Disease

If I left IT I would like to be a Pimp or a Hitman or both at the same time.

What does everyone else do about the power requirements for laptops? We have a number of rooms that use full laptop cabinets and get heavy useage, the break and lunches are not enough time to get a decent charge on the batteries for the following lessons. What do you do to resolve this issue. Extra power packs or higher capacity batteries? Thanks

Thanks Az

Thanks, when you say on each group policy do you mean for example: Pupils08 (pupils group policy which is applied to the pupils security group) needs to have loopback set in GP and the computer room OU 117N (applied to the computer room) also needs to have Loopback option set., so it's in both ou's or do I just need to set it in the computer room OU policy. Thanks

Done all that but the menus do not show.

Hi there, I am looking to have custom start menus for different labs, is anyone able to point me in the right direction, I am using server 2003 and XP SP3. To Clarify: If user a logs into room 3 he gets the specific start menu for rooms 3, if he then logs off and goes to rooms 2 he then gets room 2's specific start menus.

The SKY Schools Package does indeed start at £15.00 a month + £10.00 for SKY+HD, you can get things like SkySports thrown in but you have to send in a letter asking for a concession and prove that it will only be used for teaching purposes. Thats what we are trying to do at the moment.

I want to host it internally, MailEnable looks good does anyone here use it?

The head of IT apporoached me today and asked if I can look at email for students and the ability for them to have their own webspace. Does anyone do this currently and if so how? I have not settled on any particular OS, Software or spam filters so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, of course I am looking to do this as cheap as possible. So whats your setups Thanks

Thats just the ticket, thanks

My Account is 6 years old now I still play it every so often.

Does anyone have an E-saftey policy I can look at? I have been tasked with drawing up the school policy for E-Safety, I have looked at what is been taught in Key Stage 3 and compared it to the Becta Signposts to Saftey Teaching E-Safety Guide book and what we teach is woeful. If anyone has a policy I can look at and use as a benchmark I would be Grateful. Thanks

Thanks for all the advice on this, I went with the 3com gear in the end compared to the HP it has a higher rate of packet transfer and slightly better features.

Most of the time I carry with a Hammer, it fixes a multitude of problems

This is where you lost me , my fibre would be connected to the switch with cat5e from media converters so does the lack of SFPs matter? Should I change all my connections from media converters to Mini GBICs, would there much of a performance difference? Can I still trunk the fibre links if I do not use GBICs? What about this switch from HP: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06b/12883-12883-3445275-427605-427605-3296367-3296370.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_UKEN Or could you recommend a 48 Port Layer 3 Switch, I have a Budget of 3k for the switch. Thanks

Very interesting read so far, I have some questions if someone would be kind enough to answer:) At the moment my core switches are layer 2 just linked together with no real rhyme or reason with severs plugged into different switches along with random network sockets around the school ( inherited network). I wish to improve this because as we have expanded, the network has begun to slow down. At the moment servers go into one of the core switches which link to outlying layer 2 switches and then feed out to the sockets, most of these links are single fibre links with some being cat 5e. All the fibe is gig with gig media converters at each end and all have redundant pairs. Am I right in taking the following approach to improve my network structure or have I misunderstood points of this thread. I want to have a single 48 - port Layer 3 core switch. Into this switch I will plug all my main fibre links using link aggregation and utilising the redundant pairs to form a 2 gig fibre backbone. I would also utilise bonding the dual network connections on my main servers to increase throughput and put those into the layer 3 core switch as well. Non main servers would go into the core switch as a single connection. This would use up 35 of the 48 available ports. All outlying switches would be Layer 2 and then feed to the rooms. Does this sound right? Also if I connect other layer 2 swicthes that are in my main cabinet to the core switch would I connect them in with a single cat5 cable or should they be trunked in as well? I was thinking of this switch as my core? Support for 3Com® Switch 5500G-EI 24-Port (3CR17250-91) - Features & Benefits Thanks in advance

Webman love your site, quick question about it what do you host on your intranet as a technical department? I am looking to ravamp ours and am trying to decide on what to publish about the network etc and what we do. Also how does the sims access work on your website? I would be interested to know how it's integrated. Thanks

To bo honest it should not really cost you more than a couple of hundred pounds to have exchange through your organisation, that is bearing in mind you have a schools agreement with microsoft. Under the schools agreement you get the core CAL pack which includes: Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Systems Management Server, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server So the CALs themselves cost nothing, then all you need to buy is the Exchange software which is around £200 maybe less.

I did but I was secretly trying to convert the unclean to the great world Of Billy.

That's why here we have........Back ups, that way no one loses anything, we give certain teachers (mostly IT Teachers) full access.

Xp is the best Os, the title says Best OS not Best Linux OS

I use Acronis Snap Deploy with Universal Deploy. It allows you to take an image of a machine over the network and also deploy said images. Universal deploy allows you to send any image to a machine with different hardware, work a treat. I also have a Hard Disk Dupe machine that allows me to dupe 4 drives at once. That is ace as it does all types of HDD's including Laptop.

Raoming at the moment but will be making the move to Madatory in the Summer. Will check out your suggestion thanks.

I have noticed that when the computers go to sleep or into screensaver mode it can take 7 or 8 seconds for the logon box to show, now this only happens on the curriculm network, the admin network is instant. It is a full XP network with Vanillia 2003. Any idea what might be causing it. Thanks Ian

I tried this recently and the installer said that you must upgrade ALL DC's in the domain to 2008. So in the end I did not bother. I am sure you can not have just one 2008 DC in a domain with 2003 DC's.