_Bat_

Lol... incidently, I used Tempus Sans ITC for the main menu's. Not a font of my own choice, but it is a primary school... I was told my original site looked too professional lol, I scraped it completely and started again.

Now the topic of websites has come back up, can I ask how long every spent designing their own school website? I have been designing two websites for two different schools completely from scratch simultaneously. Along with my current work load (which has been reduced by hiding away in my cupboard working on the website whenever possible), arranging a company to host them, getting the invoices through the offices of both schools, installing and modifiyng a CMS for each site (trying to make them as different as possible), going through the feedback process which requires a complete redesign of each site and then finally trying to get content to actually put on the websites, it has taken me since the beginning of this term and neither website is actually yet finished or even online (officially). The IT Co-ords are starting to wonder whether they will ever be finished and I must admit i'm surprised myself at how long they have taken. So yeah, how long did you all spend building your own?

I'm glad I am not the only one who feels this way. I get that sinking feeling each time a staff member comes to me with a laptop that has faulty hardware such as the mobo, fans, power connectors etc. I find it difficult to tell them that laptops are not PCs and were not designed to be taken apart and have components such as the above replaced with the ease that PCs were. As people have said previously, getting hold of the correct components is a nightmare.

http://www.schoolboredom.com << found this out today at BITES conference

I've not heard about this. What exactly is it?

Had to use this today, it worked extremely well, about 90% of deleted files recovered sucessfully. Thanks for posting this. I also tried the Restoration program ChrisH mentioned. It does do the job but has no-where near the ease of use as Drive Rescue. I couldn't find any way of selecting more then one file at a time, meaning I would have had to manually save about 200 files. I didn't try any of the others so can't comment.

I'd go to the Midlands one. It'd be nice to meet those of you that go to that one... its a shame we can't all meet up together, but I know its not feasible.

I was trying to do the exact opposite today incidently. There was a file I needed to download and the site was blocked because of "phishing", apparently. I tried just about every proxy I learnt of during my college days, but our LEA is on the ball and every single one of them is blocked. I even tried one that Geoff set up a while ago, but I think he has taken it down .

From the sleepy site: I'll give this a test run tonight, see if it as difficult to break as they claim. On a serious note, my school today have now asked me if it is possible to do something like this due to fire risk. They also want to turn off the projectors at night (literally at the switch) for the same reason... i'm not happy about that because i've already had to plug in two "broken" projectors today. Shutdown.exe looks promising for the PCs though...

Tis Joomla. I get the impression they are better then mambo (I read through all about the split between them), though i'm sure many disagree. I removed the copyright cos if security issues arise in joomla (like they always will) I don't want 'hackers' finding the site through google. It is indeed for a primary school... only one teacher has seen it so far and that was my IT-coord... not sure what the staff will make of it. I'll probably end up changing most of it. I agree its not the best template, its the best I could find though lol. None of the others (apart from the brother of the one I am using) seemed suitable for a school.

Lol, was it your website that has the same template? Its the best template I could find that had roughly the colours I wanted. Had to edit the top of the default template though, didn't really like it.

Okay so about two months after being asked to get us a website, I finally get around to doing something with this. At the moment there is no content whatsoever, the kids are coming up with the ideas for that. There is just the basic template. It is also hosted on my own site as a test cos the school haven't paid for hosting yet. The link is -EDITED OUT-. Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions? I did think it looked more like a secondary school website myself... not sure if this matters too much though once the content goes on.

I just found something online which is interesting... I don't know if anyone can confirm. Apparently the GNU/GPL doesn't state that the VISIBLE copyright notice on the site has to remain intact. What it does state though is that any copyright notice in the PHP files has to remain. What the user sees isn't the PHP file, but an HTML file generated from the PHP file, so it is fine to edit the copyright out of here. Have a look here: Linky

Hey all Recently we had whiteboards/projectors installed in each classroom around the school. The people installing them pointed out that in the one classroom, the computer was at the other side of the room to where the projector and whiteboard were. There is obviously no way they could install extra long USB cables etc around the length of the classroom due to the distance. So they simply installed the projector connection point where it was suitable for them. Unfortunately though, there is no access point for the network there, that remains at the back of the room as opposed to the front. What would you all usually do in this situation? I guess my options are to either get a company in to move the access point or I could install an extra long patch cable. I'm not very experienced in the physical layer of things... at least not practically anyway, but i'm very eager to learn. If it is the latter, is it worth worrying about the length of the cable across the classroom. I realise that 100baseT has a maximum length of around 90 metres (obviously very excessive for what I need), but do I have to take into account the distance of the network point from the hub (hopefully soon to be upgraded to a switch)? Also, is using a long patch cable considered to be solving a problem or "working around" a problem? Cheers

This is just to give a shout out to knoppix. Yesterday morning as I arrived at work a teacher came to me saying her laptop had died. I tested it and indeed, the hard drive was screwed, windows wouldn't load (no errors, just remained on loading screen) and you could hear it tearing itself to pieces if you listened closely. She then informed me that she had two years worth of work on that laptop and (wait for it...) no backup whatsoever. After trying several M$ procedures, I burnt an knoppix CD, booted it up and copied all the work on the HDD over to a flash drive and then to my own HDD (in several runs). It had just finished copying the final MB when the laptop HDD finally bit the bullet and caved in, crashing knoppix. Now I have a very happy teacher and a very prized knoppix CD which will forever remain in my toolkit. Three cheers to Tux!

Hey all, Quick question: I was asked to remove all old user accounts, areas and profiles off our windows 2003 server. I did this manually by deleting the accounts off active directory, then doing the same with the user profiles and file areas in question. I have read about delprof and it seems it is only necessary to use this program to clear the cached profiles off the client machines due to the space they take up on the HDD. Is this correct or have I missed something vital here? Cheers.

Yeah it was, it told me certain files were not writable, yet it wouldn't work unless I CHMOD them to 777, which i didn't think was entirely accurate. I'm not too worried about this anymore though after the posts on this thread. Is this offer still applicable? Lol

Thanks for this info, I will probably contact them later today to discuss prices and such. Okay, that seems sensible. The main reason I wanted the auto installer was because of the CHMODs, Joomla doesn't explain very well exactly what permissions need to be set on each file (or at least I could not find an explanation anyway) and I recently had several personal websites hacked by the same person in one go due to what was apparently dodgy permissions according to other websites who suffered from the hands of the same hacker. I'm not willing to take that risk with a commercial/school website . i'm sure I can find out exactly what permissions need to be set on each file from somewhere though. Yeah, I had already considered that . I don't think my IT co-ord would be impressed if our school LAN got hacked.

Sorry it took so long to reply to this... only just got permission. I think this looks like a good choice because you appear to have used them for a variety of stuff. I have decided to use Joomla for the website, I know I can install it manually but I have to use them for a couple of websites and it'll save time if they have fantastico or the like which will install it automatically... do they provide this feature? Cheers

In my opinion its best to stay on good terms with your old employers, regardless of what your "true opinion" of them is, haha. They could help you out in the future if you are still friendly with them, if you ever found yourself in a bad situation.

Talking of which... how many of you prefer using linux over windows or vice versa? I know most of you have no choice but to use windows on your workstations at work, but what is on your machine(s) at home? Not trying to start a debate... just curious. In my case, my server runs linux, two client machines run linux and the other two run windows (I would prefer linux, but some of my family insist on using windows).

I hate computers (for the remainer of this day anyway). Does that make me an outcast here?

I have gone ahead with my plan B now... no matter what I did, I could not get the drive to map or get access to any shares at all. I tried mapping it from within bartPE and simply trying to access the share from the run command. It asks me for username and password which I entered and it comes back with an error... doing the latter says "error during installation".

I tried to map the drive via CMD and I got the following error message: "system error 1450 has occurred - insufficent system resources exist to complete the requested service" Tried googling to no avail.

Strangely enough it goes through the entire process of DHCP without any errors and also pings the server without packet loss. Network card is "Intel Pro/100 M Mobile", so no, not the above. The version of ghost I am using is V8 I have never had this problem before... it surprised me lol.