Stuart_C

That's the one but it assumes that your teachers are capable of giving you correct information

Sorry you mis-understand. I know how to restict their login hours. What I would like to do is restict and account to only be active for 20 hours of usage.

Not quite sure what forum to post this on as it's a little bit servery but I thought I'd tried here... Does anyone know of a way, either through Win2K3 or third party app to restict accounts for a certain amount of time. then lock them out. For example, there are a couple of examination that we have to do that give the pupils a certain amount of time to complete the examination. This is done in lesson time and the teacher has to keep records of who has been there, how long they have worked etc etc. When the year is split into two classes and occasionally pupils will miss lessons or there are technical problems its a bit of a nightmare. What I want it to be able to create dummy account for the students to do their exam in, that account can only be accessed for 20 hours (for example) and after that it locks them out. Any ideas?

I use McAfees Virus Scan with EPO server. Set up some userdefined rules and not only does it stop them it also handilly logs everything to a central location so I can see who has been trying to do things.

We have 6 servers, 20+ Switches, 70 Printers, 270ish computers, 20ish IWB's and until revenly just me! Now there are 1.5 of us! Still it's slightly better. Actually one of the biggest problem is the amount of time spent on problems that could easilly be solved if the person in question used the help!

"Any other recomendations" he said dragging the conversation back on topic..

Right here's the story Were and independent school and need to improve out internet speed as our current ADSL Max line isnt really cutting it. The bad news is that most leased lines are out of our price range. ADSL2+ is floating around some suppliers but not all yet so I'm wondering if anyone had any advice on what we could do. Also any recomended ISP's or any to avoid!

You can do this as I have done so. You do need Off2K7 though!

OK. I am currently using Google sketchup to produce a classroom plan of our main building which is all nice and finished but I am haivng a little colouring in problem. (And I hope this is going to make sense) I've got the building plan at a slight angle on screen so it looks more visually appealing and colour coded the department. When I produce the key, a seperate drawing, I've drawn a square and coloured it in for each department. The key however is a top down drawing and the colours are slightly differnet to the building plan. When I view the building plan top down the colours change slightly. I'm guessing that there is some kind of lighting effect going on and sketchup changes the colour of things as you rotate the model. Is there a way to turn this off? I want an object to be the colour I pick and not change slightly depending on which angle I view it from. I can't seem to find a way to do it and it's causing me a problem. Help.

Well I got the March release on and it all looks shiney. Won't know for sure until a couple of week when the teachers return and it starts getting hammered. Only took 5 minutes for someone to complain about the absence of the shortcuts to the aplications (nova etc) and how could they run them. Totaly failed to read the e-mail I had already sent detailing that they had gone, and where they had gone and how to setup new shortcuts. Don't know why I waste my copying and pasting from Supportnet skils.

I've been trying to work out how to control the power settings on the computers centrally. After some research it seems that Microsoft have enabled these features in Group Policy Preferences. Now whilst being inherent in server 2008 it does seem to be that you can get them in a Server 2003/XP environment by downloading the Client Side Extensions, XML Lite and having a Vista machine running the server 2008 RSAT. So... Has anyone managed to impliment group policy preferences in a 2003/XP environment? Was it successfull? Are there any problems I should be aware of?

Yes, I know because the numbers are different... but it's still flash 10 which is the title of the topic. Point being that I have got versions a version of flash 10 deployed thus meaning that it could be a problem with that specific minor version rather than the major version 10. If Chuckster continues to have problems then chuckster could try an older version of Flash 10 that might work.

My compuer needs upgrading just before the summer holidays. If I don't get a lot of money to spend on new projects I might have a bit of time on my hands...

Ahhh... that might explain why I have an SQL server instance running using a similarly rediculus amount of memory. CAPITA suggest a qucik reset of the SQL service to fix however if it's going to make SIMS run faster and I'm only using the server for SIMS and a little bit of file storage I might not bother for the moment.

I've deployed 10.0.12.36 here last week. No one seems to be complaining

Indipendent. You can "get away" with so much! Yes exams is a problem however there is a sepeate field for "Exam name" that can be thereed in SIMS and this is what will appear on the certificates. And to answer the other question the data is being inputted manually. Part of the problem is that we lacked anyone who wanted to take owenership of the databse and so people have done what they felt was necessary to get the correct output as wanted by the "school" working in their own little part of the database. Also as the majority of the people using are not "Technical" then they don't necessarilly look at it from the same point of view as me. Now I have to take over some measure of involvement I am looking at the data and trying to sort out these sort of issues. Form my experience looking at it simply as data it looks wrong. I was looking for the legal documentation to back me up when people throw up resistance, the "we have always done it this way whats the problem" attitude. I did see the "Data must be accurate and up to date" line in the DPA but it did seem to be a summary of a larger point and was looking for the full explanation. I think I'll just use that as my "stick" and beat the relevant people over the head with it.

I used a combination of blocking the ActiveX in Office documents and McAffee EpO/Virus Scan 8.5 and the user defined rules. The first stops them being imbeded in excel/word (obviously) the latter I have used to prevent them funning any SWF (and BAT/EXE/MSI/CMD/COM/MP3) files from flash memory, their desktops, home areas and any other area that they can write too. If I was in your situation I could also allow a small network location for pupils to save their course work and this could be agressively monitored. I also found that content checking the E-mail when this was going on here proved usefull for removing unwanted documents.

Perhaps it might help if I expaned the point slightly. Say a student want's to use their middle name instead of their first. The students full name is Frank Francis John . They want to be know as John, the person inputting the data list F.F.John as their first name and that the students have no middle names. From the point of view of the data this is inaccurate. They should be filling in Frank as the first name and Francis John as the middle names and dealing with the issues of what appear on the report using other fields. It also means that if we have to fill in any legal document for the child we have no record of their legal first name. To me this is a problem as the data is inaccurate and incomplete. I was just wondering if there was any bacup in the DPA or anything else about the legal requirements to have accurate data. As I personally use my middle name rather than my first I appreciate the distinction between legal first name and what I happen to call myself.

Recently I have "aquired" the job of providing some more database management for our school and moving SIMS from the thing everyone hates because they have to write their reports in it to something usefull that actually provides people people with usefull info and in the long rum makes people's lives easier. The first step is some data clensing. Looking through our pupil data there are a number of students mostly Chinese though not all who have what I would describe as rubbish information. SIMS (for those with different DB's) has fields for First Name, Middle Name(s), Surname and prefered first name (I can also add in fields if I so wish). The childern that I have a problem with don't use their first name so the person entering the data has done thing's like put "F.F.John" as their first name and not used a middle name instead of putting their propper First name, Middle names (though they then use the prefered first name to add in John). I suspect that this is for some reason based on school reports. Now from the data point of view this is rubbish. F.F.John is not the childs first name, and in most cases I cannot see how we can determine the child's leagal first name. I could perhaps just bully my waty though the issue and get it changed and done preoperly however I would like to have some for of backup. Does anyone where in the DPA it comments on the accuracy of data held. Are we on dodgy ground as it is or am I being overly sensitive?

There are some times when I agree and sometimes when I disagree with school policies, and I hate to use the "I'm only following orders" line but at the end of the day we are employed by the school to do a job. Part of that job includes the enforcement of school policies. We can't pick and choose which aspects of the job we want to do. SMT get paid a lot more than me and it's up to them to make the descisions. I'll quite happily advise on what is technically possible, potential problems (and give my own tuppence worth ) but at the end of the day it's up to the SMT to decide how things are run in "their" school. I do feel that we overuse the banning (which kids see as a joke punishment anyway) and you are right (as we are the same) why have a different set of punishments for behavioural problems in ICT rooms than in the rest of the school. Might mention that at some point, thaks for pointing out something really obvious that I totally failed to see.

I feel your pain. I have been campaigning for ages, whislt our servers are in locked cabinets (Dell's own) they are in a computer room and the power sockets are massively exposed. Luckilly no-one has decided to switch them off! Perhaps I should to prove a point. I had a full document quoting the DPA, all my arguments etc etc and I get a "why are you bringing me this" kind of response. I would suggest painiting the worst scenario you can. Explain just how bad it will be and what effect it will have. Try and scare the life out of them. Luckilly I have the Bursar on side! There is an office coming availalbe soon and as I realsed through cunning use of fibre optic I don't need to have the servers within 100M of my central switch I've got my eye on it!

Our current school Policy says that they get banned form the comptuers. Our deputy head says that it's a policy and should be inforced. I have had a number of disagreements with staff over this about the disruptions to work etc including one where it took a massive ammount of selfcontrol on my part not to go off on one at a member of staff who just shouted me down and wasn't prepared to enter a discussion (no a smart move as he had just asked me to unblock Sky's E-mail site as his router at home was broken, "I'll just prioritise that"). I personally feel that schools should be educating in behaviour as well as raw information therefore I agree with enforcing the banning policy. It only works if that is carried down the line with pupils punished for not handing in work thus they see the effect of their actions. If the SMT want to have a different policy/punishment system then that should be stated, people informed and then the policy enforced. It would make my life far easier if pupils coul dbe put straight into detention but that is not the policy here. I have told people who have complained to raise it with SMT, discuss their problems and see about changing the policy. No one does. In short. Enfore the School policy regardless. If people complain explain that you are enforcing School Policy and if they don't like it they need to get SMT to change the policy.

Having had to give domain users local admin rights I know it can work. Doesn't mean you should do it. Users should have the minumum ammont of access necessary to work and I really would recomend NOT giving teachers let alone students admin rights to the machine. Just remember that there's more of them than there are of you!

Not necessarilly if GP is blocking access to the drives and hiding them... Some older apps need to "see" the drive

OK. I'l try and go through this as simply as I can withot creating an essay, PM me your E-mail address if you want some screen shots. this is based on my experience with problem apps. The main problem is where to assign the group policy. This depends on the setup of you organasitional units. There are a couple of differnet ways to do this but they have different effects so someone else may suggest a slightly different solution, however... Assuming all your comptuers are in one OU: Step 1: Create a security group of computers. Create a new security group in your computers OU. Open the group properties, members, press Add. Click the "object types" button and tick "computers" Type in the name of your computers and press OK Step 2: Create your GPO Create a GPO on the Compter OU (name it something useful) Click Properties then the security tab Find "Authenticated users" and remove this from the security setting Add the security group you created in step 1 Ensure that they have "read" and "Apply" permissions (Press OK a few times) Step 3: Edit the Policy Navigate to Computer Configuration ==> Security Settings ==> File System Right click in the right hand pane and select Add file Type in the path to the program files (You will get a browse box but it's actually your server so probably doesn't have the files installed) e.g. c:\Program files\ Set the security to "Domain users" Read/Write/etc (don't give them Full Control) Navigate to User Config ==> Windows Components ==> Windows Explorer ==> Set "Hide Specified drives "and "Prevent access to specified drive" to disabled as appropiate. Navigate to Computer Config-->Administrative Templates -->System-->Group Policy Set User Group Policy loopback processing mode: Enabled & Merge The security (Steps 1 and 2) is so that you only apply this to the two comptuers with a problem. You don't need to do it if they are in a seperate OU. Simply attach the policy to the OU. Step 3 allows all users to write to any necessary folders on the computer, overrides you other GPO settings. The last bit of step three basically allows you to set user setting on a per computer basis. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT YOU SET IT TO MERGE. If not it will override ALL of your GPO settings. Disclaimer: 1: I cant guarantee this will solve your problem but it should mean that all users of those computers can see the C: Drive and write to any appropiate files or folders. 2: I'm reasonably confident this will do what I claim though I can't be 100% unless i tested it first. Which I haven't. I've used something similar to assig printers in rooms to users via GP though . 3: Any advise you get from some random bloke on the internet is followed at your own risk