pedantic with them. Also..hmm... "Why is user X not in the system?" - usually down to us not being informed of their employment. "Bloxx is broken."..no, NSS is broken..Bloxx is fine. Or the site doesn't exist. "My SMARTBoard is broken" - 90% projector turned off, 10% board unplugged. My favourite? "We REALLY could do with some of these..." - Head of IT, duly ignored and ridiculed.

Apologies if this is in the wrong bit...not sure where I could put it really.. What do people on here tend to do with old expired toner carts? We only seem to be able to find companies that will take the OEM ones...we use compatibles and remanufactured ones, figuring it's good for whatnot. However, when it comes to end of life..we're a bit stuck short of lobbing them in the bin..which seems incredibly wasteful..

I assume the boxes are vented.. It apparently works well at Walsall/Sandwell/TTS.and we'll be done on the same lines.

I've just bought an Ipaq 514 Voice messenger...not too bad at all. Wifi mail and VoIP in the building, and wifi home mail/net at home, as well as camera and standard mobile functions.

From what I understand, when our new Academy building goes up all machinery will be boxed in, student proof. Bring that on. We're missing Dell badges, and some Optiplex fascia panels..Dell won't supply spares.

We use a little thermal tape labeller. Also use it to label up network points, cabs and cabling. Useful kit. The kids do peel them sometimes though..the little gits peeled the Dell asset tags off a few and swapped them around last term..played hell with the audit until I realised. Then we have room plans for all ICT suites in our office for support purposes.