ranj

Well I probably will update them soon, but I relucant to make any changes as they are both working fine. i also think don't fix it unless broken....

Hi I had a question regarding a domain controller configuration on my network. I had 3 domain controllers on my network they all are on Server 2003 SP1. One of the domain controllers recently failed and I removed the necessary roles of that server before taking it out of production. Now the server is fixed, I have installed server 2003 and am questioning if I can have this fully patched up with SP2. If I made this server a domain controller like it was before but now with SP2 would that affect replication because the other servers in the domain are still on SP1? If anyone could advise me on this, it would be most appreciated.

HP have also released their 'mininote'. It very good value for the money. 9" screen, 2gb ram, gigabit ethernet, wireless, webcam, bluetooth. All for around £385.

Ok, a few years ago I was signed up for a cardholder protection thing for 3 years which would cover all my cards, driving license, NI card etc. I paid £35 for 3 years cover which I thought wasn't too bad for that sort of piece of mind. One call apparantly and all the items that were registered could not be used any more inc credit cards, passport etc. It also gave me cover if my items were used for fraudlent activity either online or on the highstreet. I just recieved a reminder for this through the post. Back in 2005 i only paid £35 for 3 years cover. Now they want to charge me £70 for 3 years!! I do like the peace of mind having this protection but does anyone know of any alternative protection programs which are just as good and/or cheaper than the Barclays one. thanks

its odd I just noticed that the error number is different to the one at the top. we get an error which is 18030 eror "an internal inconsistency error has occured"

Hi its Ghost version 8.2

I seem to be getting the same message "An internal inconsistency has been detected". It seems to be fine when downloading the image onto one machine, but if you do two machines or more with the same image it throws up that error.

No I have no affiliation with schoolquote

Heres a useful site for IT people in schools. If you answer yes to any of these questions, then I would consider schoolquote. 1. Do you need to produce 3 quotations to your senior managers before the order being accepted. 2. Do you need written quotations of items sent via email before you place any orders. If you answer is yes to one or both of these, then I would consider using schoolquote.co.uk. Schoolquote allows you to get quotations for projects, hardware, software even furniture!!! and it allows you to state all your requirements, if you know what you want you can give them model numbers etc and then reputable companies who are registered as a supplier with schoolquote will then come back to you with a written quotation via the site. The good thing about this is that schoolquote don't disclose any details to the supplier of who has asked for a quote, its completely anonymous. Can be very useful when you looking to get quotations quickly and don't have time to contact all your regular suppliers You could even use it to get an idea on pricing and then what ever the cheaper price is you can go back to an account manager that you trust and place an order with your regular suppliers. It be good to hear others feedback on this. Members who are already with schoolquote if you could provide positive or negative feedback that would be great. BTW its free to signup.

We use openVPN and it works well in our school.

I thought I would share with everyone a good program I purchased recently. I tried all sorts of enterprise type software to backup basically our mac os x server to our NAS box and I tried Netvault, iBackup, rsync and BRU server. I didn't manage to get any of these to backup to a remote storage device all using full trial versions. I purchased superduper from shirt pocket after a trying the shareware product, it allowed me to schedule backups, delete old backups and do a bit of tidyup on the remote device. I purchased the full version for £15! and it has worked a treat. If you looking for a simple backup program for your mac server or client machine, give superduper a try, you will be impressed!

Dear All Recently we had a corrupt default user profile (stored in netlogon share), so we went about creating a new profile. This was the first time i did a profile and thought that if I used a pupils account, use that as the template, i will then copy that and put that as the default user. Problem I have found is since doing this, any new users I add in AD (teachers and other staff) get this pupil profile. Its all locked down and when they go to start, my documents, it displays the documents of that test user I used to create the profile with. If they go through my computer and then click on their H: drive, that shows the correct drive for the user. Did I make a mistake by using a pupil profile. Would I be better of using a admin account to create this default user and then be assured that group policies will look after the rest. How do other schools do this? Please help, as I unsure of what to do thanks

we found insight to be the cheapest. I think we paid £4700 for it. an extra £14 for cd

slight separate question I have 2 domain controllers in my school, both run 2003 standard edition with SP1, I have not upgraded them as we have no issues (why upgrade if its not broken hey), I just recently added a sharepoint 2007 server and that is running windows 2003 enterprise r2, Would it be possible for me to add this as a domain controller for redundancy purposes. Would I get any issues because this server is r2, i.e. replication issues. thanks

We have a system from a company called ROSE electronics. you be able to do what you want to do with their solutions. let me warn you they are expensive but they work!!

I not sure if you can do anything. with a RAID 5 array you can only afford for 1 drive to fail. Sorry, buts it probably the news you dont want to hear.

thanks for the reply guys. I have one more question though, we currently use OWA so that staff can access their emails at home and at work. I have been advised maybe to look at an alternative client for our pupils as OWA can be resource hungry and can place more demands on the exchange server. Does anyone have any reponse to this. My advisor advised a client called round cube which is basically an IMAP client which is compatible with exchange and is siumilar to OWA but less demanding. Has anyone used this, if so would you recommend it, do you have this connected to an exchange server. Are they any alternative IMAP clients (pref free ones) which you recommend that I should look into? Your advice is appreciated. many thanks

Geoff you know Novell netdrive. Do you need a Novell network to implement that or have you implemeneted that with just a windows network and its there as an added level of security? thanks

Dear all Myself and my partner are off to our honeymoon in Florida during August, I don't go on holiday often and its my first time to the USA and I had a question regarding travel insurance. I am aware that it will hurricane season whilst we are in Florida so wanted to ask who is the best travel insurer for this. I been looking at a few travel insurance company websites as well as moneysupermarket and confused but a lot of them dont seem to mention cover for bad weather. Is this cover standard on most policies? Some companies are offering standard or premium options, for florida which option would be best? Has anyone experienced a hurricane whilst in the USA and if so what was there travel insurance like when having to claim? The cheapest I have found is flexicover, Has anyone used them and are they recommended do they offer good support when things go wrong? If anyone can offer me and good or partial answers to this, it would be much appreciated many thanks

Yes you would need to add %programfiles\promissor folder so that students have full persmission to write to the folder you also need to ensure that the latest version of flash player is installed on the client machines otherwise you will get issues with images not appearing whilst doing the test and other random image problems.

We havge just trialised this software and I have been so impressed with this. We were using some software from a company called Sanako which was study 100. This does so much more than sanako ever did. Very impressed, just placed an order for 6 licenses, each costing only £110. Very cost effective. similar solutions were coming in at 1k+. i particularly like the feature where an administrator could login from the teacher machine with a generic account and then send a command to install some software or any command. This is very useful for us administrators!

I just want to know did you manage to use this company in the end? They also come and seen us and I am contemplating whether this is a good idea or not. I do like the idea that all our printer consumables and repairs would all be sorted with this company.

We use both podium and audacity at our school. Both work well. Audacity we have installed centrally on the server and podium is deployed via GPO. The easier setup for administrators is defo podium. It also very easy to use for both pupils and teachers. If you need to use all the extra sound features, use audacity other give podium a shot.

Dear All I been thinking a lot about disaster recovery at the moment and was thinking what would I do if i had a major disaster at the school I work at. i.e. all servers down due to a natural disaster water, fire etc. So i decided on a little project for myself with restoring the schools active directory on a test server using VMware to see the results. If I manage to get that working I was then going to restore the whole of exchange on there as well. Basically more or less a replica of our main DC but in a test environment. I wish I hadn't started because from day 1 I been having problems. I think the issue is because I am using different set of hardware to restore AD. From my knowledge I know if you want to backup AD you need to backup the system state of one of your DC's which I have done. The problem is with systemstate it does everything such as HAL, registry as well as AD of that particular server you take the backup from. Problem is when your restore that you get all sorts of problems. Everytime I have tried all I have been getting is BSOD (blue screen of death) errors once I restart the test server. I have followed some whitepapers from Microsoft and I get the feeling that Microsoft dont really recommend restore AD onto different hardware, in fact they don't seem to support it. All the Server 2003 books I own dont really have much useful information on this either. So I was wondering if fellow managers and technicians have addressed this problem with restoring AD on different hardware. Microsoft recommend that when you restore AD you should have another DC in the domain so the new server can replicate from that. In most situations that would be fine. Where I work we have 3 DC's and if a server fails I would normally follow that route but if you have a big disaster and you effectively have to start the network from scratch using nothing but NT backups what do you do? Any sort of advice anything can offer would be recommended. I hope I can start a useful discussion on this topic...

Does anyone know if these are coming out on the PC version?