Jamman960

I would add it as a normal machine(domain member) and install iis, you won't need to change any settings on the other server at all although you could add custom DNS entrys so that you can access it via different names i.e the server could be called "server2" but with a DNS alias it could appear as intranet.domain.whatever.

We rolled it out a while ago, I setup the screensaver to activate after 30mins of inactivity and require a password to unlock. I've since had to ditch that idea because some members of staff are too lazy to log themselves off in the staffroom - in the end every pc in there was locked more often than not. Its not so much of an issue for us here as the pupils aren't old enough to mess around with it although it does make me cringe when I visit rooms at lunch and find the pc's logged on with sims loaded up and the projector being left on... bloody teachers

Within the ghost console program you should have a mini event log for each PC/task, that may give a reason. If you can't press the send button ghostcast probably has one of the auto start options set - press the More >> button to view these if they are hidden - it may be that its waiting for a set time before starting. If there are no auto start conditions or they have all been met then it could well be an incompatible driver causing the machines to fail. as above get hold of the latest version of the driver you need, some manufacturers drivers are a real PITA - especially Broadcom/occasionally Intel(mainly because intel use the e100b/e1000b driver for all of their modern cards, I've often found that older versions of the driver don't work with their latest nics) James

According to the roadmap System Manager 7 is due out in March 2009

Within system manager if you go to Focus > Groups and double click the required group it'll display the members of the groups. The System manager manual may also be worth a look (simsmanW.pdf in the sims directory)

Whats inside the files and how big are they? oh and do you have any software that uses .fsm files?

The event logs should give clues as to whats going on, also check for out of place processes within taskman or possibly even use process explorer from sysinternals to take a look. You can export the logs, within even viewer select the log then right click and select save log file as.

If the bulb goes while its in the projector it can cause damage, the image will deteriorate once the bulb is on its last legs.

excellent! sorry didnt realise those packages could do that. James

I was thinking how handy it'd be if users could be forced to use mono printers for mono prints and colour printers for colour prints - I've often found that teachers and students will choose to print to the shiny new colour printer in the corner rather than printing to the mono next to it. At the moment our mono laser in the staffroom just isnt being used at all, I've never had to replace the toner since installing a colour laser last november yet I've replaced the more expenisve black toner in the colour laser around 3 or 4 times now and have only gone through 2 sets of colours. I'm not sure how feasible this is but thought i'd put the idea out there

We've got one that we plan to get rid of asap - probably next summer now once our new budget comes round again

By office pc I presume you mean that its being used by a receptionist etc as well as being the sims server? It might be worth cleaning the pc up and sticking it in a dark corner to run the sims database and documents server's on its own, unless you plan to roll out class registration via sims etc you really won't need much resource wise when theres only 2 users connecting to it. If you can afford to I'd go for the above, it'd be able to cope if you were to roll out class registration via sims.

I'm glad its going well for you, I'm in a similar position with Fee's Billing/Earnie - so far Earnie has worked perfectly but Fee's Billing is a royal PITA, we've ended up having someone from sims in each time on 1k per day doing the fee's for us. This is mainly down to a lack of knowledge on our Accounts Managers part but Fee's Billing itself has also caused some headaches. I hope you can keep the staff positive, our admin staff do nothing but complain about it unfourtunatly.

Thanks guys, I'll look into using moodle assignments. We're an independant Prep school so the LGFL's offering won't apply to us unfourtunatly. I think I'll give moodle/sharepoint a go for now

We're a promethean only school(decision made before I joined), we've been fairly lucky. I've only encountered 2 problems so far - one of our boards kept blowing psu's due to a faulty controller board and one of our newly installed +2's has a faulty vga switcher. I'm not sure how but none of our teachers have managed to lose a pen although I have taken all of the spares away this summer(1 per board) Software wise I've never really had any problems, they just work We currently have 21 boards accross 2 sites.

We're looking into various different VLE's and I plan to have a play around with Moodle at some point, one thing my line manager would like to be able to do is to post computerised copies of each letter we send home on to our website/VLE and to allow parents to reply online, do any of the current VLE's offer this functionality out of the box?

I encountered a similar problem when using a script to setup the user folders, it setup everything including the drive letter but the drive either didn't map or got mapped to the root of the share(everything looked fine within the AD). I re-applied the same home locations using ADModify and they all started working again.

one thing that almost caused us a problem was having the new pupils joining the school before the first day of the academic year, they'd basically join the school one day as one year then automatically get promoted to the year above on the first day of the academic year :/

I'm fully aware of this, I only mentioned it because the latest "virus" I've dealt with was an Autoit script that wasnt picked up by the AV software that was installed.

MSConfig/HiJackthis should help if its a virus/autoit script causing the problem, also look out for duplicate processes running in taskmanager, a friends laptop had a virus that was basically an autoit script setup to capture key strokes - it was renamed svchost.exe so blended in with all the other processes except it was running as the user rather than system/network service. have you tried renaming explorer.exe and setting the renamed exe as the default shell?

I used to have: 1x 24 port cisco switch(cant remember the model#) 1x Cisco 2600 series router 1 PC running as a 2k3 server with DC, another running smoothwall, and another running linux. I also had a pc setup with 2003 server and MSSQL along with all the progs needed to run a ragnarok online server for me and a few mates in america - that poor thing was a p3 933 with 1gb of ram, it took 1 hour to get everything stable enough to use lol and the fans were constantly going at full speed. I have no idea how I used to sleep with all that going on Then I moved in with my girlfriend(now wife) - not a chance of taking all this stuff with me I managed to take 1 workstation and 1 laptop with me, the rest is still at my parents

The ones we have were installed last summer and have always been bad :/

Have any of you got Epson EMP54's? we have a few and they're awful. you can't read text on the board while writing, you have to step back a few feet. once your at the back of a room its unreadable again they're all the same so I guess its just the way they are. Other than that the only projector we've had problems with is an Infocus which happens to be in our hall - red comes out black, green is yellow. Blue is blue though.. changing the bulb hasnt helped. The latest projectors we've had installed are Sony EX4's, they're briilliant

I usually do the sims upgrades on the first day of any holiday and generally stay 1 update behind... we hadn't any problems until I had to do one last monday(last week of term) ready for a visit from capita on thursday... we ended up unable to run/design reports until capita sorted out a patch for us yesterday morning :/ talk about worst possible timing.

You don't need to get people out of sims for a backup via system manager, its probably best to pick a quiet time to perform the backup though.