ITWombat

I don't know whether anyone else has does this but I was wondering if help desk software would be of any use to other deparments in a school. Afterall there are other groups which provide services to teachers and students. Unfortunately, proper workflow solutions are had to come by at the kind of bugets scools have to work with and so every thing gets dumped on email. Are the current help desk solutions flexibale enough to be customised for the repro departmentr or maybe the site supervisors office?

This is just a plea to the bloggers here can you put as much of the technical and manglement stuff in the forums. There's been a few occasions recently when intreseting topics have ben put in bloggs when they would have got much more response in the forums. Yes I do mean you Ben, Tony and AJ. Forum threads don't always have to be started by a question. People could start off by describing some new deployment or code their working on. Don't feel so self concious. The alternative is for the forums to be filled up with discussion on the developmental benefits of eating bread crusts ........that and Geoff saying "You're wrong. Use Linux"

It's finally happened! The donations target has been met (and exceeded by £40 at time of writing). The main thing to note is that nearly 3/4 of the total has been met by commercial entities. This is true testament that you've got a hot property. Well done Dos_Box, Russ, Tony, Ric, ChrisH and all the others that make EduGeek such a great site.

Caereful with raw RDP. There's quite a few mentions on the net that it might be vulnerable to Man in the Middle attacks because there is no autentication of server identity.

Wot thtree! Jusr out of the blue?

LOL! Hey Tony have you a process setup on the server that scans each post for mentions of i***ing

Welcome home, Midget. I hope that workload doesn't get in th way of ironing

Ah ... right

What you'e saying makes sense Tony but to me cumalative means containing everything that came before.

I had always assumed that cumalative updates for IE would mean that previous updaees wouldn't bee needed. Look at the reports it shows some of the old IE CU as still being neeeed. The same also seems to apply for the Outlook 2003 Junk Mail Filter. You can download the most recent ones but the old ones are stil needed. There are some updates which are shown both as being superceded and as superceding other updates. What's that all about? Surely an updateshould be superceding until it is no longer needed.

Woudn't it be easier and more secure to use RDP via VPN. You'd also get more information if you can have a "visual" of the whole server rather than just the WSUS management browser interface.

It's a minor niggle but could it possible to have some of the formatting markups allowed inside a code block. There may be times when it would be useful to emphasise a particular keyword or variable.

Congrats Stewart but to paraphrase Mel Brooks "Are we geeks or rabbits"

Unless implementing LUA e.g. to avoid surfing as admin then there is little advantage in locking the domain account. Once you have local admin then you can do anything that shouldn't

Too right. Some people need to be reminded that teaching is not a technological problem.

What intstruction do you give your users about creating passwords. Do you require them to use a complex password or to string random words together to form a passphrase. There's a gradual trend towards passphrases as they cover two security concerns, length and user friendlyness.Paassphrases will tend to be longer thus ensuring greater protection against automated attacks. The use of normal words would be easier to remember for non-geeks. The one problem might be shoulder surfers for whom passphrases will be like plain text and take longer to type which is a bonus. As for user friendlyness, I wonder how teachers will take to Diceware wordlists. You can imagine the scene in the staffroom. No it's not a Dungeon and Dragons revival it's just password renewal day.

Hey moderator could this thread be moved to the Windows forum. Despite OPA's frustrations there alot of interesting points that desreve a wider audience, if that's Ok with you Contink.

Oh OK. That makes a lot more sense now. I'd still say server security is marginally more important. SSL only encrypts conmunication on the wire. Once you have the server you have one of the endpoints. Eve can pick up voicemail from Alice on Bob's home phone. Anyway Geoff guess you'd never thought you'd ever read yourself saying

On related question does anyone also allow offline files on desktops e.g. for extra fault tolerance. Laptops users at my school also do alot of hot desking with implications for version conflicts.

That's not fair Geoff! You twisted my words. My question was about emphasising the security of a root CA versus that of production servers. I understand totally the need for physical security of servers and as much as possible, securing clients. My concern more about the security of the ceritficiates presented to clients which they asked to trust. Sure the root might be safe but if a server is cracked can't it be made to preesent a subistitued certificate or would that require a complete rebuild of the server. Anyway, I am not secuirty expert. I just wanted to explore the limits of PKI deployment.

I suppose the crampness of a RAM disk would make job harder for a cracker but what's to stop them from hacking UNIONFS to point to their own subsituted root CA. Anyway why place a premium on the physical securiy of the root CA over that of servers. Once a cracker owns a domain controller or other central server it's game over.

I'm not sure what the real advantage is. A hacker could still change settings in KNOPPIX's RAM disk FS. He could also playaround with the certificate on the USB drive. I suppose you'd save on the time taken to do a clean rebuild of the compromised box,

Yeah and a lot of this could be tackled by a proper FAQ.

@NetworkGeezer The minmum requirements say Windows 2003 SP1 so the wait might be over

The problem is that the Wiki is a bit semi-detached. If there was more prominent link then it would get more use.