m8rk

Yeah - sorted with a removal script so it wasn't too painful. Unluckily for us our pupils noticed it straight away and were delving into all sorts of things they shouldnt've, but we think no harm was done.

@cluberti: Ah right. Yes I had it previously set as default - ie "not declined but left to manual or not approved" - and then WDS3 is fully installed to all clients from that? That would be an error in the roll out in my opinion. I admit to being lapse with my configuration, but was trusting that the default setting wouldn't cause me problems, a nieve assumption.

You didn't read the links then?

Yep - have a WSUS server see more info here: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/1...23&from=rss

Today our 350 PC domain had Windows Desktop Search 3 installed across it. Apparently it's installed under 'patch only' settings. Amazing. What the hell were MS thinking of with this? Who would not want the choice not to install this? It's something I don't want anyway. We also have a problem with it in that it displays an icon in the notification area, that if clicked (by pupils on our tightly locked down system) they have access to mmc - not itself restricted by default as pupils were let no where near it. For now we've turned off the notification area. Does anyone know if MS are intending to reverse this?

Nepali - I think you misread my answer. LimitLogon is a FREE tool from Microsoft to achieve what you are looking for... to stop concurrent connections. People have achieved similar by scripting something to work in a similar way - write the logon details to a file and look up that file to see if a user is allowed to log on - if their details are found in the file then they're not permitted to log in again. Do you know about the education IT Tech Support forum edugeek.net ?? There are several posts on this topic: http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&a...mp;mode=results

Outlook/ Outlook Express > file > export

I'd hard wire between your PC and your router first anyway just to see if the connection improves (using a long RJ45 patch lead). That outlet socket is Coax/ RF. whilst you might get away with just wiring up two wires to convert to RJ45 - I can't find anyone that sells converters. I did find mention of running video signal through RJ45 and people were saying that maybe cat7 was up to it. It'd be good if you could run Cat5 cable between those TV sockets and change the faceplates to RJ45 - is that not possible? That'd be your best option for speed/reliability. Again, homeplug would be so much less hassle. Hopefully the price will come down soon.

hmm - how many times have we heard that before! There's also UserLock which costs about £2.50 per client. The predecessor to limitlogon was CConnect - but that was insecure.

You need limitlogin from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetma...ilitySpotlight/ Has been built in in Citrix for years of course

I very much doubt that the hiccups are anything to do with your wireless connection, but entirely to do with your connection from the exchange to where the telephone line enters your house. With 3 computers sharing the line, if all are on the internet at the same time then your speed will be divided by three. It matters not where you split that connection, it will only ever be capable of the speed your paying your ISP for. Pay more to your ISP to have greater bandwidth, or a connection more suited to gaming - ISPs offer products for different uses, perhaps you're on the wrong scheme. Do you mean 1. the ADSL enabled telephone point in the wall, 2. the broadband cable connection in your wall, or 3. the RJ45 connection in your wall? 1. You'd need another ADSL line & router/ modem to get full ADSL speed dedicated to yourself 2. By your speed test i'd assume you dont have cable 3. Splitting RJ45 can be done but doesn't really work, due to interference across the wires. It'd be worse than wireless. Convert the single socket into double. If you're thinking about running a wire from your main telephone socket, why don't you run a RJ45 lead intead and plug into the router? Best performance and cheapest way is to buy a long enough RJ45 cable and plug your PC directly into your router. Better than that buy the bits and hardwire RJ45 between the rooms using proper sockets. http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?Module...O&U=strat15 The most expensive, in-between performance yet most convenient method is to buy a homeplug kit for just over £100. Plug in both ends to your mains sockets and from either end plug RJ45 cables, 1 to your PC and one to your router. http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopD...?ProductID=4744 Is your friend talking about a wireless bridge between 2 points? Sounds to me like he's talkin out of his a**.

Control Panel > User Accounts > click on the user to modify > change the picture

alt + ctrl + del only works from the login screen ...if it's XP Pro. If it's XP Home you only get to log in as administrator from safe mode.

Is the account disabled? Right click My Computer > manage > Local Users and Groups > users > double click user > uncheck disable If it was the administrator account that has become hidden, press alt + ctrl + del twice and you can manually log in as administrator from there, or follow this guide: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/05/07/u...-in-windows-xp/

Your wireless connection will be fine and should not be your main bottleneck. Normally nowadays you should be getting 54mbps which is way above your ISP connection of 4mbps. Homeplug is still expensive, and will only buy you 100mbps for about £100, or 200mbps at absolute best. Only advantage is no more cables to run. A lot cheaper for now would be to hard wire rather than wireless. You can at least prove to yourself that the performance issue isn't with your wireless connection.

Thanks nmX.Memnoch for that thorough reply. I really appreciate your help guys as this is way over my head/ ahead of my experience so far by miles. I have made enquiries of 2nd user kit as that looks like it'll be expensive. We have a problem in education in general I think that management isn't in place with experience in these matters, although surely they'll need to be in the not too distant future. We do have 300 PCs/Laptops in total, 160 is an estimate of the average concurrent users, it could be more.

Fantasic! Thanks fizban2 That spec looks very good - thanks for doing that. I don't know our space requirements so I suppose that's the first thing to approach management with. I need to get someone to quote seriously I think and make the points clearly, so that management can see that this is really needed and not just me suggesting something they don't need. Sorry to be a pain but could anyone point me to an entry level Storage Device and SAN switch? Would the above NAS serve as that device - I assume it wouldn't.

Yes, does seem too cheap for 3Tb of disk space. http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF...9-12843976.html Kids all have mandatory profiles, staff have local, changing them all to mandatory over the summer hopefully. The kids home server also hosts a database for RMs Successmaker, the Staff server runs SIMS .net (Schools Information Management System) running on MSDE soon to be upgraded to SQL 2005 Express. The gerneral share server runs a few CD images and is the print server. The 2003 Domain Controller is seperate. Someone has said we should be thinking about SAN for the long term. I know nothing of all the options you suggested nmX.Memnoch. Any information/ links gratefully received. Thanks a lot!

Someone has recommended me a HP Proliant 320s Storage server with 3Tb and running Windows Storage server 2003 for £1500 For that price I presume it's with SATA drives. Anyone have an opinion on these? How well it suits the application etc.. Ta!

We're in a critical position in that all 3 of our file servers are low on space, 2 seriously. I want some advice on the options for expansion please. We are a school with 950 users, including staff. At any one time, 60 staff and 100 students could be logged in. Currently we have one server for kids home folders, one for staff home folders and staff shares, and one shared file server. I'm thinking we could add some kind of NAS to the mix. What would you recommend would be up to the job? We did think of a vanilla PC with some big SATA drives, but I'm worried it just isn't up to the job. Setup is W2003 DC, all file servers W2K. Gbit fibre backbone, servers connected with Cat5 Gbit.

Very interesting guys! Just goes to show the state of Windows compared with linux in the 'proper' secure computing league tables. When MS manages to get developers to write for the restricted user then we can start making PC's secure.

I'd appreciate your guidance on what's the best way to have things setup. 1 x Windows2000 AD PDC DHCP DNS Server [soon to be migrated to 2003]. 2 file servers - one each for two groups of users. I have 2 IP ranges to cater for the volume of devices on site. The router is out of my control on a 10Mbit fibre a mile away across town, and the local council [we're on their WAN] have just enabled the two ranges to talk across it. The two ranges are: 172.16.57.x & 172.15.140.x I can't see machines in the other range without having two network cards - on in each range - setup on the target machine. My servers all have 2 network cards as well, including the domain controller. The IP's of the servers have the same last 3 digits

I have a similar setup. I think it fit's the thrust of this thread but please tell me if you think I should start another. I'd appreciate your guidance on what's the best way to have things setup. Windows2000 AD PDC DHCP DNS Server [soon to be migrated to 2003]. I have 2 IP ranges to cater for the volume of devices on site. The router is out of my control on a 10Mbit fibre a mile away across town, and the local council [we're on their WAN] have just enabled the two ranges to talk across it. It has been suggested that we have 2 contiguous IP ranges [we currently have 172.16.57.x & 172.15.140.x] and set up the subnet as mentioned above [255.255.254.0]. Helluvva problem before they did that - and I had to push them to look at that. I had all my main servers with a NIC on each range [secondary addresses on a single NIC doesn't quite cut it, as some things need it to be the primary address on the NIC to work, so I discovered. Sorry if this is hijacking the thread patronu!

not 255.255.255.254 > 255.255.254.0 by setting your subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 your PC will only search 169.254.0.x and not 169.254.1.x and vice versa. [255 addresses] a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 will search 169.254.x.x [255 x 255 addresses] a subnet mask of 255.255.254.0 will let the PC search just the two ranges: 169.254.0.x & 169.254.1.x [255 x 2] - is my understanding. Have you setup dns forwarding on your server?

MS produced stuff everybody wanted, Mac were elitist, Unix is just obscure. Shoot we’d all use Linux if it did wot we wanted/was easier to use/support.