HodgeHi

Toast is perhaps the best DVD burner for OS X. I think there is also one called Dragon burn. You can download a trial of Dragon burn IIRC. Toast is probably the Nero of OS X though. I don't know of any free DVD burning software.

we are also currently looking into this and have loaned a couple from our local CLC both 901 EEEpc. They are very kind and have loaned us 1 linux EEEpc and 1 Windows XP EEEpc. Out of the 2 i think i prefer the Linux model. It has a smaller resource footprint and has a very user friendly GUI configuration. I think Asus have done a relatively good job. I have also used one of the Hp mini notes running Vista and i think it is a little slow to be honest. The machine sits very high at the back as well due the placement of the battery. The Asus EEEpc has a 7-8 hour battery life and is a very small forma factor machine. I like them a fair bit now actually and am thinking of getting one for every day portable use now, i.e. switch trouble-shooting and such like.

system preferences > sound > Output. Just change it to Internal Speakers.

Brightness setting?

You would need to configure network views. But upon looking at WGM this seems to be drastically harder to configure on 10.5 than it was on 10.4??? It seems now you need to click on each computer in the list of computers and then add a URL to each machine. I have never configured a network view so am not entirely sure how it works but i think that it restricts the network view to the URL/s that you enter. It use to be that you create a network view or something and then drag the machines you wanted into that view. Can anyone else confirm or dismiss these changes? I may be missing something.

The partition/System folder may have needed to be blessed?

Hi all, I am looking at VoIP in our new school which should be built ready for the new academic year. I know very little about how to set up a VoIP system and what hardware is needed. Searching for information is pretty hard when you don't really know what you are searching for and where VoIP is at the moment. I was wondering if someone who has gone through this could give me a couple of pointers as to what hardware is needed to get this off the ground and where to go for more advice on what is needed. The system we are looking at initially is for internal calls only, with a view to extend this to some sort of internal exchange leading finally onto external communication. What sort of costs are involved in doing something like this and are there any per annum costs involved.

Hello Each. Hope you had a good Christmas/break, I am starting to look into VLEs now more closely since apparently we have to have one up and running by 2010. Is there anywhere i can find out more about the requirements and what is to be expected from a VLE? i have found a PDF on the becta website about Virtual and managed learning environments but this was created in 2005. is there such a thing as a guide line or does it changed depending on what LEA you are under (Sandwell LEA is mine)? I have looked at Moodle but cannot see a way to effectively integrate it with SIMS.net and this i think may be a key part of the whole VLE. We could sign upto one of the hosted VLEs but most of the ones people have mentioned on here are basically referred to as not the best it could be. One of the things that is stopping us signing up is also the fact that most content for Primary Schools tends to be on the naff side. It seems as though because their younger content doesn't need to be as good as secondary schools. Any info would be great. Thanks

What did you use to image the drive and then re-image it back?

My brother has been with them from the start more or less (when they were Telewest). He has only had a few issues with his connection, but even he has said that the level of customer service has gone downhill. I can also confirm this since i have had to deal with Virgin Media who are generally useless. I had an issue with my phone line not being installed when they did my TV and Internet. Now i had to call them from my brothers house. They said I can't call from this Virgin media line as it wasn't my line. But i don't have a line yet. Sorry. They said. They can't help me from this line. But i just want to ask when my will be installed. This went around and around for a bit. It was the same with my Internet problem as well. Couldn't phone from my brothers line (i was round his house at the time). Why should the phone you use make a difference to support. Even their online help form is pants now. You cannot reply to a response to a question you sent. So you have to go through the whole process again but thats pointless as they probably won't have the support's response on file no would they? Crap CS makes me so angry. O2's was worse though

Teachers wouldn't really use this software to be honest as most of the work is done in the admin side. This is the problem with most image galleries i have found. They all have back-ends in the admin side. What does stand out from this one though is there is a thing called a bucket. This is basically an FTP share where users can upload images to and it uses this bucket to add them to galleries. I haven't tested this out yet though so am not sure how it works in its entirety. I would recommend at least looking at it as it is a very nice implementation, all flash-based, including the back-end.

I have been looking for an image gallery for some time until i found this one: Expose Gallery Module I have emailed the guy who develops it and he says that it can be used by schools for free since they aren't a business. I have tried it out and it works pretty well. The back end of it is really good to use. You will need the Alpha version if using it with 1.5 though as it warns that the Register_Globals is on but in fact it is turned off by default in Joomla 1.5.

Just thought i would post a link to this little app. It's for users that work on OS X machines but also work across multiple platforms. For Example working on .bat files in Text Wrangler and then saving out. Instead of having to keeping clicking the options button to change the line endings you can use this little app to do it. It also works on folders of files and also has a protection setting as well for files that you want to exclude from changing in case it breaks the file. Works on Leopard and Tiger. I have used on 10.5.6 and works fine. Here it is: LineBreak 2.8 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker Hope it helps someone. I needed one of these a while ago.

OK. I think i understand what you want to do. You could make the new OD server a replicating server of the old OD server. Once all information has been replicated promote the replication server to an OD master. This will transfer the information. I have not done this myself so you may want to test it first before destroying the data on the old server. You should then have your new OD server complete with data and connected to the AD. What you need to do now is bind the clients to both the AD AND the OD. You will need the AD above the OD in the authentication list in the directory utility on the clients. This will make the clients check the AD for user authentication first. IMO though you may be better off upgrading the server AND the clients to 10.5.x first though as leopard does seem to work better in this configuration and is somewhat a little more forgiving when problems arise. You can use ARD if you have access to it to send a script out to your 350 clients to bind them to the AD and OD. If you do upgrade to Leopard then you will have to tweak the script a little since it doesn't work quite the same as it did under Tiger. You can find the script here: http://www.bombich.com/mactips/files/scripts/ad-bind-login-leopard.sh You will need to remove the local KDC realm on Leopard as well. The Tiger script to bind can be found here: http://www.bombich.com/mactips/files/scripts/ad-bind-login-Tiger.sh Hope this helps a little.

Seems very slow when using Safari too. I was kicked out of a session the other day.

You could use ARD to deploy the update. If you have access to it that is.

OS X Leopard 10.5.6 update has been released. One of the key points in the update is - Safari: Improves compatibility with web proxy servers. For the full list of fixes look here: About the Mac OS X 10.5.6 Update OS X Server 10.5.6 update list is here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3192

No i haven't touched my smoothwall for a while now. I will check on Monday. Thanks for the heads up.

Is this the same with camino? I have deployed camino in my school and need to set the homepage and other items. I have tried managed prefs and it works to some extent on Safari but has no impact on camino which also seems to use its own default homepage even though one is set in preferences (not WGM one either). For example i set the Schools homepage in camino's preferences and set the Schools wiki page in WGm. What you get when you start camino is the camino homepage. This is the only downside to using alternative browsers on OS X, unless someone knows of a browser that can be managed by WGM and also works with Smoothwall's School Guardian 08.

OS X Server at educational prices for unlimited is really quite cheap. You may find yourself utilising more of the services than you think. e.g. the wiki server is Ok. I'm not sure as to how this would work but you can extend the AD Schema. Now if you extend the AD Schema i'm not sure if you still need an OS X Server or if you can just download the Server admin tools. and use those. You could connect to the AD server in WGM and then change some of the settings there for the users/machines etc. You can download a whole set of vbscripts that will automate the whole extension for you and its free. I would perhaps test it on a virtual environment first though. You can get the scripts from here: Shukwit.com

Ok. I have just looked at the software update on my machines as i have now got to update iTunes. I went to one client (client A) and ran the software update tool. It failed. eh? I checked the machine connected to the whiteboard (client B). This one worked fine. Now i know for a fact that the 2 machines are in different computer lists. I checked the settings on the network prefs and then i checked the settings on the software update. Here's the problem. The URL entered into the field on client A was: http://myserver.domain.com:8088 The URL entered into the field for client B was: http://myserver.domain.com:8088/ I added the slash at the end and then restarted the client B after i had applied the changes. The client updated straight away fine. So don't forget the "/". Its very important.

At the moment it is ticking over fine again. It is very strange in how it happens. I suspect that it could have something to do with mailbfr. I use this to backup the mail service as do quite a lot of other users. I'm not sure if there is an issue with the service restarting after it is stopped before backup is taken. I will post the results tomorrow. One thing i can't get working though is amavisd updates through a proxy

When i get a second, I will try this at home where i have a completely windows free mac installation. I will test and return my findings to the group Although IIRC using ARD with 10.4.11 yielded the same results as mentioned previously. What i can't remember though is whether i tried both before i removed the Tiger systems from the AD and afterwards.

I'm keeping very well Thanks Tony. At this moment in time all my clients are using DHCP with manual address. This allows me to set the IP of the machine and set the DNS entries to be fixed as well. There is then two entries for the reverse lookup. One being the XP side and the other being the OS X side. I have never had an issue with anything else in regards to the DNS setup here. I currently have perhaps the most DNS demanding OS X service running here, for instance, iCal service with augmented AD users along with kerberos authentication to the service, iChat service with AD users in the Buddies list, online group Wiki,blog and Calendar service as well as email for both Pupils (internal only and on separate server from Staff but can mail to staff) and Staff email which can also mail externally) and netboot using FQDn in Net-restore's config files. I think most of it works like it should (with a bit of a shove in the right direction). The weakest link from the whole server setup has been SUS and it's interaction with ARD. I don't think it worked correctly with ARD in 10.4.11 either. Is it just me???????

Lots of information there. A fountain of all knowledge as always Tony. I have the Software Update Service running relatively fine within my AD-OD structure. It accesses my Apple servers Software update service for updates so bypasses the proxy to the local addresses but not through ARD. I can deploy packages through ARD that I have downloaded beforehand, except the security update for the DNS issue that they deployed. This one failed on every machine every time. So i had no choice but to do it manually. I run this command softwareupdate -i -a The error i get is this one: When run as admin it says it needs to be run as root. When using the command: softwareupdate -l as root i get: But when run as admin i get: This suggests to me that the command line Software update tool wants the admin user instead of the root user, but it can't run under admin to install, giving you a catch 22 situation. These commands were all run against the same computer one after the other. How Apple have implemented the managed preferences for proxy and exceptions is also very strange. You can still actually edit the fields if given enough permissions to get to them. I can't remember now if they actually changed anything when the fields were changed, but the fact that you can edit the contents of these fields is confusing. They have also done away with the managed preference for managing the default mail and web browser. Very much missed here The documentation is where Apple are way behind MS (apart from their Server software anyway). It needs to be dramatically improved. MS may have more issues, but maybe its because they admit to them more. Just my second 2p worth