pete

We've used Fasthosts in the past and wouldn't again - aside from the miscommunication during outages they regularly messed up billing. I'll second @matt40k's recommendation for Mythic Beasts and throw in Krystal Hosting (krystal.co.uk), who've been good for the last few years I've been with them (they bought out my old host) and we've had a couple of work domains with them for about a year without issue. If you mention you're a school, there's a 50% discount.

^ Is that the "oops, the first time round I didn't copy these files over....er...I'll just do that now" issue that we occasionally see with SIMSApplicationsetup.exe?

Yup, and I have avatars/sigs turned off ("yes, it's a serious IT forum. That? Oh that's er... @X-13 posting, yes, ponies doing...something... ")

I met Joanne and Elsiegee40 (who I wrongly guessed was Witch), plus Dave from ICT Direct. @Joanne - the Minions bag you were coveting is £1 at Tesco, usually at the tills.

^ Legitimate teachers on Twitter or BBC astroturfing?

Try Royal TSX - Royal Applications

Try adding something to the talk page saying: "Hey, I'm Bob from Schoolname. I'm aware we shouldn't update the page ourselves but the information is significantly out of date and creates a false impression of the facilities available. This has negatively impacted school finances. How can I get this information updated?" The talk page will often point to people responsible for that regional area too. But as @X-13 says, Wikipedia is where tumblrinas go when they age so don't expect too much.

I have an earlier version of that case without the window and it is really nice. The only caveat is that the PSU (in my version at least) sucks air from the underside of the case, so ensure your case is on a hard surface or short-pile carpet.

You can poll all the data on the BizHubs using the standard Printer-MIB from RFC1759. We're using it in Observium and (I think) Check_MK, so see if Zabbix likes it. http://www.simpleweb.org/ietf/mibs/modules/IETF/txt/Printer-MIB

We've just had this issue rear it's head again. Not sure whether it's the ParentPay or the Vericool end yet. Has anyone else had issues in the last few days?

We've been providing Adult Ed for a fair while now and we're pondering the best way to make resources (upcoming lesson topics, homework, resources, etc) available to students online. Considerations are: People will often sign up to a course on the night of the first lesson - we don't necessarily have a list of who needs access Courses could be anywhere from 1 - 10 weekly sessions. Tutors will need to update / add materials as the course progresses Tutors and students will have highly variable IT skills. Student age ranges are ~20-ish to 90-ish. It's hard to get hold of tutors - many work full time in addition to Adult Ed. There's no realtime IT support for Adult Ed - we've all gone home by then, so it needs to be foolproof. It can't be burdensome to maintain for us (IT) or the people running Adult Ed. Content should not be available to people who haven't paid for the course (so no just making it available on the school website) My initial thought is something where authenticated tutors can upload documents and generate a unique URLs for each student that expire X days after the course finishes. They could still pass the URL on to someone, but there's a limited time window (and they're more likely to pass on downloaded documents by email anyway). Any ideas?

Regarding 2), when we asked KM about MF integration our rep (or the person he forwarded the query on to) hid from us for about 3 months. They did say "hey, why not use this expensive KM option instead?", to which our response was "it doesn't support $other_printing_hardware and it's really expensive". Make of that what you will. What have PaperCut said? They're usually pretty responsive and (IIRC) some of them lurk on here. We're pondering an MF + $copier_brand integration when we refresh (Easter-ish) so I'll be interested to see how you go.

We have Office 365, but we haven't moved mailboxes over to it (likely in the future, but not right now), so there are no mailboxes assigned. We would like to get an idea of who's using it and I can get some of that from the pre-canned reports, but it looks like all the "tell me who's ever logged in" functionality relies on the person having a mailbox assigned. Most of the "here's how to do it" examples use get-mailbox and I don't think Get-MSOLUser exposes login info. What I'm interested in (for all users) is: Has Bob ever logged in? When did he last login? Has anyone managed to pull this info out?

^ I'm testing the client at the moment. The documentation (and their helpdesk guys) say it'll be better than last year (ended up manually pushing it out via psexec* then), but so far I'm unconvinced. The silent install I tested (msi with a transform, since the cli options are odd) choked during install because (I think) the AV really didn't like something it's doing - at a guess I'd say unsigned executables, but I haven't poked around with it yet- it was a late Friday afternoon test. The admin and server installers aren't UAC-aware either. *Try psexec @C:\temp\computerlist-etest.txt -d -s msiexec.exe /i \\server\share\IFS\etestclientsetup.msi CMDLINE="/s IFSSERVERNAME=FILLMEINHERE IFSPORTNO=5656 IFSUNLOCKPASSWORD=PASSWORDYOUSET UNLOCKCONFIRM=PASSWORDYOURSET ALLUSERS=TRUE RUNAPP=FALSE" /qn I'm not sure msiexec will be happy with the "CMDLINE=" prefix though.

^ What speed have they bought from SWGFL? That looks like something's misconfigured (or slowly dying in the local exchange).

School leadership can request you to do this, but you can refuse if you're uncomfortable doing so - there was a discussion on here about the lack of an audit trail and how open to interpretation the legislation was in the monitoring thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/behind-red-door/156922-monitoring-uk-schools-17.html On pages 8 and 15 of the document referenced by @esafety_officer is the relevant bits (who can search and electronic devices respectively).

I should be there on Friday.

Their problem to fix.

Thinking about it, set a pre-install task that just creates python.txt? Initially as a blank file, then add actual info if it still squawks about it?

Just a note about this (manually deployed the last lot and bundled it with an image). Assuming you're using a proxy (I'm giving the devs the benefit of the doubt and assuming that without a proxy it would work). From an elevated local prompt, Installername.exe /S will result in a "python.txt is invalid. Python will not be downloaded" prompt. It will then install cleanly. Looking here: git.jetbrains.org - idea/community.git/blob - python/edu/build/idea.nsi 918 getPythonFileInfo: 919 inetc::get "http://www.jetbrains.com/updates/python.txt" "$TEMP\python.txt" 920 ${LineSum} "$TEMP\python.txt" $R0 921 IfErrors cantOpenFile 922 StrCmp $R0 ${PYTHON_VERSIONS} getPythonInfo 923 cantOpenFile: 924 MessageBox MB_OK|MB_ICONEXCLAMATION "python.txt is not exist. Python will not be downloaded." 925 goto association it appears that if it can't download and then read $TEMP\python.txt it breaks the "silent" nature of the installer to tell you, causing unattended installs to hang. In an ideal world, it would check for a python version locally (where python), check whether Pycharm works with it and just silently install or sling an error in the application log.

Not possible absolutely (this will never happen because I can't break causality)? "Sorry, that's just not possible due to X". Not possible now because $thing_more_important exploded? "I'm working on $thingy and it'll take $estimate, send me an email so I don't forget and I'll look later." Not possible without X (where X is time, budget, more input from requestee, jail sentence)? "In order to do this, I'll/you'll need X. Can you provide that?" (aka "Do you have a budget?") Not possible and I can't tell you why? (confidential). "Sorry, but I can't tell you the reason (or I can only be vague). Talk to $person about it (so long as saying that doesn't give it away)." Not my responsibility? "You'll need to ask Bob about that." Generally speaking I know most of the staff well enough to adapt my response to them. So long as there's a reason and the person understands (and owns) the consequences of "No", I still get paid.

IIRC we pushed it out using WPP (SCCM-lite) using installername.exe /S and installable/installed detection using the version number of the "123D Design.exe" executable.

I vote for "grow it, plait into Viking forked beard for Bett".

A new technician should buy a copy of "The Practise of System and Network Administration" by Limoncelli, Hogan & Chalup. It tells you what you should be doing, why you should be doing it and how you should be doing it. It also tells you how to explain all of that to your non-technical bosses. The book isn't specifically technical (in the sense of "here's how to do X in Y"), but it covers things like: DR, ethics, customer care, helpdesks, documentation, debugging, workstation and server builds, fixing things once, change management, maintenance windows, etc. It's a weighty tome of ~1,000 pages The last print run was 2007, but the contents are still valid. It's the best book about IT I've bought: The Practice of System and Network Administration: Amazon.co.uk: Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan, Strata R. Chalup: 0785342492668: Books

They're offering Guardware from e-Safe. It does key capture and in-application capture. It also does an SSL MITM locally to grab websites. Things it captures are sent via https to the company (e-Safe) where a human then assesses the results. Minor-leagure shenanigans are emailed in a weekly report to the designated safeguarding lead + backup (by default). Major-league shenanigans are sent there and then/phoned in (if super-serious). The way it records or can prove violations *is* problematic however. Website information can't be presented in context so if robustly challenged by the person being accused it's not that useful without accompanying evidence (proxy logs for example). This is because they only capture and record the dodgy bits - if a website has say 8 things on it and 2 are inappropriate you only get the URL(s) for the inappropriate image/whatever and a powerpoint containing a screen grab of said images. You can (and should) configure it to not capture online shopping and banking and applications containing personal data (SIMS, Payroll). From my point of view it's better than Securus, but the evidence wouldn't be reliable for an industrial tribunal or court action and it's often hard to judge context from the reported violations.