MarcLister

We have a shared calendar for our school of all the upcoming events. Each Friday one of my colleagues will send out a link to the next week's calendar entry for staff to see what events are happening the following week. The link is sent to the whole staff group which is [email protected]. One of my colleagues can't access the shared calendar despite me sending her the link that adds the calendar to her Google Calendar twice. No-one else has had the same problem. My colleague is a member of the staff group. Any ideas what is wrong and how to fix the issue?

We have Inventry but also Net2 running here. Sometimes I re-use a card and so have to remove it from the Inventry system register for one user so I can register it against a new user. I just open Notepad and press the card to the reader. I then get a few characters of text which is that card's ID number.

I agree. It's something I don't think I can do. However as a special needs school disciplining students won't necessarily work. Our DSL doesn't want to prevent students from emailing staff and would prefer that we tell our students to email him (on a specially created email address not his own work address) out of hours as he has responsibility 24/7. Thanks. Just what I need! If staff open up a computer or laptop at home out of hours and pick up a work email then that's their own issue. If they get emails coming through to their phones, how do they know it's a work email or a private email? This might just save me a lot of work. As said above, with special needs students, we wouldn't want to discipline students. We'd rather educate them to email a particular email address out of hours so that our DSL can sort issues out and involve other members of SLT if appropriate. Exactly. I was thinking that as students know how the staff email addresses are formulated, sectioning students off into another domain wouldn't work as the students could still email staff. I would be very reluctant to block ALL student emails from a new domain to our staff domain as, as has been said, it would be a 24/7 block and I don't want that.

The issue is the content of the emails. Staff are getting emails from students with distressing content. Most staff have Gmail on their phones and so get emails at all times. It is a member of SLT who has asked me to look into the out-of-hours issue but I don't think I can do that hence my suggestion to my colleague in SLT that we might have to separate students into another domain.

We have a Google Apps domain for our school. All our students and staff have an email address on the domain but are in separate organisational units. We are having problems with students emailing staff out of hours and staff, rightly so, want their own time to be free from interruption by student emails. Is it possible to prevent students, or users in one OU, from emailing staff/users in another OU? The requirement has been given to me to make this out of hours, i.e. between 3pm and 8.30am weekdays and then from 2.30pm on Fridays until 8.30am on Monday. However scheduling in half-terms and holidays etc makes me think that it would be easier, if it is at all possible in the first place, to just prevent students from being able to email staff at all, at any time. So, can this be done? If not, I'm considering setting up another Google Apps domain and splitting the students and staff up so that we can then prevent staff from getting emails from the 'external' student domain by blacklisting it. That might be a severe option though.

Hi Norphy. Thanks, I shall look into that.

Does anyone know of any free duplicate file checkers that can scan network drives? I have a few network drives where I think we probably have duplicate files, mainly photos and videos, that staff have made copies off. I'd like to re-arrange these files to have them centrally stored, where only I can access them, and save the network space. I've used Duplicate File Searcher but it is quite slow and hasn't been updated in 5 years. https://sourceforge.net/projects/dfr/

Good call on allen keys. I'll have a look on Monday and see if we've anything that fits. I went on Ebay earlier. However everything seems to come from the US and the cost of delivery is more than twice the cost of the product itself.

As well as my ICT duties I'm also the Premises Manager at my school. We have several doors with push bars on that can be locked in to allow the doors to be opened from the outside during the day. To lock the push bars we use dogging keys. Unfortunately ours are starting to get worn out and become more circular rather than hexagonal. This means that it is getting harder to lock the push bars open. Does anyone know of any reputable and fairly priced UK companies/websites where I could purchase a set of keys for me and my colleagues and some spares?

I tried the Windows key + P to swap between computer only, duplicate, extend and projector only options. We selected duplicate and nothing happened. We plugged the HDMI lead in, took it out and re-plugged it in and the Windows Display wouldn't detect a second display.

The adapters are powered at both ends by mains. If it's a MacBook Thunderbolt/HDMI issue why does it also affect Windows laptops?

Nope. One is easy to get to, the other we need a big ladder for. Yep to Windows laptop. We tried a Windows laptop and the PC never registered the projector. We also have a Saturday school who hire our hall on, erm, a Saturday morning. They've tried with a MacBook and a Windows laptop and the projector doesn't register with their devices either. I will see if I can borrow another colleague's MBP and see if that works. It is the same spec as my 2012 one. I have also just bought a second hand Lenovo laptop so when I get that I can use that for another test. The projector is several metres up in the air on the hall wall above the stage. My thinking was I need to try and plug directly into that and bypass the HDMI-Ethernet extender but there are logistical challenges in doing this, namely getting a ladder tall enough and getting someone to support the ladder for me. This is the model, or a very similar model, to our one. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Repeater-Function-Ethernet-Satellite-60M-RX-TX/dp/B00YC3BWL2/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1525951049&sr=8-3&keywords=hdmi+ethernet+extender&dpID=5148vRFXYZL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

Hi Joanne, The HDMI-Ethernet box was put in because HDMI wouldn't have lasted the distance whereas Ethernet does.

We have a Casio XJ-UT310WN-UJ projector in the hall. I connect a 2012 MBP to the projector by way of a Thunderbolt-HDMI cable which plugs into an HDMI-Ethernet device because of the distance involved. The signal is then carried to the projector by Ethernet cable that then converts back to HDMI into the projector. We've noticed that if my boss connects his 2017 MBP to the projector by using a USB-C adapter and an HDMI lead to the same HDMI-Ethernet device the MBP never detects the projector so we can't output from the newer MBP to the projector. Last week we had an issue where a PowerPoint wasn't showing the images on my MBP so the teacher went and got his Windows laptop which has an HDMI socket. We plugged the laptop in using an HDMI lead and the laptop never connected to the projector. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on so that only my 2012 MBP with Thunderbolt-HDMI works but 2017 MBP with USB-C adapter to HDMI or Windows laptop with HDMI don't?

Nice one. Will research that one.

Yeah, sorry about that. I've just logged in remotely and found that the art of downloading the same file multiple times is spreading. I have managed to get 3.56GB of space back in another colleague's download folder by deleting duplicate files.

Voted more than 5 hours. I work 8am until 4pm and when I lived a long way from work I made sure I left just after 4pm to get the first of two trains home. Sometimes I was genuinely delayed and got the next first train home (every 20 minutes) so not too bad a delay. It was annoying if I left later and got the later first train which was itself delayed as I'd then almost certainly miss the connecting train and would then have another delay for the next train home. Now I've been the Premises Manager as well so I live in the school house which is barely a minute's walk down the drive. This means I've really started to stay late as I haven't far to walk. Today I think I left just after 5pm. I balance up staying later to get things done against going home at 4pm and explaining to the powers that be that I have too much to do in the time I have between 8am and 4pm.

I haven't set quotas on teachers' accounts. However I do run the occasional SpaceSniffer scan on the server when I notice the space left is going down. I do like to bulk re-size images through IrfanView. There's nothing like having several folders full of loads of JPGs from phones with each file being 4-5MB at a minimum. I realised a few months ago that two colleagues in particular had over 20GB of files in their folders and investigated. Turned out they'd been downloading stuff left, right, centre, up, down and any other possible direction/angle. One of the two teachers had developed a penchant for downloading the same flipping file at least 3-4 times over a period of several months from the first download to the last. I rather enjoyed winding her up about it as I spent half an hour in her classroom deleting the duplicated files. Now that I've seen this thread I might do a scan now and see what's what. Didn't realise this thread was 2 years old. How did it come up so high on the forum!?

Wow! That is a big price. We have Inventry and love it but for what you're asking for, £2,225 is a lot. Our badge printer is a Brother QL-570 I think. You can get this for £66 inc VAT from Amazon yet I think Inventry (or their partners) quoted us £375 so it might be worth buying the same label printer, if you already have one, and taking that off the quote and see if the price drops a fair bit. The label plugs in via USB so there's no reason I can think of not to get one yourself and save a few £££.

Will try that out. Thanks. Run it from VirtualBox itself? Yep, makes sense to see. I thought Macs had excellent memory management? But yeah shame he didn't get the 16GB. That wouldn't have been too much of a priority for him. He went for a 256GB SSD rather than the 128GB and probably preferred to put the money in more storage than RAM.

Sorted! I was given the honour of placing my humble hands on the royal MBP on Thursday afternoon to check the settings and to tidy up the "spaghetti junction" of cables on his desk, ironically as a result of getting rid of his Windows PC and having cables trailing all over the place to power his MBP, iPhone X and his network/HDMI cables into his MBP via a dock. I checked the network setting and it wasn't set as you suggested it needed to be. Unfortunately I couldn't remember the password for the Windows account I'd set up so I had to wait until yesterday afternoon when the boss was taking a whole school assembly to have another go. I logged into the VB Windows machine and then went to my PC to log into the SIMS server and re-deployed SIMS/FMS/Discover which obviously requires Solus as a pre-requisite. All good apart from me logging into SIMS to test it when FMS tried to install and failed. I re-deployed FMS and ended up with a happy boss. Well that is until next week when he says the resolution of the Windows virtual machine is rubbish low and is slow as hell. I've upped the RAM available to the Windows virtual machine from 2 to 3GB. The MBP has 8GB in total. Bearing in mind the boss has a lot of stuff open on the MBP how much of the 8GB RAM is it safe to make available to the virtual machine before I cause problems with the OSX running in the background?

Thanks for the suggestion. Will do.

I couldn't possibly call my boss a plonker. But I do agree with the sentiment. I said he could keep his Windows PC and I could set his MBP up to allow him to remote into his PC from home and access SIMS/FMS if he needed to. He declined this suggestion. I did smile (inside) when he asked me earlier this week when I'd have SIMS/FMS working on his MBP. That'd be the MBP he loves so much he barely let's it out of his sight and that wasn't my suggested method of accessing SIMS/FMS on? We do have remote access. As he doesn't have a work PC anymore the only machine he could surely remote into would be the SIMS server itself? Not sure I want him able to access the SIMS server itself.

Hi Arthur. Lovely, thanks for that. I'll check that next week. Got a couple of meetings with the head so should be able to have a quick look whilst in the room.

Good question. Tbh I knew that'd be an early question for me to answer. From memory I tried checking this out in December and I seem to remember that either way I didn't have much luck. I will double check this when I get a chance. Do I need to set Windows to have its own IP address in the Networking options or the VM itself? Not used VirtualBox before so not sure what needs to have the IP address set.