cjohnsonuk

Fixed it After testing with a previous snapshot of the tftp server I found that after one reboot it came up with a DHCP address in an incorrect range. A ping, arp -a later I had the mac and make of the dhcp server, reviewing the switch stats I got a port and found a rogue DHCP server. Turned it off, and all works fine again. Just waiting on doc from HP on enabling DHCP snooping to limit where DHCP service responses can come from now...

Whilst I was off over Easter a new HP procurve switch (1910 48G) was installed to replace our netgear one that was intermittently rebooting during the day. The server is a VMWare esxi ubuntu box, dhcp on windows, and this connects to the HP switch. The clients are on switches hung off the HP Procurve. Everything worked fine before I left. Everything except PXE boot appears to work fine since the change. PXE is part of a FOG install but with added isos for virus checking etc). There was quite a bit of work done in the time I was off. The fog server was rebooted. The HP switch is straight out of the box, no VLANs set up on it. Clients will boot the iPXE part of the netboot but then fail, either rebooting again in a continuous loop or coming up with "cannot start download: operation not supported" iPXE - open source boot firmware [err:3c0920] There are broadcast and multicast settings for the procurve, currently all set to "100%" Any ideas where I should start?

Have you tried connecting the projector to the network with a hub and also connecting a PC to the hub running Wireshark to capture what control instructions are sent to the projector by the NEC and Smart control software? Then you can / should be able to write code to resend these instructions...

That's a good point but its not a technical one. I'll sort out the service, they can sort out the permissions/implications/ DPA breach related issues. ;0) I've been itching to get a scheduled sims report running but not had a "Non essential" reporting task to try it on yet. Looks like this is my guinea pig. Thanks for the heads up on the existing report. I'll mod it to output to csv, then parse the file with a php page to present it as an rss feed or similar.

Does that mean you use xibo too? Just installed it the week before Christmas after failing to get on well with Sedao/Image flyer. If I get it working I'll let you know (via this thread.)

I've been asked to see if its possible to show a "Happy birthday to" section on our digital signage. The easiest way I can see it is to get sims to report the names and for me then to "perl" these into a web page or rss feed that the digital signage software (Xibo) will pull down and display. I just need to know a) how to run a sims report on a schedule (it has to be automated!) and b) how to get the sims report to default to "today" for the matched DOB filter. If only I could do a "select name, surname, dob from 'students' where 'students.dob' eq %todaysdate% " Any ideas appreciated. (ps don't pick me up on my sql syntax it was just to demonstrate how easy it should be to get at the information in SIMS!_) ChrisJ

Our SIMS reports are saved as XML files into a folder per subject that the staff then edit in word before being reimported to SIMS. When we come to print these files it can be a royal PITA both in terms of getting them printed and then collating them for each student. We've got round the issue of office 2010 not having, by default, a "right click and print" option for xml files from Windows explorer by using a registry hack but we're still left with a folder per subject full of an xml file per student that means we have loads of collating to do. With over 1600 pupils getting a report on 10 subject (approx) this would be a massive time saving. I'd like to be able to walk the subject folders for the year groups reports and concatenate all the files for each student into one file. However I'm not familiar with the SIMS/windows xml formatting of the files. I'm happy scripting perl to do this I just need to a) find out if there is a better way of doing this b) know which parts of the XML files need to be stripped in order to successfully concatenate them. As there are 3.5k lines per file I thought I'd ask before trying. Any help appreciated Ultimately all the data will be entered directly into sims but for now training 120 staff is more time consuming than i think this script will be. Thanks

Anyone had to buy themselves out of a managed service contract. Someone I know (yeah it really isn't me) has just signed a 3 year contract without getting 3 quotes first as the supplier put frighteners on them saying contract would run out. They've signed what appears to be grossly overpriced and the tech that turns up for half a day is not particularly helpful and is very possessive over who can have what access (eg 3 weeks to get password to allow staff to install drivers for home printer!) to the point that he's being obstructive*. As its a small school there is no in-house tech expertise which is why I've been asked to help. We've organised introduction meetings with 2 other local managed service providers and initial impressions are much better and quotes are less for more service. We're contacting other schools in the area that use these providers for references. With so little of the new 3 yr contract used we think its going to be cheaper in the long run to get out of the new contract and start a new contract with one of the alternatives. Anyone got any experience of this or know what options are available? Thanks ChrisJ * eg not releasing server admin password which we asked for so we could access server console to get its specification and get free disk space stats in order to spec up an upgrade/replacement/alternative. They came out with some bull story about Data protection Act (you can't let them see the server or they will have access to all your students home details and your staff records etc) and put the frighteners on senior staff so they ended up not wanting to let anyone else see the server either!

I have to disagree with you there. You monitor first so that you know how may prints you're doing. Then you can look to consolidate/rearrange/make people aware of the costs. Then knowing how many prints you do and what type you can choose the appropriate printers. Better to spend £1000 on print management software than £10k on printers with a low cost per page only to find you can't get a return on the hardware. Find out what your printing requirements before you buy your printer. Of course you don't need print monitor software you can just count toner and paper bills for this information...

We don't want the teacher to release jobs for students, they are there to teach not to release print jobs. In our proposal the teacher sets the printer to override the "person to charge" with a "shared account". Therefore one interaction at the start of the lesson lets the teacher choose who to charge and all jobs released after that get charged to the shared account... ... until we run a scheduled task that happens at the end of each lesson to reset the printer back to charge personal accounts. ... or the teacher uses an icon on the desktop to reset the printer. Classroom moves? Teacher resets the account to charge. ditto papercut (except its not tied to IIS), but it also has an local software application option as well. It has an option to do page by page detection. I've not tried it yet.

You'd have been better off with Papercut if that is all you're doing (based on the information in your post, t&C apply, your house may be at risk etc) as its considerably cheaper. We're doing loads with Papercut now. Staff have to charge back to their departments (based on their membership of AD groups) which we then cross charge monthly to the head of department. We're seeing if we can work with Papercut on an API to set it so that student printing goes to the department for that lesson as well using the "override" function.

No, not done that. The device didn't show up when connected, just gave me a yellow ? in device viewer so I ran the install from the supplied disk. There was no inf file to allow me just to update drivers...

We've got several teacher PCs with Trust and Belkin Bluetooth dongles in them. They load the Toshiba Bluetooth stack OK adn the devices appear in device manager. When logged in as a user with local admin rights they can run the Bluetooth wireless file transfer program to pull photos and videos the students have made on their phones onto the PC. However in order bring ourselves in line with best business practice and to anticipate issues with BSF teaching staff no longer have local admin rights on the PCs and the software shipped with the dongles won't run, just throwing up an error. Has anyone else had similar and managed to get round this? Or is anyone using a brand of Bluetooth USB dongle that doesn't require local admin rights to run? Thanks ChrisJ

ironically many of the google searches for lists I tried resulted in comments like "I'd post the list here but the forum filter blocks it!" Thanks Chris

We've updated our puremessage and I want to start filtering on "bad words" but I can't find a list. Does anyone have one they can let me have a copy of please? Its just a csv or txt file for importing. also How does your school process behaviour issues such as breaking AUP on web browsing, email abuse etc.? I'm pushing that its a pastoral issue not a technical one. Just because a student uses paint for graffiti doesn't mean the art department deal with that behaviour issue so if they use computers for bullying why should the IT department need to be involved in a behaviour management issue? The other reason is that managing aup breaches will not be part of the managed service so the school needs to get this sorted before BSF so that we're set up and running when it goes live and that we've put the process in place whilst we still have some control over the systems to make sure we get it right. Any feedback welcomed. ChrisJ

Are you sure its her user limit and not a user limit on smoothwall. We had a similar issue where we bought smoothwall with fewer licenses than we needed (something to do with concurrency) and one busy week it ran out of licences.

Thanks for getting back. Extended attributes look like a good option. Anyone know the best way of reading/modifying these attributes from a script? dsquery/DSmod appear to be useless. Is it vb or perl?

We've got a printing system that we use whereby we put users into a group in AD to give them permissions to print against a particular account. Our copiers only allow logging in by code. We've set a 3 digit code for each member of staff and a 2 digit code for each of the AD groups. Concatenating these codes gives us a list from which we can easily identify who is copying what for each department. So if my code is 123 and my department code is 69 then my copier code is 69123 and if I'm authorised to copy for IT Curriculum too (code 71) then I have another code 71123 to charge the copying to them. This way the department part of the codes can easily be got from colleagues and the user only has one code to remember for their personal part. I've got a wonderful spreadsheet that works it all out, creates script to populate the AD groups and exports text files to import into the copiers and mail the group managers a list of people that can print against their department. However when we add new staff or staff move or the AD groups and the spreadsheet get out of sync its a royal pita to sort out. My proposed solution is: To add a custom attribute to the user and group objects in AD to store the code To create my copier codes directly from the information in the AD rather than an duplicate set of records in the spreadsheet. What's the consensus on adding custom fields to AD?

Does this mean you can transmit the video signal from a laptop to it wirelessly? Casio list the wireless without saying what it can be used for. XJ-A145 - CASIO Projectors If just they would to an untrashort throw version it would be ideal! Then I need an ipad wireless video app for it... ChrisJ

So is there an option to allow students to access MS Office software from whatever device they may be using without licensing them all? We'd like to give students access to the school desktop experience from home (or their gran's, or Dad's laptop or the internet café or the PC at the library or their smart phone) so licensing per device is not a viable option. Accessing a VM remotely would allow us to control the number of concurrent accesses by limiting the number of VMs but even this would mean that they are accessing office software from their device not the VM. If you need a license for every PC you "use" or "access" the software from then surely by using logmein or similar you need another license for each PC you use? Terminal services delivering just the application, not the whole desktop would be a more efficient use of resources (internet bandwidth in particular) but I've not found out how MS intend schools to license software delivered this way which is surprising as they are normally jumping to force their software at their future market whilst it is still impressionable. Everyone I've spoken to says you need a license per device that the user interacts with office from. ie not concurrent use, not devices with the software installed. Help! CJ

We're using HP Procurve manager to track network traffic over our 100Mbps intersite link. We run one AD based network over both sites. Before half term everything was fine. Since half term there have been periods of activity where the link becomes saturated one way, sending data from the site with our main servers on it to he other site. All we changed over half term was printing. Each site's PCs print to a local print server so it shouldn't be a print related issue. There is no pattern to it either, it mainly happens at lesson changeover but not always. We have 200 staff so asking all of them if they are using a large files at these times would be too onerous a task especially as few would actually know if the files they use are large. We're using wireshark to try to track packets but we've not found a way of analysing the stats this collects to see who or what is creating these packet bursts. Does anyone know how we can analyse/track the packets to identify source and destination of the top 10 so that we can then look at these machines to see what the data is? We suspect is there is a way to track this on the servers too. Our "video" server is on the main site so teachers viewing videos would create this large volume one way traffic. We're in the process of replicating this to a local server to reduce this intersite traffic but we need to prioritise which resources to replicate. Is there a way on a windows 2008 server to see who has which files open so we can study these during a "period of saturation"? I tried the sysinternals tools (Procmon (used to be filemon)) but had no luck. Any help appreciated. ChrisJ

We need to get three quotes for a managed print service. We've had a couple but I'm keen to see we get best value and that includes good service which you can only mneasure from others recommendations. Does anyone out there have their printers and copiers managed under the same contract? Do you get good service? Who do you use? Thanks ChrisJ

I want to start including a fact of the day or random quote on the desktop wallpaper on our PCs. We use BGinfo to create the image along with a few tech facts (like the computer name) so users can easily access this when they call the helpdesk but I'd like to put something a little more thought provoking like a random famous quote or a KS3/KS4 curriculum topic fact (like "accelleration=velocity/time" or "Henry VII 1491-1547" or "Noble gases : helium (He), neon (Ne), argon (Ar), krypton (Kr), xenon (Xe), and the radioactive radon (Rn)." or a message to do with the time of year "Merry Chistmas", "Happy Hanukke" etc. Does anyone know where I might get a list of famous quotes from? Does anyone know where I might get a list of one line facts from? I'm pretty sure I can knock up a VB script to choose an appropriate random message to display, I just need a list of messages. I took a quick look at wikipedia and wolfram alpha but extracting the information from the page was going to be time consuming. Any hints appreciated. CJ

Not quite a vhd in the vdi sense as its a shared image. You'd have to configure your video editing software accordingly. Personally for video editing I'd use a fat PC. If you had to use or wanted to use a thin client you could do worse than install 4GB+ of flash memory in the thin client for local temp storage. Then stream the video application to the local machine in the same way as the OS so that its all running locally then save just the completed footage to the server when complete. Then get the students to wipe the local flash disks or write a script to do so at the end of the project. CJ

Our BSF proposals so far include local caching servers for data if I'm not mistaken. So far they seem to be quite sensible technically, just a bit blinkered: you must have more PCs, new Dell ones, rather than looking to transform IT they appear to be looking just to renew it. Anyone looking at deploying thin client as part of BSF would not get away with centralising it without some or the majority of the processing servers on site. What you could do is centralise additional capacity that can be automatically booted by any school to provide additional processing capacity when required. The latest Xen server can boot addition servers to provide additional processing power when required. It then powers them off again to save power when the load drops. (I think)