Chris_Cook

How about munki? it can automatically install updates and new software too. It might not solve the problems with hangs though. You could use reposado as well, then setup a test group of macs to trial the updates to see which ones hang. https://code.google.com/p/munki/ Getting Started With Munki https://github.com/wdas/reposado Introducing Reposado | Managing OS X

It depends, if you have POE switches powering voip phones, Access Points or CCTV, it might be a good idea. Then the phone system and laptop users can keep working during a power outage. Small UPSs are pretty cheap these days, and if you only have a few cabinets to protect, it probably isn't going to be that expensive. We have a few of the 1910s and the 3com equivalent, haven't had any problems with them.

Ruckus should have handled that easily. Ours does, and our APs arn't even in the same room. Some things to check: 1. was your current wifi running at the same time? you can only have so many devices running in one place. Another (non-ruckus) AP running nearby might cause interference. Also, laptops might be trying to connect to the older system. When we trialed, we turned our old system off for a lesson. Ruckus should change the channel of the ap automatically - thats one of the key features. It might be that it can't find a free channel if you have other wifi networks nearby. Use insidder (or another wifi scanner) on a laptop to see whats running nearby. You may also have other sources of interference, microwaves, radar stations, etc. Have a look around and see if there is anything like that nearby. 2. Check the zone director web console. This should give some useful info about whats going on. If you look up the access point, you can see who's connected, and who's failing. It should also give some indication why a client can't connect. 3. Check you client devices. If you have dodgy wifi drivers or interfaces, this can cause problems. We had some Toshiba L10's and M40's that had rubbish drivers. they didn't support wpa2, only wpa. They would still try to connect to a wpa2 network, but would fail. If this is the case, you should see authentication errors on the ap on the zonedirector. 4. Windows 7. This handles wifi much better than XP. If the laptops aren't running it already and they have more than 256 mb ram, upgrade them. They will work much more reliably, even if they are a little slower. Doing this cut our call-outs to laptops right down. Its a rare day we have a wifi issue now. 5. Uplink speed. Make sure your ap has a gig link onto your network. if your sharing a 100mb connection, it will be slow. Mesh mode can also be slow if it doesn't mesh on wireless N. Again, check the zone director for info. Hope this helps, let us know how you get on. We have a Ruckus solution in our school like many others, and we are very happy with it. I'm sure ruckus tech support and others here will help you to get the most out of it.

I think there was something about some emergency work on the atomwide support site. Maybe try again later.

We run it in various embedded and server roles such as securus, our staff proxy, our digital signage server, and our staff sign in terminals. I got a bit fed up with it on the desktop. To many issues weren't getting fixed, whilst the bits i liked they kept on changing - I really liked KDE 2/3, until they 'fixed' it in version 4. I've still got a bug report open about a wifi adapter that hasn't been fixed in over 5 years. One of the big benefits to me when I was a student was that it was free, and there were lots of good development tools on it. Now i get paid, I can afford windows, and there are much better tools on windows than 10 years ago.

I think this worked for me: Linux reset forgotten root password I didn't realise the password was supposed to be secret. Oops. These articles might be usefull for anyone wanting to plug that hole: How Do I Secure Grub Boot Loader? Tips To Protect Linux Servers Physical Console Access

We have had problems with backups over-running into the daytime and searchindexer.exe using too much cpu and i/o resources cause similar issues. I would check task manager on your file server(s).

I've not used this particular system, but: You probably need to factor in the ease of use of the overall system, who is going to be using it etc. These projects can outlast staff, and future staff may not have the required training. Analog multicores are much simpler to use. Also, if you already have a high quality sound desk, replacing it with a Behringer desk/snake may result in a drop in overall sound quality. It would be helpful to know what mixer you have in order to make a better recommendation. In pro sound systems, digital does not equal quality. The biggest factor is the ability of the end user. You also want to make sure you have high quality pre-amps. In the past, I would have been reluctant to recommend Behringer for this sort of thing. They make some very good products (their cable tester is one of the best i've found, and the compressors arn't bad.) They also make some rubbish quality stuff, and some of it is quite hard to use (their lighting desks spring to mind). Based on my experience, I wouldn't expect this to be a very good system. But having said that, they have bought Midas and Klark Technic, who make some very nice kit. Digital sound desks may allow for some automation and remote control, but that may or may not be useful for your requirements. Personally, I would get a demo, or at least find someone who will let you play with their kit.

We have an autoit script to run + print the sims reports and print the staff and sixth form attendance lists from a separate system. This prints to two printers on the other side of the school near the assembly area. The printers are in safes just inside the door (which is clear so you can see if its safe to enter or not). By the time the office staff have walked round, it usually has printed (or failed). The system is checked each term, and the printers are refilled with paper each time someone runs the script. The backup plan is sims lists printed out every month or half term or so.

There are a few threads on this forum for this projector. It would be worth reading them all if you have this model. It could be a few things: 1. The projector has crashed/overheated (common if projector is left on over a holiday). Turn it off at the wall, and turn it off again. If that doesn't work, take it down and leave it off for an hour or so, then try again. 2. Dead bulb - swap the bulb with another one. Replace if this fixes it and put the working bulb back in its original projector. Reset the lamp hours counter. 3. Lamp life counter is over limit (3000 hours IIRC). Reset counter, if this fixes it, replace the bulb. If you run the bulb for longer than necessary, it can explode and apparently over stress the projector. This causes a bigger cleanup job. 4. Themal cutout has tripped. This appears to be a common problem with Sanyo 40 and 41 projectors. There are instructions elsewhere on this forum for how to reset it. I would recommend finding a repair shop/company to do this if you are not experienced at taking this sort of stuff apart.

Have you checked power management settings on the network interface?

The limit on the servers will probably be the disks. We don't saturate our gigabit uplinks even where we have gigabit to the desktop. Having said that, the reduced latency is helpful. It sounds like your assuming two users (or likely more) are accessing large files at the same time. Often this is not the case. When there is only one user, they get the whole bandwidth. The maths is more complicated than simple addition. The important thing with optimising the overall network performance is measurement. Find out whats causing the slowdown, or whats unreliable and fix that. Its too easy to guess and get it wrong. If I were putting in new cabling, i would try and make sure it is either gigabit or 10 gigabit capable in the case of uplinks. Wether you run it at full speed is a different question. 10 Gig interfaces are still very expensive, and we certainly would't see a justifiable benefit at the moment. Cabling can be in place for a long time, and can be a bigger job to replace. Some of our fibre is 10 years old and working fine still. Replacing a switch or network interface is much easier than cabling.

Casio were giving away similar staplers at bett last year. Unfortunately I broke mine. I'm hoping they might do them again this year.

We have had ruckus for a few years. The system itself works really well. I think in the past year, ive only had to reboot a couple of access-points a few times. Most of the problems we get are related to dodgy wifi interfaces or drivers in the clients, or mis-configured poe switches (we use separate vlans for wifi). Once we fixed these issues, they have'nt recurred. We have about 32 access-points, and 200+ clients across the school. most of our laptops are in trolleys of 15 or 30. I think i've only noticed a problem with too many clients on an access point once, when we had 60+ laptops trying to connect to one ap. It still worked, it was just a bit slow. This was a while ago, so I don't remember the exact details. It never happened again. 30+ devices on an ap doesn't seem to be a problem for us. If you expect those sorts of numbers of clients connecting to one ap, you probably need to talk to a supplier to get their recommendation. We also have a staff and student network for personal devices and phones. There are lots of options for this, and its easy to set up and not much work to maintain. I don't think we've had to use the tech support, other than for initial setup. I think that says a lot about the quality of the product. I would recommend an onsite demo of ruckus and the other popular systems. See what you think.

We arn't using asterisk at the moment, but have had similar problems in the past. Our solution was to block certain expensive calls from all handsets apart from reception. If staff want to call some numbers, they call reception and ask to be forwarded on to the number. That way a human is involved in the decision process. Don't know if that would work for you or how to implement it in asterisk.

We have a mix of hp and netgear and other switches (HP v1910, netgear gs724/gs748, and many others). VLANs play allright together, but different switches seem to have different methods to configure them. With the netgears we have, you can set the pvid (the vlan id added to inbound packets) separately from the port membership for outbound packets. the 1910s do the sensible thing and make them the same. Once the packets are tagged, they should be handled the same by the different switches. You might have to work at getting the configuration right, but once set up, you shouldn't get any further problems. I would set up a separate test network and play with the configuration until your happy. I would start by making a clear diagram of what you want to achieve.

Is the script getting confused by the $ symbol? It might be that in the script context, the variable that has the username isn't set properly. You might also need to look at wether the $ signs are there because the share is hidden, or if its a variable that should be substituted.

PyQt4 is pretty good. I've not really done much with it, but its nice and portable (mac, windows, linux) and looks fairly professional. Its both open source and commercially licensable if that's an issue for you.

I have done this sort of repair in house at my school. We have a pretty good soldering iron with a small tip. I don't know of any companies that do it, but there probably is one. These people won't learn until they loose data and have to redo it. I always ask the owner first, but if it gets broken beyond repair then it helps re-enforce the lesson.

I would really recommend installing wifi permanently using a managed system. We used to have netgear home grade access points in our trolleys, but they went wrong more often than they worked. I think the problems we had were part rubbish APs, part rubbish laptop drivers, and part people plugging in the network cable after the power, which probably will stop a lot of access points working. Going with Ruckus was probably one of the best ict investments my school has made, and has allowed us to make good use of mobile devices. Having said that, most of the popular managed wifi systems will probably do you a good job. Maybe see if you can get a free demo from one of the suppliers on here. Could you install some APs in areas wherethe laptops are frequently used, then expand at a later date? Rather than going completely site wide? I think each of our access points covers about 3 classrooms, but it would depend on your building.

We have our cctv cameras in a separate vlan, mostly for security as CyberNerd says. Our cctv vlan is terminated on a second vnic on the cctv virtual server. Whether you reduce the traffic on your main network will depend on your network infrastructure and the number of nodes. You will divide up your broadcast domain and reduce the amount of broadcast traffic each node has to deal with. If you route your cctv vlan over the same uplinks as your main network, then it won't make much difference to the amount of traffic flowing through those uplinks. Multicasting will depend on whether your cameras or network uses it, and also on the configuration of your routers and switches. I don't think that many cameras use multicast.

Hasn't XP been out for 11 years now? 7 is 3 years old. I sort of see your point, but it was getting quite hard to find drivers for some of the newer hardware. Microsoft do support business longer than home users. 10 years is a very long time in the software world. There are also some nice additions to windows 7 and 8 from an admin point of view.

I hope netbooks don't go completely, The low cost and portability are brilliant. I get a lot more use out of my netbook that I ever did out of my old laptop. I've yet to find a use for the tablet we have at work, other than showing off.

Spiceworks seems ok for us. We have about 700 computers. We had to do some tweaking to make it usable though. I've set it to do a slow scan, and stopped it scanning broadcast ip addresses. We also have incremental scanning enabled, but that might be a default. Its still a little slow unfortunately, because its otherwise quite a useful bit of software.

Are the projectors connected with vga? We found some problems with dvds were fixed by installing the correct drivers. Sometimes we had to resort to windows vista or xp drivers.