Joedetic

I can recommend the FreeBSD based ones being as I'm a bit of a freeBSD fanboy There's m0n0wall. That's nice and simple to configure etc. pfSense has more options, add-ons and features than m0n0wall so can take some time to configure if you're going for the full whack. Both are FreeBSD based as I've already mentioned and I always find it very stable. They will run on the lower end machines such as you might have lying around to use (as will Smoothwall, being linux based). Both support vlans which is good if you have a separate networks for maybe student laptops or admin etc. There's also a captive portal on both which would be quite good for student laptops etc. You'd have to have a look on the respective websites for a comprehensive plugins/feature list.

If you want new I'd go for amazon personally, but second hand there's no harm in trying ebay.

Can't go wrong with stickers. I'll have one if you don't mind It can go somewhere with my ubuntu stickers. But not on my lovely new lian-li case mind

@Joanne it seemed to manage the ones I used ok...maybe that's because they're all phonetically spelt anyway @Edu-IT I /think/ about £100

One of my mates has one. It's fun (read as childish) seeing which swearwords we can get it to pronounce correctly

You can get information on the content of the Cisco courses here: http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/netacad/course_catalog/index.html If you can get hold of the on line materials that cisco produce it'd be even more useful. If you're studying a Cisco course you can download them in a .zip archive.

When you see the topic in the forums there are the page numbers next to it in subscript in brackets. But it could do with a last page button...I've seen that on other forums.

I knew there was a good reason that I never leave my bluetooth on That and it eats power.

*Hug* Apparently my message has to be 10 letters or I can't post....so there's some more characters.

I had a 1U poweredge until recently. Dual 1GHz processors and a Gig of ram. I added an extra HDD to the two that were there and stuck it in RAID-5. I sold it recently to a mate for £120. Not bad really. It served me well but since then I've had higher spec machines on the job

Damn...I wish I had a reason to go to Bett...I could do with a new USB stick

Whilst CCNA does technically expire you can still put on your CV "CCNA 2008-2011" etc. I'm currently doing a plethora of Cisco courses with Uni. This semester they'll be making up 3/4 of my course. Whilst they are aimed heavily at Cisco kit there is a lot of valuable theory that teaches you about trouble shooting equipment (which everyone uses at some point), creating security policies, VPNs (not just configuration but the inner workings of different types) and lots of different skills which are transferable to other environments. Obviously, as has previously been mentioned, it's quite suited to Network Engineers (*points at signature*), so you should look at which aspect of IT you want to go into before you jump into either qualification.

Sounds good. I don't know whether or not it might be useful to be able to minimize it to system tray or something? I could keep coming up with things but it might start to detract from the simplicity of the utility and make it a bit more complex.

I get that if the window isn't made big enough. too.

Transparent backgrounds on favicons look nice and rather web 2.0 to match the swanky redesign

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3R6T Google is a great website you know Mind you...you said good and I don't know how good that one is...

I'll second John on the banner thing. (I'm on a 19" wide screen so 1440x900). The links bar with the News, Forums etc links in it appears to be rounded to match the bottom of the page if you see what I mean. So it's like it's designed to be a separate entity within the page as opposed to overlapping the header which could maybe be rounded and become a floaty entity of it's own too? (Sorry for all the naff terminology...you wouldn't know that I've got an a-level in product design!)

I was thinking along the lines of various mmcs maybe. It was just a bit of a brain fart more than anything

An ultimate pub snack...scampi fries. Failing that local pork scratchings

I think I'm going to give this a go. What I've got at the moment is a tool bar that isn't docked in the windows taskbar. It's just a toolbar of a folder I've got in my home folder that has some links to software and folders etc. Very basic. Does your Admin's Admin Bar have the facility to add to and/or hide what's there at the moment?

If you want to tame your paths into something a bit prettier however, you might want to have a look at URL rewriting. I see you're using ASP.net so I'm assuming IIS. There are various ISAPI filters your can get for doing URL writing I think.

I tried to grow mine for about 8 months, then I had it thinned out a bit because it was just going a bit mad, then I decided to get it all lopped off. I considered just shaving it all off down to a short grade. Seeing as my family seems to have male pattern baldness on my dad's side I'm going to have to eventually. Back to a short back and sides for now. Dos_Box, post removal pictures are going to be required. I've seen the video interview from a previous BETT so before isn't so necessary.

God what have I started. @crc-ict: I've seen someone powering several guitar amps, one of those big Yamaha electric pianos, some PA kit and some lighting from one 13A socket through the help of daisy chained splitter sockets so that's why I really don't like the idea. It was really getting very hot and I'm not exaggerating! Of course it's down to common sense, but come on....we're talking about the people that call up IT services and ask what to do when their monitor doesn't work and the answer is "turn it on at the wall."

@Andrew_C: You're absolutely right that is just not true!! What I'm thinking and what I type appear to be two separate things these days. I meant to put something about subtle hints in design not to plug too many things in to reduce the risk of overloading or something like that. But in the end it's a moot point because this is part of the reason fuses were invented.

Well, yes, if all you're running are things like PCs and lower powered devices then you're not going to run into much of a problem. But when it comes to kettles (which are quite often found in offices ), and maybe portable air con units (which some people use in server rooms) the amps start to rack up and in turn the power. If you were to speak to your site manager and ask about getting a quote it couldn't do any harm. It makes it a bit easier if you've already got a ring main in with dado-level trunking.