Richie1972

Looking on intel's website, there's a pro 100m, pro 100s pro 100v pro 100+... Which one did you use for your GX60's?

I can't actually remember where I got the driver from now - I think it might be the Dell driver, but I can't be sure. Do you know which driver will work for all the GX60's?

The Lan's are on board Intels. I'm trying to find some alternative cards to put in, but so far I haven't managed to find any cheap cards with PXE support (the only ones I've seen haven't had the boot rom in. Anywhere in the UK supply PXE lan cards cheaply?

I place the drivers in three places: 1. the I386 folder 2. $OEM$\$1\Drivers\GX60 3. $OEM$\textmode As I've said, though, it works for some GX60 PCs, but not others. It's probably not down to a network issue (I've had that once or twice when trying to install a lot of machines at once), as it seems to affect the same machines every time. I've got some network cards on order, so I'll see if that improves the situation

I've now moved from Ghost to RIS installs and all is going well - no more images to worry about - just add drivers and go. However, I've come across a strange problem that I guess must, somehow, be a network card issue. We have different PCs throughout the school, but a few Dell Optiplex GX60's (not all of the GX60's, just some of them!) go through to the end of the install, but fail to join the domain. When you log on to the machine as local admin, it reports new software found and proceeds to install the network driver. After this you can then join the domain and all is almost ok.... We push out apps via GPO and these same machines try to install the apps every time they start up - even though they are already installed. I'm replacing the network cards to see if that's the issue, as I've tried other versions of the driver (intel pro 100) Anyone else had this issue?

it's the problem where every student imported gets the same address details as the first student entered - a simple error that they should have spotted far sooner

Our head of ICT is the Filemaker expert - I avoid it completely lol He's set up his own company and provides the system for a few other schools too Yeah, we've heard that the people at pars seem to know how SIMS works better than capita too

I only heard about this bug AFTER I'd installed the upgrade - any ideas when the fix will be released?

We use Filemaker here, but only for reports and assessment stuff. We've got the dreaded SIMS as MIS and we're now going down the road of PARS for registration - well, we would be if we could get PARS to show all the registration groups

I could be missing something here, but surely if you just use WEP encryption and ensure that only the IT techs have the WEP key, then they are the only people who can join a pc/laptop to the wireless network. If a pupil/staff member brings in their own laptop, then without the WEP key (and without the rights to join a computer to the domain) the laptop can't connect to your network

Our school's just decided to scrap running this pilot as the software's so crap and unreliable. Hopefully if enough others do the same then they'll have to either pull the plug on it or do some major repairs to it

We're finding this QCA software to be slow and unreliable. We have to often restart the postgres and tomcat services. The tests sometimes run like snails - even though the PCs are all celeron 2.66Ghz, the server is a P3.2GHz Xeon and the network is running at 100mb (1gb between server and switches) I'm sure it could have been designed better - maybe with a web based front end too - but i'd just settle for better running speed and less flakiness. I feel sorry for the kids trialling this software

We actually now refill our own toners and it's saving us a fortune

hal is irrelevant - we don't have RIS images - it does a RIS install on each machine - if it was an image then hal would be a problem. As long as the PC can PXE boot then we can install on it

ghost licences are about £20 each i seem to recall - as we have over 500 computers we decided to go down the free route of RIS on a 2003 server. We don't need to worry about updating images and we just have to add drivers to the RIS server for new PCs

We used to use ghostcast, but it meant that we had a load of images for each set of hardware and different departments. We've now moved over to RIS and we have one install (no images), a script that runs on first boot which renames PC - there's a database with mac addresses linked to computernames -, moves it to correct OU and installs some software. The rest of the software is installed via GPO. The only manual part of the job is having to boot up via PXE, enter logon details then start install

Well, I've finally got an unattended install of SIMS working by running the following script during the final phase (RunOnce) of a RIS installation. start /wait net use s: \\olsj-sims\shared$ start /wait s:\sims\setups\simsinfrastructuresetup.exe -a {QuietMode} start /wait s:\sims\setups\simsapplicationsetup.exe /S {QuietMode} [sIMSDirectory]="S:\SIMS" [sIMSDotNetDirectory]="C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net" start /wait s:\sims\setups\simsmanualsetup.exe /S {QuietMode} [sIMSDirectory]="S:\SIMS" [sIMSDotNetDirectory]="C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net" start /wait xcopy \\olsj-it\msi\sims\connect.ini "c:\program files\sims\sims .net" /y start /wait xcopy \\olsj-it\msi\sims\bwcc.dll "c:\windows" /y By copying the connect.ini file it means we don't get prompted on first running of sims.net to locate database Strange thing is that we have to copy the bwcc.dll file - don't know why, though Next stage, i reckon, is to change the shortcut to call pulsar.exe directly and put in the upgrade checks in the startup script - will slow down startup considerably during upgrades, but will mean i won't need to keep staff as local admins (I hate giving them that much in the way of permissions). We're also installing PARS on the 22nd May - anyone know if there's a way of silently installing/upgrading it? Also, do I only need to give staff full rights to the PARS folder?

Perhaps they need to update the wording of their licence. Looks like a media server is going to be going on the back burner I reckon. A shame, but nothing we can do about it.

So, in other words, any school that has a media server setup to provide centralised storage of files is breaking the law, even if they still have the original media and a PVS licence? Seems stupid - especially given that vhs tape, CDs and DVDs have limited life and suffer wear and tear

Glad to have been of help

We're likely to be going down that route - and there's definitely no way I'm having my IT tech staff doing hundreds of videos. We'll be getting depts to do their own - with training from us on how to do it

That would look bloody ugly - having a great big cage bolted to ceiling. Also, in our school, way too expensive - about 40 projectors in total. We've had a spate of thefts recently... something to do with football on tv i reckon. Kensington locks are a joke, I've sen the video clip where someone opens the lock with a pen and a piece of loo roll. As the original poster asked, does anyone know how good the stick on plates are?

If you're using Proxy Server 2 on the NT4 server, have you reinstalled the Proxy Client on the Win98 PC?

I've just got Visio and only just started to play with it - it's very nice... I like some of the diagrams you've produced... so, can you insert images into it, or is the diagram posted earlier done in something else? Not figured out how to do frehand lines yet, either

We're currently running 13, but this is likely to grow as we develop more services and improve disaster recovery and content provision. 1. SIMS (and soon PARS) 2. Domain controller and 3 years of students data 3. Domain controller, 2 years of students data, public files and QCA testing 4. domain controller, staff data and staff public files 5. Backup server 6. school database server 7. Succesmaker and Eclipse server 8. Print server 9. IT apps, drivers and IT database system (something I'm implementing across school for management of desktops and resources, etc) 10. Second IT server that currently just handles RIS installations 11. ISA server - provides web access through LEA and ADSL, plus VPN access for tech staff. Also has Websense filtering - makes our life so much easier for blocking/unblocking websites 12. Frogserver - the school VLE 13. Reporting server. Primarily used for Websense web filtering reporting, but also has 3Com network supervisor running on it All are running Windows 2003... except frogserver, which has LiSUX on it. I reckon by end of year we could be at around 16 servers... looking at adding a media server, second backup server for improved disaster recovery and possibly a development server.