DavePa

We are having an updated Sage 200 installed but when installing it on my machine I get an error that states "The computer name must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit and have the interior characters of only letter, digits and hyphens". According to the consultants this is in line with MS KB 909264 and is a requirement for Sage on both servers and workstations. I've run the previous version without problem for years so have no idea why it has been changed now. In common with a lot of people we use SCCM to image machines and grab the serial number of the machine to be the computer name. I've now got to identify any machine that is likely to run sage, drop if off of the domain, rename it nd rejoin it before I can install Sage. Anybody else had this as an issue and did you manage to find a workaround or give in and start manually renaming machines?

To paraphrase Admiral Ackbar... It's a wrap (Sorry, couldn't resist)

We purchased a bunch of APs and switches last year but need some more switches in the summer - probably 2 or 3 MS320-LP to match the ones we already have and the 5 years for the price of 1 is quite appealing. I'll make sure we order before 31/7 and let our reseller know there is an offer on and to check if we are eligible

That's me! In all seriousness though, does the 5 years for the price of 1 apply to existing customers as well or is it just the free PoE switch that applies to both?

Research has shown that 10% of men prefer women with short legs and 15% prefer women with long legs. The rest prefer something in between. I made the % up but was the joke one of theirs?

No idea on the technology that you would need but I would have more concerns about the intent - I'm all for 'winners' and 'losers' but I would have hated to have had any part of my academic prowess displayed on a big screen for all to laugh at! I understand achievement percentages are not a huge amount of information by themselves but this could turn out to be the thin end of the wedge...

Is there is any way of bringing the servers together even over a weekend or something? That's how we planned a similar task (although in the end it never happened). If you speak to backup companies they usually recommend: - both servers plugged into same switch - both servers on same LAN segment at same site - both servers at same site but dfferent LAN segments - portable storage Having the servers at different physical locations is the slowest and riskiest way of doing it - use

Softcat, Storm or XMA for general computers and laptops VeryPC for Windows tablets, Specialist builder (Overclockers/SCAN) for custom builds

You have websites that are legal issues that should be blocked for ALL users - terrorism, radicalisation, pornography and a whole bunch more. Beyond that there is a wide range of opinions. A secondary will block less than a primary but more than a FE college for example. The problem with blocking sites according to categorisation is that 'games' covers not only sites that should be blocked but includes others that may be acceptable. Youtube is another example - there is a lot of good material there but there is a lot of unacceptable material as well. Summary: Block the legal stuff, make a call based on feedback on most other stuff, the school may wel dictate which categories they want to be blocked.

Odd one in case anybody else comes across it but I've noticed that on a newly imaged Win7 machine (Image created yesterday, includes all updates) folders that the user has no access to are not even visible. We have a folder that is used by a number of people and there are 3 folders within it that have further NTFS permissions set to allow access to only a handful of people. On other machines these folders are visible but trying to access them gives, as you would expect, an 'Access denied' error. Using the image that was created yesterday however the folders are not even visible which is a far better solution and something that should have been done years ago!

Thanks @DaveP, that was my 1st thought when I was told of the issue but I've not yet had chance to sit with them to find out why it doesn't work that way.

Apologies if in wrong section but it seemed appropriate to ask here. We need to produce reports for Governors and these need to be available from SharePoint. At present we collate the information in a variety of .pdf files - some will be A3, some A4 and even the odd A5 one. These are independently numbered and have individual headers/footers. We need to produce a pdf that contains ALL of these pages, sequentally numbered and with a consistent header and footer. I understand from the person tasked with this that it is a long and laborious task involving several iterations through a process that involves Acrobat reader, Word, a PDF printer and screenshots. Is there a way (ideally free but not critical that it is - just don't want to spend £000's) to join a number of differently sized PDF documents, strip out the headers and footers and replace them with a sinlge one that runs throughout the final document and then do the same with the page numbers? We need the PDF files to retain their original size and orientation. I've only just been asked about this and haven't done much searching yet so if I find something I'll post it here for the benefit of anybody else that gets asked!

Only looked at a few but I'd hazard a guess the owner (how can 1 person own all those cars!!!) also didn't dare to use them - the ones I looked at all had less than 1000 miles on them

Last game purchased - Cities:Sklines Last game completed - Um...not sure I've ever completed one due to the fact I tend to play sims and MMOs neither of which actually have an 'end' as such. Even unlocking all the extra features of a game doesn't count as completion to me!

Another vote for OSTicket. Nice and simple and although we don't use as many of the features as others do if des everything we want. It came as a softaculous script with the hosting package that we have so we're not even hosting it ourselves

We've had good success with this and have always ended up with excellent apprentices but have on occasion struggled to find them. Sadly it does seem that some of the interviewees turn up because mum or dad make them come along - the same mum or dad who insist that they are cut out for a job in IT as they spend all day on the computer. As I've said many a time, 12hrs a day on Facebook and a raft of maxxed out WoW characters is not necessarily a good basis for working in IT! Be prepared for some apathy but if you are like us you will find the right one eventually and they will be a massive benefit to you

This site will show you a wealth of information including the existing MX records : DNS Inspect - Free DNS checking tool with IPv6 support As already mentioned above, you need to be able to edit the DNS zone file to modify the existing records - or delete them and create new ones, whichever you prefer. Bear in mind also that DNS is a distributed service and changing it at the records host does not mean everybody else knows about it immediately, it can take 48hrs to propogate although it is usually far less than that - often 20 minutes and rarely more than an hour

On topic: No limit for staff (they range between 0mb and 30gb) and 1gb for students although we are an FE college so little coursework is stored and only a few of them are using more than 100mb. Slightly off topic: Many moons ago (late 1990's) I was working for a commercial (not educational) company where we had a 50mb limit for our home drives...yep - 50mb in total! That included your email archive as well. It was a NetWare setup from memory and the servers had drive space totalling a couple of gb with RAM measured in mb and were based on 486 processors

Hope that wasn't a mix of petrol / diesel!

I always use the rule of never having live data on an out-of-warranty server. Should the worse happen and the server break it's probably all fixable although depending on the nature of the break it may not be and data loss could occur - and that's never a good thing! Hopefully you have good backups and a regularly tested DR plan although that may not be the case. If it's the only server you have I would be looking to add a new server with a 5 year, 24*7 warranty and a 4hr response and I'd then use the existing server as something non-critical such as a backup server, an print server or anything else I could live without for as long as it took to replace it. Out of warranty does not mean throwaway but be very cautious about using it for anything important

Agree 100% with the above - but where does that 42%/35% figure from? I always had a gut feeling (nothing more than that) that there was a bigger disparity than that.

Success! Thanks @ZeroHour and @Crumpet. Despite being connected to our WiFi when it installed OS-X when it then restarted it had no record of it so I get to set everything up again which is exactly how I wanted it to be

Thanks guys (and I mean that generically, not in a gender specific sense ) I found a guide here: 4 Ways to Reset a Macbook Pro - wikiHow and am trying method 3 at the moment as that is closest to my situation. It's pretty much what you have suggested. It's reinstalling OS-X at the moment - but at the point that it needed to download it our WiFi was already setup and connected so it's not a complete reset, at least not in terms of how it works with a Windows laptop. Hopefully when it finishes it will at least allow me to rename it, setup iTunes and disagree about sending data to Apple though.

So, I took the plunge yesterday and switched on the MacBook Pro that we will be using to manage our iPads. 1st time I've ever turned on a Mac device so not familiar with the process. At one point it asked me to setup an iTunes account which I skipped and the next screen prompted me for an account name. As I was setting it up temporarily just to run through the process I did what I do for Windows computers and gave it a temporary name. In this case "TempMac". Creating an account took ages - so long that I thought it had frozen so clicked the 'next' button. When (5 minutes later) the account was finally created it went to the next screen (agreement to send information about data usage to Apple) - and the 'next' that I had clicked at the previous screen meant it went straight through. Grrrr! Today I've looked at doing a factory restore which is what we do with PCs and it turns out it's not quite so simple with Macs. I#ve followed the instructions on the Apple site to reinstall OS-X but this has not prompted me to setup an iTunes account, give the device a name or agree to sending data to Apple Ideally I'd like to 'factory reset' it to the condition it was in yesterday when I took it out of the box and runs through the initialisation when I power it up - is this possible? There is no data on it so no concerns about losing data. If the above is not possible I need to change the device name and 'un-agree' with sending information about its use to Apple. I also need to create and associate an iTunes account although I'm guessing this is simple to do. Any pointers please?

They are still boxed at present - haven't had the time to look at them yet but hope to do so soon although our Meraki deployment hasn't yet started and I wantthat to manage the iPads unless I want to use Apple Configurator for everything which doesn't seem to be a popular idea! Not keen on the idea of a Mac server, this has always been one of my problems with Apple kit - you need more of it!