KarlGoddard

I think were trialling it at the moment... I'll ask the boss man and the IS person if it's OK for to take a few screen shots and post them.... not sure if that'd break any agreement made when we started using though... I'll ask and get back to you

As far as I see it once the pen drive gets plugged into one of our pcs that pen drive is then another drive on the PC, the PC is on our network and therefore we're responsible for it. If the pen drive is in his pocket or his bag and not connected to a pc it is private property and will stay that way. Don't know what the official legal bit is on all that but that's the way we deal with things and, for us at least, works exceptionally well. Good anti virus and GPO's stop any 'bad' things happening to the network. Distributing files from pen drive to pen drive would be almost impossible to stop unless you take the overall backward step mentioned above and disable all USB sockets.

why do you disable USB? that just creates more work for the tech's and teachers and generally is hindrance IMHO

As long as they're not acquiring the games from school directly - i.e. they're distributing them from a share which the pupils can access, I don't really see how you could stop them doing it. What would happen if pupils were burning stuff onto dvd or cd and passing them out in the quad or playground? Random bag searches? tell the parents to bugger off and stop trying to pass the buck onto the school. If little johnny is upto no good on his home PC or is bringing home inappropriate stuff they should give him a bollocking and restrict his PC access - which is exactly what would happen in my school if mucked about on our PC's with games and inappropriate programs (not as though he could as we have software restrictions in place) mmmm a nice Wednesday morning rant!!!

This is isn't directly relevant to the OP but it's more of an observation I've made concerning lockable desks We have two suites which have lockable desks - the rather excellent ABC Desks btw - the 1st suite we installed we id'd the potential usb access problem so we bought a load of usb fly leads, routed them through the back of the desk and locked up the front of the cage. With the 2nd suite we had a bit of an oversight and didn't order any or enough fly leads, cant remember the exact reason, so we decided to leave the pc cage open so the kids could use the usb sockets. The 1st suite has had a fair bit of vandalism to the desks - missing screws / hinges, chewing gum shoved in the locks - even the odd rivet removed! The 2nd suite, which is the one with unlocked cages had not a single bit of vandalism. It seems that if they see they're being 'restricted' from something they will fight against it and break stuff. Again, not particularly relevant to the OP but just my observation from what happened in my school.

Firstly, thanks for the replies guys... but this is what I can't sus out.. we had no problems at all with ghosting on the network before Monday. The problem only started this week! I've even gone through the switch config guide the NM created and in that he states that snoop should be disabled. I know that goes against conventional thought, and that always worked before. In fact this is the 1st occurrence of any issue with multicasting I've had in 3 years of being at the school! The network (normally) works A1. It's just plain odd. The NM's back in work next week I think I'll quiz him and see if he can shed some light onto it Thanks guys

we have wsus running on a Virtual machine! if I remember right the reason was.... ages ago we used to have sus on a 'normal' server and sus started to encounter quite a few probs. The previous IT manager spent ages looking at fixes to sort the problem, ended up speaking to MS who told him - ohhh you'll have to reinstall 2003!!!! Not something you really want to do on a live server at the best of times, so it went on a virtual machine and works pretty well for us! Not to certain off the top of my head of the set up, but I can check and let you know if that's of any help

Had quite a bizarre incident happen a day or two ago.... While I was imaging a suite I started to receive calls from our 'admin block' that users couldn't print, save docs traverse network shares etc... I looked into the matter and realised that all network traffic (my ghost session) was being routed to two switches - both 3COM 4200's - in the admin block and in particular 3 ports that had printers attached to them. Now this has never happened before, in fact I was imaging without a hitch last Friday so I find it quite bizarre! I looked at the Misconfiguration's and Optimisiation report from 3Com's Network Supervisor and that pointed out that 'Spanning Tree Fast Start' was disabled on several ports on the switches in question but not the ports which seemed to be at the root of the problem. Spanning Tree is enabled on all switches and IGMP Snoop is disabled on all switches in school. Any ideas? Cheers!

I'm after a PDA with GPS and wondered what would be a 'good' one to get. Never had a PDA before so I'm not up to speed on what models I shold look at and which ones to avoid Mainly using it GPS stuff, initially for a project I want to put together using the FutureLab mScape software but I'd like to be able to use it as a test bed for other school uses as well. Any pointers would be great Thanks!

I think if we approached this 'discussion' from a 'find as much dirt as we can...' standpoint and not from a mature, professional and considered opinion (which is what most of us are - mature, level headed professionals) we'll come across as paranoid, ill informed geeks whose main concern is about being separated from our servers I'm from a very successful, well financed school. I get paid probably 1 scale higher than most other techs in my LA. Our school network is the best I've ever worked with in terms of kit, reliability and uptime. I have a well qualified, experienced ICT manager who has brought 'customer focussed' approach to ICT support within the school. Staff, governors and pupils are *very* happy with the school ICT infrastructure. Our school will be one of those expected to be mauled by BSF. Both me an my manager are concerned about BSF. But before I go 'digging for dirt' I want to see what's going to happen to my school. Worse case scenario is that I look for another job. I'll deal with that when it happens - if it ever does. But what I won't do is start scaremongering and passing off guess work as fact. That's my take on it, anyway.

use strings.exe from sysinternals to search within *.xls for '.swf' this finds any embedded swf's quite nicely!

Software restriction policies are your friend! We started using them around 18 months ago and noticed the difference almost immediately. We had one or two minor problems with the odd 'legit' app that got blocked but a quick tweak here and there and it worked like a dream ever since http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457006.aspx http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324036 HTH

so you'll up your price in subsequent years then ?

that sounds amazingly low to me... don't ask me what I'd think would be a more accurate figure, but just the training alone would be worth far more than the £150 (I'd say approx 4-6 times more) Could you really provide a years worth of support for £150?

When you say it's not worth it, can I ask in what respects. It looks as though our LEA (Bolton) is now moving towards Uniservity... we had hoped for a Moodle solution but looks like we're going with Uniservity even though no one here really knows much about it

I don't think alarm bells are totally ringing for ELGG as they've just had outstanding success at Brighton Uni where they've got a 36,000 user account install I'll have a look at Mahara though, it looks very interesting

Is it OK if I PM you with some more questions regarding your ELGG install - not really techie questions, but more management and scope questions ? Thanks Karl

are you making the ELGG install school wide or ar you trialling it just with year 7?

me and another techie here got a rather scary 10/10.... ... I don't know if that's a good or bad thing

Does anyone know if you can manually set a 'timeout' time for the deployment of Sophos Over the past few months I've had occasional deployment failures with Sophos. There's no real reason as to why the odd client fails - Sophos error codes are generally useless - and I was getting a bit frustrated as to why this was happening. What leads me to think it's a timeout issue is that during the Xmas holidays I was imaging two suites, after I'd imaged the first suite I moved onto the second suite and started imaging that. While that was in progress I decided to deploy Sophos to the first suite - every client in the first suite failed Straight off I put this down to the network traffic of the imaging caused Sophos to have a benny (tech term for not being happy) So does anyone know if you can manually set a timeout setting for the deployment of Sophos. I can't find anything on how to set it - if it's possible that is Cheers

yep, sounds like a dirty disc. Give it a clean!

End of term tomorrow...we're in Xmas eve

Kids here don't finish until Thrusday next week, but they're out of school all day on the Thursday at church with carol services etc... but we'll (the IT bods) will be in on Christmas Eve!! hows that for 'bah humbug' eh? At least it'll get me out of last minute xmas shopping I guess

senokot... the cure for Sophos related problems. I like it!