Richie1972

We're going over to a centrally managed (3Com) wireless network in the summer. There will be PoE injectors in the cabs - cheaper than PoE switches throughout school. Each WAP will be high on wall and in a plastic enclosure to prevent damage or theft. I like the idea of colour coding PoE devices with CAT5 cables... should have thought of that myself... We're going for a dual band system that's also going to end up handling VoIP so that the IT tech staff can be contacted anywhere in school. On a vaguely related note, does anyone know if there's anything like a wireless tannoy system - it's just that we need something that can be used throughout school without having to run extra cabling - we can't use the CAT5 cabling for a tannoy type system as we have a fibre backbone? Really something like VoIP speakers with a VoIP microphone unit in reception Or even something that will plug into the network that doesn't rely on being wireles - just IP based?

I don't see any reason to go to Vista for about 2 years anyway. All our existing software works fine on XP, all software in the pipeline for the next few years will have to support XP for the majority of people out there. Vista won't offer us anything new in an educational area and i wouldn't touch a new OS until SP1 came out just to make sure it was stable enough for our environment. Our PCs are pretty much all Celeron P4 2.0GHz up to a couple of P4 3.2GHz, so they should at least handle the basics if, in a few years time, we decide to go over to Vista

We've had the cable tampering issue for a long time. Mice/keyboards unplugged, stolen, mouse balls pinched, keys ripped out, etc. We're now swapping over to optical mice and cable tying everything - kids have started ripping mice out by force and snapping cables. We are also geting cameras throughout school... however, only a couple of classrooms are getting them (and that was a struggle due to leftie teachers wittering on about being watched and judged... surely only the crap teachers would worry about that if it were to happen!!!) Unfortunately the same rooms seem to get "done" and it seems to be that teachers just don't care - rooms that staff are given responsibility over tend to fare better, but the teachers who do look after the rooms aren't in all the time or teach elsewhere at times, so the rooms do occasionally suffer. The problems are also confounded by the fact that there is an open school policy forced on us - i'm gradually trying to wear them down on that so that kids are only in classrooms for lessons... and only when a teacher is present. Most of the problems would also be solved if the government returned to the good old days where teachers could discipline kids and the kids had no rights - the "little darlings" can get away with anything these days and "joke" staff called Behavioural Support merely offer the junior thugs a "coffee and a talk" At the end of the day, though, the only solution to prevention of damage to IT equipment is discipline, something sadly lacking in the whole of society. Until this changes, we are just going to have to keep replacing equipment and costing the school money (thankfully, not my department, as we now charge every department for any replacement IT equipment)

Thanks a lot for the replies, they're just what I'm looking for

Does anyone know if it's possible to get the SIMS upgrades to run via a startup script? I'm looking to take staff out of the local admins group and prevent them installing software. I was thinking that, as the startup scripts runs at admin level, it could perform the updates, then i could have the users just going straight into sims instead of via the update program (pulsar?) If this would work would it also work for PARS.net, which we are rolling out in the near future? Thanks

Having just found this thread and being interested in providing one central point for all staff to access recordings (whether cd, dvd or tv). I was wondering how much further you have got with this. Having not delved into the whole broadcasting thing before i'm going to have to ask what is ERA (I'm presuming some sort of broadcasting licensing authority)? If so, then do LEA's sign up or is it up to each school? Is there some sort of online document or website where I can find out exactly what we are entitled to view/listen to/record/etc?

That sounds interesting. I could have a second server that would act as a backup print server in case main print server fails or needs to be taken down for emergency maintenance. Anyone got any info on implementing this?

Thanks for the thank Tarquel I was glad to help - I've only just started on the road of GPO installs and RIS (we're phasing out Ghost) and Activstudio was one bit of software i'd recently pushed out. I'm slowly going through the school's collection of software converting it all to msi or, at the very least, silent installs pushed out at the end of RIS installation. I'm sure I'll be the one asking questions of this forum soon enough (struggling at the moment to build a silent SIMS.net install for one - only the one i've made so far doesn't pick up workstation updates and throws up an error when going in to Nova T.... bloody SIMs grrrrr).

yes, it works for me - currently got isscript 8,9,11 installed this way... will get round to adding 10 and 10.5 when i get the chance

Some of the isscript installs don't have a reference in add/remove programs. The annoying thing about isscript is that some apps require specific versions of it, too. So, if you have installed isscript11, but an app uses isscript 9, then you have to make sure isscript 9 is installed as well. However, as each isscript version uses same productid you can't install more than one version... unless you use something like orca (in the windows 2003 sdk i think) to change the productid of each version

Hmm, not sure on that one - so far only tested it against the serial port version.... thinking about it, I might have to look in to some sort of scripting solution to alter it to USB, as there will be no means of setting the hardware correctly within an MSI

Have you installed the correct ISScript engine to go with it? Other than that I can't think of anything else, as I've had no problems with it

I've certainly not had any problems with pushing out the MSI for the driver, activboard software and resources by GPO. Are you using a recent version? Having said that I'm able to push out Activstudio 1 with no problems

The latest driver works for both the Promethean Activboards and the TDS Activboards. It is an msi (you can extract it from the exe) and it has pushed out over GPO fine

I think that behaviour of sysprep only occurs in win2k doesn't it? The other option is to do what we now do here (got the idea off this site i think) in your startup script delete the default user and copy the default user profile you want in its place. This has the added benefit that if, for whatever reason, the profile you normally download on logon fails to be put in place, the logging in user will then get the default user profile - ie the profile you wanted them to get (or, at least, the more secure profile)

I would have liked to have tried 7.5, but as i said in my previous post, I found that it is not a free upgrade from 7.0 - it's classed as a whole new product

You can add drive letters, however, something like: p:\*.exe only blocks exe's in the root, you have to specifiy a block on each level through the directory structure in software restrictions

We have a backup server, so all we'd need to buy are either clients for the other servers, or just back them up across the network for veritas. I had thought that I could download and install retrospect 7.5 as an upgrade to our 7.0 - in case that fixed the performance issues - however it seems that you have to pay for 7.5 - it's not a free upgrade from 7.0

There are all sorts of exe's running - yes, a lot in program files, but also other places - i'd rather not develop huge lists of programs to exclude from the list and simply block the areas where i know they shouldn't be running exe's

I installed a piece of freeware called USB Drive Letter Management, which allows you to specifiy what letter a USB device gets when it is plugged in, then I crudely had to add into the Software Restrictions in GPO deny *.exe, then *.*\*.exe, then *.*\*.*\*.exe.... for a good few levels as there's no way to specify the whole drive. The students could get round it if they put an exe in a deep enough subfolder, but I'm hoping they'd give up before getting that far

We're currently running Retrospect 7.0, but find it to be slow and, well, a bit crap compared to Veritas 9.1 that we use on the SIMS server. We're probably going to rip it out and install Veritas 10 later this year and implement a better DR solution that involves a PC sitting in another building with a load of hard drive space that runs NTBackup on a nightly basis - this will also mean that we can restore lost work in less than a few minutes. Anyone else had problems with their Retrospect grinding to a halt or just with its general performance? To be honest, as we're running Win2003 is there any need for some of these backup software apps with "open file" backups when there's volume shadow copy?

We don't allow students to change their password, instead we give them a 4 digit number. If they forget it, they can ask their teacher who can click on a link on the desktop to get to the IT Faults and Resources system. On there they can log in to the user accounts section to browse for the student's name and password. Any requests to change a password must be made through the IT Network department - I got sick of certain staff members changing passwords and not noting it down on the spreadsheet that used to be used

We're currently using Frogserver (http://www.frogtrade.com) and we find it to be excellent - the students seem to like it too. It handles school website, VLE, email, web filtering (even blocking internet access for PCs) and more. Integrates with AD to a certain extent, and they are in the process of developing links into SIMS. Pupils and staff can access their work over the internet. It's not cheap I believe, but it does offer a lot.

We've used GPO and folder security settings (deny execution of files) to block running of exe's. You'll then find the kids will start running exe's from their USB drives (if, like us, you haven't blocked them from using USB drives). All we did then was install a program to make sure that their USB drive installed as Z:, Y:, or X: (in case they tried to install more than one drive) and prevented running of exe's via GPO. The little darlings will find ways around that, too, I'm sure

We have an ADSL link as well as a broadband link through the county. The County and ADSL links are connected through an ISA2004 and configured so that if (usually WHEN) the county link falls over it automatically switches to the ADSL link. By doing this the school still has (degraded) internet access. For internet filtering, however, we're using Websense and have different filtering groups for the students and teachers. So far we're finding it fine - and no one's come complaining to say the internet's gone down (even though I've looked through the ISA server's event logs to see reports of the county link going off)