byron67

Dear elloyd69, With the critic of your AUP I might unintentionally come across harsh but that is definitely NOT my intention. I hope this prompts a healthy conversation amongst us as I think one is needed. The AUP you have is pretty much the standard fare that most schools have and that I have written in the past myself. Of late I've begun to take issue with some of thes standard clauses put in to AUPs, for example, the "Never arrange to meet anyone via the Internet." I believe that we need to stop putting this in to our AUPs. This is an issue that falls under the umbrella of "You should cover your mouth when sneezing" but is not one that we would police with respect to the student's use of our resources. Another reason is that it is not realistic and we know it. Finally, is this what we are trying to hold the kids to? If a student does give out personal information on the Internet or does arrange to meet someone they met via the Internet and a hobby site are we going to suspend their computer use? No, we won't, so it doesn't belong in the AUP. I use the above as an example but there are other similar, standard AUP clauses, that just don't belong. The other big one is using the Internet only for research and school work. No one does this. The teachers aren't, I'm not, so it's a bit hypocritical and in the end, not a rule that we tend to enforce. We may say we have a policy about it, but I've not been at a school that really enforces it so I would argue that it should not be included in the policy. What does everyone else think? What clauses should we be really including or not including in our AUPs?

Dear Andrew, Good point. It's not explicit in our AUP that monitoring is going on and what or how this will be handled. I will amend and add wording that makes that part explicitly clear. It must be pretty handy having your own legal council. Thanks and best regards

I'm offering up for your consideration (and feedback) our AUP. We worked over pretty hard on what was a long and laborious document listing out the things that you couldn't do...pretty standard stuff. We felt that a number of the items are repetitive and so tried to take a different approach. The AUP we've got has two sides to it, the front is written in 'kid speak.' Written in terms we felt got the point across but on the student's terms. The back side is more serious, re-iterating the points made on the front, but in more cut and dried terms. Both students and parents are required to sign it. Once signed, they do not have to re-sign each year. The signed doc is kept on record in their student folder. Have a look and see if it meets your needs. I would love feed back, both good and bad on what people think about it so that we can improve it. Best regards, Sean 08_09_SIS_AUP_Final.doc

From what I'm seeing, the problems you guys are dealing with are largely user related. We've had a rash of part failures, hard drives to be exact, that has seemed higher than the norm. We're running Apple computers but the problems have been hard drives manufactured by other companies. (50% of our repairs have been these). On a pure statistics level, our over all failure rate is consistent with numbers I've found for Apple, 13% failure in 1st year with us just hitting the 13.9% mark, but we've got 2 1/2 months left to go. I'm in my 4th year now of working in a laptop school and I haven't had as many problems as I've had in the past 5 months at my new school. The question I'm concerned with is: Are the laptops I'm using robust enough to with stand daily use? Given what I'm seeing from all of your postings and my personal experience I am leaning toward is a trepidatious , "No, they are not." My school has a large pool of HP computers student regularly used before they were issued their MacBooks and we didn't have these problems. My previous experience with Dells was that we didn't have problems at this level. Thanks everyone for your input.

We've been tracking our repair logs and I thought it might be useful for us all if we had some statistics on repairs. So I'll start this off. For this year, starting in October, 2007 until now, April 8th, 2008 we've had 108 MacBooks repaired on a population of 1000 laptops. That works out to an average of 18 laptops per month, or 10.8% of our laptop population. High or low or average? How do things look in your schools?

I've run in to the exact same problem in Leopard as well, so it ultimately might not be an OS specific (10.4 vs 10.5) issue but the manner in which Mac OS X handles its wireless management. It's not a silver bullet solution, but we found the number of times we saw the problem reduced when we turned off "Remember any network this computer has joined" and we stayed away from "Automatic" in the Network locations. Note that when you create a new Location, it copies all networks listed in to your new Location and it might be necessary to remove the un-needed wireless profiles. Good luck

Do you administer Macs? Frustrated with the lack of resources you've got to work with? Hopefully this will reduce your frustration by 1. http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/ Webcam-osx is a driver for a number of webcams that run in Windows. If you have WebCameras siting around your IT office and would love to use them on your Mac, you might be able after all. This almost worked for us, but unfortunately it didn't support our webcams. Maybe it will support yours.

I just had to rebuild 6 servers and update to R2 and do other patch updates. I haven't run in to any problems on any of the servers so I think you'll be OK. That said, make sure that you know BEFORE you do this, which server is your Operational Master/Primary server and so forth in case you run in to any problems at all. I've never been clear on whether you should update the primary server in a tree first or if it even matters. And...have a good backup! If you are nervous about doing this, trying doing 1 server a day.

First and most importantly, thanks to all of you for your input so far. It really has been appreciated!!! Yeah, 6 DNS servers is overkill. The guy I replaced was also running hourly, 6 hourly and daily back ups as well...I've been trying to untangle the configuration he had set up and had every intention of reducing the number of DNSssss we had. This crash revealed that our ADserver1 was not actually the primary AD serve but was the BackupServer. And, yep, they are all in the same location. There are...wait for it...21 servers in my school. Not school district, but in my school! I gleefully shut down 3 last week and have plans to shut down 7 more over the next month or two. As for the state of the servers when we walked in Monday morning. They were all on and seemingly working. But when we went to the servers all tools listed under the Administrator Tools folder were gone. My Control Panel only had a few icons shown (no discernible pattern as to which ones were there or missing). The AD list of users was empty. Users could not logon. No IP addresses were being servered as our DHCP server was affected (it was also running DNSs). But, any server not running DNS wasn't affected which is why I was asking if it could have been something that targeted the DNS.

Thanks for your input. Maybe it's paranoia on my part, but I am worried that my network was "intruded" over the weekend. Do you know where might I look for evidence of a DOS attack? Thanks, S

Hey Community, I'm looking for input from the community if possible. My situation is: Monday morning I walk in to work to find that 6 of my Windows 2003 R2 servers have crashed. It's now Tuesday, lunch time and we've been able to recover all user accounts (~1500 of them) and shortly all of our user data will be back online. (I'm taking a lunch break now...) This is where I'm hoping someone can provide guidance, cause what I don't understand is why this happened. I've been able to identify what time it all started, but not much beyond that. The common factor is that it seemed to affect all my servers that were running DNS services. (I have a slight over kill situation in that the network I just took over had 6 DNS servers on it.) Do any of you out there have any experience with a series of servers crashing almost simultaneously? It seems to have originated with my primary Domain Controller. Is it possible that this communicated "crash" instructions to the other servers and they ran like lemmings ran off the edge of the cliff??? Given that I had to rebuild network access ASAP, I didn't get to save many logs. Does anyone have a suggestion on how I might be able to go through and identify how this happened? Thanks for your help! Sean

I'm trying to bolster an argument I'm making with my admin and am hoping that the community can either provide support and information, or give me a better direction. We're launching a laptop program but no provisions have been made for student access to software beyond MS Office. My admin is afraid to purchase site licenses allowing the students to use our software while they are a member of our community. This is what I want to do as it would allow us continuity and similarity for all of our users. How are other laptop schools handling this problem? Schools I have had this conversation with have all said that they have lic'ed software they put on the kid's computers and remove it when they leave. We've got a mixed environment of laptops and I don't want to go open source for reasons that don't fit in here.