On 15/06/2008, at 5:37 PM, Reg Whitely wrote:
Hi Ronni
You've received good advice about the MacBook. Here's my tuppenys-
worth!
But I take on board what you are saying in regard to DET School
Network. I think I have a copy of Windows XP Pro somewhere in my
Computer room.
My DET leased MacBook was one of the first ones and has a relatively
small hard drive. DET had partitioned it to carry a disk restore
volume. I deleted that, made a copy of the DET profile on an
external drive, reformatted into one partition and reinstalled the
DET profile. It works perfectly. In fact DET later offered to do
this for us if we didn't mind not having the restore volume. I'm not
sure what the current status is for this - perhaps someone else
might know. Anyway, it's easy enough to access the internet from
within the school network, just get the proxy settings from a
Windows machine (in IE properties) type in your DET user name
(number) and password and you're on your way. You should also be
able to print. My MacBook did a Bonjour search and connected that
way to 2 of the printers, including our Toshiba networked copier/
printer, although you might need to fiddle around with the various
printer options depending on what's being used in the school. So
far, no need for the Help Desk.
However accessing the Curriculum and Admin servers is trickier. A
nice young man from the DET Help Desk helped me. He was their "Mac
Guy". Sorry, can't remember his name and that's unfortunate. Because
my school is/was a 100 Schools LwICT school, he told me all the
settings to put into the Go/Connect to Server pane as we were
"allowed" to have Macs in the network. Something like adminoooo
\E0xxxxxx where oooo is the school code and the E0xxxxxx is your DET
ID number, then use your current DET password. These settings
allowed me to access all admin and curriculum servers including
student folders. As a deputy principal I need both admin and
curriculum access.
Unfortunately something happened a few months later and my settings
no longer work. I haven't bothered following that part up because
I've got an admin PC (Lenovo Thinkthingy) and use that for the non-
creative things like email, Integris, reports etc but I should find
out why my settings no longer work.
Don't let that deter you or your nephew.
I had previously installed the school's DET Windows XP SP1 as a
Virtual PC7 machine and spent several weekends updating it on-line
to XP2, with MS Office IE and a good quality freeware virus program
(AVG Free Edition). I read on this list that VMware could install
the VPC machine on the MacBook so I downloaded the demo of VMWare
Fusion and VMWare Importer and it did just that. Now I have VMWare
and XP2 running on the MacBook. I haven't tried hooking it into the
school network but It should be possible. You may need Help Desk
advice there and I'd puzzle on their response especially in my
instance as I don't have the DET Windows profile. Perhaps there's a
way to access the DET setup profiles on the school's admin server.
As far as Integris is concerned, remember that reporting can be done
using a web browser from home or school. You don't have the full
functionality of Integris but you could easily do reporting/
levelling from school on the MacBook. It runs really well in my
Camino but Safari doesn't like it much! If you *must* have Integris,
you will need Windows, unless, like Blitto, your school uses a
terminal server setup. Mine doesn't. I wonder if it could run in
another form of emulator? Not sure - sounds too techy for me today
but some wonderful boffin on WAMUG might know...
Hope this is of some help.
Reg
Thanks Reg,
My Son-n-Law's School does run SIS under a terminal server but he says
people are having trouble with reporting using a Mac. Sounds like
their IT are not doing something right.
Another Teacher sent me these details off list, I don't think he will
mind me posting his reply here:
Start of Quote:
I run Parallels to access SIS (Integris). In the next few weeks I'm
getting a new one and I'll be putting Bootcamp on that as well as a
partition running Parallels.
The mac will access the network with no problems at all. The PC
servers don't know it is a mac.
As IP addresses are handed out by DHCP the Mac gets an address just
like any other device. Now install whatever printers you want.
Any teacher can access all of the Admin drives by going to the GO
menu and selecting connect to server.
the user then types smb://name of school server
Then up pops the normal windows logon window. The only real
difference is that you have to log on to each shared folder or drive
separately.
You now have access to all files and folders on the windows server
that you would under a windows logon.
One great thing about using a mac is that none of the windows
scripts will work so you aren't controlled anywhere near as much as
a pc user.
End of Quote:
Cheers,
Ronni
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