kingswood

Sweet. Thanks Tony.

It looks more like a sales workshop where they get you in a room and push you into letting their sales reps visit your school... Maybe I need more sleep...

This could be a good year :-)

We use TALMOS, so if you need help with that one let me know.

What do people want from a Guide? Bag packing Charity work Being nice to OAPs... ...oooohhhhh..not *that* kind of a guide? Then it has to be freebies :-)

Same here- we inherited some Netgears and they tend to stay "on" and flicker "off" when there is a lull in activity. Definitely no loop though. Looking at the spec on the Netgear site reveals a couple of things: 1. They are managed switches. Use the tools on the switch to monitor traffic flow etc and see what is going on inside the switches. It might be that they have small packet buffers or a lower backplane and so be slightly slower than a more expensive option. 2. It looks like they use "Store and Forward" switching. This is always slower than, say, cut-through. It effectively takes the frames in fully before deciding which port to throw them out of. That takes processing and memory bandwidth. Again, look at the performance monitoring of the switch and see what it throws up. Info here: http://www.netgear.com/Products/Switches/SmartSwitches/GS724T.aspx HTH

Microsoft tell you on their courses that you need at least one GC Server per site. I would say at least two. One way of finding out whether your servers are crunching some serious numbers and need another GC is to look at the LSASS process and if it's maxing out, either get yourself some RAM or spread the load. I have about 600 systems with two GC servers and two that don't act as a global catalog. Works fine.

I agree Tony. I thought it was just me that got angry when mice don't behave like they should! Good points.

If only that worked! Problem is junior technicians have a habit of thinking they are above it and don't do it till *you* are seen doing it. At least that's been my experience. Swapping out to optical mice has actually improved things for me- as well as changing to nice black keyboards that hide the dirt longer In any case, I think it's more of a whole ICT thing. So from the NM down if there's cleaning to do and you can all do it, it will get done faster and better than if only one of you were to do it.

Not at all :-)

Could use apt-get? http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=103462 I did this by first installing the libstdc++5: apt-get install libstdc++5 Then: wget -c ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0/linux-i686/en-GB/firefox-2.0.tar.gz In fact, I just found the article where I got my instructions from: http://www.debianadmin.com/install-firefox2-in-ubuntu-and-list-of-recomended-addons.html It's good. HTH Paul

That works for me Ric- cool!

I have been looking at the Sansa e2xx series...very nice, and quite cheap too. If you are going to use the pod for exercise you really need a solid state version like the nano or the cool little shuffle. Benefit of the bigger version is more space, bigger screen etc. It's been said before me. I would really look at a nano.

You could probably do it with these (thanks Carl): http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/pstools.mspx I am reliably informed that using psloggedon will let you generate a script that reads logon information, then putting that out to text file on the server would let you use another script to read that text file and use the data in an excel graph. Can't help you with this, I don't profess any scripting skills at all. There is also this: http://www.serversalive.com/salive/index.asp But the latter costs money- unless you don't need it for more than 10 machines (IIRC). Paul

Wanted to wish you all a happy new year. Thanks for providing a great resource over the past year, and all the best for 2007! Have fun. Don't drink too little. And remember to get some paracetamol in before it's too late Paul

I use Garageband.com when I need a free track or sample. I haven't been to the site for months, so they may have changed the way they do things. Register and give it a go anyway. If the box says FAT16/32 then NTFS formatted systems should be fine. I haven't seen it put this way- they usually just state a minimum operating system or range of OS support (98/ME/2000/XP etc). Give it a go and see. Downloadable music sources vary according to musical taste. I listen to a lot of Indie music and there's a huge range available in OGG format from various sources- none of which involve file sharing. One of the best ways of building a good library is to rummage through music sales in Virgin Megastore etc and grab low price CDs. You can then rip them in and load them onto your player, and you actually "own" the disc then :-) Enjoy!

They work on Linux. They do. I've done it myself. Although I think a Sansa 2xx series would be good- even with OS X. I looked at them yesterday in fact.

Quite. Move along. Nothing to see here...

Thanks for that Tony. I will be buying a couple of those today. Techrepublic is a great resource.

edited so as not to entice any further "strange" replies. Getting back on topic- I donated something (only a small amount) to the fund. Hope it all goes well for you guys. Have you got a lot of the preparation done? Paul

A 250GB MyBook external drive so I can actually get my videos edited in FCE and use the drive as a scratch disk. I've been moaning about using my MacBook Pro HDD for months. I've also put all my Parallels VMs on there- so it has worked out nicely. Nothing wrong with Charlie Brown. He's cool! Paul

Thanks for recognising how much hard work goes into training someone Tony. I'm sure that we will find someone worth the time. Paul

If you have a look at the Darwin Ports project, or Fink, you might get some packages that help you do what you need to. I might actually try it out myself this coming week and see what I come up with. It's actually a good idea though. The OS X kernel is actually a XNU (X is not Unix) and built around Next and some BSDs. So the tools and the technology are there underneath that you would need. http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_xnu.html In fact, to learn Unix on OS X I have simply been using my Linux books and Unix guides lying around the house. I haven't had to buy "OS X" centric Unix books at all. BTW- Karoshi is running great under Parallels. Great work! Paul

Hi. Sadly we will be looking for a Technician in the new year. If anyone is interested please PM me your CV between now and the end of January. The post will be for an "ICT Technician" and be more entry level (right now) than anything. There is lots of room for advancement though. Again, PM me if you need more info. Thanks, Paul Munro Senior Systems Manager, The Kingswood School Corby

Sorry Ric, I wasn't intending to do that. It's an interesting discussion, and I wasn't going to say another thing about it because it's been said before. Gonna enjoy the break from work. Hope you have a good holiday! Paul