PiqueABoo

You either do: 1) High bandwidth + low quantity 2) Low/adaptive bandwidth + high quantity (e.g. BITS) I've broken both by pushing the numbers. Copy as fast as you can (to a not too big subset of machines) and install at start-up does have some virtues. The trouble with BITS is what you do next i.e. when do you install? In the background can be a really bad idea in a few cases. [i think it should have been both slipstreamed and available as a package in CC3]

Prove it ;b New-style Academies has prompted more scrutiny of old-style Academies some of which have shiny buildings and AFAIK there's no clear picture on whether they have done anything to improve attainment. As ever we're stuck with trying to compare Apples to Oranges. Same applies to the school exams I took where amongst other things, your grade reflected your performance *relative* to everyone else, and the shape of exams now. My experience (you can't argue with it): I've encountered plenty of the next generation with degrees who I instinctively think are too thick to have one, as in I'm ::gobsmacked:: to find out they have. Dunno, possibly a lot more spoon-feeding going on now, whereas possession of a degree used to be a good indicator of ability to research and think independently. Yup, this is a no-brainer - it's just a case of where you draw the "consistency" line i.e. the trade off between efficient managability and uniqueness. Now that BSF is mostly done for I'm hoping more people will be less defensive and stop massively over-selling the benefits of something that's rarely genuinely innovative about their Windows systems and perhaps focus instead on some serious, economical best practices, where amongst other things "economical" definitely includes accounting for your time and energy.

Well it was released late Feb/early March IIRC, but I don't think "we" really had the measure of it in terms of emerging glitches and gotchas on CC3 until after Easter..

It's the movement I'm against. Yet again my focus is largely Primary and there I see schools which have failed to get a great deal of value out of IT because they're too busy trying to keep up with What They Should Do Next[tm] to make any really effective use of What They Have Now[tm]. Same kind of deal as National Curriculum - just when they're getting their heads around it, everything changes. The last really significant concept that's been repeatedly rammed down their throats: Your (perfectly decent) ICT suite is bad=>use netbooks/gadgets whipped out in class mid-lesson instead, has driven me close to incandesence in recent years because whatever the virtues, most simply could NOT afford the infrastructure to do that seriously i.e. the managed wireless pragmatically required to make it reliable enough to maintain their confidence in the system. Even assuming they could do that and simultaneously afford the inherently more short-lived gadgets, there's the not insignificant (for them) extra costs of managing/maintaining those gadgets. Stability is cool too - I don't want frozen in time and MS et al. life-cycles don't permit it, but I think a little consolidation, stepping off the hamster wheel where you can for a while, would go a long way.

I'm not omnipotent and my view is largely of Primary, but I've been seeing experienced and often excellent intellectually-sharp/character Heads retiring. We're annually told this generation retiring is causing a shortage, which might explain why some of those replacements definitely seem mediocre, plus these days perhaps they're selected more for bureacratic skills (negotiating the "educational psycho-babble") than their management and leadership skills? PS: Just Googling around I found much of the same stuff debated 18 months ago @ the TES and like bow-ties, this comment is cool and definitely worth borrowing: During officer training we were told - in no uncertain terms - that there are no bad soldiers, only bad officers. My observations of SMTs confirm this. There seems to be a wafer-thin veil between assertive leadership and bullying, passion and paranoia, vision and narcissism. Sadly, many incompetents are promoted upwards or outwards making a mockery of references. Good teachers respond to a complex (and contradictory) situation with alacritry, creativity and good humour in an education system creaking under its own rampant bureaucracy. There are a small number of bad teachers who are clever enough not only to beat this monolithic structure but use it to their advantage. I would love to believe in a meritocracy where excellence has its own rewards and honesty is a virtue but the high percntage of effective teachers are too frequently distracted by administrative irrelevances, parental histrionics or less-intelligent but egomaniacal, self-publicising colleagues...

For me one intruiging thing about BSF is that it promoted the 'fourth utility' should-be-like-a-light-switch idea (the only serious objection being the premise that only private-sector could do it), while at the same time encouraging all the visionary/blue sky/ICT-as-magic-educational-outcome-fairy-dust twaddle. Mutually exclusive or what ?!? So in my perfect world all that seriously decadent tat and the 'industry' behind it would very definitely go (never to return) and we'd just focus on core ICT provision with good architecture that works very reliably. I'd like to think that focus shift would be one positive consequence of budget cuts, but IME few could afford any of the "wow!" stuff in the first place (especially in Primary) which means core ICT suffers and makes it all a bit depressing. All depends on how you define "it's aim".

Can't be asked coz it's becoming increasingly ridiculous, but I'd recommend studying a bit group psychology, specifically the stuff about in-groups and out-groups.

You think? Not by a single parents I can think of from Sprogette's Primary class where Teacher is the DH and the amount of time the class are abandoned to TAs has been a serious bone of contention all year. More generally you wouldn't need so much TA help at that level if there hadn't been the political mandates to a) Be unrealistically exclusive i.e. leave some seriously disruptive kids in classes (which in many cases significantly undermines everyone else's education even with a TA around to help keep them in check), b) Be unrealistically differential i.e. expect Teacher to magically tailor every lesson to every kid's unique learning capability. Again coz I live with one and know very well what the real scale of her job is I definitely don't agree with that either. Yes some Teachers do get away with doing a fraction of the job the ought to do (and whose fault is it for letting that happen and how much are they paid to stop it happening?), but you can not extrapolate that to all Teachers.

Ack.. fires up Google and by-and-by this Microsoft document says: In the December 2005 PUR, Microsoft is also introducing expanded use rights for Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2005. These expanded use rights are summarized in the following table. They apply only to the specific editions described. They do not apply to previous versions of these products. [relevant bit of table] Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition: Each software license allows you to run, at any one time, one instance of the server software in a physical OS environment and up to four instances of the server software in virtual OS environments on a particular server. AIUI there were no updates to 2003 R2 Standard i.e. it remained the original one license per instance, whether physical or virtual, hence the word "expanding" as opposed to say "continuing" in SYNACK's 2008 Standard quote.

I'm not authoritative (MS have enough trouble doing that consistently!) but I think it's: 1) 2003 R2 Standard only gets you one licence i.e. you are NOT licensed for a host machine and a virtual machine running on the same box. 2) 2003 R2 Enterprise is the same as 2008 [R2] Enterprise i.e. licenses you for 1 host + 4 virtual 2003's on the same box.

Excellent idea, don't forget and tell everyone else whilst you're remembering. I've never broken into anything without authority: Long since had one those 'defining experiences' where I was literally a carriage return away from stepping over to the 'dark side', but having spent a day making/testing the devious vengeful consequences of that key press[1] (which were definitely going to work) I decided life would just be easier if I didn't do stuff like that. [1] For an online casino on some island tax haven probably owned by some minor organised crime bunch that had paid some spammer who happened(?) to forge my e-mail address into a seriously high volume spam sent on their behalf. As a consequence I got an exploded mailbox with zillions of bounces and a lot of "hand-written" responses of various flavours - largely threats, outrage, but just a few that made me sad and hence vengeful.

I think so too and it's what MS Enterprise folk have long suggested, but it's obviously easier when done from the start and their is a downside: If you've got XP clients you can't get the user sensible information about their folder quotas e.g. for some logon time "You're nearly out of space. Delete something!" app. But that is the *only* issue I've had with it, and it's massively outweighed by the joys of automagic user folder creation.

Absolutely not.. it's in everyone's (mine & their) interest if all their junk is kept in My Docs. I want to minimise logon overheads and I endeavour to accommodate as seamless as possible offline use, so my desktops are redirected to a one of a set of local read-only folders replicated from server at comp startup. The desktop may or may not have some 'managed' shortcuts on it and different group's desktops get directed to different local desktop folders.

Can't say I've ever used it for this, but take a look at the netdom 'move' option. [That page refers to the 2K8 "built-in" one, but IIRC it's in 2k3 support tools - google will tell you]

That makes sense to me. To fix that or something similar (it's been a while) I've long been throwing these straight into the Trusted Zone: servername (NetBIOS), servername.example.com, *.example.com. In principle the second one is redundant because of the third one which I'm fairly sure I added for DFS shares (that wildcard does, or at least did, cover "\\example.com\.."). One of those "seems to work, I'll go back test it properly and then do it with more finesse, on a rainy day" things.

Doesn't work... for the most part (usable) AV is only good at detecting old malware... if I decided to post some superficially helpful util containing my very own secret malicious payload, you could be 100% certain I would have first checked that none of the major AV products had a problem with it. Because of all the spam-bots over the year some AV blocks outbound SMTP connections by default or can easily be configured to do that, so yes it might. But there are much subtler ways to get small amounts of valuable data out of networks.

Like me for instance (once needed to be able to tick the MSCE box on job applications, no courses, bootcamps or braindumps involved) ;b I'm slagging off people with acronym collections in signatures: There are exceptions to the rule, but they are apparently trying to prove something and IME that can often extend to compulsively posting cocky, irresponsible "answers" above those sigs on issues where they're out of their depth. I think all this is an attempt to solve the wrong problem and it's not that big a problem to begin with: I'd be more interested in trying to minimise the number of people asserting broken tech memes that can break other peoples systems i.e. encourage them to be a bit more [bleeping] responsible. If you aren't 100% sure about whatever from personal experience then just use a bit of simple cautious language to indicate that e.g. "I'm not sure, but in principle... blah-blah-blah".

I'll second "some of the worst". -- I think this is a bad idea. If it's to make 'experts' happy they ought to grow up, because earning brownie points and badges is a childish preoccupation. If it's to help stop 'casual visitors' being burnt by dipstick advice/assertions, then they need to get used to it because that's what 99% of the net is like now. One of the few things that is still good about the net is that anyone who has done the work can say something clever on that topic and get a fair hearing based on their words alone i.e. regardless of their acronym collection, job title etc.

I would go back to your LEA support and say "I've got a general purpose query about modifying the DNS zone for our school: I'm told I need to make change to that, but the zone seems to be controlled by a server 'int-ns1-wak.rbcname.net and that's not obviously one of my boxes where I can make changes.'. If they say we don't support Exchange, point out that this doesn't involve doing anything to Exchange and it's a 100% DNS issue. That's special and it really means: [email protected] It's an e-mail address anyone can whine at if they have some issue with anything relating to the 'schoolname.leaname.sch.uk' domain.

One of these days I'll post a question someone knows an answer to.. Anyway ::screams:: fixed this, it was a sneaky typo in the OOTB drivers structure I'd made (arranged by OS\Make\Model). As a test I tried simplifying it to just OS\Model and that worked, so by-and-by I spotted the difference between what 'wmic csproduct get vendor' said the make was on the test machine and the name I'd typed into the OOTB driver structure.

OK repeat the nslookup in SYNACKs post (in the code block) - look for "primary name server" and assuming you find it is that anything you recognise? That is the only place you can add that CNAME and if it's not a) a box you control, b) a box where you can logon to some web i/f and fiddle with that DNS zone, then I don't see how.

You substituted in your real schoolname, laname etc?

Mmm.. some LAs are clearly much better than others then. There is of course another interpretation to that message: Could that simply be the RBC (badly) informing you that they have added that CNAME i.e. you don't need to do anything? If you do an nslookup of "mail.schoolname.leaname.sch.uk" (from home) what does it say?

Around here all the zones under ".sch.uk" are on the RBCs (authoritative) name servers so they do it. This is context sensitive i.e. don't think you can avoid talking to your RBC or some other local school for information about how things work there.

::ignore me:: I thought you meant the read-only attribute (even though you'd said ntfs) not the read ACE (access control entry). So do you basically want to stop desktop.ini having any effect on Administrator logons?