dalsoth

We have OpenOffice installed as an alternative and a nice way to create PDF files. We let MS Office do its thing and just stick OO on the machines for the kids to try. We also suggest they download it for home use because it is free. Ubuntu too, as we usually request some free copies for students from Canonical and distribute them to those that take an interest or come to us with problems about home computers.

The RM one took a while for me to get on to as they had to wait until there was enough people on the course. Turns out it was me and one other chap from a big school in London in the end Great for chatting to the trainer though about FITS from both of our own schools perspectives. Great trainer too, although i can't remember his name at the moment.

Once glance at her was enough! I purchased the torch so i can burn my eyebulbs out.

Made me laugh with the "provides good feelings" bit. I can imagine you sitting there with a creased forehead after some teacher has stressed you out and then your desk draw starts to rattle a little and you slide it open to see the secret laminate that has been outlawed in schools. Reading it quietly a smile forms on your face and the good feelings are provided!! lol

If we want to snoop we could. That goes for the majority here. Most would not get close to being caught doing so unless there were really tight security in place for monitoring this. We don't because most of us are professional enough to know right from wrong and understand the implications of doing such a thing. You may get a trigger happy junior tech who wants to have a peek at some teachers screen when they first see something like VNC in use. Secure it with passwords and such and wait till the tech is mature enough to handle the responsibility. I think in this day and age a policy is a good idea so that you have some protection should accusations start to fly. Most of us will have a simple understanding in place however, that says we ask before we view and assist. You can even edit remote desktop to allow unsolicited access if you wish with a few tweaks to GPO's as i have played with this on a test network. We tend to email the teacher or update the helpdesk requesting access at a certain time with their permission if we feel the job is quicker done this way. If the staff are unhappy with this there are no hard feelings and we will do it in person instead. Never had anyone say no yet. I understand the principle worrying about such access but i would explain that as an administrator i have full access to all of the files on the system at any time. Junior techs would obviously not have those same rights. (bet your principle is typing out the BSF plans to remove you all!! Load VNC quick!!!):D

Surprised you don't have the TomTom app on your iphone. ner ner Hehe another one for Tom Tom here. Three in use in my family all reliable and easy to use. Played with a few others but not liked them as much.

Snap!! We have moved back in with the potentially ear damaging servers because of the same situation with the students. They smashed our door to our no window cupboard sized office till the concrete around the hinges flew off. Punched it, kicked it and passed racist notes about my tech under the door. When we pulled the latch across and ignored it, they climbed up on a radiator outside the door to the top internal window pane and banged on the glass laughing at us from above to wind us up. All the while i am told not to go out and confront them because it could be potentially a bad situation. When we do open the door and try to question their immature behaviour all the 6th formers bolt out the building laughing or smirk and claim they did nothing. This would happen all day and reporting it to staff got us nowhere. The SMT refused us a single little camera to catch them in the act. I can not recognise them because i don't teach and the MIS photos are next to useless because the kids look totally different. We call the "patrol" team and they fail to turn up all the time. After they were swearing at us last week for about an hour or two and two failed attempts to get patrol across i ended up calling the deputy head. Solved it on that occassion but it is pretty much a daily thing because of the location and the lack of behavior control and sanctions. Now they have to find us a new office or i will either be seeing the union about my health over the noise in the server room or be off sick with stress should they insist i go back to the cupboard office. So i can well understand your situation I suggest you email the SMT explaining everything as i have done and demand a solution. If not, go union or go sick. Hope you get it sorted. If the noise levels in your room are at a particlar amount (can't remember the exact number) say 75db and you are likely to be in there for 8 hours a day more or less give or take a few trips out then you should have ear protectors or be moved i was told. We can not hear the door knock half the time in the server room and would not be able to hear the phone with ear muffs as we can barely hear it now. Constant sore throat from shouting at the technician 5 yards away but i guess its better than braining some kid for driving me over the edge in the other room. All the while the SMT are moving staff about so they get large cushy offices to themselves and offices are turned into private post 16 study areas. What about us? We are not teachers so we don't count . They are looking into it..... 6 months in the cupboard while they looked.... a year and a half in the noisy server room before this while they looked.... I found the cupboard although i wish i hadn't now. No place better till they kick some slacker out of their palace and move em in with someone else i guess. Thus is the life of the tech.

You may also need to justify this to auditors. If they are good enough to be of use to staff then is the taxpayer not being short changed if you are giving them (maybe even using this excuse to steal them in their eyes) to staff? What if you were just doing this because you fancied a few yourself and thought this was a nice easy way to get a free pc or two? Obviously not the case but check if you have to justify it to someone other than the school bursar and head. Just a thought.

It's bad enough with staff claiming that their school laptop does not connect to the home wireless because of the technician without students doing the same. Oh and what happens when they say the tech buggered up thier expensive laptop and want a refund? Or you see they have oodles of porn that you can not delete because it is not your machine. Or they have loads hack tools they want to test your new wireless security against etc etc.. I support school equipment but not home equipment. I will stretch the rule to help out guests and visitors and a few part time teachers we set up on the guest wireless network but no way for students with thier own laptops. Thats like being pimped out by your own school. Oh i forgot to say also. Staff love coming in with home scanners and home printers. They demand we install them for school use. Then we end up repairing them and having them electrical tested and so on and the user then takes it home afterwards and enjoys a new repaired PAT tested bit of kit at the schools expense.... noooo way.

Sounds like peeps are panicking and resorting to doing things they may not be able to undo. Usually comes from inexperience to be honest but that may not be the case here. In the same situation i would definitely not be looking to format servers without a hell of a lot of knowledge of the current system. Something that it appears the posters may not have from the remarks made and the fact that it is an RM network which can be pretty awkward sometimes to fix. Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and say, "this is bad but panic will make it worse". Then calmly look at the options available and speak to those senior to yourself about the options before making any rash decisions. First port of call would be RM support, if there is no contract, straight to SMT to sort something out.

There are some times that I do actually see the potential benefits of BSF...

The above poster carolsmith62 is most likely a forum bot spamming his cheat sites. Please do not go to the website mentioned or you could lose your certs if found out using their material. Search Always have a little check to see if the sites are legit.

Good luck formatting your school servers. Hope you know what you are doing... Oh and you might want to check with RM if they are happy for their KB articles and support downloads to be shared perhaps without a valid support contract on a forum. If it is just motherboard files maybe you should go to the board manufacturer page. If you do not know 100% what you are doing and you are just a tech without any specific RM experience and no Network Manager to advise, i would suggest you think really hard before you start formatting anything.

There are no CC3 "disks" that will install your whole CC3 network again if something drastic has happened. You should hopefully have a disaster recovery plan and have backups etc.. You may also have an RM support contract whereby they would provide help and support should the worst happen. It sounds to me as though perhaps the school has not paid it's support though so RM are not willing to help which is fair enough. When RM commission a server or network they will go through the usual and also run loads of RM only bits of pieces scripts and so on according to their system requirements. I think your best bet is to contact RM again and arrange for support even if it is adhoc to resolve your current problems. I am sure there are a few peeps on here that may be able to help but some of the inner workings of RM may be a mystery to most (sometimes a mystery to RM themselves). Apologies if i am mistaken.

Bet it wasn't even RM's fault

lol cool. That was getting painful.

Update the bios if it needs it. Check that the board actually takes 2GB as I know some machines are limited in RAM. Third, send back under warranty for replacement Oh and is the bios stating 2gb or 1gb? You say the 1gb is detected only but are you seeing this in the OS or in the bios? Check both. Also worth checking the bios options to see if there is something that is limiting the ram. If you have no joy with any potential settings, reset bios to defaults/safe settings/optimized etc and see if that affects. As i said though i would check for an updated bios off the net first. Could be a known issue? Check the support section on net for this netbook or user forums set up for it. My old HP mini had a user blog site set up where people posted hacks and tips etc..

Unless they need the laptop at home for work reasons, my line manager who is part of the SMT would most likely ask them to return the laptop so that someone else can make use until they return. Usually when we cotton on to the fact that the replacement needs one. Makes sense really. We have had to do this in the past once or twice in all and the teachers involved had no problem with it. The only ones that would are probably the sort who are not going to come back anyway and want to hang on to the laptop as long as they can. I certainly would not go chasing laptops myself in such a situation. These things are best left to school leadership teams or the head teacher.

I am currently designing the latest new Edugeek project - Edubomb. I hope to have a working prototype ready within the week. Download will be of course unavailable but the mods have kindly agreed that we can mail them out to those who are interested. Of course this is an open source project so i will shortly post the source documents on sourceforge. Developers and programmers are welcome to PM me with requests to join the project. Of course this is totally a joke and those without a sense of humour should not apply:D

I would go with the bios date thing as mentioned above. The errors that usually come up can be checked out to see why it would not update.

A teacher got quick narked off with my techie when he told her he would install her computer from scratch with everything on it for £50. She has never spoken to him since. He told her she could always go to PC world and they would most likely charge more as he was going to replace a faulty hard disk from a spare of his own for free too. She tried to haggle the price down and although he was polite and explained it was not worth his time otherwise she went on the turn. Best not to get involved in my opinion.

Suitable name for a bit of flaming but i guess my remark invited it a little . I mean to say really that i can not recall a member of the teaching staff who would have some sort of skill or ability that i could call upon for a favour. I am pretty much someone who can turn my hand to anything and most of the teachers i have met are the opposite. It is a struggle to move a computer tower from one side of the desk to the other without need for tech support. Bearing that in mind i would not be asking them to come round to take a look at my boiler. Certainly this is not the case with all schools and all teachers. Kindness such as fixing staff home equipment whilst you are at work would certainly be a problem, especially if word got around and others ask for help with other problems. Taking equipment home to fix is definitely a no no for me as per my reasons earlier.

Not in my contract here. I always provide technical support for use of computers for exams and such. I am always available and usually will stay close by for the first session or so and then make sure myself or someone else is ready to respond immediately if there is a call for help. The bit i would not do is the actual invigiliation. Providing support is fine. Even happy to sit there during it, just would not take on the role of invigilator is all. Totally understand that sometimes it is not worth an argument for some though and for others it is in the contract.

If i ever want my homework done i will fix the teachers computers for sure! What you describe is slightly different from what i was getting at and i do not see a problem with helping someone out who you feel is the type of person you could definitely use a favour from at a later stage. I have never met more than one or two teachers who would ever do me a favour. Sorry to the teachers out there but most I have dealt with have no common sense. I would not trust any of them near anything i own as they have an auto destruct sequence built into their DNA to wreck stuff. Now i have done the site agents favours and such because they are top guys and know when to return the favour. Outside of work, i do things for friends and family but the usual suspects know not to bother me too much as i moan a bit when a relative has screwed up windows or linux for the 10th time in as many weeks and needs it sorted ASAP.

Not something i would let them rope me into really either. School decides they want teachers to do even less work. School decide you should do more work. School decide that forcing you to do it saves them paying external people to come in. No wayyy, i have a network crash to deal with all of a sudden!!