Mungo

Hi all, Don't know much at all about Viglen Classlink but we manage a Primary that is loosely federated with a High School. The High School want to 'join' the networks together. I am pretty sure they are on Classlink and we have yet to talk to anybody from the school with an in depth Windows Server background which leads me to believe that their network is highly managed. Just not by them. We are arranging a meeting with them to discuss the 'join' and although we are happy doing this with vanilla AD installs, I am second guessing that Classlink may have some inherent barriers thrown in to prevent people from bolting on a child domain, mucking around with the schema or even having Enterprise Admin rights full stop. Can anybody confirm this or share any experience in this regard. Can we even VPN to it as a separate site without getting Viglen involved Forewarned is fore-armed. Many thanks Aidan

Dont know much about CC4 GP but what caught me out badly once was a rogue install.ins that lived in a program files\internet explorer subfolder on the client PC. It used to be delivered via an adm on our original Windows Server 2000 deployment. 3 or 4 server migrations later we changed the name of the proxy server and found that Internet Explorer wouldn't let go of the old proxy name. A previous version of Internet Explorer had been setup using IEAK hence the custom install.ins. Took me a while to track that one down. It was a version of the ins that did not live anywhere else such as the SYSVOL or within the default profile yet when you deleted a users profile from the local PC, it was this .ins that was copied back, not the ones located in the SYSVOL on the server which may have been a behaviour of the IEAK customisation Find the install.ins in the above folder on local PC and edit with notepad to check what proxy setting it holds. Rename proxy server if required and save. If you delete the file it will reappear on reboot with original setting. Whilst I was getting to the end of my problem, I came across this which was very useful. http://blogs.technet.com/b/perfguru/archive/2008/04/26/how-to-troubleshoot-internet-explorer-s-maintenance-group-policy.aspx Hope this helps

Unlocking my s-foils and setting shields to full front in X-Wing vs Tie Fighter or the first time I setup miniGL for Quake and playing it 3 times in a row. Aaaaah. Haven't touched a software renderer since.

Always a sticky one. As previously stated, you are always going to have access to sensitive stuff, its the nature of the job, especially on small networks when there may only be one admin. As far as you are concerned its all just data. It should be up to staff to qualify what is sensitive and who should have access to it. For peace of mind for the school do the NDA thing but also get yourself on the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB Checked) if you havent already got one. I consider this an absolute must for handling Pupil related information of any sensitivity. It also shows that you have been open and proactive as an employee and are sensitive to the nature of confidential data. Aidan

Dos_box, you are spot on. On a similar note, here's a link to a bit of a rant i through into Becta's forums a couple of years ago. Had a bit of 'mixed' feedback about it. lol. LEA baiting is such fine sport! http://lists.becta.org.uk/pipermail/research/2003-May/000240.html

I need to adjust the tone of my thread i think. I dont have a problem with Promethean per se, it was more the fact that the visual element of teaching has lept from a two component solution (dri-wipe board + pen = 0 IT Support) straight to an equation of whiteboard + projecter + PC + amp + speakers + dvd + video + signal splitter + voting buttons + slate = chuffing nightmare from a direct support and training angle. As we all know, if teachers cant teach what they planned to teach then all toys come out of the cot and I dont blame them By complicating that side of the classroom, it means that whiteboards have now escalated in terms of service priority and it seems to me that Promethean were thinking with there pockets first and not really caring about the impact this was going to have. IT is the same all over, once they start relying on it, they cant be without it. Its up to us to manage the fallout. Rant over.

Hi Mark, The way we have got round that debarcle is the fact that we are told that for our county, 'schools are their own authority'. This has been a double edged sword in the fact that we cant 'force' them to do anything as an IT team within the council as they slip through our corporate governance. But we can advise them on an individual basis, so we setup the paper work and build the deal up but the deal is directly between the school and Dell in each case. It may be different from county to county but thats how it works for us. Its a little extra work for us on the pre-sales side but the benefits are worth it. In terms of what Dell offer, they are no better or no worse than anyone else but the lease deal did represent good value plus as a corporate we are into them in a large way so we can throw a little weight (just a little mind) behind it. I will try to dig some figures out for you but I will have to get them from a school. The education team at Dell are pretty good for an example quote also. Have fun!

We are an education team recently merged with the corporate IT support. as a county we have 14 secondarys and 84 primarys. We manage nearly all the primarys and half the secondarys in terms of day to day support and all of them in terms of infrastructure (outbound link) support. We have a number secondarys with the Technology Status (each have about a thousand kids) and their budget is £120k pa EACH purely for IT. We managed to get in early with a few of them with the idea of showing them how to spend their money wisely and that has really worked. we are getting to a stage now where the internal infrastructure (active kit) is bought & paid for with another 3 to 4 years life left and the desktops & servers are on a 3 to 4 year rolling replacement program. Next year a couple of them wont have anything to spend their money on apart from the fun bits (i.e. no bodging or propping up of network, just new toys) I really feel for Ninjabeaver knowing that is where we have come form 3 to 4 years ago and I know exactly the situation. I suspect Ninjabeaver has a much bigger budget than he realises but he will never see it. I have seen IT budget (Standard Funds Grant for instance) 'redeployed' into other areas (highly illegal but they are their own law in that respect) because the mgmt team dont realise the importance of IT or the fact that they are not running IT in a cost efficient manner. Ironically enough we now have a couple of instances that are completely the reverse, budget from other areas being redeployed to IT because they realise that IT is there to make their workload more manageable. Its our job to make sure it does. If you are able to accomplish this, you budget wont be a problem. Something that has helped us is giving kit a specific lifetime (3 to 4 years in this case depending on role) and leasing it over three years (Dell seem ok for this). That way they have a planned expenditure over three years. Every year then you get rid of a bit and take on a new bit. Its not a huge expenditure all at once but spread over a time but they need to realise that kit doesnt last forever. IMHO IT in schools is better funded than most private business but its case of:- A) Getting you hands on the money B) Making sure the money is spent as wisely as possible C) Reducing teacher workloads to guarantee continual spends in IT and most importantly....... DONT RESCUE ROPEY KIT.....if you know it on its last legs and you know what the problem is and you know you can fix it...DONT. It is seriously in your best interests to put that doggie down. It surprising where they can pull money from when they have to but if we keep propping it up and putting it back on its feet then they will never put their hands in their pockets to replace it. Firm but fair!

Sry, badly worded. We get the interaction in terms of file and print etc but ISA Server (which we have a lot of, locally at schools site and centrally) simply lets it through autonomously without recording who is actually using (username) that Mac so when we try to track down who has been looking at http://www.chubbylover.com, ISA doesnt know. We just have a time and an IP. Big hole in audit trail means I dont get to bollock anyone, which is after all, most of the fun.

I am sure you'll be fine, its all in the prep work and knowing whats on your box. And as all of us good people are non-teaching staff, we will be in over the holiday anyway!

Sorry Chris I was being flippant about the Start>Programs thing. It doesnt exist. Microsoft seem to have a 'wizard' for everything these days. Follow the link in my previous post and work through the step by step guide on the right hand side of the page. (In fact read the 'How it works' doc first as this is a good indicator of the process involved and what to expect) They are command line tools but they do work. Obviously a couple of good backups and a spare pair of pants goes without saying. We have done it a couple of times on 2k3 (even with Exchange loaded) and it does work but take no chances with it as the reason I was being flippant is that it is quite an involved process made easy by a couple of command line tools. It was impossible on Win2k with AD, you had to rebuild the box. Sorry for the mislead....

It's a doddle on 2k3 server (inbuilt, part of the furniture, Start, Programs, Admin Tools, Rename my Domain)......sods law tells me you are only asking because you are not on 2k3. If you are on 2k3 then try this as a double check http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/downloads/domainrename.mspx If you are not on 2k3 and they have no backoffice apps on them (Exchange, SQL etc) then it may be a good opportunity to blow them away and upgrade them. (Renaming 2k domains is a bit of a finger-cross and dice roll of a double six to proceed. You may have to rebuild them anyway) 2k3 server is well worth the bit of extra effort in terms of functionality and an easier life!

We had an early uptake of them and across the board we have nearly 400. We have had a nightmare with their driver (3rd party rebadge) causing bluescreens and rolling reboots with our currently deployed image. They blamed our image even when we pointed out that the only non-Microsoft certified portion of our image was their driver. They continued to say it was our problem up until they released a driver (not theirs obviously as driver authoring is beyond the skill of a simple value added box shifter)that fixed everything. We still couldnt get an apology. They insist on mounting their Sanyo projectors upside down (thus inverting the lens filter) allowing 40 kinds of crap to drop onto the lens when you clean the filter. It has been know for some Sanyo projectors to be sent off twice in one year for professional cleaning (at £200 a pop). Got Promethean and Sanyo in for a toasting and their answer was that we must be a particularly dirty County and teachers should perhaps be unmounting the projectors before cleaning them. Yeah right....you tell them! They also ask teachers to upgrade the firmware on their whiteboards in order to resolve issues. We've lost a few whiteboards this way, but that is their choice. I do go on but there is no doubt in my mind that they lend a great deal to teaching, hence necessary evil.

Just a line about the sharp increase in work our engineers have had to pick up because of the inadequacies of the above company. Also poor quality installation work, inappropriate projectors for the job etc etc. It cant just be me, has anyone else got a story?

I agree with Geoff. Its a difficult point to get across to those that be but you need to draw a line between IT infrastructure and IT consumables. Pushing the ownership of consumables back to a departmental budget instead of IT budget certainly makes people think twice about pushing 600 page pdf's through a deskjet. It is also a fairer way of doing it as some people do take the pee if they know they aren't paying for it. The other thing that really does work is spending more money on larger printers (get a decent 3 year warranty while you are at it, makes your job sooooo much easier) as you get a much better scale of economies in printing costs. As an example, we ripped over 40 deskjets out of a primary who had a consumables bill of nearly £2k per term, MADE them buy 4 large B&W and 2 Colour lasers. Their consumables bill dropped to just over £1k per annum saving nearly £7k. The printers paid for themselves in the second year. Do the business case and put it in front of them! Another thing Geoff mentioned was the quota s/ware which is a great way of taking their usage info and handing it back to their line management. It does make people uncomfortable but if your pitch is saving money then there shouldnt be much of an argument. Ninjabeaver, dont know how many boxes you have but it sounds like ur getting screwed over cos ur management aren't 'IT' facing yet. Be interested in knowing more about your setup.