ken_kaniff

not unless someone wants to come up with a sims component for mambo our mambo site is our main public facing website though. i think it's important to draw a clear distinction between your publicly accessible website, providing information, news and pretty pictures - essentially and electronic publication - and the backend stuff like a VLE and MIS integration. our moodle installation is being kept seperate from our main website for this very reason. I see the two things as seperate. Just because two things are web based doesn't mean they should be bundled together into some kind of frankenstein solution.

we ditched uniservity. we found their cms/vle soultion to be extremely poorly put together and their "technical" people clueless. On several occasions i actually guided them in fixeing problems with our site as they we're unsure of how parts of it worked - like the java wysiwyg editor whos jar file included executables and was being blocked by schools proxy servers - they didn't know how to unpack a jar!! i had to explain to them how their applet worked, and why it's genrally a bad idea to shoe horn in off the shelf solutions with little idea of how they work. not to mention it was costing 3k per annum and wasn't even on a dedicated server... or domain for that matter (all uniservity sites hang of school-portal.co.uk) not impressed. I've developed the school a mambo public site and i'm doing a moodle thingy for the kids.

no. for some reason they felt they needed to write it upside-down. it doesn't project anyway

it appears to have a two-tone metallic coating like a camera lens

Some little bar steward has written the word 'poo' onto one of our projector lenses in permanent marker. i'm a little wary about using a solvent based cleaner to remove it as i'm unsure of what that would do to the lens coating (?) i'm not really sure what the best approach is. It's not really affecting picture quality, and i fear i could make it much worse if i damage the lens. at the same time it needs cleaning off though any ideas/previous experience would be much appreciated

Yeah it's almost impossible to detect the culprit. Only ever caught one herbert, and that was only after following a lead (namely that he boasted repeatedly to his victim)

we clear last user at logon through GP, but in general it's done with malicious intent. I've thought about upping the number of failures a bit but they'll just sit and hit enter a few more times and we're back to square one... it's a toughy

Our kids think it's hilarious to repeatedly attempt to log onto another kids account till it gets locked out. Now, i'm assuming this is a problem at other schools also, and i'm wondering what strategies others might have used to deal with this, as along with resetting passwords, it's a huge time drain. Anyone car to share?

no, you're right, they do run in the contect of the user who is logging on

wecame across the problem of freezing and missing redirected start menus. decided it was most probably cause by yhe fact that at a start of a lesson there might potentiall be 100 or so kids loggin on simulatanoesly thus creating a lot of "start menu traffic". what i did here was to apply a startup script to all the workstations via a GPO which xcopys the start menu directory from the server to c:\sm on each local machine. then i set folder redirection to point to c:\sm and we've had zero problems ever since. if the startup script ever did fail on a particular workstation, the worst that can now happen is the start menu might be outdated.

Amiga Forever!

unless you really need offline files i'd unregister mobsync.dll on your workstations. more trouble than it's worth IMO.

holding a sheet of paper (anything will do) and looking agitated whilst periodically appearing to read from your sheet of paper is a good technique for getting from A to B without being ambushed by $randomStudent or $randomTeacher with poinlessQuery(). Headshaking and overenthusiastic tutting are optional extras but work well in conjucntion with the above.

moodle?

I'm currently trying to decide on a way for out kids to hand in their work to their teacher securely, that is without other kids being able to osteal it and pass it off as their own. We have a setup whereby each teacher has a folder on a network share to which they have full control, the pupils user group has write and list folder contents. creator owner has full control. so in effect they can 'hand in' their work and make alterations to their own files if they wish, but they cannot open other kids files. the problems arise however when teachers copy their folders off onto laptops, usb sticks etc take them home and mark them then dump them back, and hey presto the kids lose creator owner on their files and cant open them. and the teachers calls me up flapping like a dememnted monkey on crack. how do you do it?