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?

we had this problem with some new machines we bought. installed windows xp, everything went fine, they were great but group policy didn't apply when our users tried logging on to them. Exact same error message as you are getting. Two weeks of hair pulling and desk thumping ensued then *blam* the problem went away by itself and has never resurfaced. i suspect dns caching issues of some sort, but it's still a mystery. i'd love to know what causes this though, as several weeks of usenet trawling turned up nothing useful.

alex: christ no! Ric_: i toyed with the idea and then i thought about copying them locally and went with that instead. to be honest i think just using our fileserver to host the start menu would have solved the problem equally well... but i'm being presumptous, only time will tell if it's acyually fixed. touch wood(en leg) it is

thats all well and good if your users have sufficent permissions to navigate to their documents without the start menu! :-) i've now got my whole setup copying the start menu across locally on startup (simply using xcopy) and redirecting the users start menu based on that.. we have one start menu for teachers and another for kids. so we'll see how that goes. a helpful side-effect of doing things this way is that adding shortcuts to the start menu's of individual workstations (such as scanner software etc) is now childsplay too. i'm hoping this will be the final workaround...

i coming to a similar conclusion. the start menu folder is on one of the DCs, and i'm guessing that maybe when a full class of 30 kids log on simultaneously some of the redirects time out. if this was the case though i'd expect some sort of an error in the eventlog though... has anyone ever played with copying start menu folders locally using a simple startup script then setting group policy to redirect to this local folder? sounds too easy to me... but in theory wouldn't this work? would cut down on network traffic a bit too. Our start menus can be very laggy at times.

We have a Windows 2003 network of around 800 users and about 300 win2k and xp pro workstations. pupils and teachers are locked down by group policies which works great except every now and then, randomly the folder redirection for the start menu wil fail and they'll get a stubby little start menu with next to nothing on. They have no access to anything else, no desktop, no my computer etc, this is by design, but it means they then cant do anything but log off and comlain... and complain... and.... complain. nothing in the event logs indicates what the problem is. nothing aparently is failing as far as windows in concerned. it's getting worse though! help?

Not actually true. Check out LanView 3 from MST Software. It has its own Internet Access Manager built in which you can use to disable access to single computers, whole rooms or just certain users. You can also set an over-ride for certain systems or users so that staff can still access the Internet. And just to cap it all off, it's completely free! (And no, I don't get commision from them! ) That's all well and good, and i have played with it, and it would be really very useful if it wasn't for the fact that anyone with a copy of it coud potentially come into my school and wreak havoc!! or am i missing some hidden security features? cause i can see none.