PiqueABoo

Probably, it depends what you have and want. Look at 'shared address space' in this Live@Edu Implementation Guide (v2)

Just a bit, but explaining is good because someone else may not know. To zoom in it looks to me like most (all?) of the config is in user Application Data folder XCU files which makes it a teensy bit of a pain i.e. want to change something and you've got to get updates into there. The only ADM mentions I can find googling are from "Open Office Technology" who appear to sell some kind of client that run on workstations at some point and presumably reads ADM settings and turns them into config file modifications for you (free for personal, otherwise not free). I suppose it's not the end of the world. I guess you can set some the initial config pre-installation with MSTs and thereafter can update it with a logon script or have user GPP copy over updated files, but when there is a well-known long standing standard native mechanism (registry/GPOs) having to deal with special cases is irksome. -- I've only glanced so far but can't obviously see any piles of graphic resource's (Sprogette at least is very keen on dropping pictures of pink dolphins or whatever into their efforts). Am I missing something? If not is there somewhere you can go to get this kind of stuff?

Maybe. Sprogette's new Y3 class have been doing things with MS Word in a CCx school that decided against using RM's TFW, so it's the same one I use just with all the extraneous stuff locked out. No doubt some could use it earlier, but do they really need to learn do this in KS1 where they're a bit pre-occupied with teaching them to a) stop fidgeting, b) read and write the old-fashioned way? You don't have to replace the MSO they already have (everywhere here at least and typically 2003), perhaps just put it on the start menu as an alternative and see what happens. But in that scenario I would want it defaulting, maybe even restricted to MSO file formats so, as ever, how do you centrally configure it in a domain?

Mmm.. I've long talked about Exchange being technological overkill, as in the kind of thing you get "to run mail for a small planet", but I ran considerably simpler, and trivial to recover ones before it existed (Netware Mercury being my very first => your e-mails were stored as files in the file system) and have never got over the relative scariness of Exchange. I'm convinced that used to be the other way around for 2007 i.e. MS said you ought to be scaling out (adding boxes) if you got to the point where you seriously though more RAM would help. Regardless I think there's a bit of a consensus that 16GB is better... and all of this might be different for 2010. But managing accounts in a local GUI is much the same as managing accounts in a Live@Edu + you can get to play with ILM, break things with a subset of the powershell cmdlets, even point code at it (I did the add a few things to someone else's mailbox test the other week => worked) etc. I suppose it just depends on whether your definition of interesting extends to having to fix a seriously broken local Exchange, not that they do tend to break. The inevitable problem with thinking about Exchange is predicting the various loads. You can waste a lot of your life not resolving much with the MS calculators, and by-and-by probably end up making it a bit of a Rolls-Royce solution just in case (which might turn out to be the right decision!). Do the latter for 1700 users and yup, there is a cost-effectivess problem. I think it's really hard to ignore/dismiss Live@Edu and I'm struggling to do so for Staff accounts, never mind Students.

Yes, I'd have quite liked some kind of apology for being tarred with the same brush as your troll (you're not that distinguishable BTW).

This has cheered me up. Yes please.

I served out a serious dev sentence on a nice big complex MIS in the 90s and but the end of that decade we'd "been there and done that" with the kind of issues that, AFAICT, the school ones have been mixed up in of late, not least interoperability. The rough timescales and resources seem reasonable to me, but this rather common OSS binary "all or nothing" is soooo.. frustrating. The first problem is having something that works (with the features an eclectic range of folk have been begging for), the next is getting them to discard the knowledge investment they have already in an existing product. The latter I think, is really, really hard, so you need to do everything you possibly can to chip away at it i.e. if they have MSSQL now and know how to drive it, then just give them MSSQL[1] to make the techs and LA support teams marginally less scared of it, make some of that existing tech know-how still useful and so on. You need the same kind of attitude to GUI-land except I avoid school MIS client apps like the plague so can't comment there. It's the same uncompromising deal with lots of those OSS apps. Sure you can run it on Windows, but nope we're not interested in making deployment easy, we're certainly no going to use MS file/open dialogs so your lockdown works etc., and GPO configuration? Oh no we've got our very own opaque [js|conf|xml] so never in a month of Sundays! ::sigh:: [1] With the appropriate architecture you could certainly make the DB a choice, but no I'm not volunteering for any of this either.

Your mileage varied then.. sorry I haven't ever seen that with dotNet 3.5 SP1 , which mysteriously always works for me. There is someone's last resort dotnet removal utility out there but I have never used it and I'd have to be really desperate, exhausted every avenue, have a known good backup again etc. There might be some useful info on there in the meantime though. In your shoes right now I'd be scrutinising the dotNet 3.5 SP1 installation logs for possible clues. You may or may not be missing something, but that's what mine looks like: dotNet 3.0 SP2 has the WPFs etc. 3.5 SP1 has three ordinary looking hotfixes (KBs)

The MSI you can sign-up for and get says 10.1.85.3 in the MSI properties table.

I wanted to know which edition? in some code and it wasn't anywhere near as straightforward as I expected e.g. just go look in add/remove or whatever. Ended up connecting to the DB and running this query: select SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

My line in the sand is read-only access to student my docs, no access to other adult my docs, no one ever gets their normal user account made an admin. I've been expecting but have yet to encounter a compelling request for write access re. SEN kids etc. Password changing doesn't bother me provided it is limited to a select few because it leaves tracks you can refer back to if necessary... not bothered includes the prospect of say one SLT being in a position to change a teacher's password. Standard defences: "This runs against the grain of [magic word with emphasis] E-safety blah-blah.." and one of those true stories of the very serious inconvenience when a promoted-to-admin teacher account got hit by some brand new and thus undetected malware, which swiftly got the entire domain. The trust issue is fun, in the sense that some folk just don't appear to have ever considered how much access you have until you talk about it re. the seriousness of giving it to someone else. I always used to think trust/ethics was part of what you got paid for in the private sector, so next time you're sulking over the pay-slip perhaps that ignorance is part of the problem...

ROFL. Ask a few simple security questions that should be of interest to anyone allowing any incoming to their LAN, reference something I just read in another thread and: Duh.. lemme see.. oh yeah, 2 + 2 = 22 so ::lightbulb:: You can only be some undercover secret agent working for the Capita opposition!! How extraordinarily Kafka-eqsue... my, I will cherish this one! Or maybe not ::sob:: - are you perhaps, talking about the first post matt40K replied to? But even so you've sucked me in without so much as a.. I'm currently directly on the public pay-roll like most everyone else. I do however have some security in my past and present, thus would like people to care about these kind of issues... y'know as in security of their sensitive data.. that pesky thing the Cabinet Office downwards started getting very fretful about the other year. PS: Good for you. Meanwhile people like Ross Anderson seem to have managed to find security issues in big public sector projects run by other folk who can get some decent consultants, if not the spooks in. It seems highly unlikely Capita wouldn't have done this "nicely", but it really shouldn't hurt to ask or answer.

It's a VPN as in "N is for Network", not an TLS-ised specific application protocol. It necessarily sails through an edge firewall to the relevant box, which I suppose if it's a big fat and relatively expensive SQL app server might host some other DBs. The point of VPNs is that any traffic can be stuffed through one, and of course the standard security practice for VPNs has you terminate them outside a firewall so you can filter what comes out of them. So, does the config you get by default limit it just talking SQL protocols from Capita-land (and how would that be limited to a specific SQL instance)? And if not where/how do you configure what's allowed to pop out of it at your end? Apparently doesn't use certs for mutual auth. either so how good is that shared secret and how widely is it shared i.e. are they unique per site and what's the entropy like? Mr Neal seems to think it will all end up in shipping containers sooner or later. Personally I think there still a few cost of bandwidth vs. increasing data bloat issues to contend with. Plus with a lot of business critical eggs in a basket the very first outage longer than say 36 hours i.e. hitting Day 2, will put a lot of folk into reverse.

Do the backup. Otherwise I've done more than a few of these and haven't yet seen anything to be nervous about. Bear in mind that the current SQL2K5 instance isn't going anywhere, so if you do hit an issue then everyone can just carry on using that current instance until you've figured out the problem. Implicit in the latter is that I haven't seen an SQL2K8 install break current SQL2K5. As ever YMMV, but I think to make this go wrong you'll need to seriously mess up the instruction reading part, or have an OS/system with significant existing damage => take a look around the event logs first.

I'll raise you all with an online emulator. You've been able to get emulators and way too many of the original games off the net for a long time. Not sure this one is much of a motive though i.e. in this case Good Then != Good Now. [Lemmings from a bit later is still pretty cool though - raised on modern tech Sprogette loves it as much as anything on the Wii etc.]

Absolutely. It might not be perfect but being quaint & old-fashioned, if I don't have a very serious clue about something I don't speak in an authoritative manner, plus like some others of my era I suspect I know much more about this and those few bits of software you just mentioned than you might suspect. Whatever, consider what you've just done: Me: DG != ISA + [commercial category filtering] You: DG + blocklist subscription + clueful time ( I suspect is underestimated) = ISA + [commercial category filtering] That's a rebuttal? People who are trying to get this right are supposed to ignore that bit I just highlighted? One way or another the "blocklist subscription + clueful time" you have just inserted **costs money**. So how much and even with those additions are you really sure about your equation? [Doesn't work for me] Look, I'm perfectly happy to agree that given someone clueful with thumb-twiddling time that some org is paying for anyway, you can arrive at a reasonable filtering solution (whether it's a politically acceptable level/type of filtering is another ball-game - category DBs give you whitelists, blocklists miss stuff). What I don't see is a large proportion of sufficiently clueful techs in secondary schools, and in the primary model that I see cluefulness is a moot point because the techs don't have any time (schools can't afford to pay for it => use some RBC/LA default filter level). I do recall someone or other touting it around for that kind of purpose several years ago, so did it end up anywhere? Did it work? Did they have to bolt on anything that cost significant money like a category database for instance?

Think I'm on another planet again. The IWF list seems like a mostly irrelevant side-issue because all the schools I'm conversant with either a) connect through their RBC/LA and get mandatory IWF there, or b) have their own connections (private schools) with ISPs that blackhole the list. Assuming the latter then the only issue is whether your favourite web-filtering solution has decent added category-filtering at an inevitably significant cost per annum. Dans Guardian by itself is NOT a credible replacement for an ISA with a Surf Control, or an Fortigate subscribed to their category filtering service etc. That's it, move along, nothing more to say. --- I decided to play hard with the OSS is perfectly viable for a Primary meme this week and it was in a positive-give-it-a chance way .. and I might stop laughing some time in November. The list of apps on DVDs, miscellaneous list etc really doesn't cut it because a lot are not relevant to those actual requirements and from the remainder most are already used!!!! Are we all supposed to be so dim and stupid that when e.g. a school wants to play with audio, we don't know about and suggest they use Audacity?!? Ditto for the others, except I substitute paint.Net for Gimp etc. What's left: Open Office but very few have hit O2K7 here yet, majority are O2K3 and plenty still run XP - they're just not into changing that for perfectly reasonable reasons and O2K3 has 3.5 years in it yet, by which, bandwidth permitting, they might be scribbling away in the cloud. Might not though because bandwidth costs money too! What's missing?: How long have you got? It's not a fit for everything, but if I had to sum it up it is "lots of software that schools purchased to shore up areas of the curriculum where they are often weak"... science, maths, languages. And of course there is the software for gadgets. And anyone who casually reckons you could pull an MIS like SIMS out of Primarys where plenty of folk have spent years acquiring fragile grips on a fraction of the functionality and insert [free whatever here] without significant trouble is stark, raving mad. One way or another it will cost lots of money, after which you'll still be paying annual maintenance/support regardless of [free whatever here] because that's what you do for critical systems. This mish-mash of visionary educational ICT "experts", the arrogance, the impractical nonsense (I'm assuming most only ever play with and tweet about rather than implement* much besides trivial tech - oh, the parasitic mediocrity of it all!) are really beginning to do my head in now. We are Here[tm], show me a viable There[tm] for the majority of these schools together with some intelligent, credible costs for the journey. Put-up stuff that genuinely works as opposed to "sounds nice" .. or just shut-up please because I don't want to waste my time and school's time (=money) explaining why X, Y & Z is a crock in practice.

Saw that on bink.nu yesterday and cursed it quite a bit for not being the change I wanted! MSE is very nice because of that simplicity, relatively low resource usage which helps with older kit and I've seen it reach malicious parts that the usual bloated AV suspects have missed. Oh and it hasn't yet blue-screened a box, or corrupted a file system and so on. If they made it free to education say <= 100 computers I'd be happy, although I'd be happier with some similarly simple, low resource central management - when to update, can't be messed with and so on.

I think it's like this: When Administrator takes ownership of a file the creator owner does become "Administrator", but the system adds new permissions to the security descriptor for file so the original owner still has the same access they used to have. PS: Having just played for a few mins, sometimes it it definitely "like this" and sometimes it apparently isn't... can't figure out the trigger one way or another, possibly depends on what existing permissions the new owner already had. My head hurts now.

That sounds about right. Whether it *is* right depends on the character of the school.. which in turn usually depends on the Head.. and maybe their predecessor. But don't underestimate how hard it can be between the budget and the Primary s/w & gadgets, especially when it comes to the installation part. BTW who supports them now & what makes you any better? No. I can only speak to what I see locally (other places can be different), but IME Primary systems with that kind of stuff nearly always tend to be very broken/depressing. Depends on the requirements, but I get to play with both Primary and Secondary and haven't noticed that they're especially different except: Primary needs reliability because typically a tech is only there once a week if that; they tend to get by with one DC and maybe an MIS server/workstation, so miss out on replication and load balancing issues; they don't have the Moodles, Exchanges, digital signage, ICT teachers with potentially irksome opinions etc.; they do have lots of software some being quite demanding. Primary can only afford so much support time and you can't easily add a box or pay-s/w to achieve something because of the more significant proportion of the budget that represents. So it definitely helps very much if you're technically adept i.e. good at implementing miraculous native/free solutions in -ve time. Trouble is people who can do the latter that aren't often content with also having to do all the grunt work. That kind of thing gets done at county level for them here e.g. e-mail, VLE. Given the cuts there's no telling whether that will last though.

2008? There may be others, but go look at this utility. Key points: 1) Forget trying to do this with normal GPOs. 2) You can **only** apply this to groups or users.

Wonder what he has been paid by the tax-payer, but no doubt it was worth it. Interesting quote from his personal philosophy: "Great organisations do not rely on a few individuals but embed leadership throughout." Not entirely sure how that fits with these unique and massively important folk that must be paid obscene (for public sector) salaries. More directly, there's not a lot of obvious evidence of their mega-skills and salaries having achieved anything notable in recent years.

Obviously not the first thing to do if you have Win7 drivers, but sometimes they can. I necessarily tried putting an XP NIC driver in a WinPE3 image a while back and it worked.

It genuinely is a joy when you've done it . The pain bit is: a) Messed model names you can find lurking in some boxes (I just edited the gather info script that obtains the model to work around some broken ones - none have been Dell BTW) b) Rounding up the wide variety of h/w available for some models. It's not bad, but model isn't perfect indicator of what consistent bits will be inside any two of them.

I want to scream. There's plenty of unobjectionable stuff in there, but it's the bible quoting, the blithely ignored (inconvenient?) real costs, the hey they have a fifth of the computers compared to Secondary so lets just divide the numbers by five to get the Primary number!!!!!, and most of all the extrapolation to the entire UK. I wouldn't have minded at all but for the latter, could just dismiss it as some opaque local experiment from the wrong side of the Pennines, but if you asked me about it in real-life you'd get to hear some colourful expletives. On my apparently very different planet, like most change, it would immediately incur additional cost not save 25% and it's very debatable how long it might take to recover those costs, assuming you ever do. Point this stuff at typical Primarys, yes Primarys those SHAMEFULLY overlooked schools that do exist and do have their very own non-trivial requirements, that are as much a part of this austerity deal as any others here, and I reckon it would be a disaster. The most pragmatic game in their town right now is about NOT changing .. can you get another year or two's warranty for that single server and thus carry on with the entire stable/settled/understood system.. do you really need to upgrade some app to the latest version with a trivially rearranged GUI and bunch of new bugs.. can you still get XP drivers for the couple of dead boxes you will have to replace, or the one that won't run a realistic Linux any better than XP (has Linux been confused with a 1995 version, NanoBSD or something?) PS: Is there something wrong with Office Live that's right about Google Docs?