AJWhite1970

Saturday afternoon is pretty good, anything that's not nailed down is usually fair game as many exhibitors would rather give it away than pack it back up and lug it home. But that's just our little secret right...

Nothing specific this year, travelling with a SEN specialist from another school and an IT Manager from yet another school (annual trip for all three of us) but will be interested to look at interactive TV screens in classrooms instead of IWB's, a look at 3d projectors to see if they have got any better, pizza from a really good tech stand around lunchtime, dinner with one of my suppliers and the usual trawl to find the best freebie without getting my badge scanned

Changing the login wallpaper is a doddle. Simply create your jpg file (it has to be less than 150k in size from memory), rename it to backgroundDefault.jpg and then copy it to c:\windows\System32\odbe\info\backgrounds To activate the wallpaper, create\change the following registry key:- HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background - OEMBackground=1 (Reg_Dword) Another vote for BGInfo here. We use it to set a nice boring blue background and then have the info we need as admins in the bottom right hand corner (screen shot attached). The asset tag and software versions are taken by using the registry and file version queries hidden in the custom section of BGInfo Hope that helps Andrew

Been doing lots of small jobs all Christmas using Remote Desktop but not required back in the office until Monday. Sims admin did a full upgrade on Tuesday and that's gone fine. Staff and student Remote Access been working 24/7 (and been hammered with logins) and for once no power cuts. All in all, a very simple Christmas shift this year Andrew

Found this guide online:- http://setchell.net/resources/Xibo%20User%20Guide.pdf Bit old but the basics are the same. We managed to convert all our Powerpoint slides into Xibo in one morning plus lots of neat embedded pages etc. Still only scratching the surface at the moment but thus far very impressed Andrew

Broke my EduGeek duck last year when I stopped by for a chat and a lanyard This year I may be even braver and pop round when the pizza's been delivered. At BETT Thursday, Friday and Saturday this year and not going home until Sunday night. Hotel booked and paid for by the school for 3 nights, all I pay is travel (thanks to £1 Megatrain tickets...) Andrew

Hi all. I'm having a quick pre Christmas week play with Xibo to see if it's a better solution long term than our powerpoint driven display screens we use at present. I've got a new Xibo server installed on a Windows 8.1 PC with XAMPP and all looks good. Just wondering if anyone would be prepared to share or point to an idiots guide in getting a display up and running to save me reinventing the wheel? Many thanks as always Andrew

37 twitter accounts managed by myself and the HM with passwords for each department feeds only given to the relevant HOD. Each HOD now has responsibility for their feeds in their JD's and appraisal tasks. Sounds complex but works really well as the departments use it as the news feeds in their departmental webpages. Also big kudos to our PE team who are all massive twits and cover every match of every sport live. Parents absolutly love the information flow especially for foreign trips where staff tweet once a day with pictures and news as well as travel plans, arrival times etc. To start with the HM took some convincing of my plans, now he is the biggest supporter and leads from the very top

Many thanks Chris, exactly what I was looking for Andrew

Morning all. I'm supporting a new in house website hosted on a Windows 2012 server running a very basic html5 setup on IIS (no SQL or clever asp pages etc). At present lots of pages are being updated and staff are having issues with pages remaining in cache and not updating to end users quickly enough. I've disabled file caching in IIS for several file extensions (at least I think I have) but could someone please advise what the latest/correct standard is for not having a page cache in a browser. Thanks Andrew

Thanks everyone - downloading it now Andrew

OK, so fixing another school's network and their lone Windows 2008 SP2 (not R2) server hasn't run windows updates for 30 months!! (The issue I was called in to fix was broken replication on their two Windows 2003 servers so you can kinda guess the mess here, full C drive if you were wondering). Windows Update over the internet just times out (no doubt lost count of the updates needed after 200 or so...) Just wondering if there is a standalone updater I can download and bring back later on an USB drive that would do the job instead? No disk space anywhere on-site to install WSUS... I've used autopatcher for workstations but it doesn't support servers. Cheers Andrew

I have one old Macbook that is used to convert Pages files to Word when students forget and their life works is due to be handed in in 10 minutes time...

7.3.4 came out today, may be worth trying that and seeing if it was a bug? I've used 7 since it came out and I've not encountered that error message. The user you are logged in as to run the app on the workstation does have rights to the path? Andrew Edit: 7.3.4 release notes:- Fixed an issue with Launch Application accessing network subdirectories.

Watched the french film District 13: Ultimatium last night as hadn't seen it for a while. Some brilliant free running scenes in that one!! Last English film I watched was Man of Steel on Sky, which IMHO was utter rubbish...

To answer my own question - This!! Cute File Browser with jQuery and PHP | Tutorialzine Andrew

Hi Does anyone know of a neat php/asp app that will display files and folders in a webpage (I don't want to turn on document browsing if at all possible) I've played with this FolderList which is very simple but I can't get it to browse past the root, any subfolder gives a 500 error (directory browsing works fine in the same folder...) Any help would stop me going slowly mad Cheers Andrew

I agree with all your comments, just arrived on-site and it's a museum here rather than an IT lab. I've brought up one of my older development servers and I'm going to virtulize the exchange server as soon as school finishes and then discuss proper upgrade plans. Windows 2003 with Exchange 2003, the other server here is also 2003 and struggling for disk space. I think this could turn into one of those phone calls I wish I'd never taken... Thanks everyone for your comments Andrew

It's an old 2005 Dell server with "strange sockets on the back of the drives" which I'm guessing is the old SCSI connectors. Not sure sourcing a replacement for that would be that that easy. Am I right in thinking any larger drive is OK or has it got to be an exact 300Gb replacement? Either way not my problem but I bet I get asked.... Andrew

Got them to reseat the drives and then they decided to force both drives online in the Raid controller despite my protests. Amazingly the server has rebooted with all data present. After I've given them the lecture about data backups etc, I'll start getting them to take a vhd snapshot every night so at least there is recoverable data. Hopefully this scare is the kick up the ar$e they need. Thanks for all the advice Andrew

Backups? Don't think so from the way they are panicking..... How would they be able to check what was in which array? Is that in the RAID config somewhere? I'm trying to do this by phone and screen shots before I get in the car and drive 80 miles.. Cheers Andrew

Hi Been phoned by a primary school in a panic this morning as they have come in to find a Dell server with two failed drives in a RAID 5 configuration. It runs their Exchange 2003(!) server but no home drives etc, that's on the other server. The Raid manager is showing:- 00: Ready 01: Failed 02: Online 03: Online 04: Online 05: Failed The server obviously won't boot. My understanding of Raid 5 is if you loose 2 drives at once it can't be recovered even if you put in new disks? Am I correct in telling them it's unrecoverable? Thanks Andrew

Two files are needed, one to delete all printers, then one to install based on computer name cscript \\quartz\profiles\printers\_delete_prn.vbs cscript \\quartz\profiles\printers\vbs\%computername%.vbs delete_prn.vbs strComputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set colInstalledPrinters = objWMIService.ExecQuery _ ("Select * From Win32_Printer Where Network = True") For Each objPrinter in colInstalledPrinters objPrinter.Delete_ Next ------------------ ajw101.vbs On Error resume Next set objNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network") set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") 'Add Network printers objNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\quartz\HP LaserJet P2055dn IT01 P1" objNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\quartz\HP Colour LaserJet CP2025 IT01" objNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\quartz\Konica Minolta 421 STAFFROOM" 'Set Default Printer objNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "\\quartz\HP LaserJet P2055dn IT01 P1" Hope that helps Andrew

Bing? Whats that...? SWGfL have a ticket open on this 4669448 but if it's anything like the rest of the west coast ddos attacks this week I guess it will be working again when whatever attack bot is running either falls over or is turned off...

You're not running BGInfo or similar are you and that's what's kicking in second? Andrew