secman

Does anyone know if Centra Stage is available for "testing". As I have posted, we have been able to get Team Viewer working but they have blocked the website at the top level so you can't allow it. RAv3 is still not really up to the job as parts of it just do not work and the support team seem to ignore protests. Thanks

Hi, Just to let people know that as a school that has recently swapped to LGFL2.0 we are having a few issues. The Web Filtering package is not easy to use and not even as intuative as the old NetSweeper although changes do happen instantly. RAv3 is pants! it is impossible to test from within the LGFL and the support team seem to think we all have secondary broadband connections which we can use to test remote access or the resources to spend a day at home testing the services. Despite setting everything up we still cannot FTP to our LGFL hosted website from outside the school. However we have managed to get RDP working to allow our LEA to support our SIMS system. BTW Team Viewer DOES work both in and out. You may have to have an account on the Team Viewer system but things do work OK. No-one has mentioned Centra Stage to us despite a number of sevice calls and cases being rasied on the matter of remote access. We do use our own firewall as well and have had to set up a number of NAT addresses to get things operational. Contact me if anyone needs more info.

I know this thread has been running for some while but.... 1200 Students 100+ staff Around 500 PCs and Laptops 50 IWBs and Projectors 50 Printers Drama Unit lights and sound Hall Lights, Sound and Projector/Screen Music Studio 10 Servers, Exchange e-mail, Firewall Anything AV SIMS + SLG + whatever else they can think of. We also support the Primary School, 700 Students, 40+ Staff 100 PCs + Staff Laptops 3 Servers 15 Printers 3 in the team. Hope this helps

We have been "using" the LGFL for about 6 years. The internet access is generally reliable but the portal services (the website and e-mail) are pretty poor. We have just installed an Exchange Server for staff e-mail cos the LGFL was so difficult and time consuming to use. I don't think anyone here ever used the content.

We are planning to move away from WinSuite and have a well advanced GPO based setup ready for testing. However, one of the things we will loose with Winsuite going is the ability to easily see who logged on where and when. We know that this information is looged to the security event logs on the DCs but as we have 4 DCs (W2K3 R2) we are looking for a way to consolidate the event logs instead of having to track through 4 server logs to prove that "little jonny was the idiot logged onto the PC that has had all it's keys swapped on the keyboard!!" Any ideas or software suggestions? We are not skilled with VB or programming here so something free would be best. Thanks:)

I am not yet ready for a bus pass but am getting mail from SAGA!

We've been using Papercut Quota NG for a couple of years. It works very well. The costs do only include step upgrades, but they offer special pricing to cover major version upgrades. It's still good value.

This is a simple maths trick and a clever bit of programming. The question will always produce an answer that is a multiple of 9. (9, 18, 27 etc.) Each time you go to the symbols page it changes the symbol representing the multiples of 9 and just displays that. If you do it more than once with the same number you get a different symbol because the symbol is change for the 9 times table! Sorry to spoil your fun but I like to find out how these things work.... Alan:)

I think the problem is that you have not made the USB Pen drive into a bootable device. I have created bootable USB Pen drives which can now boot all of our PCs and run GHOST ready for imaging. They also have the ability to boot to DOS with CD Support if required. You have to use a utility called "Makebootable" to set up the pen drive before loading an operating system (e.g. Win98) and the files for booting different PCs as described by other posters. There is also a utility on the HP website called "HP Drive Key Boot Utility" that does the same thing.

I have used the Sysinternals psshutdown program (free) and a series of batch files (never got around to sorting scripts) and a scheduler program. We do have a couple of machines that need to be on or staff who work late so I can't have a blanket shutdown.

We have allocated pens to departments and they then distribute them to their satff. We do have the occaisional one go missing but most replacements are down to failures or heavy-handedness.

Papercut quota NG used here. There is a free small version available as well.

Silverman, I am not using VGA over CAT 5 - I have just had long (up to 40m) VGA Cables and stereo audio cables run by our site staff. They work fine. We are fortunate to have locations to site the PCs reasonably near the screens so didn't have to resort to using the cabling system. Cheers, Alan

Chaps, We now have a fully operational Digital signage system. We use 6 Dell Optiplex 740 PCs driving 7 LG 37" LCD TVs directly (1 PC drives two screens via a VGA splitter). We use the Procyon d|sign software which allows us to have different information displayed on each screen. The admin is done from any PC with an admin program installed. We will soon have the ability to display live TV on the digital signage system in a window. ... and so far we are within budget as well!! Alan P.S. If anyone wants any more info or wants to visit us to see the system, just ask.

We have selected the Procyon System called D|Sign with basic Dell AMD PCs and 37" LCD Toshiba TVs. We will have a 7 screen system run by 6 PCs (eventually when the building work is finnished!) These will have a customised interface for the school and will also have a TV feed. Procyon have a special education discount making this professional software reasonable. Our total budget was £12,500 and we are well within that at the moment. :-) Alan

We are still looking at this and have almost decided upon a supplier - I will post the final decision soon. However one thing we have been advised by the suppliers we have been speaking to is to avoid plasma screens as these easily suffer burn-in from the usual template style of display used for Digital Signage. We have also been told to be careful of LCD TVs being used as PC monitors. Apparently some cannot really display the resolutions they quote. You really need to test the kit first if possible or ensure that the TV will display a much higher res than you need.

WWe were looking at hosting it mainly because our LEA Internet link is a bit unreliable and slow. It would not look good for the image of the school to visitors if the reception display was dropping out because of a bad internet link. It is also I beleive an ongoing subscription which our IT Manager is not a fan of. If we go for anything we will probalby look more at something like the ACTIVE Netbox (from memory) cos it can take live TV as well! Alan

Have been talking to Litscreens. They also offer an option for you to host the system. Not cheap though. You are talking in the region of £18-£20K for 5 systems inclusive of hardware, software and installation. We are still looking ....... Alan

Speak to Dell. They are really pushing into education and will probably give you a good deal. We are all Dell at both primary and comprehensive school and have found nothing to complain about. Alan

Mark, What sort of unit costs are we talking abount for PlasmaNet. It's budget time and we are looking at Digital Signage. Can you give us an idea of cost please. Thanks Alan

We are very strict. We use Winsuite to lock down the desktop and provide a menu system. We do not allow anything to be installed or run other than the software we have installed and made available via Winsuite. That applies to staff as well as pupils. (Staff are often worse than students for trying things!) You can do the same sort of lockdown without a third party control package as others have said but I would never give students local admin. I have rejected software that wouldn't work without local admins. (Multimedia Science school will work without local admins!) It's becoming a problem though as schools want to continue to use badly written software on new PCs. Can't really see it changing that much till someone gives us the cash to upgrade eveything and the curriculum reqiurements get updated. Alan

Sorry for the delay but was at another school yesterday.. We tried this and under DOS the attribute dissappeared. However, windows still reports a read only attribute for the folder. Having read the article this appears to be by design so we will have to live with it I suppose. Thanks Alan

Ben..... The Read only setting doesn't stop saving if you specifically allow a group Full Control of the folder. Geoff..... The parent folder is the root of the drive! I haven't found a setting to set those paramaters ... unless you know somewhere?') Alan

Ben..... The Read only setting doesn't stop saving if you specifically allow a group Full Control of the folder. Geoff..... The parent folder is the root of the drive! I haven't found a setting to set those paramaters ... unless you know somewhere? Alan

Chaps, This is a problem we have noticed since we installed W2K3 R2 over the summer. When you create a folder off the root of a server drive the "read only" box is checked under properties. If we remove the tick, Apply and Save, when go back into properties, the tick is back! The tick appears to be slightly greyed out but even with empty folders it cannot be removed.:? We have taken ownership of the folders as administrators and played with every combination of security settings we can think of but to no avail. This is happening on servers that have been upgraded from W2K AND those built with W2K3 R2 from scratch. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Alan