cjohnsonuk

Did you try Ergo.co.uk?

Spreadsheets take too much time to do all the updates. All new purchase orders we now og in our helpdesk: Web help desk (free for one tech): This has no built in assett discovery. For asset discovery we've used the following: Spiceworks (free) Discovery is initiated from the server on a schedule. OCSI/GLPI (free) this uses a client on the workstation to update the database so updates are more reliable if the scheduled update might miss PCs that are off at the discovery time. We're just looking again if anyone else has any other suggestions

I've not looked. Do you know if this does this allow us to scan emails for inappropriate content, quarantine them and forward on to a moderators address for action? Does it do spam and virus filtering? My hotmail spam filter doesn't give me confidence in this service when compared to my gmail account! Chris J

The adsl is really just a backup for our leased line. As the restrictions on traffic on the leased line are more restrictive (originally we could only get outgoing on port 80!) we set up email to go out over the other link.

We think it was the router dropping the line but as we're not in to test we can't be sure. A reboot on a Monday morning almost always cures the problem. I think one of the problems with Exchange 2007 has been the changes we've had to make to allow for the additional space everyone is using. New servers have been added and old ones removed but the GUI tools don't show the full picture The memory requirements on each box are going up too and according to MS recommendations we need 4 maybe 5 Exchange servers, an edge server, an external CAS server, a hub server, and a Storage group server. We'd thought of having to SG servers to split staff adn student data onto separate boxes to spread the load. That's 5 servers that need looking after! The comment on DPA is noted although surely all spam filters do the same looking at peoples email and Phorm does the same with every web page. As part of esafety we need to scan every email for "inappropriate content" too. I thought there was someting about looking at emails that was different in the eyes of the DPA if it was a machine doing the looking as opposed to a person.... Setting up a smtp connection through our Janet connection has not been tried yet but is on the list of things to consider.

We're currently running Exchange 2007 but often experience downtime either at the weekends when the ADSL line drops (and we can't do anything about it) or during the day when some configuration or another doesn't do what its set to and the email tries routing itself round in circles. As staff use email more and more for students submitting work and as students need more and more storage I'm considering "outsourcing" the provision of email servers so we can focus on other support issues. We've considered moving to Gmail for schools before but at the time we were on Exchange 2003 and thought moving to Exchange 2007 would be the better option. When it works well its great but... Has anyone else moved to Google mail? What are the drawbacks? Are there any ongoing problems? What limitations are there? Has anyone made the move and regretted it? Initial quotes from google for email services including 7gb storage per user, positini services for esafety etc are around £4.25 per user which to me seems exceptionally good value. However with 1600 pupils and 200 staff its considerably more expensive than the cost that I can quantify for managing our own internal email on Exchange 2007. Whats difficult is working out how much technician time we need to look after it and how much the downtime costs the school in terms of lost productivity. What value can you put on a reliable /dependable email? If staff lose confidence in using email then this has long term effects on the use of "e-communication" tools such as email. Please let me know your thoughts on this. I tried searching for previous threads on the subject of googlemail but its showing loads so I'm presuming its picking up people's email addresses. ChrisJ

I'd like to run off reports from SIMS FMS to show all the purchases from a particular supplier, or for a particular part/description but both our finance person and their support at the LA say it can't be done, only reporting by cost centre is possible. I know it can be done but just not through the FMS application as the data is all there in a database. Has anyone else had to set up reporting from sims FMS using third party tools? My SQL isn't quite up to "inner joins" and I've looked at the table structure and its all a bit involved. Also does anyone have a tool that will produce a graphical representation of the tables in a and MS SQL database and all the links between the tables? Thanks ChrisJ

Did you get this website baker to use SSO with Active directory so that staff don't need to sign on when viewing teh page logged in as them? Chris

That's currently top of my list. However sharepoint skills are currently bottom of my list having been brought up on a diet of php and mysql, mambo, joomla, etc

I'm looking for a CMS that will allow me to do the following: - Content "audiencing", ie setting it to be viewable to staff only, student only, staff adn student only, public (unauthenticated) based on user group or requesting IP (so that we can have internal content and external : this may be easier with 2 sites and the external one taking a content feed from specific category in teh internal one) - SSO so that staff and students internally get to see content targetted at them WITHOUT having to re log on to the website. The idea is to have the website as the (forced) default intranet page with today's announcements. Obviously targetted content will improve this but staff won't want to log in before they go to the site they opened the browser to view. This should be against LDAP/AD with multiple containers. Open source would be good because, as with all schools, our requirements will change and our budget is zero. Web based management would be best. Anyone got any suggestions? ChrisJ

Our PFI partner is under the impression that they will need to rip all the cat 5e cabling out of their 8 year old building and replace it with cat6 in time for the BSF hand over in 2012. The person stating this couldn't tell me what the difference would be but I don't think it was him that made the decision either. As this will no doubt cost the school is there an arguement to support this? We have fibre between the cabinets and most desktop machines are still only 100Mb/s. I accept that data use will go up but I don't anticipate it going up that much that 1Gb/s to the desktop will be an issue and IIRC cat6 only supports speeds greater than this over short runs. Even at the end of the first BSF contract (approx 8 years from now (IIRC its a 5 year contract and we get handed over in 3 years)) I don't think 1Gb/s to the desktop will be limiting based on our progress over the last 8 years and everyone's predictions that everything is going wireless to personal learning devices. Please let me know your comments. Polite ones, so that I can use them to support my argument that this replacement is not necessary. Thanks

Has anyone got any more information on this? Proxy server bug exposes websites' private parts • The Register Has it been fixed in the latest smooth guard / advanced firewall?

With Gary McKinnon fighting to avoid extradition to the states for cracking/hacking the Pentagon and NASA (IIRC) then you would have thought that the seriousness of this type of offense would be pretty high up in their consciousnesses! He made no changes at all (allegedly) and faces life in jail. How did the BBC know that their bots wouldn't get installed on a PC in a bank or a military establishemnt or a hospital? What if the desktop screen change crashed a PC running someones life support? (it was targetted at MS Windows so this might be possible! ;0) What about the hours spent tracing the perpetrator and undoing the changes. If it took 1 minute to undo each change thats still 15 days of technician time working flat out or 45 working days. If 10% of users placed a call out for tech support at a cost of £50 for the call out and fix that's £110k of additional call outs placed! Somewhere deep inside me I really want to see what would happen if one of the PCs infected was a military PC and that the code they used had a bug in it that opened up a back door for the original writer of the code to gain access. I'm presuming here that they used a script kiddie kit rather than writing their own from scratch? Why create your own bot net when you can get a script kiddie to do the distribution and take the rap for it and then you just exploit a bug you put in the script to give you access to the existing infected machines....

If the tech team at the BBC are naive enough to believe that gaining unauthorised access to a computer is legal then both they, the legal team that should have advised them and the management that should have ensured that the legal team advised them should be hung out to dry. What message does this send out? Can you imagine: "BBC reporters steal cars from public car parks and car showrooms to highlight poor security in todays car design" , "But its OK to do that as it was all in the name of public interest and the cars were returned to the public car parks a month later." or worse "The cars were returned to the owners who were identified when a government department gave out the contact details of the registered drivers to a BBC researcher" Not that I ever did respect their technical know how but really puts a nail in the coffin. I don't know whether I'm just getting old and grumpy but I'm finding more and more BBC (and other news) reports are often going for a story rather than news and are presenting the facts in a biassed or inaccurate way that influences society. E.g. There was a report on yesterday about someone who had committed a crime. "the man, who has recently suffered from XYZ disease, did crime ABC" Where's the relevance in stating his recent ailment? Is that an excuse? Should we feel sympathy that he had a runny nose? Take another example : the recent snow. "It was chaos". No it wasn't, it was a minor inconvenience. People incapable of driving in snow went out ill prepared. Snow chains cost £50. I got places where 4x4s couldn't go in a lowly 2WD hatchback. If you can't afford them stay at home. Or stick to gritted roads. Or get a lift from someone who can drive in snow. There really was no excuse for 90% of the driver who got stuck. And the weather... Rain is always described as "miserable". The weather has no emotion. They are brainwashing us to associate anything that isn't sunny with unhappiness. If it rains put a coat on not a sad face! No wonder there is so much depressiosn in the country! Pheww. That feels a lot better. ChrisJ

Talking of slowing them down... If I change the image or the text for our BGinfo settings (like a Red nose backdrop for example) not all the PCs pick this up, some do some don't. They are all in the same OU. The one I was using this morning didn't pick it up over 5 reboot/gpupdate cycles but then after about 15 minutes it did. The images for the backgrounds are stored in the netwlogon folder and I checked that they had synchronised to all DCs. Even when they do pick it up it can take minutes for the desktop image to appear. WHen I run BGInfo from the command line it takes ages to start up (usually about a minute and it is generally sluggish when being operated). I don't have another network to test it against. Its been bugging me for a while. Help! (please...) ChrisJ

We have the latest BGinfo running at Machine startup via the machine policy to give a "generic" PC info page so we can see info/settings without having to log on. This lets staff tell us what PC they can't log into just by reading the screen. We have another running at login that shows login time, user name and MOTD By default bginfo saves the resulting bmp into %temp%/bginfo.bmp The actual bmp file displayed by windows is saved somewhere on the PC. I did find this in the past but I'm stumped now as, halfway through this post, I can't find it! Our idea was to run attrib +r %temp%/bginfop.bmp from the login script to set the image file (not the BGinfo one shown but the windows one that I can't find) to read only. Without resetting this attribute they shouldn't be able to reset the desktop using the right click "set as desktop image" method. Its not fool proof but it may slow them down.

Does anyone have a working set of smoothwall /Guardian settings that hits that happy spot as far as filtering goes without too many false positives? We've evaluating it but when we went live for a trial it was blocking far too much. I just wondered if anyone had a set of settings that would give us a kick start in the right direction Thanks ChrisJ

How do you get rid of your waste toners? We used to be paid for ours but now we are looking at paying approx £100 \ 60 litre box which we recon we will fill 2 of every month. Ideally we'd like to avoid them going straight to landfill. Chris

We're reviewing our "e" safety practices with the intention of producing a new policy to include at least the following: Web Content filtering Social networking sites and protection of personal data Real time chat Supervised access School IT security and bypass prevention E bullying Integration with behaviour policy, including sanctions and how to apply these with minimum disruption to T&L Does anyone already have anything set up or any documents that you are able to share please to save us reinventing the wheel? Are there any good resources online? Thanks ChrisJ

Spoke to Google in the UK today and got a price of just uk£4.25 per user per year for the Message Discovery option on Google Apps Makes it even more difficult...

I've been loking at this too. About 12 months ago when we were still on Exchange 2003 tools didn't seem to be available however I looked again just last night and there are now solutions using Postini for $45/user per year. I got quoted 60% discount bringing it to £12 per user per year. (currently checking on how that user count changes at the end of each year when we get another 200 students in) So with 2000 students and staff thats still £24k per year but look what you get: Brief -Keeps all your mail for 10 years, including deleted mail! -Allows you to set up reg exp checks on all incoming and outgoing emails and action them -allows you to manage attachment types -7GB of email per user (who needs local storage anymore, think of the savings! (2000 pupils and staff x 7GB = 14TB of data, how much would it cost to back that up?) Students email work through to teachers so less paperwork for them to carry too. -70% (complete guess, please correct me) of all PC use is generic word processing, spreadsheets, internet access that doesn't require specialist software so you cut down on licensing costs for applications. Everyone gets the same interface. -built in chat for peer support -built in video and voice chat now too -OS independant so will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile phone -virus and spam checking included -xml based user account creation /management meaning if you can get a csv of the user names you can automate the creation of new users -no servers to look after -no remote access to set up -no security updates to apply more details: Google Apps If you currently run your own exchange server(s) you'll be spending a significant amount of time maintaing those servers and going on courses to update skills, if you need to provide 24/7/365 then you may need two technicians. Can you get all that for 2000 users for less than £24k p/a elsewhere? You'd be pushed. The only problem I see is a major shift in how to use IT and from my experience "Major shifts" don't go down well with those that would probably most benefit. Please flame me Or support me I'd love to find out what you all think! ChrisJ

Our Zabbix does this for us. What we're struggling with is getting the router restarted programatically.

We're starting to use Zabbix in anger now, rather than just having it installed. We want to monitor access to the internet and if its not "up" then we want to trigger a restart on our ADSL router as 9/10 this resolves the problem. To do this there is a link on one of the router web pages that calls a javascript that restarts the router. Does anyone know how we can call this from a script? Or an alternative way of doing this... We've discovered we do have telnet access to the router and can restart it from there. Thanks Chris

I was hoping to get one answer not 3 more questions! Thanks for all your feedback. We've chosen exchange over open source as it integrates nicely with Sharepoint which our VLE is based on. Per user license would need to include 200 staff and 1700 students. Per PC would be about 800 but then potentially the same as above on top to cover all the staff and students home PCs as well Does anyone have a link to a page that explains all the MS licensing in enough detail for me to make an informed choice without too much legal blather? Thanks Chris

Does the built in windows reporting tools in Server 2008 allow us to view historical information on disk use so we can anticipate when our disks are going to be full? Something along the lines of JAM software's Spaceobserver JAM Software - SpaceObServer - The Hard Disk Space Manager with Database Storage Does anyone else have any other experience of this sort of software? ChrisJ