Ephelyon

And DC security logs. Le edit: great minds, Domino...

@nickdennis, could Berkhamsted offer this?

Can they even reach the pedals?! My mother was raised in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe/whatever and apparently the first thing you used to have to do was reverse around a line of cones. If you couldn't even do that, they wouldn't take you out on the roads!

We have no external tool to create the link so I've scripted it into the Pager field (as our Parental Portal, which is the only thing that currently needs it, works off that). The attached batch file was used with the attached SIMS RptDef (both renamed to .txt for the forum) to do the initial UPN import across the school (picking off the few stragglers whose Forename and Surname fields in AD didn't correspond with the Legal Forename / Legal Surname fields in SIMS for some reason, by querying AD for pupil users with blank Pager fields once the routine had completed). Subsequently a similar routine was adapted for the ImportYear7.bat script that I run every summer plus the CreatePupil.bat script used for in-year admissions. ImportPupilUPNs.txt Student UPNs.txt

^ This. The problem is that business depends on competition; good service both now and in the future is dependent on the need to outperform your rivals such that both you and the customer are better off. Businesses that know they have a monopoly in a particular area tend to provide a less good service because there's less motivation to. Privatisation by means of opening UP the market can be good, but if that's not the case then you're probably better off leaving it in the hands of people who in theory ought to be trained/experience to provide a good service without the added "incentive" of the need to compete.

That's right, but I was talking about how we might not necessarily be completely specific about "X need" when we're planning for future developments (statemented children with particular needs aside). Sometimes we do decide to make a foray into a new tech ecosystem to see what it brings us.

Done that now and it's much better, so yes, it seems the faceplate is alright but it must be the cable going from there, through the annoyingly non-false ceiling, to the projector itself. No idea what we'll do about that but thanks to everyone anyway for your help!

Just checked them now, everything seems fine to me. Reset everything to defaults in the menu, same issue.

We have an Epson EB-X6 that doesn't seem to be displaying certain colours very well. I've attached a photo of the laptop screen and a photo of how the projection appears on the wall. The reds and greens seem to look more yellow than anything else. It seems bright enough so I don't think it's the bulb. Unfortunately I don't really know anything about projectors - does anyone know what could be causing this? I've heard the term "colour wheel" being bandied about but it doesn't really mean anything to me. Would it need a service and repair? Never been inside a projector myself and wouldn't be confident trying to.

All very true, but sometimes we might opt to plumb the depths of a very broad set of technologies rather than being very very specific from the outset. We might, for example, say that there are thousands of educational apps available on $ecoSystem's App Store, and we want to tap into that. We won't be investigating down to each specific app at this stage (though a few solid examples would go a long way), but we know that in a very broad sense this is "the kind of" tech available. We might then buy a couple of iPads or Android tablets to see a bigger picture of what "all these apps" can do, maybe handing it off to HoDs and SENCOs to investigate for their own more targeted purposes.

There are some who do like to get involved in the world of (in this case) educational technology and how it's used. They can then add value by talking in detail about what's out there and what other schools/teachers are doing with the tech. A broad background in that can come in handy during a round-table discussion as it opens up the options. A technologist should have broad experience of "what is out there"; teaching staff and teaching leaders should have broad experience of how they personally might want to use it to meet their own/departmental/strategic goals. When managed well it can turn into a collaborative partnership. The suggestions for electronic registration, interactive voting devices, Securus, side-wide wireless, pupil e-mail moving to Exchange, an e-safety group, a strategic ICT group and departmental discussions around the use of technology with the IT Department have all come from me at this place. That's in addition to the strategic development of the system in terms of the move to virtualisation, developing backup and DR facilities etc. It's actually quite fun when you get into it, plus you are adding value not just maintaining the status quo. These are definitely SLT-level discussions but educators aren't the only ones who can (or should) talk about educational technology. You need the technologists involved as well. If I wanted a job that literally consisted of being told what to do and doing it I'd look for another career.

I'd have to ask about the philosophy behind having children supervised by staff who are not qualified/trained/experienced/whatevered to do so. If you do happen to be for whatever reason, fair enough. But if you're not, I'd advise informing the Governors that SLT is not fulfilling its safeguarding obligations and is putting children at risk. The fact is that there are options available in terms of training and gaining experience that would make this sort of thing much safer and more viable (including the SWiS qualifications and MAPA), and there is no excuse for putting staff in this position without them.

Wasn't the idea to emerge WITHOUT the Ring of Power?

28 pages already... Me too please! =]

Well... it depends. Distance MIGHT be related for some schools as naturally there's the travel costs as well, which if you're claiming them too could in some cases amount to more than the deposit. It's just about shaving some of the costs off. But then yes, good point, I meant the other way round above... xD

I'm going for Option 3. How about setting up a catchment area? So if you live further away than X range from the venue you pay.

Well, Settings.txt contains this: DRIVERS\PARADOX\INIT\NET DIR = C:\Users\Public\Documents Such that this is a writable location for end-users. It's a fix for a problem that I forget now.

We use this to do the lot: @echo off echo Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")> CheckVer.vbs echo Wscript.Echo objFSO.GetFileVersion(wscript.arguments(0))>> CheckVer.vbs cscript /nologo CheckVer.vbs "C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\FMSSQL\Finance.exe" | find "6.152.281.0" > nul && goto :cleanup psexec -accepteula -is \\%computername% psexec -isx cmd /c \\blahblah.local\driveshares\MSI\FMS\FMSApplicationSetup.exe {QuietMode} [sIMSDotNetDirectory]="C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net" copy /y \\blahblah.local\driveshares\MSI\FMS\FMSConnect.ini "C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\FMSSQL" \\blahblah.local\driveshares\MSI\FMS\idapi32cfg.exe -i "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Borland Shared\Bde\idapi32.cfg" \\blahblah.local\driveshares\MSI\FMS\Settings.txt :cleanup del CheckVer.vbs Then I just change the version number to look for every time the FMS upgrade is run on the SIMS server. The psexec bit is only to display the setup onscreen so users know why startup is taking so long - risky but otherwise they just switch it off sometimes, especially when I've got a lot of things to push out this way.

Maybe there could be a way to cram it down into Starter Edition or something to save on space, but other than that it sounds fine.

Indeed, there shouldn't be any problems there for the time being and that does sound like the best setup. What's the guest OS? "If your network setup is solid anyway, that should never be an issue. My best piece of advice currently is not to over-complicate or get overly worried about minor things as it stands." I think I made reference to that earlier.

We're not using SSDs as standard so that might have something to do with it Many schools are still standardising on 2GB RAM. We're trying to move forward with 4GB now. There is some work going on from a security standpoint as to whether it's possible to "break out" of the virtual sandbox and execute instructions directly on the host. As it stands, there are 17 CPU instructions on the x86 architecture that can't be virtualised. It does seem the risk of this is pretty minimal for now though. I for one would be interested to hear more. How have you deployed this? Is it part of a standard image?

@gdrinkall, I think we have something similar going on here. In fact, it's now got so weird that ALL printers now say they failed to deploy in the Application Log... but most of the time they actually do?!?! The one Application Log error that definitely means it won't deploy is the data area passed to a system call is too small one.

Right, so as I suspected this is a solution that works but only if it's been actively worked into the spec based on a planned approach to the problem. Schools that just want to start having pupils creating and running problems willy-nilly without changing/spending anything would need to re-evaluate. It does sound like the best way of doing it though. Can I ask how you're going about presenting this to the pupils? Is there a way of having seamless integration of virtual apps with the bare metal OS, à la XP Mode?

As a talking point, how are people going about using virtualisation as a solution here? Are you hosting the VMs on a server or on each individual workstation? Is there an impact on the spec - and price - of said workstations if so (e.g. more RAM)?

Classic example of the mass-produced label and the robot employees who don't read what they're sticking on. Not that I can blame them at all really! And here's another one: [ATTACH=CONFIG]20639[/ATTACH] How about "no"?