KeithFermor

He He! Yes... this has happened here as well. The cable though was hidden behind a filing cabinet and it was only because of some pretty tight documentation on switch ports vs room ports that had just been completed... that it was found. Our school is a Jarvis school and uses large numbers of EtherWan switches. No documentation, no management and no control! I spotted it by a lengthy process of switch/port elimination.

Naming PCs with sensible room/location conventions works well, I then use IPSCAN to grab a list of all PCs on sub-net to show IP/name/MAC/User. DHCP provides all my student PC IPs... and most importantly... with scopes set up correctly a ton of administration is removed. Static IPs are fine when you want to lock down, but like most things they be prone to finger trouble... it only takes a moment in a busy environment to err, and then lots of time to diagnose and track. So, its up to you to decide when the situation demands a specific solution and then how to distribute that to potentially many disparate systems!

Generally there is a simple answer: DON'T play the DVD before you display to the projector, switch the display function so that your laptop screen is off and the projector is on, ONLY THEN use the projector image and your mouse to start your DVD player! Try it... it works for me.

Juest been perusing the thread... I liked the Avrio box plate, cos it has the VGA mounted vertically. I have some well thumbed plates with horizontal mounts that alow the cable weight to eventually break the fixing. Having the locking thread at the top of the fixing gives it more durability. Hint: I have had many laptop based connections with an overlapped display (left hand edge repeats as part of out image). I have releived that by changing the output resolution from 32 bit to 24 or 16 - depending on availability from grafix card. Found that changing display frequency didn't matter a jot!

In my previous incarnation I was Technical Software Trainer. I heard differing opinions about LT. The courses were heavilly booked with large classes and students shared systems. I would sugegst that you look for courses where the student/tutor ration is about 1:10 or less. This gives the tutor a reasonable expectation that student ability is not tooo stretched, and provides good opportunities for student/class discussion of hot topics. Course accreditation is good, but not essential. Although it becomes increasingly beneficial to record any training that you undertake that progresses your skills. Go, if possible, by a 'warm reference' - both to course center and tutor.

NinjaBeaver: "Yeah, we've got three running on an old server with 2003 installed. They are the D-Link 2100+ IP Cameras." If you are monitoring students, do you require their agreement? I appreciate that monitoring corridors and school premises is performed by a security system; but, does the use of cameras in rooms for non-security staff pose an invasion of privacy issue?

Our school (as part of the Kirklees education net) has a 10Mbit broadband service connection provided by a BT LES circuit. 'Our' pipe is shared, of course, with a number of other schools. We do not receive any reports on usage or bandwidth availability, and its tricky establishing just what our daily skyline of bandwidth is. I have tried several Internet bandwidth evaluations: http://home.cfl.rr.com/eaa/Bandwidth.htm http://www.beelinebandwidthtest.com/ http://www.dslreports.com/stest?loc=1 http://toast.net/performance/ the first of these gives multiple sites from/to which tests are undertaken. Some sites offer text or image downloads, some offer bothway testing. I would be very interested to get some feedback from other educational site users (with a TOD stamp) on their received bandwidth access to/from the Internet. Ultimately, it can only really give info on the slowest link of the connection and whatever share of the bandwidth is available during or outside 'normal' school hours.

NT4 Lockdown (CLANG!) 1. Students share a mandatory profile. 2. Students have their own profiles for Netscape & Firefox based on an original with setup of favorites. 3. Windows 2K has local policy set based on image for different wkstation types. 4. Local policy deletes local cached profiles, removes name of last logon, hides ALL drives except Student home and shared area (Read only). Access to any local drives is removed - includes CD & FDD. This then forms a precurso to Windwos 200X platform and use of AD. 5. User accounts all have description with Year and Tutor Group. 6. Scripts are used to generate new users accounts and set home directory access. 7. Student home directories are stored under named Year group folders (again to facilitate move to 200X User objects in future). 8. PDC has responsibility for account authentication & validation only. 9. DHCP, WINS, SQL, Student home directories, Application programs - all exist on separate Windows 2K Servers. It just about works...

We are one of the few schools in the area to have a 10Mb BT LES10 service connection, with an internal 100Mb network. The LEA has a central Web Marshall proxy which can be individually configured (or removed) for linked schools. Many schools are to be connected through land and wireless services through the LEA provided service - but to general consternation about the ability of the LEA to satisfy all schools data needs! Its nice to have a 10Mb pipe, but sometimes I wonder if there is anything in it! Internally, we have a CAT5e network, fibre linked hubs and dang awful unmanaged EtherWAN switches (from outer mongolia possibly?) - data goes in and has been known to come out, not necessarily in 'order the right'. Must say that with the plethora of games (both DLL and web based) and the high probability that a mis-spelled search word brings up some porn pic or text, then a Walled Garden for Secondary is an appealing concept! No individual profiles for students (or staff) but I provide a mandatory profile on our (yuk!) NT4 domain network - with the vast majority of users on Windows 2K wkstations. No funds for anyfing more yet. Keith Fermor ICT Slave and minion Somewhere in hilly Yorkshire

Event log error message(s): it sounds like a timing issue, although you did say that there is only a single DC in your domain. If the clock is >5min out between DCs, then replication fails. So, I would certainly look at system time across all of your servers, as GPO activity is also time based and synchronised. Bon chance! (Or is that FAT CHANCE!)

der, dun der dun, ^ der dun der dun, V der dun der dun whooooeeeeeooooo!

Somewhere in the great ether that is everywhere, a download exists to satiate your wildest imaginings of the SIMS.net permissions matrix. It is an ever changing 4 dimensional time-slot of transitional exponential dataset - so please don't say 'I told you so!'

SIMS.net - I was so confussed with the permissions set of the SIMS modules and their weird linking to what users can actually do, that I requested a permissions matrix. I have that document, an XLS spreadsheet of about 112K. If there is some way to get this to you guys n gals... then let me know. *** Don't you just love keyboard key swap-arounds! ***

There are some really simple apps out there, and this is one I use regularly. Its 2B found at http://www.angryziber.com/ipscan (or do a qik search for Angry IP scanner). I have just the two IP subnets, and its such a basic tool to display computer names, MACs, IP, user names for active PCs. Keen scanning...

I have a growing list of work that involves video editing, inserting clips, movie conversions, audio bites, etc. Wow! Tis is an area of increasing interest and its gobling up my time... although its a great nerdish area to have some fun with! In particular, I have been hunting for some conversion package (freeware, shareware, something that works!) for Realplayer RM to MPEG1 or 2. I have downloaded over six products to try so far, without finding one that actually produces the goods. So, a general discussion area of multimedia could be a reely reely useful discussion root - any thoughts?

Hey there Geoff! You're right, if the budget hat doesn't fit, and no-one is listening, then move... But! I must admit that it hurts to leave a school where ICT is such a dirty word and where, ultimately, the students suffer. At the end of the day, I make it my prinicpal to try my darndest to improve the ICT lot of the students - and stuff Senior Management! It appears that the perception of the majority of school staff is that supporting the ICT resources (and quite often any other electrical equipment going, plus ICT furniture) is equivalent to cleaning floors - and that's not such a simple task! We are assumed to have respective fingers on ALL of the buttons ALL of the time, AND to have a deep technical knowledge of ALL software AND hardware... Phew! And then to have to beg for financial resources... Why, oh why do we do it!

As a result of my complaining to RM, they rang personally this morning and resolved my problems with SuccessMaker. So, although a brick wall existed yesterday, today the mortar exposed some humanity in their support services - which I must say I applaud on this occasion. A specimen to place with care in the rarities category...

Heh heh heh Now thats wot I call a qwik response! Tanks guys n gals(?)! RM Redundant Machines ? Randomised Marsupials ? Ritual Moonrakers ?

We have SuccessMaker installed on a low number of systems. Its very good, the kids work well with it and generally it runs clean. But, when a resourceful young student found the way into Admin and ran riot deleting all enrolled students - then the sloppy stuff hit the fan! Restore from backup seemed a good idea; but which files? Didn't want to recover the lot! Call to RM... "Sorry Sir, you no longer have a support contract. Try our knowledge Base", fair enough, support is VERY costly and when things run well... Onto KB: register and then scan the SuccessMaker support area. Hmmm, why are most of the items greyed and not available? You need to have a current support contract to view them! But, I have a licence? You are not allowed to know what the 'FAQ of SuccessMaker backups are', or 'How to uninstall SUccessMaker from a Workstation'. Why? "You must have a support contract". Surely its a basic courtesy to allow access to these Qs & As outside a contract? They are common both in & out of a support contract! I am not a happy bunny when being shoe-horned into yet another expensive contract for answering basic questions. Lots more 'Hhhmmmpppfffff'!

I have Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D (don't you just love the 'search AND destroy'!) and use HiJackThis to check for loaded registry items. Carry them all on ma faithful data stick for those times when nothing else will do... Alongside these annoying little spyware, malware droids are the delivery agents; trojan horses et al. As long as our Sophos AV is maintained and distributed frequently, with a check & delete config, then the entry points are reduced. Finally, its not just the sllooowwww down of systems thats bugging, its those little side effects that interefere with daily computer activity and are caused by (or appear to be as they disappear after cleansing) background installed spylets. The fireaxe is always on hand for those finer techy moments!