dgsmith

Any update on whether we're still on track to local filtering ability in July? If so, that coupled with our fibre going live next week will certainly be cause for celebration here

Hey, I am letting off steam - it's been a very testing week! At least if I think they may do something positive (say something meaningful) it makes me feel better

I've been around long enough (here and in Lancs) to know how things work I've never known it as bad this week as it has been for us (a combination of the en-masse issues and our own local mast problems which affected us in the first half the week). I said thorough which need not be "long winded" but merely just to the point and no beating about the bush (yes, I know it's a long shot and I have only made that opinion clear on here, so likely will make no difference ). The only consolation for us is that, as far as we're still aware, our fibre install is due to be finalised and connected next week which will at least raise moral somewhat after this very trying week..

Internet is back now - just logged in to our locally hosted exchange server from home. I sincerely hope a justified and thorough explanation is in the process of being written by CLEO/WF (for the problems this week, not just today)..

Same here Simon. Internet all week here has been appauling. We haven't got our fibre yet (next week) and our internet is via a mast. That failed on Saturday so we had no internet Monday morning. Rest of the week have been county wide issues - today has been a nightmare. I can't express how utterly frustrated we are although I won't go into it too much as this topic is about the filtering and not if the internet is functional for Lancs or not! Looking forward to the ability to locally unblock websites though, however we would be much happier to just have a STABLE INTERNET CONNECTION.. EVEN FOR ONE DAY??? ONE DAY!

Faith called me up about 3 weeks ago to get our account "renewed" (we haven't used it apparantly for many years - I didn't know we had one). I just sent her an email today, 3 weeks later, to remind her that she agreed to email me contact info! I'm giving Insight a chance as I tend to hear positive comments/reviews about them here else not sure if i'd considered it (given I have enough suppliers anyway). Sorry that's a little off topic though - we renewed our SA in April for around £25.40 each (340 clients including office) having received lots of quotes - the more the better really, gives you alot of negotiation power with your preferred suppliers.

Whenever we have issues seeing machines, we tend to check that client32.exe process is running and that Client32 service is also started - for us if there is a problem with either suggests a problem with the installation and usually we reinstall the client. We are a CC4 school however we use what is essentially NSS10.5 although it means because of that I can't advise on your other issues (as our deployment isn't done via the deployment wizard). Also with regards to Ranger, I was under the impression that the tutor part of ranger was Netsupport school but rebadged (so it's never going to be a "newer" version of NSS on that basis, but likely the opposite).

Heard mostly negative things about them, however when they called a few weeks ago we decided to speak with them having fobbed them off for quite a long time. Got a quote for a classroom of PCs - whilst the price was reasonable, the components where fairly entry-level, including a basic Gigabyte motherboard (G41M-ES2L) with a Pentium Dual Core and a case which in terms of durability in a classroom is questionable. Still, it was a valid quote and one we can use during our procurement process. Wasn't too impressed with the rather high level of attempted communication shortly afterwards though - it isn't how we do business...

Really? I have disable cart check running right now on our 5550 and we can just press the "stop" button to come out of it; it may take a while to sort itself out but it goes back to the state it was before cart check was enabled. Same with our P3005n, although you don't need to go into diag mode to disable cart check for that. I suppose anything is better than faffing (no pun intended ) around with changing chips etc.

Ok well, it's perfectly possible to make setup only install specific elements of the creative suite but I am not sure if you can "chop out" the components that aren't necessary, but you can customise the install to suit. For instance, we run Design Premium CS4 and I have several "packages" for these; the main one at the top which installs the whole lot, then sub-packages which have custom command line switches to install each of the individual components, but the whole software is only in 1 place on the server, not a separate one for each part. I can't remember offhand, but I know there is a way you can load the main setup wizard where when you check/uncheck the desired components (DW, FL, PS etc) and it creates an xml file (I think) of which bits to install, and you can reference this as switches in the setup command. I can't remember the procedure off hand although it's entirely possible to do. Someone else may wish to clarify/expand upon this as it's a while since I did it and my memory is a little sketchy on the specific details! As for MSIs, well, given the whole software is made up of many MSIs I wouldn't recommend trying to repackage them or even extracting the ones you want. Personally, i'd just stick the whole lot on to a share and do what I described above, which means you can install just contribute via group policy for example using the official method Adobe support whilst leaving open the option to install the rest if you desire at a later date. Not that I am saying you can't just "cut out" the contribute part, but that I personally didn't go down that route and I didn't see anywhere which suggested this as a viable route to take!

You mention the "PC" - I guess this is a single PC? If it is, why can't you install it locally from the disk? I'd only make MSIs/packages if there are multiple (say 5 or more) workstations that need the software.

Some printers have override in them. For instance, the P3005 and 5550 both have "diagnostic" menus where you can "disable cartridge check" and therefore the printer ignores any chip based info from the cartridge and prints from it until you replace. Likewise, the 2600n series have an "override" option which is slightly different to the above but does the same thing. I'd frst check the printer menus first to see if you can force the printer to ignore chip info before spending time and mone on a new chip. Not sure about your model though i'd say look very closely as HP have a habit of hiding these menus deep so that you don't find out about them!

Interesting - did you have them both plugged in to the same switch/network before? With our's I just have both plugged in to the same switch as it wouldn't work with just 1 and I didn't want it to act as a "proxy" between the inet but rather purely as just a web filter. Maybe this is our problem too(!)

Well, you could see if you have the same problems we have with smoothwall express 3? It's basically the same as IPcop anyway which may be a good thing (just as easy to use) or bad (the problem may be there still). We use it primarily for the dansguardian although I have pondered installing a vanilla dansguardian on ubuntu with squid and seeing if it makes any difference. I know that boosman/webman here use IPcop (with advproxy/url filter) so would be interesting to hear from others who use it and whether the problems are also seen.

To my knowledge both smoothwall and IPcop use a variant of linux. I'm dissappointed you say you have seen the problem on 3 separate installs, although is that in 3 different sets of hardware or the same physical box? if the latter it could be a hardware issue like ourselves..

Very interesting you should say this. We run smoothwall express 3 (which I believe at one point was closely related to IPcop), and I find that every morning requests just don't get processed for a short while until the user refreshes their page or waits long enough to get "contact" with the server. Likewise, if it has been say 30mins since I last contacted the box then I can't connect to the web interface or ping it straight away (i'll set it on a ping -t and wait about 5-6 attempts before it starts responding). It seems very similar if not identical to the problem you're having, although as noted the actual software isn't exactly the same. I have put it down to the fact we are running it on an old desktop which, when it ran Windows XP, often also "jammed up" and did weird things. Also the fact that is was setup in a "quick and dirty" way didn't help! For us, the ping/contact issue seems unique to each client wanting contact, and one machine making that contact doesn't mean everyone else will get it then first time. Very bizarre although the fact that I plan to get entirely new hardware is the reason why I haven't looked too closely into it.

I must admit i'm not a massive fan of the new site design but overall we're quite happy with BT Business. As above, send requested items to account manager (even if the items aren't even listed on the site) and providing it isn't EOL he'll get a price over to me. We already have a customer discount setup on the site so the prices we see are already cheaper and usually our AM can get even cheaper than that. Works well that we also do quite a bit of business with Misco too, competing against prices etc. Delivery never a problem and sometimes I can haggle it for free depending upon the value/size of the order. Only issue we did have recently was that there was a massive cockup with some USB hub labelling; I ordered 2 powered USB hubs and they kept sending out 2 unpowered ones. Each time it would have cost them more to have them returned so we kept them. The third time they got it right and we got 4 free USB hubs out of it, but still we have no use for them and would have much preferred having the correct order first time! Still, other than that we're happy customers. Bear in mind that you may be able to get your AM manager to give you discounts on personal dabs.com orders too (i've stopped buying printer inks from PC world or the like now when I can effectively get it for half the price).

Looks interesting - I didn't know they were exploring this until I read here. Will be keeping my eye on how this progresses, although I don't expect they'll have a reasonable stable beta version for quite some time yet. Still, got the start somewhere!

We do really want them on the network (at least we couldn't justify not having them on). The battery life on the Celeron laptops comes in just over 3hrs, and most review sites tend to agree with this in their own tests which is more than sufficient for what we need. Had it been, say, just over an hour then obviously we wouldn't be considering this particular model. I know that the dual-cores could operate in low-power mode when not in use, but at least if there is a brief moment of intensive work needed they could perform much better than the Atoms, however we're really looking for just easy to understand reasons!

Our English department are very keen for new equipment (laptops) and their only use really is internet/word processing. The management our very keen on adopting netbooks simply due to the cheap price, however we're not convinced this is the best way forward, especially when you can get low spec dual-core laptops for not much more and also not really knowing what they will want from them in years to come. Just want opinions on the matter really and whether netbooks are suitable or not. We want to put an arguement forward why it would be better going for the usual laptop route than netbooks. We're an RM CC4 network so there will be quite a bit going on in the background, but need a bit more than that really for arguement justification. For instance, I have seen Celeron dual-core Samsung laptops with 3yrs warranty for £330 each which compares to the price of a netbook with a single core processor.

I agree - these do the job as good as normal powered splitters. We have some of these USB ones which take up less space, don't need a power socket and are very discrete.

You could probably push to around the £25.50 mark (we have 340 to renew and are looking at a cost just a tad below that). I went all out this year and asked well over 20 suppliers (quite a few of whom saw my request on the forums!)

For anyone who is interested, the script we're going to be using to turn everything upside down (doesn't seem to be quite the same as that in the first post) is: <br /> <br /> html body {<br /> -webkit-transform: rotate(180deg); <br /> -moz-transform: rotate(180deg);<br /> filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=2);<br /> }<br /> <br /> If you use CSS templates like we do, you only need the bit from body { to } and everything in between.

Same with me when I bought my new Fiesta last April. I paid for it in cash (well, part exchanged my then 3yr old Corsa) and the guy seemed rather surprised that I wasn't going to pay the remainder in finance, considering i'm only in my early 20s.

Are they really that hard to find?