HodgeHi

You have to use the newest hardware due to driver differences eg the graphics card, and newer frameworks are added to the .nbi when created and perhaps a few other things too.

I don't think its all about the cost of someone coming in and repairing stuff that doesn't work. What about additional services to complement the curriculum and learn pupils about use of ICT? For example, setting up a mail server that pupils can use to learn how email systems work, a web-server that pupils can upload websites to? For 5 hours a week and at £85 are they going to configure and set these sorts of things up? Having a technician in the school isn't just about fixing broken stuff. It's also about what else they can bring to the Infrastructure to develop the use of ICT in Schools. IMO anyway.

Thanks for that. I just couldn't see it It made sense as soon as i went through the process. I was trying to link the menu I had created for the other menu to the Parents menu.

Hello, I trying to add a new item under the parents menu on the front page. I have now been looking for over a hour and cannot find out where to do this. I have added it to the menu on the left hand menu when going through the options after clicking on the parents link, but cannot get it to list in the drop-down menu on the main menu bar. I have checked the main menu in the admin back-end and the new item i have created is not not listed. How do i get it into this menu? Hope someone can help me, it's driving me insane Thanks.

I have an fat 80GB machine. I didn't use mine last night as i decided to watch some red dwarf instead. I will check tonight to see if i can sign in. Might have a quick (4 hours usually) blast on Killzone 2

Also head over heels remake is awesome: Head over heels remake link

Not sure if any of you know about this but: Wizball remake It's not bad at all. When i was a young 'un, we had the c64, Amstrad 464 and then the cpc 6128. That was a good machine. I remember my old man trying to load a game (fly-spy) and it refused to load. He used a little screwdriver and tweaked the pots on the cpc-464 to try and get it working. He did and it was worth it too. Quite a good game. I also remember playing last of the ninja 1,2,3 and i think the forth was being made for the new machinesw. Not sure how far it has come. But one of the best games for the Amiga has to be Shadow of the beast (SotB). The best platform to play this game on. Even now, you cannot emulate the game to it's full glory. The smoothness of the scrolling on all layers. Awesome soundtrack. Solid game. Loved it. Again trying to be re-created but not sure how far it's got. SotB 2 was a completely different game to the first and i couldn't even complete the game with invincibility enabled. Solid game. But now the classics. Jet Set willy. Manic miner. Bounty bob and bounty bob strikes back. The apprentice. Saracen*. Army Moves. Roger Rabbit. Starray. Perhaps the fastest side-scrolling shootem-up ever. RAC Lombard Rally. The best rally game ever made to date. Navy Moves. Game Over. Nebulus. All of the Dizzy games. From Amstrad to amiga. All of the Magic Knight games. Spellbound, Knight-tyme, Finders-keepers etc. Spellbound Wiki KickStart 1 and 2. Buggy boy. Barbarian. Vampyre. Only one person in our house could do this game. My dad. Way to go old man! Operation Wolf. Valhalla. 1, 2, 3. I think this is enough for now. These are just some of the games i played when i was younger. Oh the good times. You could actually go out and afford to buy a game. *This game was sold using the graphics of He-Man, Masters of the universe on the box and looked nothing like it. The game though was fantastic. He-man though did look like the graphics and was utter pants.

I read this thread with interest. Although its about the suitability of WoW for primary school kids, this is also related to PS3. I say PS3 as its the only machine i feel that has an open online connection method. What i mean by this is that anyone who has access to a PS3 and has the knowledge can set up an account that is online. You don't have to pay to do this, unlike the xbox 360. With the payment method you at least get the cost restriction for the younger players. Why do i bring this up? Well, many parents don't realise that their kids at home can use these machines to communicate with other players online. I'm currently playing Killzone 2 on PS3 online and the chat from what i can see is global by default. Anyone who speaks can be heard by all through their TV. You can mute certain players as far as i know. Many times i have spoken to staff at school who are unaware that their children are getting access online or even requesting xbox live connection for a prezzie and not knowing exactly what it entails. Just thought i would mention it, that's all.

What i think happens is that Windows automatically updates the DNS entries when it gets a new IP address from the DHCP Server. Windows clients are allowed to do this as they are part of the Active Directory and therefore as secure updates is usually the default option when setting up AD and DNS, XP can update the records. OS X does not do this. If OS X takes a new DHCP IP then the DNS records do not get updated causing DNS records to become incorrect. If you dual boot your macs you have the same machine with the same mac address with 2 operating systems that behave differently when it comes to IP leasing and DNS updating. I believe this to be the cause of my and maybe your issues. although i may be completely wrong. Take this example: Server1.example.com has an IP address 192.168.1.1 DNS entry for this machine is currently 192.168.1.1 you run OS X. Th machine obtains a new IP 192.168.1.2. The DNS records do not get updated. You then run XP. In turn Xp gets the new Ip 192.168.1.2 and updates the records accordingly. DNS now reads 192.168.1.2. IIRC if you manually create the reverse lookup records they stay and a new one gets created. So now you have 2 reverse lookup records that point to different IP addresses. I can't remember which way round it is and i always get confused when thinking about this. I haven't looked at my own DNS yet. When i do i will update on my findings.

Reserved Ip addresses and manually entered DNS entries? This is what i used a year ago and everything seemed to work relatively well. This year i have not done it and my DNS is also in a terrible state. I may be going back to doing a manual reserved IP range for the macs at least. You can use the netsh command to create the DHCP scope and add the reserved Ip addresses and associated mac addresses. It can also be scripted. You can also do the same for the DNS entries too. I have the commands somewhere if you're interested. Oh and if you have ARD obtaining a list of the Mac addresses for the macs is a relatively painless task. Just run a report for the network section of the system. This should give you the info you are after along with the name of the machine.

We dual boot here. Setting up a dual-boot system is a relatively simple process. The only part i am struggling with is the automated process of the Windows Xp side. I do this manually as i don't have the necessary skills/knowledge yet to script this part. What i mean by manual is renaming each machine uniquely and joining to the domain. The mac side is taken care of more or less completely by the imaging process. Once deploy studio is installed, configured and running as it should, then the imaging process, configuring the OS X partition, and deploying a dual-boot setup is as easy as deploying a single OS. There's a little bit more work on the Windows side but that's only because of my limitations. I'm sure others fully automate the process. Also using Boot Picker gives users an excellent way to choose between OSes. Its a simple window that starts up before the login window, that has 2 images 1 for each OS. You can list points about why each user would want to choose a certain OS. Then the user makes the decision and clicks the appropriate image. Again the Boot picker is as simple as deploying the installation file. ARD is a great tool to do this type of deployment, but installation files can also be installed as part of the imaging process using deploy studio.

This may be due to having 'Force local home directory on startup disk' ticked in the directory utility. It's under the User experience. For information purposes, in snow leopard you can also access the directory utility from the System Preferences. Just open Sys prefs and then go to accounts. Click on Login option and then click edit... next to the Network account server. This will bring up a dialog box where you can enter the details for the network servers you wish to authenticate against. There is a button in here that opens the directory util.

We are a primary school in West Bromwich (sandwell) that has been running mac systems for over three years now. The head has been delighted with the transition. We had a suite of 25 PCs when i arrived and we went the mac route to give users the benefit of utilising different operating systems. We have a good mix of software, Some PC-based and some mac-based. But some PC-based stuff can be 'edited' to run on a mac as they are only flash based. I think i mentioned this before in another thread with regards to software. Try to buy online based content for the VLE as most software vendors are now porting their apps. This allows you to use the software across all OSes no matter what they are. We use Open Office on both Windows, OS X and iWork '09 on OS X. Pupils choose what they feel comfortable with. Staff choose Windows and want to choose Office Administering macs is good fun i think as well as frustrating at times. But no more so than Windows/linux etc based machines. I learnt most of what i know on the job so it's not too bad Using a Mac Mini as a server is a good way to start off, i.e. for learning purposes and deployment of images (which IMO is easier than Windows) but i feel when the kids start getting more familiar with the OS and it's apps, you will want to push things further. This will mean you will probably start pushing the Mac Mini to it's limits. But saying that i have used one of these new little things and must say, they are quite nippy. We currently have an Xserve with 8GB RAM and it serves up home dirs over AFP (fully networked accounts) and also runs as an OD Master, SMB Server, FTP Server, NetBoot Server, software update server, a mail server for the pupils to learn email and a web server. We have coupled this with an XRAID with 1TB RAID striped and mirrored, for our storage. We have the AD side of things re-directed to our OS X Home dirs documents folder along with other shares stored on the XRAID. We started off with Garageband as we have sandwell Music come in and teach the kids the fundamentals of music using ICT and this worked well. In fact three years on we still do this. We now use iWeb to teach KS1 how to create web pages and for kids to interact with each other's sites to produce our own inter-networked encyclopedia. In total we have nearly 100 macs (iMacs, Macbooks and Mac Minis) now in school with StudyWiz installed on one of our own XServes and a 2nd XServe serving up our School website and mail (We have 2 servers elsewhere in Co-Lo). I am investigating the possibility now of deploying Linux as a 3rd OS to expose the kids even more to variety of platforms. I think what it comes down to is what you want to achieve. If your school has visions and goals that they feel OSX can help them reach then it may be well worth the investment. On the flip side though, don't just hand over the cash to get shiny equipment. Think it through. Find out what they can bring to your school. And if you want to see how i have implemented this stuff then by all means, pay us a visit. Please note though, it's just the way I've done it. I'm not saying it's the right way, just my way Oh and my experience of the new edu iMac hasn't been the best. They have Nvidia chipsets for the networking. Now, it may just be that the machines start quicker than the older models therefore the networking hasn't started yet but they seem to take longer for then to connect to the domain in XP. This causes a little confusion. Be warned Well, that's my 2p worth. Hope it helps. PS. Try to get a good company on your side as well. We got a great deal with KRCS for our macs and support is brilliant. They have helped me out many a time. Thanks antonio

This may be of some use. Apple - Support - Discussions - Snow Leopard and DFS ... The reason you can now see the home dir is because it is now a mobile account the home dir is stored on the local machine. To verify this you could log off as your AD user and then log on using the local user account. Go to the Users folder found in the root of the HDD where OS X is installed and you should see a folder there with the AD users account name. Fully networked home accounts in OS X don't store information on the system for the user. It comes direct from the network. This is why when the clients get disconnected from the server, Finder crashes and causes all sorts of problems.

mgnicks Currently found in Killzone 2 trying to rank up. Not the best gamer in the world but i make up for it with dedication, when i can get my little un off lego star wars

In what way would i move connections around to optimise network traffic. At the moment i have 5 switches each daisy-chained through ports 24 and 48. I have recently connected the bottom switch to the top switch for fault tolerance. Is this the best method? Also the network wiring and switches are cat 6 which i use to connect the switches together. They do have connections for fibre but i haven't used these.

We do have a fair number of Networked printers now. I will have a look at their configurations. These haven't been looked at since they were installed.

I had. I followed your post on a previous thread about re-directing a few locations (Application Support, log, printers etc). I had a few issues with some of the re-directs however. iWork 09, Pages in particular) kept crashing after printing a document. Upon creating the Printer folder again the problem went away. Also some of the re-directs didn't seem to take on login and iWeb failed to load correctly since it could not create it's site file in the Application Support folder. I think that i kept the caches and logs re-directs though. I will check this.

Thanks for the info. I have wanted to look at SNMP but didn't quite understand how it worked. I think i may need to investigate SNMP further.

Hello all, So the half-term is coming soon. during this week i want to look at the network and tweak it's configuration a little since it seems to be quite slow, especially when using OS X over the network, just browsing the Internet brings up the spinning ball for a second or two. So my question is how's the best way to tune a network? What tools would be best used to do this job? We have a few SRW-2048 switches which allow for quality of service configuration although I'm not too sure just as to how this works. I am also looking at teaming up the connections on some of the servers. One other thing i need to look at is setting up DNS to utilise DNS round-robin. My AD servers have DNS installed. Is round-robin configured automatically? Also the main DC seems to be used for nearly all connections, authentication, DNS etc. How can i get the 2nd DC to be utilised more? Also is it wise to do this stuff without any users in or should i do it when there us traffic flowing across the network? Hope you can help Thanks

This is a bit of a catch 22 situation. As you say not many people are clicking on it, but then not many people can find it. It seems that parents don't want to have to type in the URL, instead just clicking on the link in google. For an update. I have added my site into the Google business and entered my details in there. I have had to claim a business since it already existed on Google maps although in the wrong location. Just waiting to verify the business since i am not at work I have also added more meta tags and created a sitemap and yet still not listed in about the first 5-10 pages in Google. Looks like our School is still not even on the radar. I think the confusion though is that our new School name has replaced the old school name but the location details and other details are still the same. No website has been added to these existing details. Thanks for the information though. Most appreciated.

We purchased the sennheiser HD 201 headsets. We purchased cheap headphones before and they broke real easy and quickly. We have purchased around 35-40 HD 201 headsets and the only ones that we have replaced are the ones where one of the kids keeps chewing through the wires.

Have you checked the internals? check to see if the liquid cooling system is leaking. Hope that it is and hope that the next bit is true. There was a rumor i read (macrumors i think it was) that Apple are replacing powermac g5's with mac pros due to a problem with leaking liquid cooling systems. How true that is i don't know, but i'm hoping that it is and my G5 develops that specific fault Other things to try. Turn the machine on and hold down the cmd, shift and P and R keys on your keyboard. Try reseating the battery on board the mainboard. Remove any other devices inside the machine i.e. pci cards, additional HDDs etc. Re-seat all the fans in the machine to make sure that they are snug etc. Start in verbose by holding down cmd and V keys.

I would like to +1 for Accessit Library. We have had the system for a while now (2/3rd year) and so far had no problems with it. in all honesty that may be because we haven't utilised properly and our Library database is yet to be added in it's entirety but all that will change very soon i hope. Support is very good. I contact Support, they email me back same day. I request a file of some sort, they email me a link to download it. They have even converted a Database file from a previous version (10.4 compatible) to 10.5 as when Apple updated the install procedure failed over night, ready for download in the morning. One of the reasons to work with companies in New Zealand. I like the software. It comes bundled with a web-based browser as well so the library can be viewed online. It can also be split from the server running the library database, which is what we intend to do, but i cannot confirm this to work since we haven't tried it yet. But overall, a thumbs up from me

Is the padlock at the bottom-left of the window closed? If so click on it, type in the local admin user name and password and then see if you can type in the box.