linuxgirlie

We use Openoffice here on it's own for about 3 years now. It was slowly phased in and now it is the only office software installed on all but the admin computers (about 10 out of 400). We did move to Serco CMIS though, which means that all the reports and registration etc can be done online, and the offline stuff is done with pdf's so we don't need office for that either. We do OCR National Level 2 for GCSE and Level 3 for A-Level, and the Business Studies students do BACS GCSE along side their normal BS one. So it is used for both coursework and exams. For those who need to change the default save, you can do this under 'Options' you can then change what file type it will save as including MS format. It also reads 2007 files, and to my joy the other day, now MS Works as well Can't think of anything else? I would be happy to answer any questions. Jo

Unison have a guide as well: http://www.unison.org.uk/file/A2331.pdf

Hi, This doesn't have to be just OpenOffice, but that is what we are using, but any ideas are welcome. I don't think that this is just our school, but I was wondering if anyone has solved the problems of students not saving work. I currently have OpenOffice saving automatically after 5 minutes (15 minutes was to long), but for some reason it doesn't "kick-in" unless you saved the document at least once. This is where our problems occur, they don't save the document at all! So what does everyone else do? I am fed-up that the system is blamed every time it happens. Is there a way of making it save a copy as soon as they open a new document? Could I get a script to push a 'ctrl-s' to the suite as soon as they open the program?...might get annoying but it will do the job....but I wouldn't no how to parse that information to the program. Thanks, Jo

I can't find any information on the web at all about this subject. So is it possible to power on a computer via a USB keyboard? I have done it with ps/2 but can't find any information about usb. The problem is I need to find a way of stopping them from turning off the computers with the power button, the only thing I can think of it unplugging it and making them turn on via the keyboard (and wol but that isn't any good in the middle of the day). What do others do? Thanks, Jo

Sorry to drag up an old thread but is this still the case? I was told by Serco that I couldn't backup the data just from the sql database because it won't restore it correctly, but using the 'database' --> 'backup' is driving me crazy when all other servers are doing it automatically. Thanks, Jo

Oh ok, maybe that's because its my 'other half' aka Head of ICT, writing part of the statement, I get a bit of an insiders view Just assumed everyone was told about it from the beginning.....hmmm. I'm at a lost at the timings now Thanks for the help so far.

Yes, I have tried to find out as much information as possible so I know about the waves etc. At what point in the 3 years did your school start writing the vision statement? Was that quite earlier on?

How long has the whole process taken? I notice you posted in Jan 2008 was that the beginning or were you already part the way though? We are in the early stages so I am finding the whole thing a bit fuzzy at the moment, the only thing I know is that we are currently working on our vision statement.

Ah, and there was me thinking that it was simple Just checked an XP one we have here the COA is for vanilla XP.

Thanks I know its XP, but it has the RM login screen and everything, so I didn't know if it was a full version or some kind of deal they had done, so it is nice to know that we can just install without worrying about spending out loads of cash. Jo

A couple of questions: If you get given computers with a XP license sticker on the side does that mean you can keep XP on it or is the license with the person who purchased the computer? Second question. If said computers were from another school which used CC3 and the computers still had XP on them but the RM version, and you didn't have RM at your school could you wipe them and put vanilla XP on them (using the XP code on the side) or would you have to buy a license for them all because the original one was an agreement with RM and the School who purchased them? If you also had within this group of donated equipment RM pc's running CC2.4(Win 98) could you then use an upgrade license to run XP or would you again have to buy a OEM XP license. We have just put Linux on them at the moment just in case, but it would be nice to know if this is needed or not. Thanks, Jo

Yes.

This has been canceled.

Is this just another thing that will affect Network Managers and Technicians? Schools told to improve or close - BBC - BBC NEWS | Education | Schools told to improve or close When/if schools shutdown and merge into academy's they won't need as many ICT staff, so someone will lose out on the way. Just wondering about any thoughts people had? It doesn't state a timeline, but they seem like they want it to go though pretty quickly, someone was quoting to me today they heard it is on this years exams, and the schools have 50 days? But that could just be rumours. Jo edit: Here is the list of schools: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7444059.stm edit again: I have just been reading about this on other forums and wondering if they do rebuild the schools as academy wouldn't that be an easy way of getting outsourced ict in place? Maybe it is more like bsf than I first thought....bsf in sheep's clothing.

The primary groups for staff and students are created by default I think up to 2050. The students are place in groups via yearof entry, so yr2006(yr9), yr2007(yr8), yr2008(yr7) the staff are placed in either itadmin(administrator access on Windows/Linux), tech, staff, studentstaff. You also have exams and guests groups. All lockdowns are performed per user group. When creating a user you will be asked what group you wish to place them into, this will then determine profile, etc and will also create them a login, email account, moodle account, and internet access. Hope this helps. Jo

Not at the moment, but you are the second person to ask that in the last few days so we are looking into making that change. I can pm you a way of creating an extra primary group. What did you want the primary group for?

We use the SmartBoard software, you can download it from their website and it works native on Linux. We don't have any promeathens so I can't speak if they have equivalents or not. The software is identical to the windows one, including the notepad items etc, so far no staff have noticed the difference. Jo

ok here is the finished list. In ICT they tend to use OpenOffice, Nvu, Blender, Firefox, Alice, Scratch. Music use Rosegarden, Hydrogen et al, Media Studies use Celtx, WinFF and a few others, history at the moment are using audacity to create revision podcasts. Most people just use Internet and Office. We have all the plugins installed, Flash, Java, WinCodec, etc etc Jo installed-most-used.txt

oh....rofl Here is the installed packages on the main computers. I am working my way though to create one that is just the packages we use, but this is what is installed, and most of the packages available though the menu are used. Blender at the moment is in favour with the year 7's they are making amazing movies with it. Jo installed-all.txt

Ok, here is the list it should be all there but might not be 100% - the list is in a random come to mind order! Its also only correct for the 6.0 beta as the older versions didn't use ldap etc..: web management - written by us, from scratch to admin/manage day to day tasks and the functions of the rest of the software found below. Uses cgi and bash. Samba - Used for domain control and file access for windows and linux Cups - Printing for clients Apache - Web server - two versions running, one for ports 80/433 and another for ports 2001/3001 mysql - for database based apps php - for php based apps Shorewall - firewall for each server Kixtart - Windows client drive mappings and permissions Pam_Mount - Linux client drive mappings ldap - user and group information for servers and linux clients( pre version 6 this was done via ypserv and ypbind), user and group info. Squid and Dansguardian - Proxy and Filtering system dnsmasq - internal dns server for the network dhcp - dhcp server various apps (moodle, website baker, egroupware, squirrelmail, joomla, phpnuke etc) postfix - mail transport agent imap clamav and spamassisin - for virus and spam scanning mailscanner - monitors/controls the mail stuff pop3 ssh server - so all the other servers can be controled by the main one mon - network monitoring and lastly over 1000 config files that we wrote to hold the thing together! Thats it, should probably put this one in the karoshi documentation somewhere!

The username and password for the web management is different from the one on the box because of security reasons. We lock down the clients with mandatory profiles, using kix. http://www.kixtart.org/ It takes the information of which group the user is in, and provides them with a specific type of lockdown, for example itadmins have administrator rights, yr2005 will be locked down but may have different icons to yr 2007. The lockdowns are mostly done by regedits, and group policies, that like stated above are dragged down by each user who logs in and are removed when they logout. All these can be deleted or added, in the groups 'kix file' which has a list of regedits etc in them. Jo ps. This also means we can use roaming profiles, but we don't recommend it.

I have replied to your PM. For security reasons the login for the web management is separate from the actual box. If anyone else has any complaints about the system if you could email them to me I would be grateful and we will do our best to make the changes. Most of what Simon said was correct, except that we don't have a direct connection, we have to have an IP range given to us via the county like most other schools, its just that we have a firewall, that uses NAT so that in the internal green and DMZ orange zones we can have whatever IPs we like. You can build a cheap firewall using IPcop and 3 network cards, which will do the same job for your own school. Saying that we are looking into making the changes so that all the system can have its own IPs, the first step is that we are stream-lining the current IPs so that you can just edit a text file and it will just work. The second step, once we have LDAP fully tested is to allow for any IPs, the reason we were restricted before hand was for security and data reasons, so that the servers knew who to talk to etc, this would have been no problem if all schools use just 1 server, actually that would make our life easier, but because we need to be able to spread the load and the fact that Karoshi scales up to 8 servers we had to have a way of dealing with this. One another note, Dover Grammar School for Boys have been running a nearly fully Linux system for 4 years. We have 12 servers, use both Sims and CMIS, and have 350 computers. Now Sims is used for finance only, so they have laptops running XP to do that. CMIS is web based, so for our admin staff we have 10 XP computers but all other staff can access it from any web browser inside and outside school. The 350 curriculum computers about 300 are Linux and 50 windows, but we are daily getting asked if 'said teacher' can have theirs 'upgraded' to the same as 'so and so' down the corridor. You are quite welcome to visit....as well as anyone else interested. Right, off to do some work now!! Jo

We are now looking at rolling them out. Still in the planning stages though.

Thanks geoff, they don't seem to be a company that would host dodgy stuff, but I will continue to try and track down these specific ips. I mean its down to 254 but alot of websites can be run on 254 servers

Ah, well I have managed to shrink it down to: 84.53.177.0/8 So I will leave it as that for the moment and see if we get any trouble, they are still having to go though a proxy so access is recorded, but you never know, they aren't stupid students