AngryTechnician

Reposted from the Becta safetynet list: I've had a quick look through this magazine this morning online and it's 100 pages of very good information, and not a single direct advertisement. Kudos to Vodafone for the resources they've put into it.

In my experience, an awful lot of people are oblivious to the security warning bar that appears below the ribbon in 2007 and 2010. It was designed to be less obtrusive than in previous versions, and to deter people from the 'click OK on everything without reading it' culture, but now a lot of people just don't interact with it at all.

Have you ever done that thing where you go to pull open a heavy door by grabbing the door handle and leaning back to let your body weight do the hard work, except you do it too fast and miss grabbing the door handle, then nearly fall on your backside when you lean back with nothing to catch yourself? ... ... No, me neither.

I made that mistake. It turned into a LOT of work from SMT and no real benefit to the school or satisfaction on my part because the rest of the staff didn't give a monkey's.

In my last school, branding changes were mandatory, but routinely ignored. This was simply because people were too lazy to implement them. Much easier to just take the letter you wrote last time and replace the text. It's like necromancy for Word documents. Even in my current school, where a branded school letterhead Word template sits in the root of the Staff shared drive, I've seen documents supposedly written in the last 2 weeks that on investigation actually started out life more than 15 years ago as Word 6.0 files. Unless SMT are willing to enforce it by disciplining staff who fail to follow simple instructions, there will always be people who can't be bothered.

Glad I decided against taking up their EtherStream product now - SMT here get tetchy when our connection is down for more than about 10 minutes!

Have you tried running it from another XP machine?

When I took over a CC3 network last year, I was given a day's briefing from an extremely knowledgeable RM support partner that the school had a contract with. One of the few things he told me never to do was to try and rename a workstation.

I have actually seen this method in my current school, though only indoors and hidden inside trunking!

In a word: no. The inability to install updates is the case with every version of Windows from 2000 onwards - though before Vista, standard users would just get an 'access denied' message instead of a username and password prompt. The solution many of us here use is to ensure that the update prompts are suppressed, and take care of the updates ourselves using a package management tool. The exact method will depend on your own setup and the bit of software for which you want to turn off update notifications. Have a search through the forums for each individual bit of software and you should find solutions for each of them.

Probably Friday for us.

At my last school we had a bespoke MIS developed by the Network Manager, and while it was very good, it did take up a considerable amount of his time. When School Census time came around he would literally work on nothing else for a couple of days to integrate all the changes that had been made to CTF since the the last one. I understand that a big problem for him was that the CTF format validation tool provided often did not correctly validate according to the published spec.

We're on a lesser connection at the moment - 40Mb/10Mb FTTC from Zen Internet, which costs us £65/month +VAT. A 100Mb leased line is MUCH dearer - I'll let someone who has one break that cost to you. In terms of filtering, we currently rely on an onsite RM SmartCache that was left over from our days as an RM network. The box is paid for and the filtering updates are dirt cheap at less than £100/year. It's not the best solution though, and if I had the money to replace it I would have a Smoothwall box instead. The filtering subscription is a bit dearer, but worth it. The initial cost of replacing the hardware is what's putting me off at the moment.

As soon as SMT get around to bringing it up with the School Council. We want to involve the pupils in wording it.

If you mean the suggestions that appear in the dropdown while you are typing into the search box, I think the URL is http://clients1.google.com/complete/search

I think you're spot on, Common Buzzard (buteo buteo). Poor bugger.

Zen Internet gave me a competitive quote which compared quite favourably with BT and Virgin. As srochford has said, for 100Mb you'd almost certainly be looking at fibre; I can't think of any copper product that goes beyond 40Mb.

One the drivers are installed, you'll get an icon in the system tray (near the clock on the taskbar) that will allow you to configure it, just like with the SMART drivers. From what you've described, the amp is correctly wired into the wall plate. You should not need any extra audio cables to the wall plate; the audio cable from the laptop should go into one of the pairs of connectors on the back of the amp, and then select the corresponding source on the front of the amp. One last thing: you mentioned "touch control". Are you aware that Promethean boards are not in fact touch sensitive? They only respond to the special pens that come with them. If you do not have the pens, ask for a quote from suppliers in the Our Advertisers forum here on EduGeek. They will almost certainly be able to supply replacement pens cheaper than buying them direct from Promethean.

Wait, my mistake - if you try and set SafeSearch to off in Google's settings, the SmartCache blocks the request to set the cookie. Not sure if it would be possible to set the cookie some other way, but it does at least make it quite difficult.

The 2.1 update was pulled due to some serious bugs, so most of us Streak owners are still stuck on 1.6. We have been officially promised 2.2 by the end of the year. I suspect there will be bloodshed if Dell don't deliver. I'm not sure on the Tab, but the iPad and the Streak are simply not the same class of device. Both sides of the Apple/non-Apple foodfight like comparing various 'tablets' to each other, and every other 'tablet' is directly compared with the iPad in the same way that every smartphone is compared with the iPhone. The latter is usually unfair when you compare price, and the former is simply a stupid comparison through and through. I wouldn't buy an iPad simply because I have no use for a device of that capability that doesn't fit into a pocket. I probably wouldn't buy the Tab for the same reason. Think carefully about how you want to use whatever you buy. Basically, if you want something you can slip into a pocket and yet not have to squint at when browsing the web, a 5" device is for you, and the Streak is a reasonable bet despite Dell's misstep with support. If you're happy to carry your device around in a bag, go for something bigger.

RM SmartCache can't do it, but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure the dynamic content filter will kick in just by searching for the word 'porn' and block the results page.

Group Policy Preferences will do all of this, but only once it's patched with hotfixes as even the version shipped with Windows 7 doesn't work properly with OU or security group filtering. If you're willing to push out the patches and have at least one Vista/7 machine to configure the policies, you could be in business.

I've been waiting for the first major blow-up over this since it came in a few weeks back. As usual it's typical of Facebook's two-faced attitude to the way people use their site. On the one hand, they want you to make as many connections as possible in order to build their data pool for advertisers. On the other hand, their privacy model is based on the assertion that you only add trusted people to your Friends list.

Slightly advance warning at this point, but as a CEOP Ambassador I plan to run a training event for nearby schools at my own school in Berkshire in the first half of the summer term 2011. If anyone would like further information when it is put together, please drop me a line.

Thanks both, I will proceed as planned and blame you completely if it goes horribly wrong.