ranj

Hi We got a dilemma in the school I currently work in and was hoping for some help. We currently have 2 networks in our school, a Windows and MAC network. We have 50 Macs which are on their own Open Directory Network and this is connected to an Xserve and XRAID running 10.4.11. The Mac clients are Intel and run 10.4.8. It's become difficult to manage 2 networks and initially when it was setup we tried to integrate the macs on the Active directory network so pupils would have one login but the storage area for Macs would point to the XRAID storage and not windows storage. We never managed to get this working but would like to revisit this if it can possible to do what I propose. I would like all pupils to have one home folder and in this home folder I would like them to see both their windows and Mac files. All storage would be held on the XRAID rather than a windows file server/Nas Box and was wondering if this is possible? Is it possible if a windows client logs in and wants access to a shared or home directory, can this be situated on a XRaid and also if a mac user logs in to a mac with an AD account, can they also see the same storage with a mix of windows files in their home directory? I know they are issues with resource forks and possible corruption by mixing the two file systems but has this been address in 10.5 leopard? If this solution cannot work, is there an alternative way that this could be done? we have have a SNAP server which has a huge amount of storage and can talk via afp, smb, nfs, ftp etc. SO far I have managed to get the XRAID to be seen by our windows server and we can browse files on the storage and the Xserve is binded to our active directory server but if I try to change security permissions on the XRAID through windows it doesnt like it and I am not able to change any security as it seems it can only see users/groups which are the Mac side only. Even if i become an owner I just gets lots of access is denied messages. Many thanks

Hi I hope someone can help me with a question I have. We have just recently installed a wireless network and we have brought 30 laptops to try out on the new wireless. Try to manage Ip addresses for these wireless devices I wish to dedicate a subnet range for just these wireless laptops. Could anyone possibly tell me how I could do this. We currently have 4 separate subnets. We have a 10.122.84 - 10.122.87 and I would like to use our 10.122.87.* subnet for just wireless devices. Its currently used for our VPN connection at the moment and not many IP addresses are used in this range. We have 2 wireless managed switches which manage our wireless network. Would I need to setup a DHCP range on these. Currently this is disabled on the wireless switches. If anyone could point me in the right direction, it would be most appreciated. Thanks

have you had a look at this site: HowToMac.co.uk | Bringing the future of Apple into education Its a really good site and has some good solutions on how to integrate Macs to Windows Domains.

Solution if you copy all the files onto another PC, then run attrib -s -h -r /s /d, this will then take the hidden attribute of all the folders and sub folders for the problem shared area. then you can copy the files back and all is working. Courtsey of Bdixon

Sorry I'm back again with this same problem. Its happened again but with a different shared folder this time. Roughly after 2 months after first posting. I am struggling to understand why only this server is affected. The difference I see is the drive is a iSCSI target connected to a SNAP server rather than a drive which is actually on the server. Due to the importance of the files the files are backed up every night onto a backup server. the backup script which runs is effectively a perl script which utilises xxcopy pro to copy the data from a remote location to the backup server. From my research it seems the backup software could also be the culprit but from the switches I have used it shouldn't cause any issues. When I am on the server which is on server 2003 enterprise r2 when I go to the shared folder the directory is empty (even if I show all hidden files), when I right click the shared folder to check the size it is a large size which indicates that the files are there. When I move the whole of the shared folder to my Win XP machine I can then see all the files but they are all shown as hidden but if i try to make them unhidden I am not able to due to the hidden tab being greyed out. I just wanted to ask again to see if anyone has had similar issues or could point me in the right direction. Thanks

its pretty impressive, not much change since cod4 but still a decent game.

have a look at admodify.net to assist you with any bulk changes you want to make.

XP Home and Vista basic is sufficient enough to act as a base license for a schools agreement.

Try to sell it by saying it can prevent missed meetings (if your school has lots of meetings with staff) there is a really good feature where you can invite attendees to a meetings, if they accept the meeting, it then gets added to their calendar and then it prompts them when the meeting is due. I sold this to staff and we find lots of staff use this feature and has proved invaluable. If you go with exchange 2007, mention how exchange can link in with Voip and if messages are sent to a voice mail, it can then email that up as an attachment and send that to a users inbox, all these types of features improve communication in the schools. Have a look at Microsoft papers, your probably find lots of things that exchange can do that RM easy mail can't. If you do decide to upgrade make sure you go for exchange 2007, make sure that your server needs to be 64-bit.

Does anyone know much about BDD (business Desktop Deployment) can anyone tell me if this is Microsoft's take on imaging machines? I heard its good alternative to ghosting machines. If anyone uses this I'd been keen to hear from them.

I have a question about the Microsoft Support incidents. Our school has a Microsoft Schools agreement and as part of this we have 2 complimentary support calls free of charge and I wanted to use one of them just to get advice from a Microsoft expert to check my whole windows domain and ensure everything is ok. Theres nothing wrong with the network its more of an expert just checking everything is ok and advise to improve things. Do you think I could use a support agreement for this type of call or do you think it can only be used for issues arising with Microsoft software? Thanks in advance

I have recently come across this thread and have become very excited with the possibilities of Sharepoint and what Twynham School have developed. From the VLE they have developed it seems that it must provide real benefit to all users in their learning community. What particularly impressed me was the way parents can interact with their VLE to find out about their Childs progress. At my school we are building our VLE from scratch using Office Sharepoint 2007. I have successfully made a team environment for our members of staff where they can make announcements and collaborate other information. It is also linked with one of our exchange public folders for staff to see the school calendar and we also have an area where we host links to other sites. Currently this is only available to staff but the hope is we can have this rolled out to all of our students and the vision is pupils and staff can login from home access their documents, shared drives, email and the big one is we allow parents to be able to see how their son or daughter is doing in school with statistics from our MIS system (CMIS/Eportal). I wanted to ask if any other edugeek members may be able to share a useful contact/company who may be able to give us a solution similar to what is Twynham. I know its a long shot but thought I would give it a shot.

Please see attachment of what the directory looks like with this issue. thanks Attrib command didnt work unfortuntly.

Came in this morning and I am suddenly having trouble seeing or finding folders and files in a certain shared area on our file server. But when I check for free space under properties, I know the files are still there since the amount of Used Space is still the same as before. When I open up Microsoft Word or Real Player, I can still load the files listed under "Most Recently Viewed" section, but when I actually go into the shared drive, none of the files show up. What I noticed was all the files were showing as hidden, but even when i change the hidden attribute, I am not able to because it is greyed out. Even if I copy the files to my local hard drive I am still not able to change the hidden attribute. I suspect that this is due to a virus, and I have run a full system scan to remove any threats. But I still cannot see any folders or files. Sophos is not able detect any threats either. I have tried going to Control Panel, Folder Options, View, and then select "show hidden files," but it still doesn't work. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Dear all I was wondering if anyone has used the built in application template - Inventory Tracking which can be found in WSS3.0. What we have done at our school is create am inventory system for all our printer toners and cartridges. When we first had it installed if we logged an install it would deduct the amount of items we had in the inventory which means we could track how many toners/cartridges we currently had in school. We had a system crash and didnt manage to backup this template, so we had to start all over again. We have managed to get it back up and running so all of assets are in the template but now if we log an install and change a toner/cartridge it doesnt seem to minus of the item which means we have no idea of how many toners/cartridges we have left. If anyone has used this template, you will know that when you log an install you fill in the information such as what consumable you want to install with other information we customised such as which room its installed in etc. Once that's done you can go to you inventory and it will show that someone has logged this install and what should happen is it should deduct that consumable of the list. It doesnt seem to be doing this, has anyone else come across this issue? I thought it may have been that the group who use this application may not have permission but I have checked this for this particular web part and that doesnt seem to be an issue. If anyone can advise, it would be most appreciated. Thanks

Dear All We in the process of doing some extensive work with our sharepoint site. It currently is used in school as a way for teachers only to see important information, at the moment we only have one team website. we also asked Link2ICT to create a external link, so that the sharepoint site can be access outside of school, and we managed to get some ports unblocked by the ISP. We have a Linux web server which has a second roll of acting like a gateway into our network. So when any resources such as e-mail is accessed externally, it has to come through our web server then to our email server before user gets access. We have done this to reduce the number of servers which are advertised out to the world. Now I thought we had given full access to our sharepoint site externally. We have a team page which is accessible but any other page it trys to reference the address as though it is internal so rather than going to OpenDNS, it goes to http://servername/sitedirectory. Does anyone know why this might be happening. I think it may be an issue with IIS but am unsure of what setting it could be. Any help would be most appreciated.

I would agree with this, if you want a great thumbnail view, ab tutor is great...

We had all sorts of vandalism in our school, because all of our ICT rooms are quite close to each other, we came up with an idea to use one large unused office and build that into a data centre where we rack mounted all of our PCs into 2u racks (not citrix clients but proper intel machines). As large runs of cables were required we used PS2/USB/VGA over cat5 to send the signal these long distances. It is a higher cost because you got to factor in these cat5 extenders, racks and all associated equipment, air conditioning as well but because all your PCs are central in one area you will find you have less issues with the equipment and all pupils see on their desk is a flat screen, ps2 mice and kb and usb port. The benefit is cables cannot be seen with this solution and the secure TFT mount will hide the cables. we purchased tft mounts from a company called Toptec. It has cut our maintenance costs by replacing 2/3 mice a month (previously this would have been about 20/30 mice) and it is a really tidy solution, and if you have an IT room where it gets really hot, this makes a drastic difference as your PCs are not in the same room and TFTs generate really low heat so you staff and pupils dont get too uncomfortable. It works really great for us. Touch wood we have not had an air conditioning failure but if that happened that would cause a slight inconvienance, but nowadays you get a temporary solution and hire an airconditioner in a number of hours. We have 4 IT rooms and the library running throiugh our data centre and it works a treat. This solution was built on the top floor of our school but we can still send these cat5 cables down to the ground floor. You can basically send it a maximum of 90m. We guarantee that all PCs are operational with this solution to the teachers and so far (its been in place for 4 years) its worked really well. We have 2 backup rack machines so if one fails, the technician can swop it in an instance and then take the failed machine away for maintenance. Would recommend it to anyone especially if you have issues with vandalism, IT rooms getting warm, IT teams wanting centralised management of their machines. You can pull machines out the racks to do maintenance which makes it far easier as well. I am happy to send some pictures if required. I can even put you in touch with company who did the installation for us. They are based in Bham. I am hoping once our new school website is complete I can put some pictures on there. It be good actually if any other school have done this type of solution.

Since moving over all of the staff/pupils home directories and profiles to the iSCSI target we have suffered some performance issues. Its not been horrendously slow but there are times when some staff and pupils are saving or opening work on their computers and it will just hang. Currently at the moment the iscsi initiator and target are connected onto the same switch but effectively on the same network. The network card on the initiator is doing both network traffic and iscsi traffic and I have been told that if we use the second network card on there which doesnt have a TCP offload engine (TOE) it will make a difference and would have to monitor CPU usage and if too high might need to invest in a TOE compatible network card. I just wanted to get other views on this. If I used the second network card to just do iSCSI traffic will this help. Its currently all connected to a Layer 2 gigabit switch which does support VLans and the rest. I am currently using Microsoft's ISCSI initator and would really appreciate any recommendations if someone has already performed this at their own institution. Thanks

Hi all Just wondered if anyone has ever had a funny noise come from a laptop AC adapter (in particular Toshiba's). The noise sounds like a insect is trapped in there.... and it keeps making the noise every second. There is something wrong with the AC adapter as the laptop doesnt charge anymore. Just wandered if anyone had this issue. I know it does sound weird... Thanks

We have a signage soliution from a company called inspired solution which I am fairly happy with.

Dear All I think I may have a problem with my passport and I wanted to get other peoples view on it before I act. Ok my passport is due to expire on 19th February 2009. I am going away to my honeymoon in Florida, US and leave these shores on 23rd August 2008, and return on 8th Sept 2008. When I leave here my passport will be less than 6 months to expiry. Will I get any problems leaving the country? I had a look on the US embassy site and think I might be ok but just need a second opinion. Consular Affairs U.S. Embassy London... this site suggests otherwise just read here as well http://london.usembassy.gov/cons_new/faqs/faq_visa_niv.html#niv079 saying "Does my British passport have to be valid for six months beyond my date of departure from the United States? No, if your passport is not valid for at least six months beyond your date of departure from the United States, it will not affect your eligibility to travel. The United States has an agreement with the United Kingdom automatically extending the validity of a passport for six months past the passport's expiration date. Therefore, your passport need remain valid only for the duration of your stay in the United States. " Your advice is appreciated on this, I am beginning to sweat.

HOORAY!! I followed the instructions and it now works, thank to both of you for the support.. much appreciated

yes I have restarted the computer to see if that helped and it hasnt. I thought I would install opera to see if it would resolve the problem as maybe it could have been a firefox issue, but the same issue happens in opera as well. Is there any tool I can use to check the status of the install?

Its odd because now I think it has started to work partly. My edugeek avatar is butthead and before it was static but now it has begun to move, could this be related to this? as that file is only a gif.