AngryTechnician

Also works in Firefox 4 and IE9. The game itself is HTML5, but it does use Flash to provide sound. If you don't have Flash installed it will ask you to install it.

We have some major building works on site over the next year, and in the half term a contractor will be digging a trench directly over the path of one of our underground fibre ducts. I believe the intersection point is currently beneath tarmac. I have been asked by Facilities to give an estimate of how much it would cost to repair said fibre if the contractors screwed up and dug through it, so that they know what sort of financial penalty to specify in the contract. I have given them the impression it would be pretty damned expensive. Anyone have a close-ish idea of what sort of figure we'd be talking about?

My plan for this is "restore the entire DC from the full backup I do every night". Windows Server Backup is built in and will image the entire server for you to a second drive. This can be external, and can even be a NAS on the other side of the site (as in my case).

I was pretty shocked the first time I gave a purchase order to the Bursar for about £20,000 so he could have someone higher up sign it off, and he handed it back without a glance saying "No, that's fine, just fax it through"!

I did it by mounting as USB, saving the key in a text file, and opening using Text Edit form the Market.

You have to have the password in a hashed format (either SHA1 or MD5) in your AD. Bizarrely, Google don't provide a tool that does this themselves. I use this one, but this one is also reported to work. If you are particularly security conscious, you may be interested in my article on how to make sure the hashes are not readable by internal domain users: Securing your Google Apps SHA1 password hashes

Almost certainly dust on on the LED optics, despite the filters being cleaned. Cleaning the filters only ensures good airflow, it doesn't do much about preventing the very small amount of dust that inevitably makes its way inside. A deep clean would probably fix it; to do it yourself you'd have to part-dismantle them. Possible, but tricky. I've done a couple of XE-31s before and it worked nicely, but it was not simple.

Gerbil food. The gerbil is an essential member of the IT team if I need any cables severing in an emergency.

My work bag is embarrassingly technical and unamusing: Laptop + charger Bluetooth mouse Network cable CEOP biro Pocket screwdriver set Precision screwdriver set 2x USB keys Wi-Spy CD case USB floppy drive Small bag of broccoli

What is the power light doing? (Green/Orange/flashing in some way?)

Whatever this was it appears to be redirecting to a different ad-filled site now.

Personally I'd be tempted to just turn off the requirement for Ctrl+Alt+Del on those machines.

Could someone have extracted it from the laptops? There are plenty of tools out there to do this, though I think you need admin rights most of the time. (Possibly not with XP).

What utter codswallop. Not to rub it in for you guys, but I know I'm getting paid more in a private school than people doing my job in a state school, and I know the teachers here are in the same boat. We're not a rich school, either - I know the competing school down the road pays more than we do. First, consider the source. Check out the About Policy Exchange page, where all but one of their endorsements is from a Tory. The very fact that Gove likes them should be a good indicator of how much BS they produce. Then have a read: "We advocate empowering communities to solve their own problems at a local level, and helping people to be more self-reliant rather than dependent." Big Society anyone? They are also cherry picking their figures, like almost all stats-based reports. Their example of "Primary and nursery education teaching professionals" can include everyone from the teaching assistants upwards. Private schools tend to have many more teaching support staff to supplement the core teaching staff, and many state school budgets have been hit so badly they have had to lay off their teaching assistants almost entirely, which pushes the median upwards. Interesting that they don't draw any comparison between secondary school teachers where the staff demographics are much more similar between private and public sector?

Also known as "Payback Time" given the cleanliness of the statue...

I show my tweets using a widget. It doesn't create any new posts, tweets are just pulled in by RSS and displayed. Jetpack has a widget to do it, and since much of the other functionality Jetpack provides is very useful I'd recommend going with that. If you definitely want archiving (i.e. create a post for each Twitter update), hopefully someone else can recommend a plugin. As for publishing posts as tweets, you have two options. The easy way would be to use twitterfeed.com. The alternative, which gives you more control, is to use something like WP to Twitter. There are a bunch of these sorts of plugins available, but this is the one I've used. I'm sure others will be able to recommend similar ways of doing both of the above, so it will be interesting to see what others use.

I called them for the exact same thing a couple of years(!) ago, they forgot to send it to quite a few existing customers I think. They sent me a CD no quibble.

If you want shot of the old hardware you'll probably still want to image the server, but it sounds like the version of Acronis you're using should make it relatively painless. Make sure to look for any remote access software and disable it pronto.

I think it depends a little on how senior your Bursar is, but much more on how ICT is viewed regardless of organisational seniority. I'm in the same boat as elsiegee40 from a hierarchical standpoint. Everyone at my school ultimately reports to the Bursar or HT, who each report directly to the Board of Governors with equivalent levels of 'power'. I report directly to the Bursar, so while I am not officially senior management there is only 1 step between me and the Governors. You could argue that on the org chart, I am a similar seniority to the Deputy Head. I don't feel that I need to be any higher up the food chain than that. Ultimately though, what I think you're really getting at is not where you sit in the org chart, but whether your position is respected. Mine is. I have strong support from SMT and the vast majority of the staff; I could probably only pick out 1 or 2 in the entire school who have ever seen me as someone who is just there to service them (ooer missus) and in those cases their attitude is widely derided by other staff. I meet with SMT on a 1-to-1 basis regularly (with the exception of the Head as he's simply too busy) and meet with them as a group on a termly basis to discuss ICT policy. I have almost complete operational independence, and direct control of one of the largest cost centres in the school (it's worth noting than I am one of only two people who can sign off purchase orders - literally everyone else has to have the Bursar sign it off). I don't think any of that that has to do with who I report to, but it speaks volumes about how seriously my contribution is valued. In summary, some schools do value their IT staff. Those that don't will suffer because of it, on all sides, but it's by no means a universal attitude.

This is now officially the most entertaining thread I've seen all week.

Check under the keyboard and the mouse mat!

Click the Advanced button on the Security tab and then go to the Owner tab.

I've only ever had experience of IronPort's spam filtering products, but that was very good. I'd be optimistic unless you hear otherwise!

It will almost certainly not boot after cloning due to the HAL probably being different and the storage controllers needing different drivers. The most likely result is it will bluescreen at first boot. This is a common problem when performing P2V virtualisations, so the approaches used there may work here. Changing the HAL, if necessary, can be sometimes done by doing an inplace upgrade. It's not a supported scenario and I would be very nervous about doing it on a DC, which this seems to be. More info here: Updating "Standard PC" HAL As for the SCSI controller, it might work if you configure the controller in the BIOS to it's 'compatible' setting, which should emulate IDE. If that doesn't work, you would need to perform a perform a procedure similar to this one, adapted for the storage controller on the new hardware. Neither of these procedures to be undertaken lightly on a production DC, especially one that sounds like it is their only server. Personally, I would be tempted to do an actual P2V virtualisation and run the server on Hyper-V Server from now on. If you use Disk2VHD or something similar it should perform the above steps for you and confiogure the HAL and storage drivers for Hyper-V. However, you would then have the additional complexities of managing a Hyper-V environment. As for getting into the Domain Admin account, that is a two-step process. The machine does have a local administrator account that is normally completely disabled, but if you boot into Directory Service Restore Mode, it should let you use it. Hirens might let you reset that password for you, otherwise try this: Forgot the Administrator's Password? - Windows Password Recovery - Windows Password Reset Once you have the local admin password, try this: Forgot the Administrator’s Password? – Change Domain Admin Password in Windows Server 2003 AD Note that I've never actually tried this myself, so be sure to have a backup before you try it.

Following on from the sample AUP for staff that I published last year on the wiki, I have now updated this to include some sample wordings for use with pupils. You can find them here: The Angry Technician's Sample AUP - Wiki These samples are in use with our pupils and the wording was reviewed and approved by teachers of the various age groups. They are deliberately not overly prescriptive, and it is expected that they are used with direction and input from ICT/class teachers to help pupils understand them. We refer to them as an ICT Code of Conduct rather than an Acceptable Use Policy.