SSFC

Hi, we are considering a new firewall, web filter and email filter and these two vendors have so far come out on top. I was hoping to get some users of these systems to give me their views on them and if anyone has experience of both let me know which one you prefer and why. At the moment I see the main differences been SonicWall can throttle bandwidth based on application e.g. video streaming while SmoothWall can only do this on individual URLs. For the email side of things the mail is scanned on the SmoothWall hardware internally while the SonicWall system send the mail to be cleaned in the cloud. Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks

We had the same issue, we ended up removing the patch on each pc. we had to: • Boot XP from CD • Press R to enter recovery console • Wait for keyboard prompt to timeout • Press 1 • Use local password • Once in enter the following to remove each patch $NTUninstallKB2393802$\spuninst BATCH spuninst.txt type exit

We are a sixth form college and have opted into a custom MIS system in conjunction with 3 other colleges. The core of the system is a SQL DB; from this we have integration with active directory, Moodle, Bromcom and ProMonitor. The system is entirely maintained and developed by the group and so far has been successful and has been a fraction of the cost of a bought in system. This however does not take into the man hours the system requires. I cannot comment on the other colleges in the group but i would say 70 to 80% of my time is taken up with this. I am an IT technician and to compensate for the increased workload we have taken on an apprentice (NVQ scheme) to deal with some of the more routine aspects of the work us IT techs do allowing me to devote the time to the MIS. It would be interesting to see if there are any other schools/colleges in a similar boat.

We have had this before so i will be keeping an eye on this thred for a definitive solution. However i do know if the time on the mac is more than 5mins out with the rest of the network login will fail. Could this have been an issue for you?

As part of the colleges marketing strategy we wanted potential new students to be able to chat to current students to ask questions etc. With the live chat option a school and college would liaise and give a time and date and the students would log on in this window and be supervised by a moderator (Plus only a small number of students would be given rights to use the chat program e.g. 6). I agree the forum option would be easier to man if both were 'live' all the time but this is not how we plan to use the facility.

The idea behind the chat facility was to arrange a time with a feeder school so a operator/s could man the online chat facility. The open web chat program we have chosen to use allows an email to be sent to a designated address if a operator is not online. Ideally we did not want a forum style approach as we did not want users to leave unmoderated messages on public display and we do not have the resources to constantly moderate the forum.

Thanks guys, we wanted something that a user could press a button and open up an instant messaging client. i've installed Open Web Messenger (Mibew Messenger) and its exactly what ive been looking for.

The powers that be have decided it would be a good idea for our website to have a live chat room so new students who will be coming to us in September can ask questions and be answered by both staff and students. I have installed a vanilla forum but management would ideally like a simple chat client that can be opened up at a certain time and used for an hour so that moderation can be done easily and students get responses immediately. (The best solution would be one of those chat clients used by companies so you can click a button and chat to a person at the other end.) Can anyone recommend a free application along these lines? As i said before ideally it would be something we could host or plug into our website rather than simply using a external one.

I would say thats a fair assesment.

We used to have one but got it took out last month. Basically it is a pc that shows video clips (automatically downloaded) to screens placed around the building. In addition to the provided content you can add your own videos and slides. There is also a schedule/timetable element so you can choose to display a particular slide and a specific time. A web interface is also included so people can update the system from there own machine We got rid of the system here as for the cost of it we could do nearly all of what it could do with a standard pc running powepoint and since it is only updated by one team member here and we didnt use the schedule feature it seemed to make sence to simply use our method.

We have decided to give each student a USB drive for next term. The drive will contain free software, college documents (Handbook etc) and allow student to save there work to it. The Head would also like them branded with the college logo if not too expensive. I would like to know what people would recommend as the cheapest place to get 2gb drives, How much it would be to brand them with the college logo and how much to have the data we want pre loaded onto them. We will be getting either 1500 or 2000 drives depending on price.

Microsoft have finally released the fix: When you try to log on to a Windows XP SP3-based computer by using a roaming profile, the roaming profile cannot load.

We have recently implemented a network access solution so that students can access the wireless network and get filtered internet access. Currently we use Inty as our filter and firewall. Before we give the students the information to access this we want to make sure they can’t use up bandwidth playing multiplayer games (e.g. call of duty) or worse use the college internet connection to download copyrighted material. Ideally we would like to block all ports except for those needed (e.g.: 80, 25, etc) Has anyone implemented a similar blocking policy? If so what ports have you white listed? P.S The way our network is set up the policy would have to be college wide it’s not possible to isolate the wireless devices and apply a different policy.

We had a similar problem here. After a lot of research we found the problem was associated with a corruption in the folder ‘C:\Windows\system32\catroot2’. Delete this folder and allow the pc to create another one on reboot. The folder cannot be deleted until you stop the process ‘cryptsvc’. This worked for us but it might not be the same for you if the pen drive is trying to do something fancy or needs a special driver etc...

Hmm, dont think my room would be big enough for a 42" screen that might be a bit of over kill! Am i right in summing this up as: There is not a massive differance between a good 32" set at the lower res to a budget 32" set with full 1080p. BUT...If you want to totaly enjoy the viewing experiance and future proof go for a good 37" with full 1080p.