_Bat_

I only know what it is cos its been in the news recently that their servers were'hacked'. Never heard of it before then though.

I understand it's hard for the sales people, but companies going to the customer as opposed to the original plan of the other way around has a really bad name. Everytime a colleague of mine forwards a 'deal' from a company through e-mail or any other method, I usually trash it immediately. If I was looking for it, I would most likely have already purchased it. Occasionally I think the product they are offering is a good idea (I was given one the other day regarding the creation of a school tour to put on our website) but then i'll either take the idea (with possible modifications) and do it myself or find another company to buy it from. I had another one recently that offered to built a website for the school for about £600. I've never actually been involved with purchasing a website as I always do them myself, but is this a normal price or is it expensive? I didn't realise websites cost that much to build. Most of their examples of previously built websites consisted of just HTML, snippets of javascript and the occasional small flash animation. There was no server side scripts involved at all.

Okay... so basically anything with world write permissions is dangerous? I don't really understand that. Even if a file/folder has world write permissions, how would someone actually edit said file/folder without any passwords? I've seen it done before, but how do they do it? Is there a flaw in the coding which allows them to do it?

This could go under web development or *nix, so I chose *nix. Can anyone give me a rough overview as to how linux file permissions work? I tried searching the net but there is nothing basically explaining the security risks of file permissions on the internet. Most of the files on my joomla installation are by default set to 644. Most folders (and a few files) are set to 755 by default. Yet there are upload folders (for uploading files from the joomla frontend) set to 777. Is this dangerous? Do they need to be set up 777? I've had a website hacked before due to dodgy permissions and I am determined it will not happen again. Cheers

Cheers everyone... appears the coordinates were correct then. The problem appeared to be the cache in IE. Thanks.

Anyone know a free service that does this in the UK? Google earth looked promising, but when I enter the coordinates it gives me into my google maps API thingy, I end up in a location about 150 miles out. I don't know if I am doing something wrong (don't think I am), but this is my first time using google maps like this. I work for The Oval Primary School (postcode B33 8JG) and according to google earth my coordinates should be about 52.48 Lat & 1.79575 Long. :S

Yeah, I suspected that they might be after a conference I went to (BITES). I heard that they are designing a template for schools to use with joomla, i'm annoyed cos I was already well into doing my own by the time I heard this. Plus I had already got third party webspace by the time I heard this. Grrr! How annoying! I guess the plus side is that my websites will look very different to all the other schools, giving us a unique feel. The thing I am most pee'd off with is that we are paying for hosting which we will be able to get for free soon. Secondly i'm curious as to what this pre-designed template looks like lol. Incidently, do you work for the BGfL or somewhere related? Is there any place on the web I can get more info about this so the blow won't be so much of a shock when it actually happens? What does the 'very near future' mean?

Agreed. The net would be fine if the effect of the school blocked/allowed list was instant. Instead, they insist on checking each and every entry. It gets on my nerves as well.

We used the BGfL for internet, but virgintrains.co.uk isn't blocked?

Just tried this, but didn't appear to work. Is there just this one service needed to be restarted or two like stitch & monkeyx said? Have you found this as well Dan? Thanks guys.

This is probably another stupid question, but I still haven't quite gotten to grips with this program (CMIS or EPortal). Can anyone tell me how to change the teachers login name and password to access eportal? I understand that the login name and password for EPortal are seperate from the standard CMIS logins (they are edited in CMIS under options >> Users >> Resource Passwords?). When I use the current login username and password for a teacher (the one that appears to have been generated by the system) it works, but if I change it and click modify, the logon no longer works using the new credentials. Is there something I need to click to update the database or have I hit another bug? Cheers

Haha. That line on its own sounds quite funny. Sorry... i'm still young, you'll have to excuse my sense of humour. Anyway, I have 120 machines (curric, admin and laptops) and six servers in total. Also have the responsibility of two different school websites, 28 whiteboards and 28 projectors (figures have been edited... I forgot to include the reception/nursery classes). I work most of the time on my own, but I have a network manager who spends half a day a week at both schools (or at least he used to until I came, now he often skips coming to the two schools that I work for so he can concentrate on the other schools he works for that don't have support). I can still contact him though if anything major goes wrong. I am a junior technician BTW... really its my first real job in IT, i've not long been out of college.

I didn't realise that anyone other then M$ themselves and government organisations had access to the source code of windows? Who else has access to it?

Small problem with this. The teachers rarely log into the domain on their laptops. They connect them to the network for internet purposes, but log in as a local user. They have been doing this since before I came and trying to get them to change it will need an act of God. I think I will have to try and modify the windows firewall to trust the server and hope that it will fix that problem. The other problem is teachers installing their own firewalls... they often do this without even realising they have done it. One teacher even went as far as uninstalling Sophos off her laptop because the internet security program she had tried to install told her it was 'interfering'. The only solution to this appears to be locking down the local account from installing anything, which again, I am reluctant to do.

So what about firewalls? This has been bugging me for a little bit now. Obviously we have a firewall provided to us by our LEA in school, so no need to have firewalls installed on client machines including laptops. Plus having any firewall including windows firewall enabled messes up certain things, especially sophos. Yet teachers are encouraged to take laptops home and connect them to their home internet connection. This is especially dangerous to those laptops which are used by the teachers children (many of them are and I would hate myself if I had to enforce a policy to stop this happening). We need a firewall on the machines for home use, yet if there is one, it makes the laptop incompatible with our network in school. Teachers have recently gotten into the habit of installing their own firewalls because they come on the CD (along with a load of other junk) which their ISP provide them with. I have got one sitting next to me now which has recently had norton installed. Not only does this block sophos by default but the install was buggy was caused windows to hang each time it was shutdown. I was reluctant to remove it for security, but had to for the above two reasons. How does everyone else get around this?

I'll take a look at this tonight when I get home. Thx

Hahahaha! Can someone please remind me why IE is still the most popular browser? It needs to become obsolete! I just hope IE7 proves me wrong... I haven't used it much yet though.

Cos of the quality... due to some of what I was doing, the quality of GIFs just wasn't really suitable.

Why, with all their billions, can't microsoft keep up with the computer industry? Having completed layout of one of the websites I am building and starting to add content, I decided to do a complete test on all common browsers before I continued. I knew that IE6 didn't support PNG transparency, so I got a javascript workaround off the net. But this seems to leave the page continually loading, though most of the time it appears to be correctly loaded anyway. However today, while testing it on my grans laptop, IE completely screwed the site up due to the javascript PNG fix, about half of the PNGs wouldn't even load. I know IE7 gives full support for PNGs, but what the heck took them so long? It will be a while yet before the world starts to convert to either that or (hopefully) a better browser like firefox. If only M$ realised how much stress and wasted time they caused me. Anyway, rant over.

The main advantage over linux for me is the cost and no license worries. The disadvantage is difficultly of use (because i'm so used to windows). The main disadvantage of windows (for me) is viruses. For some reason, everyone I know left right and center is calling me and asking me to remove viruses off their windows machine. I gave the worst culprit linux and there have been no problems since. At one point (due to the way I was working) I had to connect a default/clean installation of windows XP directly to the net... before I even got a chance to open IE, I was hit with a virus and they started coming in so fast that I ended up having to do a clean re-install again. I think the firewall I had at the time had problems installing, so the only option I had was to connect to the net and try and do updates very quickly. Didn't have much luck.

Are these the people who are suing users for file sharing then? Haven't they also sued the creators of the file sharing programs (if known)? I don't really know that much about law, even with relation to computers. There seems to be so much confusion about what is actually legal and what is not due to the way things are worded... take the M$ license for XP for instance :S.

I didn't know they were doing that. I couldn't find anything about it anyway. Yeah... I did read that... not that anyone ever does this with VLC (unless they have money to burn). I guess it's still potential for trouble though. The reason this legality issue bugs me so much is because I hate windows media player with a passion (and I have been told the latest version is excessively full of DRM) and the software that comes bundled with the laptops for DVDs is a load of rubbish and takes up way too much space/memory for what it actually is and is supposed to do. I think I said in a previous post that VLC played a DVD with much better sound quality then its proprietary equivilant.

Been giving this a lot of thought today and I don't believe that any problems would arise by installing it... If the government do decide to directly answer the question as to whether it is really legal or not (there is still a lot of debate and confusion) then they will take videolan to court (if it is illegal) as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of people in England/America that use it. They haven't even done this though, so I doubt they will penalise the users. I think it's one of these things that isn't worth worrying about (such as temporarily using adaware to remove spyware off a school PC, BartPE and the tools that come with it, a BootCD etc.)

heheh, thanks for that vote of confidence, Geoff I wasn't aware of that, i'll add it now. Thanks. I said it in jest really... there is no way the school would accept paying for something that only I am going to use, heh heh. I always buy my own tools (such as screwdrivers, IDE to laptop IDE cable etc.) i'm not sure how normal that is. I guess I just get to keep them in the end.

Oooh yeah. I only ever get two responses... the silent blank stare and finally an "okay.." or the one you said above.