TheCrust

I was wondering about doing that, but wasn't sure it would work when users were going to URL's rather than trying to hit the IP address directly. Will give it a go - thanks!

We run ISA 2006 as an additional layer of filtering to pick up sites our RBC fails to filter (amongst other things). As part of this we regularly monitor the logs to detect common "off task" site accesses - i.e. students accessing proxy websites. We've come across a real vein of proxy websites this morning - loads more than I want to sit and add into the "ban" filter because I've got more pressing things to deal with - but I've noticed they all resolve down to a couple of IP addresses. Is there a way of quickly blocking access to a URL based on the IP address it resolves back to in ISA 2006....? This will enable me to enter in the target IPs quite quickly without having to sit and trawl through a list of websites... Thanks in advance! Jim

Ah - I did wonder what that extra meg-and-a-half update from the same page was for, and had you not posted it I would have sussed it. Eventually. That's been applied so I can connect it to my network with impunity then.

I had the same problems - my download managed kept dropping the connection and it took hours to get the iso image. By the time it arrived, I was surprised it was actually usable I got kicked out that many times. I also couldn't apply for the key - same errors when I tried - but having burned the ISO to a disc and stuck it into a Tecra M9 laptop we've got lying around the place I was plesantly surprised to see if you don't enter a key, it installs as Windows 7 Ultimate and apparently it gives 30-days grace before it forces activation on you: plenty of time for the hoo-har to die down a bit and MS to get the key side of things fixed. Seems to run OK on the laptop - perceptibly quicker I think - though Aero isn't working at the mo as I need the right graphics driver. The thing that worried me most was the ominous warning on the Technet download page about backing up MP3 files on local discs or network drives that the Windows 7 PC might have access too. Why it didn't say but until I can work that out I think I'll be keeping it off my LAN in case it "upgrades" any MP3 teaching resources to the point I won't be able to access them for another 18 months or until we upgrade properly....

As an update to this, it seems the problem occurs because the CRYPTO folder in the user roaming profile is corrupted. Look in C:\Users\ %username% \Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft on a vista machine and delete the CRYPTO folder. I am yet to try this but apparently it will regenerate it next time the application is run. So in my case, the mandatory roaming profile needs to be de-mandatorised for a bit, then re-restricted after I'm done. A job for the holidays then, when I can guarantee students won't be logged in.

One of our IT teaching team pointed this one out to me this morning. He was doing part of the OCR Nationals that requires the student to encrypt an excel spreadsheet - students were saving-as their spreadsheets fine, but when it came to apply the encryption (via Office btn -> prepare -> encrypt) the documents refused to save and an error message is presented: Clicking "OK" to the message causes Excel to stop responding with an immediate "Microsoft Excel has stopped running and will be restarted" type message. The environment is: Vista Business SP1, Office 2007 Professional SP1, Mandatory profile for all students, redirected desktop and start menu folders, Redirected "my Documents" to a share on a Server 2008 Standard edition box. I suspect this could be something to do with GP as we do lock our desktop systems down quite a lot, but am at a loss of where to start looking. Any suggestions appreciated.

Hi guys - thanks for the replies, sorry for my lack of. @IanT and Zimmer, no - we don't use any teaming software - for instance the Proliant DL180 only has a single NIC so it can't be teamed with anything and the Intel-based machine had it's second NIC disabled after Win2k8 decided it was going to refuse to bind any protocol stacks to it. Since I posted up, both machines have behaved themselves to date - and we haven't seen the problem on any other Win2k8 box on the network. It's very odd. A bit like one of our Win2k8 terminal servers reporting it had run out of disc space last week when it hadn't. Again, a reboot cured it but quite why it was needed when the same hardware under Win2k3 would have run perfectly for months I have no idea.... I wonder if Win2k8 R2 will be just as entertaining?

We've got a bit of an odd one here. Over the summer we started upgrading our servers to 2008 server. The DC's have all gone across fine (were DCpromo'd down, rebuilt from scratch rather than upgraded, and DCpromo'd back up) and the fileservers went likewise. Some stuff is still on 2003 server, for instance our Exchange box, but the core domain infrastructure and file servers are all now migrated to 2008 server. Now last week we had one of the student file servers - a Stone Computers "intel clone" rack job with dual Intel Pro 1000MT server adaptor and Windows Server 2008 standard - reporting that both network cards were disabled even though they weren't. The affected server could access the network and surf the internet, ping other hosts, open up shares, worked a treat as you'd expect BUT try to access it from any other device and it refused to respond to a ping and you couldn't access any shares on it or even start a RDP session. Just as if the firewall had reenabled itself (it hadn't - it's disabled via a GPO). Right-click the card, select "enable" as normal, and the server showed the enabling dialogue box but then re-reported the card as disabled. All very odd. Two reboots finally cured it. Today we've just had the same thing but on another server. This time a HP Proliant DL180 G5, brand new this summer, single Broadcom gigabit card onboard - running Windows Server 2008 enterprise (it's one of our DCs) The server stopped responding on the network and investigation showed the NIC to have "disabled" itself - even though the server could still access resources on the network. As with the other server, a reboot cured it - but we shouldn't have to be doing this sort of thing to a server! Neither server has any power management features enabled on the NIC (why would you want a server to switch a NIC off?) but they are connected into the same stack of Cisco 3750G switches. Anyone else had this sort of problem or behaviour with their Win 2008 boxes?

"Never had an iLibra"...? You missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime to be responsible for an Elonex SFF desktop PC that was usually crammed into the tightest, hottest space possible, left there for years and allowed to fill up with dust and get hotter still. I think I've got a couple lying around in the back of a comms room that we use as doorstops on really hot days. If I remember I can bring one of them especially for you to give to Gary if you want.

Tim, we do something along the same lines at the place I've just moved to - only there is no performance-related pay to encourage / motivate support staff. Staff progress up the pay spine in one point increments every year, until they reach the top of the scale for their particular job grade. Then they stay at that point until the job is regraded or they leave the post which means little financial incentives to improve their performance or meet targets. As such although I am "obliged" to do the PM reviews for my staff, as they have no incentives to meet them, nor do I get any for achieving my own, I am seriously wondering what's the point as it seems to be more a paper exercise designed to tick a box on someone's target sheet rather than because anyone actually wants to achieve any improvement in the support staff as a whole and it frustrates me.

Kinda of. Inasmuch as we used a Win2008 Terminal server to deploy the app anyway. - Install the app on the Win 2008 terminal server in single user mode. - Use the Win 2008 terminal server application deployment tools to create the .rdp file - locate the file centrally on the network, create shortcut to file in students redirected desktop / application folders Works OK for us.

I'll be there. Gary let slip that the 11th is also his birthday, so we all have to be extra nice to him. I suggest everyone going brings an old bit of kit to use as a birthday present: old Allied Telesyn VLAN switches, decrepid iLibra hardware, anything DCC has inflicted on a school in the past that we've since taken out behind their backs - that sort of thing. Jim

Thanks for the suggesting - I downloaded and installed the cccp but it made no difference - Kar2ouche still winged about a missing codec... Back to the drawing board

That's good, but our ex-head can beat that. His name was "Richard" and he signed all his emails as.... ...DICK!

Yeah, we kind of do that with our own ISA boxes at the moment - but even so there is always this level of EMBC-ness that is lurking in the background, getting in the way when you don't want it to. Like today with the filtering service issues - if schools were allowed to run their own in-house with the EMBC offering disabled, this wouldn't have been the issue it was for many. But that's not in the spirit of a centrally-manged service. Or BSF.

Hmmm. I know a schools agreement allows you to run Enterprise, but we chose to run Business when we migrated the entire school across over a year ago. Our environment runs relatively faultlessly and we've since updated our images to SP1 without issue over this summer. Could it be worthwhile building a Vista Business image and seeing if you get the same problems? Just to identify if it's any of the additional Enterprise stuff that could be tripping the machines up? Aside from the UAC thing occasionally popping up on machines that aren't controlled by any specific OU, the only other time I've seen a vista machine pause - and that's all it is, a ten second hang or so - is when Office 2007 was referencing a networked drive on a Server 2003 machine - for instance when adding an attachment in outlook, opening or saving a file, inserting a picture, that sort of thing.

It's not anything related to UAC trying to grab focus is it? I've seen a couple of machines - even my laptop - apparently freeze then after a few seconds there's the flashing in the taskbar as the UAC control tries to get my attention. Click on that and I get the usual UAC darkened screen with "you have moved a mouse and windows needs your permission to continue" type of message. Approve it, and the workstation comes back to life. It made me wonder quite why UAC was popping up in the background unseen at first and in the end I attributed it to clicking on a window to change focus at exactly the same moment UAC sprang into life. May be worth knocking UAC on the head if you haven't already, just to check?

...all of which re-inforces the viewpoint in the south-east corner of our region at least, that schools that have the technical staff on-site to manage their own connection should be left alone to get on with it. We did ask for that once - a plain vanilla internet feed from EMBC that we could filter and manage ourselves to BECTA standards, using services that suited our schools individual requirements. They said no, because the RBC was there to do that for us and that represented "best value" (this term comes up a lot in our region). Surely it must also have represented "fitness for purpose" at some stage, but we can't remember that far back.

I bet your LA didn't decide to host their VLE on the other side of it though. Ours chose Kaleidos as their VLE of choice - a platform currently hosted by RM in their server farm at Abingdon and effectively out on the wider internet. While this may have been the "best value" decision at the time, it's coming in for some serious questioning in schools when the EMBC service can be "less than 100% reliable", to be polite. I can think of at least half-a-dozen schools in my region that have had immense difficulty in delivering IT-based lessons over the last day or two because their internet access has been sporadic and they can't get to their VLE....

I don't hold too much faith in the people on the networks helpdesk up at Matlock - one of our partner primaries rang them earlier this year to report a seriously inappropriate site that wasn't blocked. The chap on the helpdesk logged it, but said nothing could be done about it there and then as it was in the EMBC transition period and there was a block on changes. What the guy up at county said next practically sent the feeder school head into meltdown. He said he would close the call as "it didn't look good for their targets to have an outstanding issue so long" - and that the head should ring back in a month or so to re-report the issue.

Translation: we unplugged something to boil a kettle, and forgot to switch off the urn when we'd done.

I'm recreating one of our Vista images from scratch - and as part of this am re-installing a range of Kar2ouche modules. They work fine, but when started complain that an appropriate MP3 codec required to play audio isn't present. Anyone got an idea what this codec is and where I can get a copy? The application error message (helpfully!) suggests I install a copy of IE5 service pack 1 or later..... I have Quicktime 7 installed, along with VLC player (which usually handles most things video-wise) but Immersive's website doesn't seem to cover this one. Any suggestions appreciated. Ta!

Yeah, the 11d install thinks Windows 2008 is Vista (presumably because the versioning and core code is so similar) and will only give you the option of installing the console components rather than the whole media server stuff. We had to buy 12 to get around this, and all the agents which niggled a bit but it's in and done now.

To be fair, you can re-instate NTBackup if you want. You have to copy the exe and a few dll's off a Win2003 machine - but they don't even need to be registered, just present in the path so you can pluck it out later if you want too. It's handy if you have any legacy .bkf files on a NAS somewhere that you suddenley find you have to recover from. Like we did.

Sorry to say that this problem has reared it's ugly head again. Same problem - same hardware manufacturor (Elonex). Several machines have identical GUIDS however the DMI_2043 utility won't touch them whereas before on other elonex PCs I had trouble with it was happy. The utility either runs with no obvious failure, but doesn't change the UUID or errors with a series of ouputs: The boards in question are MSI MS-6558 version 1.0's - but MSI's website seems to deny all knowledge of ever having produced a board with the SIS 650 and 961 chipsets. Have tried wiping the BIOS, even looking for an updated BIOS to see if there's something languishing around left from when Elonex cloned the boards, but with no success. Any suggestions before I take to these PCs with a large mallet and a sharp pointy chisel? Aaaagh! Thanks in advance