TheCrust

Yeah, spotted that - have tried everything bar the hotfix with no joy so far but it's one of those niggles that I only ever get ten minutes at a time to look at. You're welcome - got fed up of testing it on two PCs in the IT office that aren't really used "in anger", and figured a real-world suite that's quickly re-RIS-able wouldn't be too much of a hardship if it all went bad.

AVG for us - has worked a treat so far though I have experienced the problem when the core engine files get out of step with everything else and it starts to winge. Mind you, we retained McAfee on our servers though - purely for Groupshield Exchange which is licenced on a per-server basis rather than a per-mailbox basis like a lot of other stuff can be - in a school with 1000+ mailboxes, that made economic sense irrespective of my thoughts on McAfee. By running two distinct and seperate products across server and clients we hope that something that gets past one will get caught by the other. I've never had to put that to the test, but have this wierd feeling I've just hexed it by speaking out...

I have no firm idea to be honest but I have a vague recollection it would be retained. From a recent briefing between south-derbyshire network managers, the Derbyshire networks team and EMBC, I understand that their platform will be based heavily around MS services unlike the current Fujitsu offerings which are in some cases quite bespoke. As such, the webmail facility will be replaced by OWA with a different front end depending on which age range / school family the user belongs to, the current squid proxy will be replaced with an ISA equivalent (or a cluster I presume) and sharepoint will come in at some stage too. The h323 functionality will be provided by something different (as ISA doesn't, despite what it claims on the tin). There will be the facility for a RBC-wide AD infrastructure / forest should you be brave enough to entrust this to them. Personally I'm out on that one at the moment but they do claim to have a lot of experience in SSO and making disseperate systems talk to one another. In Derbyshire the Community Gateway will be replaced with something more functional (userfriendly and hopefully better to look at!) but I couldn't say what other LA areas under the EMBC umbrella are getting. They are also looking to offer network-based backup services which could be a substitute for taking your last set of good backup tapes home with you (which is a practice that is much to the annoyance of our LA audit department - who insist they should stay on-site and be destroyed in whatever fire/flood/theft strikes the school, yet winge when they feel the data is inadequately protected.....) Whatever they base the platform on, I have more confidence in them to do the job than the abilities Fujitsu currently demonstrate. However because of past blunderings (on the part of Fujitsu we presume) Synetrix will have a long battle ahead of them to reassure schools - certainly those I've spoken with in Derbyshire - that EMBC have changed and are something that can be relied on.

Have you tried sending the user a test email? I've seen something similar when I've created a new user but there was nothing in the mailbox and it hadn't actually created it as such. Sent them a "test" email, and all worked after that. May be rubbish, but could be worth a try?

I seriously doubt they know the meaning of the word sometimes! Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately our LA service desk can be less-than-cooperative at times and this wasn't filtered through to us when we rang and complained to them about it - they just said something along the lines of "because it's in a period of transition, any service change requests will have to wait until after the swap over to Synetrix". I had to laugh when it was pointed out to me by a colleague earlier on that the Kudos Online site was being filtered out because it was a phishing site!

This morning one of our post-16 art students did a search for celtic roundhouses. He used Google image search, as you might do yourselves, and got a nice page full of images of roundhouses back. Great. Going well so far. But, click on any one of them and he got this: http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a69/thecrust/forumstuff/embcerror.jpg Our RBC - EMBC - has apparently decided that parts of Google is an anonymous proxy website and therefore the results of certain searches can be blocked. Oh for the love of pete! I know schools internet access needs to be filtered, but there's filtered and there's over filtered. And when teaching and learning is impacted, I'd definately say that someone somewhere has seriously overstepped the mark! Anybody else in the EMBC region getting this problem or have issues where the filtering service gets seriously in the way of ordinary teaching?

I'd have to agree I'm afraid. We used to use McAfee TVD - but the console on the central server kept crashing, hanging and had all manner of wierd and wonderful problems. McAfee's excuse when we tried to get support from them? "Your network is too big". Excuse me? We purchased 400 licences because, heven forbid, we might want to use it on 400 machines. How can this be "too big" and more to the point, why did you not tell us this during the pre-sales stuff when we did the requirements analysis? We didn't stay with McAfee long and now use AVG - it's a fraction of the price of McAfee for educational users, a sinch to install remotely and has much better rates of detection in the magazine tests of AV software (if you believe the journalistic hype, that is). Sorry, I know that's a bit of a digression and it doesn't help you solve your problem, but I thought it relevent. Good luck with the install!

Hi all! We upgraded one of our IT suites to the XP SP3 RC1 over the christmas break to see what effect (if any) there would be. We'd deployed onto a couple of test stations in IT first and they'd gone fine - so a single suite that could be re-RIS'd quickly if it went bad was the next logical stage. And all appears to have gone well - apart from we are now starting to see students coming to us having lost work they thought they had saved. We thought at first that this was a student thing. "I can't be arsed to work, so I will claim the file has gone" - I'm sure every school tech sees that at least once a week - but we're seeing too many students for this to be the case. Having examined a test station in IT with SP3 installed, and one without (both in the same OU so same GP applied and the same user used) it seems that under SP3 folder redirection for the "My Documents" folder to the users H: drive doesn't work. On the SP2 machine it works fine. The users H: drive is mapped as usual, and desktop shortcuts created so the logon batches are running OK, just the redirection of "My Documents" to the users H: drive doesn't seem to want to work. Anybody else come across this? Any thoughts? Thanks in advance! Jim

Have a look at CConnect on the Windows server resource kit if you get a mo. We use this to restrict the maximum number of concurrent logons that will be accepted for any one student user ID. It also comes with a handy admin front end that shows you where the little scamps are logged on, and allows you to remotely log them off too.

Like you, we have a domain group called "Webdeny" and proxy settings set at the machine and user level. However we have an ISA2004 server sat up on the edge of the network and seperating us from our RBC (the RBC hates it being there, as it stops them coming in when they want, but after they transmitted the Blaster worm or whatever it was to us in the summer of 2003 they just can't be trusted!) Members of the group webdeny are banned from going out onto the web by a rule on the ISA server unless it is for specific sites - we operate a whitelist of sites always used for educational purposes (such as mymaths.co.uk) so the naughty students are restricted from general internet use but can still do their work. Works well enough for us - they hate the fact that they can't get around it: they can run what they like on the PC, be it Firefox from a USB stick or IE, but the proxy just won't let them through if they've been bad boys or girls.

Yeah there are in 2003. Kind of. This is assuming you have the Exchange tools installed on the same PC you are accessing ADU&C from: 1. Start ADU&C, view the properties of a user (for arguments sake, your headteacher) 2. Click the "Exchange General" tab 3. Click "Delivery Restrictions" 4. The bottom half of the window that appears is what you want. You can set Exchange to accept messages from authenticated users only, everyone, only from, or from everyone except. 4. Choose "from everyone except" and just add in your student users group to the box. 5. Job jobbed. This doesn't hide their email from the GAL, but it stops students sending email to that member of staff. Of course, not necessarily appropriate if students are expected to return coursework via email or are encouraged to email their form tutor under anti-bullying policy (for example). But it works well enough. In terms of hiding address lists, we seperate student / staff email lists by leaving the "Firstname" and "lastname" attributes for each student user blank - only populating their display name in AD. Staff user accounts are fully populated as you'd expect anywhere else. Membership of the relevent address list is based on if lastname / firstname is blank or not. If blank, is student (so go in student AL). If not, is staff (so go in staff AL). In tandem with the exchange sending restrictions that works for us quite well, but doesn't stop those intent on doing something stupid and intelligent enough to work out how. As has been said by Fooby and Andrew_C though - usually just removing internet / network rights for a nominated period of time and providing the evidence to the SLT does wonders, and if they plead innocence they are more likely of being guilty of sharing logons with another student somewhere along the line so they don't escape the consequences.

That did the trick! Thanks Peter, much appreciated!

Nope - don't appear to work - the DMItool just hangs the machines dead with a "waiting..." message and the DMIBrowser utility from the MSI website pretty well does the same thing. Although I'm no further forward as regards a solution, it does nicely confirm that the problem is due to Elonex at manufacture - all machines I've tried the tool on so far report the system manufacturer as "Elonex PLC"..... Anyone else have a working DMI reprogramming tool that is happy on the MS-6526 and MS-6558 motherboards used in Elonex Prosentia PCs or would a BIOS update to the latest image likely clear the DMI pool stuff?

Super - thanks Geoff - I'm over at the school in question this morning and will go and try the utility on one of the machines later. Cheers!

Hi all, I'm getting this really wierd problem with WDS at a partner school we provide support for. Last year I built them a new HP Proliant server with Windows 2003. This has run absolutely fine and generally I'm pretty happy with it. However some of their network PCs are getting a little clogged up so I updated the server to SP2, installed WDS and created a base Windows XP SP2 image to use to clean-build their machines with rather than sit at each one with a stack of CDs. The problem is when I PXE-boot the PCs, I can build the first three with the correct sequential naming scheme as defined in AD. However PC number 4 thinks it's PC number 2. And so does PC number 5. For a change, PC number 6 thinks it PC number 3, but the pattern repeats - all subsequent PCs think they are either PC number 2 or PC number 3..... There are no apparent errors in the logs on the WDS box, and it's been deployed exactly the same as WDS boxes I've done at other schools which all work fine and as expected. When going through the BIOS POST checks, all the PCs seem to be popping up with the same GUID that instant before I hit F12 to boot them from the network. The PCs are all (*spit*) Elonex Prosentia (*spit*) units that are a few years old but otherwise OK. I've tried using both the onboard Realtek card and the additional Intel Pro 100 card that all the machines seem to have installed too with the same results. Even if I alternate which card is used in which machine when I try to build it. This is definately a WTF moment - I've passed it up to the support team at the LA to see if they have any ideas (they haven't) and shared it with network managers at other schools to see if they've come across it (they haven't either). Any thoughts as to how to get around this issue or what might be causing it? To my mind it's almost as if when Elonex built the PCs they literally cloned them a little too well.... Thanks in advance! :thumbup: