ITWombat

Oh alright you've talked me into it but I reserve the right to make cheesy jokes

With the rapid growth of the site it would be helpful to the newbs (and not so newb) to have a forum FAQ that actually deals with the subject matter of each forum. The current 'forum FAQ' hotspot appears to be a generic FAQ from the original CMS code. If the EduGeek wiki is meant to be the site FAQ then perhaps there should be a way of more tightly integrating it into the main site. Normally people only find about it in repsonse to a software deployment question. Maybe there should be a reminder in the reg acknowledgement email or the initial PM from this Chris Byers dude-- whoever he is.

Is it the glass and a half of milk in every bar? Seriously though, after having passed the 1st anniversary and the 1000 members mark *, it's as a good time as any to ponder what makes EduGeek such a whizzer site. Is it the proactive admin, the acknowledgement that we are not all in Southern California or just the reassurance that in the mayhem of educational ICT we are not alone. *We probably won't hit true north till September.

in another thread, RoyG suggested that it would be OK to give students admin rights so long as server security was up to par. Best practice normally calls for uptodate patching and disabling unused services. I was just wondering if, added to the above, people here also have a firewall inside the LAN between their servers and client PCs

.Bit Torrent Geoff? Haven't quite fully made the transition to gamekeeper have we

Doesn't OEM licensing have its own restrictions?

Hi Michael, Wilkommen in den EduGeek! That's quite a CV you have there but only your wardrobe can tell us if you had half as 'interesting' a life as GrumbleDook

Ah Mr. Pied Piper of Hamelin, we meet at last

a 1, 2, a 1, 2, 3, 4 ... You're not winking. You're not winking. You're not winking anymore! [pause] You're not winking an-y-more! OK perhaps not quite as poetic as Barrett-Browning's original Sonnets to The Portuguese but conveying much more emotion I think

Yeah, read the explanation text for the policies.

And it appears to have been pretty short lived. I heard on the news that the RAC had clear up loads of discarded flags from the M2 motorway. They should have left them there and let Wayne Rooney pick them up as part of his ASBO.

@tosca Unfortunately the those parts of the admin templates only work for Windows Explorer. Other apps, including some from Microsoft, don't always respect these settings. NTFS ACLs and SRP should always work in all but exceptional cases.

Thanks forall the replies. An great EduGeek thread IMHO. To set the record straight logons aren't unbearably slow at my school but I just felt guilty that GPOs were might be great for me but less than optimum for the user experience. Anyway, I am surprised by the all the negativity towards loopbacks as I once read they were what were used to make per room settings such as printer mappings.

@GrumbleDook Err didn't you have any backups of the S:\SIMS folder tree? @Ashok I hear what you about getting evrything on SQL. The trouble is when Capita .netify a module the first release doesn't work so well and lots of important functionality gets chucked out with the bathwater because it didn't capture the imiagination of the developers.

Yeah I remember that too. They had to speak Russian at the start of the film with accompanying English subtitles and then all of the sudden they changed to speaking English with Russian accents (Connery and Neill excepted ) It was if a suit rushed down from Marketing, shouting "Hey! Drop the substitles now! We have to sell this sutff in the States.".

It's amazing how threads turn out. This one started out as a rumintaion on the use of smilies. It's now become a comparative theology 101.

and in other news: Today marked the 90th aniversary of the battle of the Somme I guess you're right Craig. There are more important things in the world other than football, even for patriots.

Doh! Just found this on the Squid mailing list perl -p -e 's/^([0-9]*)/"[".localtime($1)."]"/e'

Thanks for that Ben. You're not the same Ben of the Unix Time Stamp .com fame are you?

In March uk101man posted a nice script to read the URL history files kept by Internet Explorer in a user's profile. I wanted to write a script to process Squid access log for our on-site proxy but I can't workout the the format of the time stamp it uses. Does anyone how to convert it into a human readble format. I haven't got the time to go all Blechly Park on its ass.

I said I wasn't going to watch the match but I did and the famous Wombat jinx came into play either that or ITWitch thought the Portugese players were the ones playing in white.

I was watching Highlander the other night and something occured to me. This a film about a Scotsman, set for a lot of the time in Scotland. So whose idea bright idea was it to cast Sean Connery as a Spaniard? In a lot of his films they have to go to some lengths to explain away his unchanging accent."Oh cousin Abdul went to school in Edinburgh. Well we are nomadic tribesmen afterall :roll:" This time you wouldn't have thought they would need go through the same sorts of contortions.

Active Directory group policies can be very useful for lots of things but can there be too much of a good thing? What's the best practice for stopping users waiting an eternity befeore they finish logging in. Should you use a monster GPO or a handful of well targeted policies, perhaps one on the user account OU and a loopback on PC room OU?

I don't know if there's a reg hack you could use ut how about creating a short cut of your own and copying it over the default one. It could point to an innocuous share where you want it to be. On more general point it shouldn't matter about the kids getting onto the C: drive if you set the NTFS permissions securely and use software restriction plocies (SRP) to prevent the execution of games and/or malware.

@Geoff So you don't allow acess to HTTPS at all at the schools you manage? Even if nobody orders on-line (e.g. Amazon, Dabs etc) many thirdparty VLEs and webmail services require HTTPs for secure logon. How do you counteract the ARP poisoning in the walk through you gave above?