ITWombat

Keeping track of emails involving students can be a bit of nightmare. I have been toying the idea of setting up public folders (Microsoft's term for shared emal folders) for each student. The folder could then either be emailed directly or just a drop box for corrspondance relating to that student. Folder creation could be scripted but can Exchange Server cope with thousands of public folders?

Do schools have to record IM traffic in the same way they have to store emails?

You are as probably fed up as I am of old applications which store user data in a common folder, making things quite insecure. An alternative approach would be to run the program from a network drive. There would one copy of the application folder for each user. With map under root you save on creating 100s of shares. The problem if we stopped there is that the duplication of files would needlessly eat into file storage, particularly if the folder is quite large. This where hard links come in. A hard link is directory entry which points to another file. This makes it appear that a file is one folder when all acceses to it are read from another. The idea is that al common files (e.g exe, dll, media files etc) would be reprsented in each indvidual user folder by hard links. This saves on file storage as only individual user data would actually be stored in a user folder. The main downiside is that it takes longer to set up. Each new user must be set up individually. You must also be quite sure that common files will never need to be modified while the program is running. Most of the slog of setup can be taken away by scripting. The command FSUTIL (XP and 2003) can be used to create the hard links. So what do other people think? Is this scheme worth bothering with or should we stick with the single program folders and curse teachers for buying obsolete programs?

Ah, is that a wet haddock you have there Mr. Dyas :oops: NumptyPoints+=1; Strange that they kept it so quiet. Did anyone here get an invite?

Be careful. This looks a lot like phising. There is no mention of any product called Ignition on the official LogMeIn web site. This is surprising as they are not the kind of company that shuns publicity. If you receive an email purporting to be from LogMeIn which is inviting you as a 'valued customer' to participate in a closed beta then contact LogMeIn support and verify it separately. Don't reply to the mail or click on any links. Don't put your network at risk. The bad guys want your passwords. Think I am paranoid? Just read this.

Yikes! Never do system admin form any machine where non-IT staff have regular physical access. The EcoClub doesn't turn off the servers overnigth do they?

I think A+ is multiple choice so there is no room to explain and show your thiught process even if your answer is 'wrong'.

Shouldn't that be the other way round? If the site's not on the same subnet and there's no gateway then bypassing the proxy would lead to a dead end. I think some RBCs block direct connections to the Web (i.e. connection without using a proxy).

The temp DC will be a VM and so is hardware independant. It could be run from a desktop or laptop while the the exisiting physical server is taken off line and rebuilt.

@webman and srochford The problem with proxy bypass is that Microsoft are not located in your subnet . Ofiice (or rather the IE engine) has to use whatever proxy that is normally used to ge on to the Internet. I think proxycfg is only used to configure Automatic Updates and some other system level processes.

It's the dot between test and server that's the problem. It makes it appear that you have an extra subdomain called 'server' and that the machine's FQDN (fully qualified domain name) is test.server.school-domain.local You should rename the sever as test-server

Actually, all Office files with embedded flash games have the word shockwaveflash written in clear text somewhere. I imagine it wouldn't take much to create a grep and squish script.. Add a bit of logging for evidence and run after the nightly backup. Things will hopefully get easier once the world decides on an XML format for office documents. Does anybody if it is possible to create custom AV signatures for this kind of thing. As Clam is opensource does this run to their sigs?

You could also do a local secuirty policy to prevent student and staff groups from logging on.This would be probably more reliable than scripting a reboot.

Homebrew is difficult unless your Linux guru. If you don't mind spending money I think Symantec Ghost can do push installs of disk images.

That's if it's true network extension VPN like OpenVPN. Broswer based SSL "VPN" doesn't home spyware malware vectors don't get direct access inside the perimeter. Everything is mediated by the application/webserver doing webmail, WebDAV etc. You don't work for Microsoft do you

The Staff on Line list doesn't always seem to contain the names of staff members on the Who is Where list. Is there an official policy of having a duty geek (who puts a blue light above their monitor) and all other staff are then off limits?

Hey D are you either married to or the son on of the head teacher

If Geoff's "only the Senior Tech", then who's the Network Manager, Linus Torvalds?

I believe I made that call The infromation is availible. The problem is that it is hidden. Links to off-site Wikis need to be more prominent. Unless finding the FAQ is some kind of initiation rite then it's location has to bee more obvious to newbies. Also the wiki is not the perfect soltuion in all cases. The FAQ for each forum should be expansive and relavant to the subject matter covered effect. Yeah, there can be a bit of the "too many chiefs and not enough indians" sometimes. However, some changes, such as page design can only be made by admin.

Are you sure about that Mr Britton. It appears to be IPSec and PPTP (yuck!) and it's only for 10 connections. If anyone uses full blooded VPN for MIS clients and such how many concurrent users do you normally have?

Initially thought it was a misprint but it is 400GB not 40GB. It's a Seagate unit drive as well so pukka stuff. Might be worth checking out before they change their minds.

@alonebfg Will they actually being creating EXEs/scripts etc. or is the execute permission just needed for file associations? If it's for the latter then make sure Software Restriction Polcies are setup in additon to the NTFS permissions. This is so that they won't be able to launch their favourite games or any malware from the new folder. Ideally the app should be written only to have common read only data in Program Files with any user created data either in My Documents or the Application Data folder.

The web searches I had done seemed to imply that 2.0 was a subset of 3.0 which was really something called WinFX. I just was just hoping that this meant that I could skip 2.0 altogether. Well bang goes that theory

Unlike .net 1.1 which has a substantial software base, 2.0 hasn't had that much time to gather momentum before 3.0 came out. Is it safe to skip 2.0 and go straight to 3.0 unless you're unlucky enough to be lumbered with an app that is tightly bound to 2.0

Trust you to get that little nugget in. Anyway, fo a number of quite straightforward reasons it may not be possble to acquire FLOSS/freeware equivalents of certain applications. I am just wondering what kind of software would need additonal license control over and above the number of HDD installions or control by a special server module e.g. the 10 connection limit on Windows desktop OS versions acting as file servers. If the software runs of a Windows share, I think thre is an option to limit the number of possible concurrent connecions.