ITWombat

I came across this article which disscusses the various options for VPN. The general bias appears to be OpenVPN (SSL VPN) good, IPSec bad, Client-less SSL VPN is also frowned upon. I guess this touches upon SSL Explorer which was recommened in Cowman's remote access thread I am tempted to go the SSL way but wonder if there would be a performance penalty. Faterall IPSec is emplemented at kernel level and so should be faster.

I like the logging features in ranger Outpost but I think for the price SSL Explorer Enterprise Edition offers more. For £1249 you get unlimmited connections, reverse proxy, network extension, SMS authentication as well as the WebDAV sttuff you get with Outpost.

The idea for this topic came from blog posts on a similar theme by GrumbleDuke and mberry. Miles Berry is a head teacher and former IT manager. In his blog he is concerned that EduGeeks might be too focused on the securing technology and not what the students can get from it. He raises the counter example of Higher Education where staff and student are given greater scope to surf the web and connect their own equipment to the organisiational network. What this fails to acknowlege is that uni students are over 18. They have complete responsilbity of learning. There's no one from the admin office who ensures they attend classes. As for dress code ... yeah well, you see what I'm getting at. University lecturers are pretty much 'just instructors'. School staff are in a large part in loco parentis Bill Fitzgerald replying to Mile's blog said that Very pithy and in fact our very own RoyG raises a similar point in another thread before being shouted down by a chorus of angry NMs. But Roy is no fool. He had a backup plan, basically using disk scrubbing hardware that works like DeepFreeze or Fortres Grande. Tell you what Miles I'll make you a deal. I'll divert the money normally spent on enforcement technology (e.g. NetOp etc, Securus, CensorNet, A B Tutor etc) to educational purposes if teaching colleagues actually take responsibilty for what goes on in their classes

Does what we do as network managers/ICT techs increase the students learning or are we just keeping things ticking over? From the training that is given to IT specialist, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking your runnging the IT for a branch office of a goverment department. One might become concerned about the security and reliablity of computer equipment and data to the detriment of every thing else. Part of tthe problem is that all the measurables tend to focus on administrative tasks whether the MIS is running and is secure and whether teachers can do form filling, lesson planning etc. These tend to have more legal ramifications then whether or not little Jimmy knows how to setup Lime Ware to download video clips (whose content of course will all be educationally relevant ) But then again that's how are jobs are defined. We look after we what we are given and the same teaching staff that seem to need help with doing the most mundane stuff in Word and Excel, are put in charge of selecting the most apporatiate ICT resources. The IT Techs do not concern ourselves with educational effectiveness and teachers don't think about security and deployment practicability.

That's OK for general mailings with just an anonymous Dear Parent/Carer In other circumstances where a student name is mentioned you may need to any check mailing flag just in case their is a court order or other block on an individual parent

The local versus domain account thing shouldn't really make a difference. Have you checked to see what happens when you launch the address book. Can you see the contacts? If this problem has happened 'all of a sudden' then try running Detect and Repair from the help menu or repair Office 2003 from Add/Remove Programs applet in contro panel.

If you use software restriction policies in GPOs you can decide what counts as an executable.

Thanks. I will look at the links. Any reason to NT Wrapper over SrvyAny?

python? what's it like performance wise? I suppose as it deals authentication it's only called once or twice in a session.

how about net user jbloggs /fullname:"Joe Bloggs" Formatting and extracting distinguished names as per dsmod can be a bit of une chienne.

Oh no we actually have to pay for stuff!!!! Sure if you up against the wall budget wise then go for the freeware option. Otheriwse don't give up on Censornet. The V4 educational pricing appears to be quite good.

Thanks AJ. I'll be starting a campaign to have you named as EduGeek's own Deployment MVP. Soon as start of year rush is over I will be giving IronPython and the Express languages a whirl

I know but 1.1 is more widespead. I don't want ot be forced into an upgrade before I know what the situation is with SIMS and other apps.

"...and then you said blah, blah blah blah, blah"

Microsoft has finally released IronPython 1.0, it's implelmentation of the Python dynamic language. Only problem is that it only appears to be availible for .net 2.0

Well's that certainly an interesting argument for VPN. Is that what swung the budget for the FireBox?

"Just a moment ....ah that's better. Now where were we..."

Just focus on the people who know what an IP address is. In these days of DHCP not many people concern themselves with such geekery. Also block internet access from the IP. That will flush out them out

Eeek! They have found us! Let me just change out of the dressinng gown. I guess now I've got to find an alternative whinge space Oh well I suppose it at least gives us hope that EduGeeks can aspire to greatness.

I've been meaning to switch to LDIFE but now dsadd is here it's probably not worth the bother.

Just use the same CSV to feed usernames to net user. There three steps: CSVDE to create accounts then a foreach for the following two commands net user %1 password net user %1 /active:yes Accounts should be disabled by default and won' be enabled until the account meets the password policy for the domain.

Are you sure? OK then what was that thing I was using two years ago on a Windows 2000 network?

Yes , you can still get security 'fixes' for it. As of June last year Windows 2000 is in Extended support until 2010. You get help with security. The only feature update they provide is an upgrade to Windows XP. It's NT4 and Win9x that they have completely disowned and probably Windows XP RTM too.

Even if you don't think the web server contains no valuable information, it is machine on the internal LAN. If it is compromised a hacker is just a hop away from getting at something really juicy like a domain controller, email server or the file server whch has pupil reports, staff appraisals etc. The usual advice is to put an externally facing server in the DMZ. You are lucky in that your server doesn't require Active Directory authentication or access to the SIMS database. @Ric_ To be fair to MS, although IIS4 was like Swiss cheese and IiS5 less so, version 6 hasn't had any really jaw droppingly bad flaws.

Nein! Nein! Have a the script in the startup scripts section of the GPO. It will then run in the system context and so have administrative access to the destination computer(s). You will probably have to put the computer accounts in a group with access to the SIMS share so that they can download the setup executables.