flyinghaggis

Cheers Lord_Edam, This has done the trick. 8)

We've been asked to set up a pupil with an email account so they can send/recieve from email other pupils/staff in the school but cannot send/recieve email externally to addresses outside our domain. We're running MS Exchange 2003 SP1. I'm sure there's probably an option hidden somewhere to do this but I can see an easy way to do it without breaking something else! Does anyone know the best way (assuming it's possible) to set this up? TIA

I've bought a Hauppage WinTV digital Nova-T PCI card from PC world for £40 that works pretty well with Windows media centre (which is just as well because the bundled software is useless )

I'm pretty impressed with it overall. There's nothing groundbreaking but plenty of solid UI improvements and a lot of the built in applications are much more fully featured (ie cutting movies,pics to DVD,etc). The file seach utility is now much more useful and way faster than XP. I ran it on my P4 2GHZ, 1Gb RAM, 256Mb GF6600 and got a system rating of 3. As other people have said it's pretty slow at the moment though hopefully it'll improve. It's also worryingly quick to swallow up the GB of RAM all to itself after only launching a couple of apps like IE and media player. I think the biggest improvement will be that fact that apps need to be designed to run without admin priviledges (should help us lot in schools out no end) and that when the move too 64-bit happens all of the drivers will need to be signed by MS which should make the stability and deployment of hardware an easier task for us aswell. I've been looking at buying a new PC but Vista's convinced me to wait another 6 months until it's released 8)

We set up software restriction policies that stop pupil/staff from running executables from their my documents area's and local/removable drives. It doesnt stop them copying files into these areas but we're found that as soon as users realise they cant run files they copy into these areas it stops them from doing it. Never realised that 2003 could do this. Handy to know it can filter file types in shares! (though unfortunately our main file servers are still 2000) If anyone wants any advice on how to set up Software Restriction Polcies you can PM me :!:

Downloaded it yesterday in 30 minutes via JANET:) I tried it on my home PC and after a bit of playing about with drivers i managed to get everything up and running which was pretty impressive for a beta. Probably more luck than skill on my part though It's looking really good so far. The media centre stuff is nice as is the new interface (way better than the fisher price XP style) and the new Aero Effects are seriously bling 8) It evens runs OK on a 2Ghz P4 though i dont think you'd want to run it with less than a gig of ram as it grabbed about 750Mb with just windows, media player and media centre running. I think a lot of applications will require a rewrite to get them running smoothly under vista as a lot of the ones i tried had various issues (though these may be resolved by the time it goes gold).

Cheers for the replies people, I guess we'll likely end up setting default resolution with a script and/or giving users the ability to change settings themselves (prob using MS quickres/multires scripts). I'd hoped there'd be a way of getting around this issue as we've just recently got the network to a point where everywhere is running at 1024x768. It just seems like such a step back to the days of Windows 95/98 to have to roll out packages/scripts to PC to cater for different resolutions/colour depths and refresh rates. With regards to TFT's is there anyway/setting to get video card to auto-detect the native optimal resolution of a monitor and automatically default to that? So,for example, if you have a 17" TFT windows would automatically default to the correct resolution without requiring this to be checked and set manually for each workstation depending on the monitor?

Changing the resolution is the preferred solution at the moment. I'm just concerned that some staff might complain about the loss of quality after doing this. Guess there's not any real way around it other than to leave them with a CRT monitor!

We've been getting an increasing number of people asking for new 17" flat screens to replace their existing 17" CRT monitors. We've look at various ways of scripting setting screens resolutions but we're unsure what the best course of action is. Typically most 17" TFT's run at 1280x1024. Past experience has shown that a lot of users find the text on a 17" flat screen set to 1280x1024 too small to comfortably read. The 2 'fixes' that spring to mind for this are to either to allow users to set the resolution to 1024x768 (which spoils the picture quality as it isn't the native resolution) or try changing the default font size in windows (which is a bit hit or miss depending on the program you're using). At the moment it seems like a case of picking the lesser of two evils. Does anyone have any other solutions to handling this problem? Another issue is that all of our projectors run at 1024x768 so we'd also hit image quality problems with resolution if people are using 17" TFT's as they'd be higher. We've managed to get around these issues so far by fitting 15" TFT's to various places which are pretty much identical to 17" CRT's. As the prices of 17" TFT's drop (you can get then for about £100) it's looking like 15" TFT's could become a pretty scarce resource so we're trying to find an easy fix for the above problems. What is everyone else doing when it comes to TFT's and various resolutions?

Just for info to anyone looking to buy Inspiration the the Primary site licence on TAGlearning's site (£550) refers to a Primary (Junior School) 'only' site licence! There is a seconday school licence available according to TAG for about £2500. Kinda pricey but better than buying 500 individual copies! We'd looked at Mind Manager and it does look more professional but apart from that it doesn't seem to offer anything that Inspiration doesn't. Inspiration also appears to be more flexible in that it doesn't force you to create a mind map style diagram (ie. you can use if for data-flow diagram's,etc).

Cheers for the link. We'd checked Pugh's site and a couple of our other curriculum online vendors but they only offered per-PC licences. I wonder if primary site means your main business site or if it means primary (school only) site licence. Hopefully it's the former It just seems odd that a site licence should be so relatively cheap when they're mentioned over 1000 copies at £18 each on the same page. Seriously, what school's gonna spend nearly £20k on mind mapping software 8O

We've blocked it as we've already had one complaint from a parent about a page on there to do with one kid bullying another (All done out of school though so not much else we can do).

We're just away to demo MindManager and Inspiration to the staff and give them trial copies to take home to play with so we'll see which one they think is best. The biggest problem so far isn't a technical or social one but licensing terms! MindManager offer a site licence for £2k but I can find anywhere that will sell inspiration on anything but a per-computer licence. Ideally we'd like to roll the software out to all of the computers in our school (over 500) which makes Inspiration the much more expensive alternative. It's either that or heavily restrict where the software is installed. We like to avoid limiting deployment of software like this as it annoys staff who always assume software is available on any PC! Does anyone know if it's possible to get any kind of site / concurrent use licence for inspiration :?:

Has anyone had a chance to play with this yet? I've read about the concept and it sounds pretty cool being able to run an OS locally on thin clients over the network without the traditional multimedia/performance problems on thin clients. It does make me wonder how quick it would be as it's loading the whole OS over the network! Hopfully it's not another RM NetLM! I could see it being pretty slow streaming apps over the network and the costs of 'thin' client Wyse hardware for WSM isn't far off the cost of a full PC!

Yeah. We're basically looking to use the PIX like a router to let traffic go through from it to ISA and then onto the internal network. We haven't got any dedicated routers onsite though. The PIX would just be configured to allow all outbound traffic (as it would be controlled by ISA for clients on our network). We'd then redirect the various incoming ports for web traffic from the PIX too ISA for WWW,SMTP,etc. It's just a question of trying to get the above to work to allow access to the relevant servers.

Cheers Pete, That's actually the main document we've been looking at to decide on how to arrange ISA and the PIX. Worryingly it says that arranging a back-to-back set up like we're planning should be simple! I guess it's the age old thing of anything's simple if you know how to do it

Yeah, we're fairly happen that using ISA on it's own would be secure enough but wanted to add the PIX just for the extra level of security. Shame there doesn't seem to be anything readily available on the web giving information/guides/exampes on setting up a PIX Makes me wonder if Cisco have got some kind of copyright law that stops people from publishing documentation regarding their stuff on the web? Any web links would still be appreciated as I don't think there's much chance of getting a Cisco course organised for ourselves in the near future.

I suspected that was the reason I was having problems finding free documentation! The quick setup guide (what they pass off as a manual) that comes with the PIX is a waste of space aswell. It's literally just a few pages telling you how to plug it in, assign IP addresses and add simple IP port forwards with the GUI :? I was just living in the hope that there might be some websites out there dedicated to setting up and configuring PIX's with some how-to guides and examples :?:

Yeah, we're basically wanting to use it like a filtering bridge but I know a PIX cant be setup like that as you need to route traffix between it's interfaces. I just wanted to check that the above setup was workable and to see if anyone had any comments or suggestions to improve/change it. Are there any PIX websites/guides you could recommend as I've not configured a PIX before. All of the PIX guru's I've asked only speak using the command-line version of the interface. This is OK if you know then commands but it's double-dutch to me at the moment Im keen to learn the syntax though as everyone says it's way more varsatile than the graphical device manager.

We've been looking in ways to combine our ISA 2004 Firewall and Cisco PIX to ‘double’ up our firewall to increase security but we're unsure about the best way to go about it. We've had a hunt on http://www.isaserver.org and decided to implement a back-to-back setup with the PIX connected to the internet directly, then the ISA firewall and our internal network. Something like the diagram below if it makes sense:- {Internet} | | [External IP address - PIX] Cisco PIX 515e [192.168.4.1 - internal PIX address] | | [192.168.4.2 - external ISA Address ISA 2004 [192.168.3.33 – internal ISA Address] | | {Internal Network - Web/Mail Server, etc} We wanted to use the PIX as more of a simple pass-through IP filter for the internet traffic forwarding incoming traffic (HTTP, SMTP, etc) to the firewall which would then control it. Our internal network has the subnet 255.255.252.0 so if I’m thinking things through correctly ISA should be able to route between the external IP to the internal network without having to double-NAT on the ISA address which I’ve been told causes problems as both internal network and DMZ are on the same network address but on different subnets. As far as I know there’s no way to use the PIX as a simple IP filter without routing/NAT’ing between its connections? We've got outgoing traffic from internal network clients working OK but we're having problems getting incoming traffic redirecting past the ISA too the SMTP, WWW, etc servers on the internal network. I was just looking for a quick sanity check to make sure what we're planning is possible and that it won't cause any issues. I'm aware that we could put the SMTP, WWW server on what's effectively the DMZ between the PIX and ISA but wanted to avoid the complexity of this at the moment if possible. Are there any sites with how-to guides for setting up PIX that anyone could recommend as I’ve checked Cisco’s site but the documentation available there seems pretty poor. I was hoping there’d be something along the lines of ISAserver.org as it’s proved invaluable for setting up ISA?

We created a Software Restriction Policy GPO that stops users running executables from removable drives A: to G: and shared areas where users can write files to the network (my docs, subject shares,etc). Took as few days to fine tweak it but we sleep a lot more easily at night knowing pupils (and staff) can't run any .exe or script they feel like on the network. It's worked pretty well for us so far.... I'd expect this would stop them from launching the app within Office documents aswell though admittedly I've not tried this yet?

Cheers for the replies guys. We've downloaded a few demo's and MindJet MindManager and Mindgenius are looking like the favourites so far. They also offer educational site licences which is ideal. We'll put these onto our list of suitable software and see what the powers that be decide to go with

We're in the process of trying to decide on a piece of software to use school-wide for mind mapping. We've looked at several so far and the best two we've seen are FreeMind and Inspiration. FreeMind seems pretty good (and doesn't cost anything which is nice) but lacks some of the features of Inspiration. The problem with inspiration is the cost and the fact that they only offer per-machine licencing means it which would work out very expensive to roll out to every PC on the network. We'd heard some folk saying that LT Scotland had a deal with Inspiration to provide it more cheaply to Scottish school but we haven't managed to find and links or more information about this. What's everyone else using for mind-mapping software?

Ah, not sure it can be done then. I think as someone else mentioned that pressing the poweroff button on the PC case itself should shut down the PC even if someone is logged on/locked. This is probably the best thing to do but it does mean that you have to shut down the PC to do it. At least it's better than pulling the power plug as it shuts down the PC cleanly. I dont think there would be anyway to give them access (other than admin rights) as logging someone off a machine would require permissions to close any of their open files and close all their active processes. You wouldn't have these rights unless you were a local admin on the PC. I can't think of any easy way to selectively grant those kind of permissions either. :?

I don't think it can be done without granting Admin rights (to the local PC at least) and I'm guessing your probably (quite rightly) not going to want to do that! Perhaps you could add a new group policy that only applies to pupils that would stop them from locking workstations but wouldnt affect staff if they're moaning about losing the option?