Joedetic

Old Perculiar and spitfire are ace. I love Pedigree as a good ale to trust that's good most places you go. (Plus it's brewed locally )

If you're on holiday those little ones in the trays are cool. The last BBQ i had was when i was on holiday with mates last summer. We found a rocky cliff that you had to climb over a wall and climb down a hillside to get to, but the view was awesome! Down in Torquay...very nice incdeed. Also good is lighter fluid. We got a bottle....for a purely constructive purpose you understand *looks shifty*

@ wesleyw What's stopping you from letting staff log problems from home with liberum?

OK. It took two degree students (ie me and my flatmate) to get to 51. Not bad for having had 4 pints and a bottle of wine myself this evening Got stuck on the one where you've got to hit the coloured balls in order (i thought it was boggy again but apparently not), so there we gave up.

How are they getting the WEP/WPA key?

The usual convention is for a / to be followed by the number of bits in the subnet mask, not an actual subnet mask isnt it? (or have i got the wrong end of the stick) ie /8 = 255.0.0.0 /16 = 255.255.0.0 /24 = 255.255.255.0 /32 = 255.255.255.255 So maybe you could work out the number of bits in your subnet mask and try it without the whole mask but using the slash mask instead?

Hmmm....at least it's not CISCO ACLs with wildcard masking....fun fun fun.

It's basically a glorified overhead projector if you just use it for documents. The science department have one that they use for dissection. Point it at whatever you're dissecting and play it in big on the screen. I should imagine it'd be useful for demonstrating the innards of a computer for ICT or computing classes. As for where to buy them...have you looked on RapidElectronics. They have all sorts of useful stuff. I'm not sure that's where the science dept. got it from but it could well have been. Failing that maybe the Philip Harris catalogue.

Congratulations! I'm busy trying to work my way through my CCNA at the moment. It'll be next year before I get the whole thing (providing i pass everything) 'cause i'm doing it through the uni. CCNP next apparently I know someone doing the Microsoft stuff and he's finding it quite hard to find time to study for it at the same time as travelling to and from work...being at work for long hours and coming home and just collapsing asleep cause he's getting so tired. But well done and all the best in the future. The sky's the limit eh!

Ooooh it's creepy you say you're a psychology graduate. The guy that incorrectly designed and built our old network was a psychology gradudate. I hope there's no correlation between the two! I'm sure there isnt...he was a silly, silly man! (huzzah for polite insults)

For 250 students and tutors on top of that that's a hell of a lot of laptops. We only ever used to keep two as spares/loan outs. I personally would just say tough. Explain the licensing agreement to them and that you cant give the software out. If it's an external company that manage the courses as opposed to the actual institute then surely they should be supplying their own software licenses for students etc?

One thing else that i'll say about it all is that the other technicians / non-teaching staff can get to be good friends quite quickly. Science techs are always willing to use the helpdesk system i found. Another thing that was found was that technician-types always seem to stick together in the ongoing battle against unrealistic support requests from staff. Something that was asked of (or rather told to) one of the techies at my school was that "You MUST put more RAM in the CMIS server before the end of the week 'cause i've got work to do." When he showed her the RAM usage on the server being very low indeed she still wouldnt believe that it was fine how it was! You've got to love admin staff.

If it were C i could have a stab at saying something to do with FILE *out; fopen(some stuffs i'd need to look up); fprintf(some more stuffs i'd need to look up); fclosef(yet more stuffs i'd need to look up); Have a look on t'internet for streams. If it's just for running occassionally on one machine try http://www.belarc.com It'll list all your machine specs, all the software, all the windows patches etc etc into a local HTML file. Very useful.

You could try getting the book "stolen." When I implemented liberum where i was (cause OTRS fails at what it does), the Head of ICT wanted to keep it in testing stages. As in, only open it up to a very limited number of users. At first only the people within ICT. When we opened it up to heads of department for them to log requests that way it just didnt happen. So you find yourself getting calls on the phone and logging them yourself! It just turns into a departmental management tool in the end for use soley within ICT Services if you cant get people to co-operate.

As a quick aside, talking of the USB - RS232 adapter. One of the things that attracted me to my thinkpad was that i thought it had an RS232 port on it. It doesnt But it is good and light and as Ric_ says...very useful for dragging around and configuring routers and switches and the like. Also makes good for testing interactive whiteboards. Other recommended software is NetStumbler. Good to walk around the school with it in scan mode and check what your WiFi is doing and whether there's any local unsecured wifi networks that the kids could hop onto and get unfiltered internet access etc etc.

Ric_ is right. Separate scripts make it easier to see what's going wrong. However, if you /do/ decide to lump them into one super-script make sure it's commented well, that way it's going to help when it comes to editting etc. With regards to the printer problem. Could it be a permissions thing? IE: being able to print to but not edit properties of the printer?? (*makes stab in the dark*

As a recommendation from someone who worked in ICT Services when i was 16 and 17 (urgh, yes I was mature for my age), dont let the staff take advantage of you cause you're younger than they are. It always happens (not just during term time when i was a student...out of term time when my legs were only just visable from underneath the server cabinet etc etc). It's just something that you have to show the maturity you've no doubt gained and judge what is a favour and what you're actually getting paid to do (or werent getting paid to do in my case ).

@NetworkGeezer. Yeah, the batch files did require environment variables and was an extremely poor bodge that was used by the person that designed and built the network the first time round. It got a complete rebuild on an external contract because it was so poorly designed. The VB script i referred to was the logon script that did EVERYTHING. The "super logon script" i think it was called or something like that (one of the techies wrote it). It checked the machine name and then assigned printers based on that IIRC. It's been a year since i was still helping out in ICT services and there were a few months before i left where i was focusing on my education so i could get into uni so it's a long time since i had anything to do with it to be honest.

I seem to remember someone telling me in the past (or reading it somewhere) that his netgear router had a habit of overheating so he had to put a timer switch in so that it forced it off for 10 minutes every day. But i dont know that that would help in this case. Have you got the settings backed up to a file so that your mate can just logon and restore them if you teach him. Not a permanent solution by any means, but a temporary work around until you find something more permanent.

I <3 debian. It's my prefered distro. As great as ubuntu is for just working with whatever you care to throw at it, I still prefer deb. I always use the unstable version (or is it testing, i cant remember what my netinst disk is now). It's always awesome. Never really had any problems with it. Although, trying to mac spoof on a CLI installation to attach myself to the university's in halls internet then apt-get X and gnome etc is a PITA...i just registered my MAC address on my new computer in the end. (I dont actually boot it any more. Too much software such as Pro Engineer (Prodesktop's big brother), Multisim, labview etc needed for my degree runs better / is easier to install on windows.)

LOL. Pass the Kleenex...i'm hoping that was a crying reference not a ref to my domain name

Well quite. It's not at all pleasent and /that/s why i'm considering changing it. Even if you just pronounce it without the 'i' in the middle it still sounds a little bit like it should be wrong. Never register domains in a hurry people!

I was always under the impression that if you wanted to run electrical cabling outside it needed to be arctic cable so that it doesnt crack when the frost and ice comes? But mind you, when i read the DIY book i was 15 (light reading you understand) so i could well be mistaken. I woke up on sunday and looked at the pile of assignments that need to be done (including a CCNA case study) and thought better of it, donned my sunglasses and shorts and went out on my bike. I did the same this morning, but didnt need the sunglasses as was overcast. Then it started spitting (everybody in!! in a true peter kay reference).

LOL very good. People tell me that i ought to change mine. Apparently people keep reading it as if there was an 'i' between the J and the Z in my domain name (JZNet.org.uk). Which as you can imagin is irritating. Down to unfortunate initials

Well, I've just bought an IBM Thinkpad T41 with a gig of RAM in it from ebay for about £250. I love it. It's only an inch thick and weighs a lot less than my Compaq Presarion R4065EA that's just died on me. The compaq was what i used to use when i worked in IT Services. That was a good laptop, bit heavy, 2GHz processor and a gig of ram, 100GB HDD. Good machine. The thinkpad is going to get used for configuring routers and things aswell as just generally getting lugged around to lectures etc. 1.6GHz Pentium 4 Mobile, 1GB Ram, currently 30GB hard drive but it's getting upgraded to a 120GB this week. It's got WiFi etc so is all in all quite a good laptop. I'm suprised that there was only mention of one thinkpad in this list. I think they are awesome laptops, if not a little expensive.