Rod_Mustard

this seems like a good way forward- how difficult was this to implement?

We're quite a big school - over 1000 workstations and laptops - i think adding all those mac addresses to our switches would be unmanageable and indeed futile. as has been mentioned, it's easy to fake the mac address anyway, and even if i went down the route of a vlan and giving the pupils a separate 'untrusted' outlet and access point for their wireless there is nothing to stop them from unplugging one of our machines and launching a denial of service attack on one of our windows servers (for instance) from a 'trusted' network socket. it's a difficult one, i say ban all outside laptops, but as you know, it's quite difficult to convince the upper echelons.

Just wondering what the policy is with you guys with 6th formers bringing in their own laptops? personally, i think we shouldn't allow it (since there is no real way to prevent them from plugging their laptop into a normal outlet and being able to access the network). i know we could have separate access points for them on a separate vlan, but i don't think that really solves the security issue.

we've found this also, the main reason it seems is due to editing video in mov format straight out of the camera, the best way to work around it is to convert it to microsoft dvi and edit using the video in this format. it takes ages to render, but it will save you a shed load of hassle.

there is a quick and dirty way you could do this.... create a self extracting archive using iexpress or winzip and stick it as a group policy start up script with the appropriate parameters to extract it to %windir%\fonts you could make an msi package if you've got the means to do it, but the above solution will work quick and easy.

Offline files isn't an issue for us, we trialled it with teacher laptops, but the problem we found was that some changes were being reverted because they were logging onto the network, creating files, creating files at home, and when they connected the laptop to the network some of the files they created on the network were getting deleted. i'm sure this is fixed in vista, but tbh it's not really in issue for us and we're skipping vista anyhow.

we're going to be replacing two servers over the summer, these are windows 2000 servers with (for the time we purchased them) a bit of storage, not used for anything else other than home folders. now, i'm looking at replacing these servers with nas device, like an Overland Snap Server. the more i think about it, the less sense it seems to make to have a box running windows when all it does is share files when there are dedicated, more flexible devices on the market where you can upgrade the storage in a much easier, transparent way. so, really how many of you gone down the nas route? better or worse than having a windows server sitting there?