AngryTechnician

YouTube have today announced the launch of YouTube for Schools. In a nutshell, this gives you: Pre-approved channels of educational content Ability to whitelist individual videos on YouTube itself (rather than on your local proxy) Comments completely hidden and disabled from videos (though not on channels themselves, based on my testing) This may be a good option for schools who currently block YouTube and are nervous about unblocking it despite demands from teachers. As well as adding individual videos to your school/authority-specific whitelist, you can nominate channels to be added to the pre-approved list. I've already requested the 2012 Olympics channel as that seemed to be a glaring omission I found within a couple of minutes. How it works You need a proxy that can automatically modify the outgoing request to either add an HTTP header or append an option to the URL query, as described here. I know Smoothwall should be capable of this because it does it for other things such as enforcing SafeSearch, so if anyone knows how to do this already in Guardian 3, I'd be interested in hearing, but I suspect it may need a new Content Modification policy adding by the developers. More info here: YouTube for Schools FAQs - YouTube Help

Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the template anywhere else. If the wiki remains down I will reverse engineer it from our finished AUP, but I don't have the time to do it immediately.

It definitely uses less RAM, but unfortunately the promised 'fewer reboots' is in reality only a marginal difference as most of the patch Tuesdays in memory have included at least one vulnerability that affects Server Core and requires a reboot.

I suspect its not the most up to date version, but the only thing that would have changed is the download locations of the tools.

However, the school may go out of their way to find 'some other' reason to discipline you, so take advice from your union before making the call to the HSE.

According to HMRC 480(2011) - Expenses and benefits page 10, meals are non-taxable so long as, in general, all employees are entitled to them.

LibreOffice doesn't officially have an unsaved document recovery in the same way that Office 2010 does, but try looking in C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\3\user for any temporary files that might have unsaved work in.

As @elsiegee40 has pointed out, Prep schools don't have anywhere near the sort of cash that senior Independents do. The Prep school I work for ranges from around £7,000 up to a maximum of around £11,000 per year. Those fees are inclusive of meals, after-school care, and trips - even residentials. The only 'extras' parents have to pay for are uniform, basic stationery (i.e. pens), and PE equipment if the pupils want their own rather than using the school kit. For us, EES did work out slightly cheaper than Schools Agreement - but not by anywhere near the sort of margin most state schools can expect. Still, its better than nothing. Remember that only staff who actually use a computer count - your cleaners probably work more than 200 hours a year, but you don't have to include them. In my experience resellers often don't know this, but this information was given to us personally at an Edugeek forum by the Education Business Manager for Microsoft UK in February, so I'm pretty sure its right.

Local Update Publisher can be used instead of SCCM/SCE. I use it for almost all my installations now and it works great with Office. Note that if you're using Windows 7 SP1, you need a hotfix due to a bug in the Windows Update agent which affects SCE as well as LUP. Luckily you can deploy the hotfix using LUP too by adapting the instructions for SCE here (use the DISM method halfway down the page, it works better).

Too bad - for the school. The decibel levels simply mandate when action needs to be taken regardless of worker's current health, but if you are getting ringing in your ears that can be attributed to the environment you work in, then it becomes a H&S problem anyway and they HAVE to do something about it. See your H&S rep, see your doctor, and if necessary, see your union. Hearing damage is usually permanent and is not to be taken lightly. My office was also the server room until Easter. I was lucky enough to have a large enough office that they could throw up some partition walls in the corner where the server racks was, and still have an office left.

My gut feeling is a corrupt font cache. With the affected user, look up the filename referenced in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\FontBmpCache - it will be something like fbcC181.tmp in the user's %AppData%\Microsoft\Office Nuke the file from orbit, then load up Word and see if the problem remains.

The spam will end up in their Spam folder just like normal Gmail. In my experience, the default Gmail spam filtering is very good, but the messages can still be seen if they go to the Spam folder.

A couple of things I can add to the above: 1. The dress code will likely be stricter than would be expected of you in state. Expect to start wearing a tie every day if you don't already. You should be able to get away without wrecking your suits if you buy some smart blazers to go with your regular work trousers. 2. Marketing is far more important in independents. The kit that goes in often has to look the part as well as do the job. It doesn't matter if the computer you've had made bespoke is half the price for the same performance, if the case looks ugly, you will get it in the neck. On rare occasions, equipment may even be put in primarily for show and hardly ever used, simply because "parents expect to see it". 3. Independent schools usually don't have the same restrictions as state schools regarding family members reporting to each other. Prep schools in particular are renown for having the spouse (usually wife, sad but true) of each member of SMT work for the school. They may have a deceptively low official role, but their actual job is best described as "Headmaster's wife", and should be considered at least as powerful as their other half. It is ridiculously old fashioned, but still quite prevalent.

We looked at both, but to extend our capabilities rather than to make savings on existing equipment/software. Neither is a replacement for the full Office suite, for example, but both can save on email costs. My advice is to look very carefully at whether any functionality you propose to replace by moving to one of these systems is actually equivalent functionality. Teachers will be up in arms if you swap what they have for something more limited, regardless of the cost savings, and I would be asking SMT to take 100% of the flak for that if they make the decision based only on cost. My opinion is that Google Apps is better suited for Primary or small/special schools, while Live@Edu is better suited to Secondary and above. We therefore went with Google Apps. It should be noted that we have retained our on-premises Exchange server for staff, as we use features in Exchange that are not available in Gmail. A large factor in my preference for GA in primary is that Live@Edu provides no way to disable access to Windows Live Messenger when at home (you can disable the chat functions in the webmail but this doesn't stop you using the desktop app). Essentially, we felt that providing a monitored email account to a 10yo was justified, but providing an unmonitored IM account was unacceptable. Our GA setup will sync account details and passwords, but users still have to log in with their credentials manually. There are ways of achieving automatic logon but they aren't simple to implement. We trialled both GA and Live@Edu, and I found GA significantly easier to set up, and requires only negligible server resource to do the account syncing (Live@Edu recommends a fresh server with 2GB RAM to run the sync software).

What we have to remember when comparing public vs. private sector is that when we aren't in a recession, the private sector usually does quite well in terms of pay increases, etc. while the public sector does not. The heart of the current dispute is that the pensions cuts will be long term (likely permanent) cuts, while the financial difficulties the country faces are probably not.

As above, the 4000 series only have very very limited routing features. Basically you can turn routing on or off, but if its on, it routes all traffic between all VLANs with no option to access control traffic between them.

I didn't have to change this setting, though I can't guarantee it wasn't set already from when we used to be CC3. How would I check?

As others have hinted, I would follow whatever the school policy is. All schools should have a clear policy on what action should be taken and by whom. Consult your line manager, or if you don't get a satisfactory response, someone on SMT such as a head of year or deputy headmaster.

It looks more like the connection to the domain controller is failing than the connection to Google, so I don't think a proxy is to blame. My settings are as follows for reference (anonymised, obviously), and in this example my domain is ANGRYTECH with the FQDN being angrytech.internal Connection type: Standard LDAP Host Name: mydc.angrytech.internal (just the plain hostname also works for me) Port: 389 Base DN: OU=People,DC=angrytech,DC=internal (this connects to an OU I created called People in the root of the AD) Authentication type: Simple Authorized user: ANGRYTECH\gads (this is a standard user I set up just for GADS) Password: blahblahblah

Seen on Twitter earlier:

I think it may be a Smoothwall Guardian 3 feature. Have you been upgraded yet?

At present we block access to YouTube for pupils and allow it only for teachers, but we are a primary setting so have to be more cautious. In my last school (a secondary) we allowed it and managed it with teacher supervision - which I know can be a problem in some schools. We have recently deployed a Smoothwall filter, and this now allows the built-in Safety Mode of Youtube to be forced always-on (which is quite effective), and can strip out the comments sections. We are currently evaluating this internally to see if, combined with supervision, these measures will allow us to lift our blanket ban.

This same user can be found via Google on hacking and security forums, asking about obtaining the admin tools for 2.4. Call me sceptical, but I don't think he wants this just for home use.

My impression of this ad is that the school is in almost the same position my school was in when I took my job. My school had considered outsourcing but the Bursar had convinced them to give a full time post a go. It sounds like a final decision hasn't been made with this post, but I would say that if you went in and made an impression, the decision to keep support in-house would be made pretty quickly. If my experience is anything to go by, a school like this can be very rewarding for the right person. It's big enough to have the money to do something interesting, but small enough for you to integrate with the rest of the staff.

I have never seen that Windows Installer error before. Also had no problems installing ABTutor 6 here. Do you get the same error when installing manually using the same transforms?