sakwoya

Hi all Thinking of moving from Server 2000 to Server 2008 R2 and I am wondering about CAL licenses and the like. Current setup is ad hoc admin network and the curriculum side uses the Server 2000 (Viglen Classlink). Admin machines get DHCP and internet connection from the 2000 server. Reading up on the licensing suggests that I need CAL licences for admin machines all curriculum machines all network printers using DHCP laptops Am I correct? Also any recommendations as to which version of Server 2008 to get (maximum connected devices <100) ?? Thanks Graeme

Hi We're looking at Joomla on SWGfL but our hosting package is FP, no SQL etc etc. Previous post here states they want £170 to 'upgrade' to PHP/MySQL I don't have £170 but I do have PHP/SQL hosting elsewhere. I could also get a WAMP or XAMP box running in the school to host internally My questions are: 1) Any security/safeguarding implications in hosting off-site? (i.e. 'official' objections - there's no sensitive data being held on the Joomla but is there any body, anywhere that does not like hosting this way?) 2) If I frame the off-site Joomla setup in our SWGfL hosted index.htm file then will I have any problems with filtering or caching? 3) If I host it internally then is it just a case of setting up the box in the school and then telling SWGfL? Graeme Edit - just found out SWGfL want £170 per annum so that is definitely out

Thanks for this - that certainly wipes Sims out of the equation Graeme

Hi all Here's the scenario: School with about 120 pupils run along the lines of a Primary School (i.e. each student has a class teacher but also sees specialist tutors for PE, Music and so on). Current system is that the class teacher writes the main body of the student's annual report and gives it to overworked office staff. Specialist tutors do the same. (They are unable/unwilling to add to the class teacher's report as this is 'admin' work and they say that their job description/working practices means they do not have to 'do' admin stuff [i have to try hard not to create a mini-rant here as if I only did what was in my job decription.....]) OK so office staff now have to cut and paste (yup - we're really advanced) the reports for 120 kids, print, review, reprint, photocopy times eight yadda yadda. 2010 we're going to have to this - 2011 I would like to have some sort of automated system in place where the teaching staff will directly edit the student's report. Looking around (OK mainly EduGeek) it looks like Sims Profiles may fit the bill. However we use Sims as a Primary School may do - no attendance or assessment data gets entered, no teachers are Sims users - it's entirely an Admin resource. So - is it feasible to setup Sims Profiles to handle this or, as I am thinking, is it a sledgehammer to crack a nut (given that I can foresee lots and lots and lots of my time being 'wasted' in holding the hands of teachers) and should I look for some simpler method of doing this? Some sort of collaborative report writing package where I could just dump in a csv of students would ( I think) be ideal but I have no idea of where to start. Current network boasts Windows Server 2000 and Office XP - staff IT know how would be about 3 on a scale of 10. Graeme

This caught my eye - Devon CC retained all the HT Grant in previous years but, in 2009-10, passed it to the schools. At the same time they passed on the SWGfL fees to schools - funnily enough they were identical.(previosult HTC had been used to fund SWGfL fees) I began asking about opting out of some of the SWGfL 'services' that we were paying for and got the same response 'Oh dear that will put the costs up for the others'. Inquiring about leaving the SWGfL and going with a third party ISP/connection got more moans and groans from 'above' with the rider that the 'removal of all lines and equipment belong to/provided by SWGfL would have to be paid for by the school' - cue blank cheque which the head is not keen to sign. Excuse me but we are a teeny, weeny little school and we do not need/use many of the 'services' so do we really care if Big School down the road with its 1200 pupils has to pay more? No. A load of the other small schools have joined in with a clamour and we have been told that 2010-2011 should see our SWGfL bill drop from £6500 to around £2000. Fine but I'm waiting to see where the £4500 balance comes from (or has the over-priced GfL cut it's prices?) Graeme

£200 million? Sounds like an industry failing to adapt to new technology/change in the market to me - I watched the program last night and found it to be a now-typical 'dumbed down' 30 minutes worth of Paranoia rather than 60 minutes worth of Panorama like when I was a kid (Cue Victor Meldrew moment). Having said that it was thought provoking in a few areas but did leave me & t'missus with more unanswered questions than when we started. Will the bill even get through before the next General Election.? Right - off to iron my Pirate Bay T shirt Graeme

Hi So far (touching wood) no repeat of the login error so I'm assuming that the timeout correction has done the trick Thanks Graeme

Hi all I've been Ghosting onto a load of new PC's and, to my woe, found that some have a slightly different motherboard to the others - when I Ghost to these ones and reboot Win XP sticks in a boot loop. My assumption is that it's a driver/hardware problem for onboard video, lan, whatever. I've tried disabling all these in the BIOS but still it loops. I can login to the XP installation using the Recovery Console but, without knowing which driver to start with I am a bit lost. Any suggestions (I could build the workstation from scratch and create a new image but teh old images carry a lot of software rather than rely on GP to install)? Thanks Graeme

Hi Mapping is correct and local connect.ini is: [sIMSConnection] Redirect=G:\SIMS Browsing to the G: drive is possible DNS and Hosts file are correct. I seem to remember this happening before on another workstation and I got around it by setting a timeout in the connect.ini file - I've added that in to see what happens (also taken the IP address out of the connect.ini file and replaced with the server name). The fault is intermittent (as before) and I think the timeout takes place because the 'server' is simply too busy (it's a peer to peer network and the 'server' also was running FMS and a SIMS workstation when the failure took place Graeme

Hi all The above worked - changing dates, resetting passwords failed. Just recreated the user, added to group and -tada! New user. Second problem - new user logs in, logs out, logs in again but gets an 'incorrect G:sims\connect.ini file' warning - edited the connect.ini from [sIMSConnection] ServerName=server\SIMS2005 to [sIMSConnection] ServerName=172.16.1.11\SIMS2005 Logon works - why is that? Graeme

Hi all I am having a struggle with sims.net - here's what's happening... New member of staff to be added as a Sims.net user with membership of the Personnel Assistant group. Yesterday Bursar added the staff member using the Focus > System Manager > Add Existing People as users of the System, she thinks she also added the new user to the group 'Personnel Assistants'. New user unable to logon - gets 'incorrect username/password' popup. Today I checked the settings and the new user is visible, no group was assigned so I have reassigned her to the Personnel Assistants group (this may be a red herring though) Can anybody suggest why the user is getting 'incorrect username/password'? Graeme ------------------------------------------------------------

Hi everybody apologies for the delay in reply but attack-a-mac was low on the priority list.... Thanks to everybody above for their tips and hints - I've tried the lot (often times) but, alas, the Mac still has DVD indigestion. I'm quite happy to skin a laptop but gutting a Mac - i.e. I don't mind taking a laptop to bits but getting into this Mac looks to be problematical (you sucker the screen off??) and my measly budget is not up to sending the thing off to be fixed so - another question (which I could maybe Google but.....) Can I run an external USB DVD read/write rom from the Mac and would it just 'show up' on the GUI as a normal drive? If so - any suggested makes? Graeme

Hi all OK - I have a Mac on the network, just one, shiny, posh looking machine which has taken up proportionately more of my time than any other bit of kit that I can think of. This one is an iMac desktop and is now maybe 18 months old. Most recently it decided to keep hold of a blank DVD that was inserted into the narrow, designer 'cool', slot on the side (yup - the one with no pin hole emergency eject thingy) So here I am, tried all the 'fixes' I can find on the www but still with the DVD in there and the eject mechanism clicking away all the time. So - questions - any body fixed this without tearing the machine apart to get at the drive internally (and looking at the guides that seems to be a big job)? or Does the Mac have some software way of disabling the DVD drive so that it stops clicking and whirring?? Graeme

Hi all Spent ages on this but decided to cut my losses and went back to the start; Formatted drive C: NTFS full format Load Windows XP Add .net 3.5 SP1 Load Office 2003 Map SIMS folder on server as network drive S: Install SIMS Restart PC We're off and running - SIMS running , reports running - all smooth No idea what went wrong yesterday Bossmans KB entry did list another error that was being thrown yesterday so there is some relevance there possibly. I am still bemused as everything today was installed as yesterday but today it worked - grrrrr. Thanks for all the advice Graeme

Hi Printer installed, drives all mapped properly, I've reinstalled SIMS several times and just had another go at installing .NET. The connect.ini is in the correct place on server and the local one is correct. All other functions work other than reports. Other SIMS workstations operate fine. I think the error may lie with Office 2003 - reports generated for WORD will throw one error whilst those needing excel can't seem to find Excel and through another. I've been uninstalling and reinstalling Office/Sims all day to no avail - this is really a little bit peeving :-( I think I'll call it a day for now and redo the whole thing from scratch tomorrow Grrrrrrr Graeme

Hi all Just rebuilt one of the 'admin' workstations and loaded the following on in the stated order: Win Xp Pro (SP3 slipstream disc) .NET Framework Microsoft Office 2003 Sims.net Sims is throwing hissy fits when trying to run reports (reporting 'no table exists at that location' frequently plus other errors). I'm going to wipe the machine and reinstall from scratch - has anybody any advice as to what order the software should go back in (I have an image for the machine but I was hoping to create image from this new install) Graeme

Hi all OK finally got somewhere - the PC had one EIDE Western Digital Caviar disc installed - no errors reported by either Win XP or manufacturer's utilities - however it was setup as a Dynamic Disc with a single volume. Converted the disc to Basic disc and it is now Ghosting with an estimated 45 mins left Thanks for all the advice Graeme p.s. netbookdisc.com is a cracking resource - thanks

Hi all Running Ghost from a DOS floppy - PC boots up into Ghost, accepts the Ghost session from the Ghost server but, when I start to dump the image from the PC to the server it hangs at the "dumping mft table file" point. I have checked and rechecked the HD for any errors but I stll get this 'hang' Any clues? Thanks Graeme

Aaaaaaaaah! I've about had it with an RM Mobile One - I need to access the BIOS to boot from USB but I cannot find the key combination to get into the BIOS (all the usual ones fail and I get the usual Win XP startup) It's F2!!! Yaay!

Hi all I have a similar problem to the one discussed about HP 2600 here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/13558-problem-hp2600n-laserjet-print-server-spooler.html We have a Windows Server 2000 (yes! Really!) and it has an old B&W HP laser plus a Canon C3220 Copier/Printer attached. The Canon seems to loose connection with the server form time to time and, whilst the print spooler service is happily running (the other printer works fine) restarting it seems to get the queued print jobs into the Canon. The Canon is on a static IP and everything seems to be fine at that end. I have had problems with setting the Canon up it is presently running on their PS ver 2.1 driver which seems to be fine Has anybody any experience with this beast/problem? Thanks Graeme ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Solution - in case anybody else has one of these At the printer end setup the Canon Print Server with a static ip. At the Server 2000 end delete any mention of the Canon from the printers. Now create a new TCP/IP print port and map it to the static IP. I used a generic MicroSoft driver and not the Canon supplied one. Four weeks later the printer has yet to 'time out' or drop 'offline'. No stuck queue - no lost work

Hi Has anybody got real life experience of the HP Touchscreen PCs in a school environment (IQ770 or IQ772 are the model numbers) We're wondering how they compare to a standalone PC and a normal touchscreen and how 'kid proof' they are (no worries here about the radio keyboard or mouse going walkabout so security is not an issue) Thanks# Graeme

If it's any help - there's some cheap caddies available from eBuyer - http://www.ebuyer.com/search/?strSearch=caddy&strOrderBy=decSellPriceExcVat&strOrderDir=ascending&bolShowAll=true&bolShowAll=true I've got a few here for swapping backup drives and, whilst they are not very robust looking they do the job Graeme

Hi all Instead of a mobile Smartboard (list price £6,500) we've been looking at the cheaper option of using a Smartboard plasma screen overlay on top of a 42" plasma screen mounted on a trolley. Couple of things: has anybody used this sort of overlay and, if so, how does it compare with a normal Smartboard in terms of sensitivity / use? In addition we're trying to find a trollry that has a built in rise and fall capability for the screen - so far I've only foundone in the USA - any ideas? Thanks Graeme

Hi I'm having troubles with a Classlink XP network (it's a small network but it's still a pain). It seems as though Classlink overwrites and manual changes made to Group Policy? there's certainly something strange going on with it and I'm just not sure where to point the finger at? Anybody else experience this? Graeme