Teth

Since the start of term I've had some odd happensings on my network but no time to investigate. Antivirus updates failing on some machines. Some machines refusing connections from VNC and netsupport school etc. I finally got to investigate properly today and have discovered that the Windows XP firewall has been turned on on every XP SP2 machine on my entire network. According to the GPO controlling it it is turned off but the evidence is irrifutable. Machines refuse to reply to ping until you go into GPO and add the exception for ICMP. They refuse to accept VNC connections till I added an exception for that in the GPO. I changed the GPO setting for windows firewall in GPO to "not defined" and then back to off restarting some sample machines in between. The goldpadlock is gone from the network connections but unless an exception is defined they are still rejecting connectiosn unless an exception is defined. If I define an additional exception and update group policy on them the connection is made imediately. Alot of hotfixes from MS installed from WSUS after the summer break so my assumption is they did something. Has anyone else come across this? Its home time but research via google will start on this first thing tomorrow.

Ok I think I've got it. At least ona test machine. *.vbs still had a VBscript icon but it seemed it had lost its association with wscript host. It wasn't opening in VS2005 and it wasn't popping up a "what program should I use" prompt. It was just doin nothing. Gonna try the rest of the room and cross my fingers.

Ok I realise the title makes no logical sense what so ever but I'm sitting here looking at the problem and thats the only way to describe it. A little Background. This year we had to add some more licenses to allow larger classes to use visual basic in computing classes. Obviosuly VB6 is defunct as far as MS is concerned but they agreed to upgrade our VB6 licenses to VS2005 and add more VS2005 licenses. Upgrades are a pain cos learning resources will be made obsolete but it can't be helped. We got our VS2005 license I installed all the prereqs from GPO, .net2, MSXML (the whole kitchen sink) used the admin installer to make a mst file for our needs and deployed it by GPO. That shoulda been it just some adjustment needed from Pupils and staff to the new menus etc. Today I got a report that somone couldn't print. I looked on they're account no printers. I logged in myself no printers. I use a user login script that I got from here to assign printers. Set oNet=wscript.createobject("wscript.network") Set objSysInfo = CreateObject("ADSystemInfo") Set AllPrinters = oNet.EnumPrinterConnections On Error Resume Next For i = 0 to AllPrinters.Count -1 Step 2 oNet.RemovePrinterConnection AllPrinters.Item(i+1), true Next strComputerDN = objSysInfo.ComputerName comp=Parse(strComputerDN) 'Wscript.Echo Comp Function Parse(strDN) Parse = Mid(strDN, InStr(strDN, "=") + 1) Parse = Mid(Parse, InStr(Parse, "=") + 1) Parse = MId(Parse, 1, InStr(Parse, "=") - 4) End Function Select Case Comp Case "R214" strPrinter="\\Server2\R214-Laser1" strprinter2="\\Server2\R214-ColourLaser" ........... End select If strPrinter <> "" Then oNet.AddWindowsPrinterconnection strPrinter oNet.SetDefaultPrinter strPrinter End If If strPrinter2 <> "" Then oNet.AddWindowsPrinterconnection strPrinter2 End If If strPrinter3 <> "" Then onet.AddWindowsPrinterconnection strPrinter3 End If It worked on these machines before VS2005 and still works in the rest of the school so its got to be related. Even if I run the script from my desktop with an admin account it just appears to not execute. Anyone any ideas? There is nothin helpful in event log etc.

I have to lend my support to the package option here. Its not that hard to learn my first package took me a day to get right since then I don't think anything has taken me more than a couple of hours and that was Macromedia Stuidio MX which is a known pain. We run a few thins from the server out of a share all single exe or exe + couple of dlls stuff. Past that I have to be honest your asking for trouble trying to run it out of a server folder. I used to fudge a few of them by logging on as the mandatory profile in writeabale mode. Installing it to the mapped drive and then making the new mandatory profile the default. It works but if you get an app that screws up on install, or a years worth of software updates later that .man starts to look pretty damn bloated and starts causing issues. By that stage its not going to be easy to fix. Its going to be a start from stratch every time. Starting from scratch even once a year in 3 different schools is going to eat alot of summer holiday. Lastly it leaves you no scope for differing the software available on different machines. Packages are do and forget. They get pulled down automatically if you rebuild a machine, and it even has simple tickboxes to manage version upgrades and incompatibilities.

Awaiting second step of ragistration. Thanks for the heads up on this. Will save me many "I'm sorry I can't just give you a disc for that the school only owns a certian number of licenses" calls

I had it off all the time during the beta. Since release in preparation for eventually rolling it out I decided to keep it on and learn to live with it. As an admin I have gotten fed up and disabled it a few times. When you have just installed and your setting up your desktop and drivers its a major PITA but I re-enabled it afterwards and I'd honestly say now that it is a good thing. A little sidebar control to enable and disable it on the fly when you know your about to do something thats gonna spawn a dozen of them. Another solution would be 3 options on the popup. Ok | Cancel | Ok and supress UAC for 5mins. would be great.

a 50p donation to charity in order to have your password reset does the trick for us. I don't get more than 10 requests to reset a password a week ina school of 1300.

2k3 R2 will give you a very easy way to add quotas and they will be retroactive without having to do any messing. The downside to the R2 quotas is that it is very hard to notify users of they're quota status. By default its set up to send e-mail to warn about quotas but not all school are running internal e-mail systems and in those that are how many kids check they're e-mail regularly enough. The other option is NTFS quota. It is hard to set up. If you want to have differences in quota size between users you have to pick 1 general quota size and then adjust every other user that deviates from that manually. The NTFS quota can also be retroactive but it requires that ownership is properly set to the users who's files you want to have quotas on. It doesn't work ona per forlder basis but rather the whole drive. It will however show they're quota on they're mapped network drive which I find is the best way to notify users. A best of both worlds approach would be great but sadly MS don't give us that so you'll have to choose.

Last week our after school advanced IT group which I supervise installed feisty fawn on some notebooks as they're project for the day. We found the wifi support to be either brilliant or very ropey at random. There were 2 types of laptop involved HP nx9010s and Dell latitude 110ls. They both have builtin intel Wifi adapters. The 2 HPs both worked first time. The 110ls were more intresting. from 5 identical laptops 2 installed with WPA fully functional while 1 worked ona second install. Out of the remaining 2 one didn't find the wifi at all and the other could only use WEP even after a reinstall. It seems the hardware detection during the install is not 100%, it doesn't seem to get the same results every time.

I've had to set up 3 exam laptops to be shared by 5 pupils this year due to time table clashes. I got away with just the 1 last year. I use older machines that have been retired and clean install them. my basic formula is. 2 local user accounts 1 admin 1 exam user since they wont be on the network during the exam if at all. Uninstall all optional extras. The exam board document we have here specifies no access to calculator etc either. Empty the exam user start menu. The pupil works on an RTF document on the desktop which is then transfered to memory stick and signed by the candidae and myself. Its a been a bit of a pain in the past because the laptops used had to go back into service somewhere but this years will just remain exam laptops for life.

I'm a little disapointed in this thread when you consider the incredibly detailed, well informed and professional answers people recieve to very technical questions on these forums. I ran a couple of vista beta's on an off during its development and it wasn't ready. However RC2 was a real operating system. Its new and a little different I personally don't like the "momma knows best" approach to security I think education is better but I realise thats totally unrealistic. However 20 seconds on google later and I disabled the handholding features that I don't feel I need. Everyone here is extoling the superior virtues of XP over the bog standard out of the box install of Vista they just did. Is you XP install "vanilla" I know mine never are. I'm sure I'm forgetting some but my XP install process includes at least 30 registry edits or settings tweaks and 3 utility installs before I consider it a usuable OS and I'm sure you guys are the same because I learned some of those registry edits from you. Yet your barating Vista for not being tailored to you out of the box. I Picked up an OEM Vista x64 Ultimate disc Around the beginning of march and Dual booted it on my home system. Driver support especially for printers was ropey at best. However the important stuff was there. In the following month updates from HP and Highpoint sorted out almost all my complaints. As of the easter holidays my dual boot is gone I'm on Vista 100% now. Working on XP in work frustrates me no search bar thing that I can run everything from even if I don't know where it is in the start menu and the lack of that newfangled dropdown on click browsing thing in the address bar of explorer windows which for me has now totally replaced back button and largely replaced the folders pane. Application compatitbility I hear alot of complaints about. I've not found anything yet that I can't run. Some have been big surprises. I thought for sure Daemon's tools drive emulation given that it needs to install a fake driver would fair but it worked way back at RC2. Sony erricson phone suite complained but put it in XP compatibility mode and its happy. Now I don't run educational software or MIS stuff at home obviosuly and I have every expectation that they would crash and burn but then we didn't move our admin system to XP the year it came out did we? For that matter I think ours here ran NT4 workstation for 3 years after windows 2k came out. Now genuine complaints cos I have some Performance. I have lost some. Its not noticable in desktop use certainly on my core 2, 2GB ram, Nvidia 7900GTX system but I know I've lost some FPS in games which can be noticable in company of heros multiplayer especially. I feel its fair enough tho. There is a "hump" for vista performance just like there was for XP. Up to it the OS runs like a dog compared to 98SE likewise up to the hump for Vista it runs like a dog compared to XP but as the bottom of the line new PC surpasses that hump Vista will become ubiquitous just like XP has. I'm also hopeful that refinement of the Creative xfi and Nvidia drivers will help performance. I don't understand why MS stopped EAX from working but they did and creative are doubtless gonan take a while to catch up... possibly xfi2 knowing there past record for product support. Security. Alot of people are saying "wait for SP1 to fix securiity" this is I feel a second hand opinion being upheld by legions of fairly technically knowledgable people with very little basis. Its possible a huge security flaw could be found in vista tomorrow but its equally possible one could be found in XP tomorrow. Its very likely the same flaw would affect both. The only major security patch I've recieved on Vista so far was for an exploite which existed in cursor handling of IE and affects every windows OS that can run explorer. MS put alot of effort into security in Vista and I think its paid off. I've brought a virus or 2 home of memory sticks from work by accident since going vista and even without my AVG antivirus (I don't use resident sheild) they couldn't do anything on vista. With vista your much safer from new threats than XP due to user control. On a safety scale I'd put Vista alot closer to Linux than XP at the present time. Network Control panel. At first I put this down to newness, unfamiliarity, stupidity on my part but I'm now convinced its bad design. On XP I can get from desktop to a network config in 5 clicks (inlcuding a right click to open a menu and the left click to select as 2). It is impossible to get to the Vista network adapters and open they're properties in less and 8 because you have to go through network managent first. A page that has little or no information that you wouldn't know before getting there. You can bet I'm going to network options because I don't have an internet connection or a lan connection telling me when I get there that the internet isn't available is not the most useful. I fragged my WRT54GL router flashing a firmware recently and had to visit network properties alot in the process of fixing it so this one really wound me up. Windows firewall... when I turned it off I meant it. Re-enabling it every time I change a network setting doesn't make me happy. BTW in response to somone above. When I allocate network adapters to safety zones they stay there. Sounds like you've found a bug. In short I'm happy on vista atm. My games work, my videos and music work. My re-encoding and DVB TV card software work, my 2.2k TB raid array works and the usability features are making me faster in routine tasks. Media centre for all is a huge boon too. It wont be going near the school network for at least 3 years maybe more. Until there is a real need for it either because MS stop supporting XP or we get software of strong educational or management value that needs Vista. For home use tho I'm sold and I think you guys should at least be giving it a fair chance instead of falling into the "I read badvista I hate it" or "I eat up MS propaganda I love it" camps.

We recently invested in 6 macs for a 6th form music composition room as a test case for a larger purchase for our new school when it eventually gets built. We have used sibielus on Ps for a long time for composition score work so it was a natural choice (altho we've had issues with its lack of native intel support which isn't well documented) We have logic express for more serious composition work for orchestral pieces and finally garage band for the singers and guitar pupils. We've had some teething troubles becasue neither I nor the music composition teacher are well versed in Apple technology but it has been very success ful the results speak for themselves. We looked at both PC and Apple solutions before purchase and while logic and sibielus are available for PC there just doesn't seem to be a good equivalent to garage band. It does what it does incredibly intuitively and efficiently. Locking down macs is however proving an almost vertical learning curve

I give out Ubuntu discs to a few pupils who are intrested in alternate operating systems etc. Its also handy to give out for kids who use mac office, claris works, MS works, wordperfect or open office at home and bring in files that offices 2003 can't open. By default ubuntu Breezy can't write to NTFS anyway if your concerned your permissions on desktop HDs aren't 100% you can neuter the disc so it will mount only select partitions or none at all. I have a little booklet made up to teach them how to mount the common folder and they're home folder so they can work quite effectively on it. I control the bios tho so only limited machines (the ones right at my door) can boot from anything other than the HD. I would love to have a dual boot but I'm somewhat put off by A properly securing a linux install I know limitations and I know thats beyond them and I wouldn't be able to RIS a linux/XP dual boot machine which would fairly scupper my normal setup for desktops. We do alot of delphi programming and dreamweaver stuff here so the windows machines are by neccessity less than 100% locked. I rely on f12 > credentials > rebuild to deal with the resulting occasional damage. BTW watch out for Knoppix discs. Those you can do alot with. When I arrived at this school the old tech had been gone 6 months and no one knew anything except the admin password for 1 domain admin account. Routers, printer server, switches, printers everything else I found on the network and then brute forced or changed the passwords with a knoppix disc. I now have a knoppix USB stick install for those noboot / nonetwork support calls.

Unfortunatly the "am I on a lan? no use MS site" option is not an option. The solution I choose for ours is to have the Laptops in an OU that doesn't take the WSUS policy. The image they recieve when installed is set to download and install updates automatically using the standard windows update controls so when they are connected at home or in school they will download updates themselves. Its not ideal as it totally removes the benefits of the WSUS cache but its the only way to be sure they get done.

We frequently have a problem with reports after a room is re-imaged. The wizrd will get to the last part and then fail or if you try to create in design view it will just fail to open with no error. I've found it to be printer related. I forget the exact process for this because its been september since we re-imaged anything but I find logging into one machine as admin opening an access database with an existing report created, going into page setup and making sure everything is correct then printing a copy and suddenly the whole room will be creating reports fine again. It bothers me that I'm not sure exactly why this works but it has done countless times now. Now if they could just open access databases from explorer I'd be happy

I have exactly the same issue myself. I quickly discovered they could open them from inside access and informed teachers and that is now what they do. Its untidy tho and I'd really like to know why every other office document type opens just fine except .mdb and .mde files.

Just thought I'd bump this post and see if anyone has had any brainwaves on the subject since. I just implimented a new R2 based file server over the easter 'break' there and I finished off tweaking year group based quotas today. I'm now at the point of finding a way to notify users of they're quota. I used to be happy enough that they could see they're free space by looking at they're mapped network drive but with R2 quotas its reporting the full volume free space not the quota space like it used to with NTFS quotas. I'm wondering about using the execute command option coupled with the % limit events you can set in R2. Obviosuly net send would be an option but I don't need to tell any of you how much I loath the idea of enabling messenger service on client PCs. Has anyone thought of another way maybe a 3rd party secure messenging client that could be run on server and client that is accessable from the command line?

We use net support here as of 3 months ago and its gone down a storm. We bought it for a room at first and that lasted a month before the booking for the room saturated and we applied to finance to get it for the rest of the curriculum network. At first only a couple of memebers of staff used it and I got worried it had been a bad buy but once those teachers left planned lessons using netsupport for cover teachers soon I had requests for access (which they all had they just hand't noticed) and training. So on our last baker day back in feb myself and one of the teachers who had been making alot of use of it ran a brief tutorial for anyone that wanted to come. Around 17 memebers of staff turned up and considering the school only has 4 IT teachers we thought that was good going. Since then we've had requests for another day or a written form which I'll create if I can get the time. Anyway configuration wise I have dedicated "teacher" PCs set up in each lab which have the tutor version installed and the default startup is to connect to a known list of clients. I also have an admin station with it installed that I can use to connect to any and all clients for supervision after school and During lunch. Getting classroom layouts to remain persistent is something of an annoance still but I'm sure its something I'm doing wrong. I intend to make a new mandatory profile for teachers soon and I'm hoping that that will sort this out. The layout feature really helps teachers visualise where in the room any given pupil is when they look at the screen and I think this is one of net supports big benefits over other software. The register taking and testing modules are very quick to use and staff are using them for the kinds of lessons that would previsouly have been done with active boards. We didn't get net support manager altho I'd like to try and sneak it into a future budget since you can upgrade to it by paying the difference from school. My only reservation there is whether clients being connected to a tutor machine prevents the mangement version connecting to it. That would make it less than useful For the moment I use LanView 3 for network management I've had no conflicting issues with it and Netsupport school even if I VNC a machine that is being Viewed or broadcast by netsupport.

I'm running Vista 64 at home and using AVG on it. No complaints so far not that its found anything since it was installed in february but we assume thats a good thing

Ok first up this really isn't my idea, somone at RM gets credit for this. I was solving a local app install issue on our managed c2k network when I stumbled across how they control user start menus with respect to what apps are available on any given machine and I want to adapt it for our own network but I lack the scripting skills. Its very simple so somone that knows VB fucntions in detail can probably write this in a dozen lines. I want to have a full start menu with all possible installed apps in the mandatory profile that users get when they log on. I then want to run a logon script which sets hidden property on any shortcut with an invalid target. The result being a start menu which contains only groups and apps that are on that machine. The limit of my scripting in VB is unfortunatly recursively renaming directorys and copying files and folders with the odd mapped network drive or printer map added. I'm going to have a go at this anyway after school today but if anyone knows the functions I need to get the target property of a shortcut and to set extended attributes on a file that would be a big help.

I'm building a new image for some new Media studies PCs. They have 80GB HDs and I want users in upper school (GCES and A-level) classes to be able to work locally on the drives. I figured the easiest way would be to partition the drive say 20/60 and have the 60 GB partition only show up for apropriate year groups with GP. Great in theory works on my test machine but then I set about getting the image ready to be deployed by RIS to the other 23 machines and suddenly we have a problem. RIS either takes the whole drive for C or asks you to input partitioning info yourself. What I want is to be able to create 2 partitions with the install or at least create a 20gb partition for the OS and then create a second volume later with a firstrun script. Anyone know how to define partitions in the .sif my experiments with the instructions in deploy.cab have yeilded poor results.

WHat kind of data loss have you suffered is the first and most important question. Does the drive sound ok, no new clicking or scratching etc that might hint at a hardware failure? Secondly is the USB HD blank as in no folders when you open it but it does open, blank as in windows asks you to partition / format / or initialize is when you plug it in, or is it not detected by windows at all? Depending on which of these your dealing with you need very different tools for the job. Also be aware data recovery tools take TIME 1hour to several days depending what kind of data loss you've suffered so starbucks probably isn't the best place to be for this.

Well decision is made order went out last thing yetsurday after a week of non stop reasearch and bargaining with suppliers we have a core 2 duo refresh coming to a computer room and a new file server with a pair of mirrored 74GB 15,000 RPM sas drives and a 4x300gb 10,000 RPM sas raid 5 array for the home folders. 4 x 1gbps ethernet and a swap out deal on our current UPS for one capable of running all servers + core switch. I think I deserve a couple of days off for the work I've put in since tuesday last week but the best I'm gonna get is an hour this morning with the phone off the hook on edugeek =p Thanks for all the opinions and experience they really helped.

Ok stupid question inc. But where are you getting it from in the UK. I've been looking at this for ages because LanView which I use nw is just not safe to let teachers at and the idea of the classroom and Admin elements together in one package is just fantastic. I looked in the reseller list and theres only Ireland there. And I'll say that what they quoted me makes me think you guys are getting it cheaper because no matter how good it is we can't afforde that

We have a few rooms with CRTs left. 1 on my network and 3 on the managed network which wont be changed until they're contract renews. The base resolution of the managed system is 800x600 which anoys me no end becasue the hardware is capable of more they just "don't support it". Our own network CRTs run 1024x768 and all the TFTs in the other 4 rooms run 1280x1024 which I think is the stardard for a comfortable XP desktop.