cheredenine

We're a High School in Norfolk and have recently migrated to SIMS through our LEA's recommended setup. This comprises a hosted solution that we connect to via a remote desktop setup. All well and good until it fails. The component that manages user accounts and handles logins has bittn the dust and hasn't worked since last week. Not just Norfolk affected, apparently the issue is nationwide. Made all the more fun since i've got a timetable to finish off and can only do it through the hosted instance of NovaT... Is anyone else affected? Is this a common occurence with the hosted service?

Me and t'other half relocated from Cheltenham to Norfolk about three years ago; managed to combine the move with upgrading myself from technician to a network manager after 3 or 4 interviews for various jobs. Working in a school already council rules were in effect, so i was able to get paid leave for interviews. T'other half's parents lived near enough to Norfolk that i had a base to spend the night before the interview and could then travel straight back to Gloucestershire after (generally via the KFC at South Mimms services on the M25!). My advice would be to be as selective as you can about the roles you apply for so that you're not travelling huge distances for a job that might well not pay enough or hold your interest; admittedly in the current climate your options might be limited. Also let your boss know your plans - its a legit reason that doesn't reflect on him/her or where you work now and him/her being unhelpful isn't going to make you less keen to leave.. We found it more complex to find a new rental property whilst running out the one we were in and moving everything ourselves in a large van. That said we moved most of the stuff one weekend, i started that monday, whilst t'other half finished with her job and the old house for a couple of weeks. Worked out perfectly for her as well as she had been made redundant and was let go with with a payment ready to get a new job in Norfolk.

I've got two Funkwerk access points linked to a radius server that are currently both new and playing up. Just witnessed a class of laptops unable to log in; nothing untowards in the access point log, but radius server cpu utilisation was at 100% with the process being svchost.exe (helpful, i know) Access points haven't been terribly stable; slight difference in setup that i've so far not been able to get an expert opinion on from manufacturer. One is set to 3000ms server timeout, the other is set to 0. Also the first access point is set to 3 server retries, the other 0. I'm wondering if the 0ms server timeout ight be causing the access point to flood the server with authentication traffic, perhaps. Any thoughts?

Permissions have indeed cascaded as you'd expect. Even created a test text document and it inherited the correct permissions.. Anyone have any clues?

This is what i though as well. Doesn't stand up to testing, however - user has full access to folder in question, even without being a local admin...

Hello, hello! I have a head of maths thats spent a chunk of cash on an Edexel disk - Mathmatics Linear A - that uses the Active Teach interface. Software would only install and would only run when logged on to his laptop as domain admin. When he tries to run software it gives an error: "The application cannot start as it cannot create the needed files. There may not be enough disk space" Suffice to say, there is plenty of disk space... I've tried monitoring the application with Filemon and it seems to stall at a particular stage for the user - it tries to create a folder in his profile (Docs & settings -> User -> Local settings -> Temp -> 'Temporary Files.aaa') and then complains that it can't find a file within that folder. Under the domain admin account it rolls past this point without a second look. The odd part - user is set up to be local admin on the laptop, so there should be nothing his account can't do that the admin account can. Very odd. Anyone else experience this and have a fix in mind? Cheers!

I know very little about laptop trolleys as I've managed to avoid letting pupils use laptops, but the times, they are a-changin' and it looks like we might be going down this route soon. I will be looking at having 30 laptops (make/model unknown currently) that will need somewhere secure to store and charge them. Any suggestions on products to avoid and products that work really well? Any pitfalls or recommendations?

This looks spot on! Thanks for the link, the document will prove most helpful, i reckon. Cheers!

I was going to go down the route of multiple access points for this very reason. I'm assuming the access points will be sufficiently clever or configurable enough to deal with this without clashing... I think i'll do my homework and see if i can get this running...

Thanks for the advice - i'll have a ponder. I suspect the chance of someone gaining access using their own equipment is slight at best meaning a PSK approach would do for us, but its about managing the risks, i guess. I admit i was exagerating about the hugeness of the project; i would need to do significant amounts of research and testing before i would feel comfortable rolling this out and, given i don't have anyone to delegate work to, i'd have to fit everything in to what limited time i can find. One question about the Radius approach, i'm presuming i don't have to apply this network wide from the outset? Specifically, if i have existing wireless access points that i initially don't want managed by Radius, i'm presuming they will continue to work correctly side-by-side with radius enable equipment? I'm likely to be implementing this during termtime and some of our teachers have a wireless connection only and therefore couldn't be knocked off for any length of time.

We're looking at setting up a diploma rooms with 30 computers; recent discussions mean i now need to look at setting up laptops with wifi access rather than the hardwired PCs previously discussed. We dont have a huge amount of wireless onsite - where it exists its used by teaching staff, mainly in mobile classrooms. I'm wondering if its worth the effort to set up a Radius server to authenticate wireless clients given the small number there will be. Would using WPA with a suitably obscure pass phrase be secure enough? Context: We're a rural school with few immediate neighbours. I'm the network manager and also the sole technical support for the school (~600 pupils) and i don't want to make a rod for my own back by committing to a huge project if its not really necesssary..

Peking duck? Now thats a tasty, tasty punishment...

I was reading a similar thread on Ars Technica recently - the consensus of opinion is that if things kick off its very unlikely to go nuclear. The US et al would be too concerned about fall-out or even the perception of fall-out effecting friendlies in the area (South Korea, Japan, etc) to use nuclear weapons unless severely provoked, whilst North Korea's recent weapon tests suggest any nukes they may have are shoddy to say the least. I sure i remember reading something to the effect that the yield calculated following the last test suggests the device failed to go nuclear in the conventional sense at all. I think Dos_Box is right - this is North Korea plonking itself back in the limelight so that they can demand/negotiate more food and resources in return for not getting more belligerent. The other option, of course, is this is Kim Jong Un cracking the whip and putting his stamp on things, ready for when he succeeds Kim Jong Il..

So i got wind of itunes and safari installed on a pupil PC - odd as i haven't put them there and no-one else has admin rights to the PC. Do some digging and found some pupil has downloaded them and the install process has run far enough to install these two apps with only domain user rights. Not sure what state they in as to whther they run properly, but i'm a bit bemused as to how they could get installed without admin rights. Any ideas?

that would have been helpful info, wouldn't it? Oops.. Client PCs and laptops are all WinXP, Server OS is Win2003

No clues, anyone?

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but we've got diploma monies to spend and a decent sized spare classroom. The powers that be want 30 PCs in the room, but in an office style layout, rather than classroom style; i.e. round tables or clusters of tables, et, rather than desks facing the front. Has anyone done this in their school? If so, who did you use and do you have any hints or tips?

This is just a bit odd, but bear with me. Our students have a mandatory profile, whilst the pupil PCs have a policy in place that redirects the start menu/all programs location for any user to a centrally managed list on a share. Teachers have a roaming profile and no start menu/all programs redirection - start menu/all programs contents when logged in determined either by their profile or (much more often) by whats in the all user's start menu on their laptop, etc. Only i've got some teachers now who, on their laptops, have a different all programs menu to what i would expect. As it turns out, and it took a bit of dodgy educational software to bring it to light, the start menu/all programs is being redirected to one of the locations intended for pupil PCs. As an example - i had a MFL teachers account logged on to her laptop, but the start menu/all programs was redirected to the location for one of our library PCs. I'm assuming the affected staff have logged on to one of these pupil PCs at some point and the relevant gpo setting has been lodged in their profile somehow. Any ideas on how to fix? I don't think setting a redirection for teacher accounts will work as they'd need to point to the local computer's all users folder most of the time, but occasionally the teacher's profile...

Apologies if i'm covering ground already covered, but i'm playing catchup here after returning from paternity leave and have a pile of things to get sorted! We've had an issue in the past few days with our kids accessing a porn site. The site wasn't picked up by our LEA's generally quite effective filtering and this has caused our headteacher some concern. Whilst we realise 100% accurate filtering isn't possible, the head is keen to look at more effective solutions. It looks as though the site was created using a freebie domain name by one of our pupils and was sufficiently devoid of content apart from pictures not to flag up any keywords, etc... So... What filtering do you good people use and how flexible is it? I've heard of products that evaluate how much of an image is skin tones and filters accordingly and, whilst this is something i think the head would be interested in, i'm not sure if we're talking huge sums of money to aquire.. Cheers!

Having a look at Joomla now - just waiting for a demo account to be set up. For some reason i'd always assumed it was VLE related like Moodle, so i was initially suspicious... A brief look at their website suggests it might indeed be useful; hopefully a go with the demo site will tell me definitively. The website spec is being produced ready to be issued to a third party company, so i need to be sure Joomla is suitable/appropriate before asking our new site to be built with it in mind...

I'm in the early stages of writing a website specification for an upcoming revamp of our school's website. Our previous one is a bit of a mess, something i had put down to an old fashioned layout and the fact that the web-based content management system wasn't very non-IT-savy user friendly. I had imagined using a similar method for the new one, but having ready a mention of Adobe Contribute, i'm wondering if a locally installed bit of software to manage content generation and uploading might give better results? What sort of systems are in use out there - anyone have any suggestions? I'd ideally like a system friendly to non-technical users as i don't want to get collared making all the changes all the time...

The Edugeek software available from here (thanks to whoever made it) is great - I'm currently having a crackdown on music the kids have saved in their personal areas on the server. I was prompted into action after a backup failed the other day due to the tape being full. I was subsequently, and with no real difficulty, able to delete getting on for 15gb of music off my network. The little... darlings....

Interesting! Am i right to assume the use of two ADSL lines is intended to raise the total potential download speed, rather than any fault tolerance? I've heard of places using two ADSL lines for fault tolerance, but this was described as lines to different exchanges with different providers...

Our connection is undoubtedly expensive - something like £28000. The infrastructure has apparently been upgraded recently from 10mb to 100mb, though they've yet to actually unlease these speeds - a recent speedtest.net outing showed approx 9mb down and 6.5mb up. We'll probably see increases soon as they manage to get BT to finish tweaking the last few rural connections... What i'm getting at here is that its common sense that we should subscribe to a robust service with filtering, etc, but i'm looking for some official source (Becta, DCFS, whatever) that spells out a schools obligations - a document i can give our business manage to quote, you know?