AngryITGuy

To be honest I don't think the real reason will ever be known to the public, there are still many schools in the authority that probably do not want to go down the route of a Managed Service. Giving them the real reasons for the current failure would only give those schools additional ammunition to fight the Managed Service! I could be wrong but the reason on the school website sounds like the "spin doctors" have been working on it ... let's not forget this is the LA beacon school for the BSF Solution which if I recall should have been ready and fully functioning in September.

My understanding as I am no expert when it comes to VDI and thin client stuff is that since all the servers are located in a data centre all file transfers should take place there with very little traffic being passed to the client. I've just fired up the VDI solution as I have access to it. In five or so minutes I launched Word, Excel, Google Earth (looked up school postcode) and IE (to check the news). We use NTOP to monitor network usage and the laptop I used to access to the VDI solution had received 28.9MB of data. I made sure nothing else was running in the background, is this normal to have so much data transfer via a thin client solution?

We have been led to believe that the two links will take different routes back to the data centre, and that infrastructure has been designed to ensure that there will always be a link available back to the data centre if one goes down from the school or if multiple links go down across the WAN.

IMHO fat clients for the teaching staff, if the WAN ever goes down (although we have been assured that with 2 links to the WAN this won't happen) they should in theory still be able to teach ...

An excellent question will try to ask that for you if I feel brave enough after all I will end up working for these people I don't want to rock to boat with them! I've already had my knuckles wrapped once for asking such questions. I have been given access to the test Citrix Servers and to be honest its a bit S-L-O-W but then again I don't know how many people are currently using it. The servers have plenty of curriculum software installed shame not much of it runs, I have given up trying to get anything from Adobe to play ball.

Someone from the BSF ICT team are coming the the school on Wednesday to demo this very solution to the SMT and other members of staff. Maybe I should ask what problems Durham Johnston were having ... think the question would go down well if the first question I ask is how well the solution will work!

Looks like the download link no longer works on the forum I directed to you. Information on the new version of MLSM is here and it looks like email functionality has now been included as well as the ability to check CPU and memory load.

Not sure about the email functionality think it was in the pipeline for development. It can also check what services are running on your Windows servers via a WMI check, so you should be able to monitor things like Exchange, SharePoint and Remote Desktop.

I use My Little Server Monitor (MLSM) to monitor network devices and services. Details here, think it was developed by fellow edugeek ICTNUT

Have eight stick of Hypertec 2GB PC3200 DDR2 ECC RAM up for grabs. Memory is about 12 weeks old, six of the sticks are still sealed, the other two have had the seal broken but have never been removed from packaging. Looking for £35 a stick which also includes posting costs.

You can achieve this using the psexec tool which is part of the SysInternals Suite. If you havent already got it you can download it here You need to run the following command from dos to launch a command prompt on the remote machine. psexec \\computername cmd Once done you can navigate to the USB device assuming you know the drive letter as if it was connected to the local machine.

I think for £50 it's worth a punt, I wouldn't have considered this at £149.99 The App Store is a nice touch although it does need more support, most of the apps on there are games other than Google Maps, Google Calendar and YouTube.

An O2 SIM (PAYG or Contract) to use the Calender and Messaging functions, think you also have to register online to use the functions. All other features can be used right out of the box, picked mine up yesterday I haven't hacked it yet so it's just running in it's standard configuration. It's a good piece of kit if you can look beyond the poor touchscreen and WiFi (it randomly drops the connection even though other devices have no problems. I'm sure it's full potential will be unlocked once its been hacked!

I recently got myself a HP ProBook 5310m, think it ticks all the boxes as its powerful and lightweight. Details here mines the VQ469ET version.

We tried this once and blanket reset all student passwords, think we had a different password for each year group and set it so they had to change the password at first logon. Students were informed of the passwords from their tutors as staff we emailed the details of the new passwords. The main problem with doing this was that some idiots decided to login as other students and delete the entire content of the Home Directory which meant we were then flooded with request to restore data!

No joy here either I'm afraid 'Connection Refused' error via the Durham ISP however the site does work via 3G on my iPhone!

Good point, I thought there was something I was missing.

Unless I am missing something here I am sure it would be easier to just export the list of DHCP leases from the DHCP server assuming one exists on the school network? This gives you an output containing client name, IP and MAC address. Assuming bart21 has the names of all authorised devices on the network he should be able to filter out the rogue devices.

Agreed you could lock down connectivity to the wireless network by adding the MAC address of known machines to the APs in question. If the wireless isn't managed its going to take a while to do considering you have 50 APs. An alternative solution and one we have depolyed here is to use the MacFilterCallOut DLL on your DHCP server. Its a DLL released by the Microsoft DHCP Team that will allow you to either allow or deny a specific set of MAC addresss to obtain an IP address from DHCP. Easier to manage in theory as its only implemented on one device on your network, the allow or deny list of MAC addresses is a basic text file of MAC addresses which you can create by exporting the leases from you DHCP server. Details can be found here Rather than having an allowed list you could deny the problematic Apple products on your network assuming you know the MAC addresses for them if you want to put something in place quickly on your network. Hope this helps.

That is strange! From what I can recall the application installs to %programfiles%\WallpaperToy and then dumps a shortcut to the program in Start | All Programs| Startup folder for the user that has installed it. It shouldn't have been picked up by other users unless the shortcut has actually been placed in the Startup folder for all users. Could the user have installed the application to a shared network resource where everyone has access? Its the only explanation I can think of if you have picked up the program on your workstation. You could also try running Process Monitor from Sysinternals to find where the software is running from think the exe is called WallpaperToy.exe

What browser are you using IE7, you might want to try an alternative browser to try and find out if the issue is with the IE or the OS itself.

If Vista cannot connect to http://www.microsoft.com it assumes the machine only has local network connectivity. Maybe worthwhile checking proxy settings for IE. I've just fired up a Vista machine here and even though I can surf the internet its telling me I only have local connectivity

Don't forget to include a potential payment to your insurance company for wanting to use your car for work purposes. 25p a mile seems a little low, I use mine for work too and I'm sure it's something like 45p a mile that I get as a Casual Car Allowance. You would normally expect a lower payment per mile travelled as an Essential Car user as you also get a bulk payment each month. Casual Car users get a higher payment as they don't get the bulk payment each month or atleast thats my understanding of it.

You'd have one hell of a commute to work considering the school is actually based in Redcar looks like someone on the Job Search site has made a mistake.

Are you running the script with the '-log' parameter? This will create a log file at %Windir%\temp\PpcMachine.log which enables logging of the printer connection deployment. It might help with troubleshooting the issue. We use GPO deployment for printers here too and have only ever had one issue which from research on the web was sorted by disabling the Point and Print Restrictions group policy found at User Configurations | Administrative Templates | Control Panel | Printers Hope this helps.