ICT Weekly Update

8th March 2007

Account Administration

ICT Rights to Student P: Drives
Staff with ICT rights now have access to read and delete files from Student P: drives to reduce the use of excessive storage by students. Please do not delete a full student P:drive. It will break the links with the rest of the identity management cycle. ePass will be used to move and deactivate student and staff accounts to ensure the users email portal services and personal drives are
managed as part of the identity.

ePass Update
ePass is in final acceptance production testing for a scheduled rollout on the 10 – 11 March. The launch will be silent, meaning schools will still need to submit requests for moves, adds and changes to Editure. The Schools Service Desk will then make the changes in ePass. Schools will be notified when ePass is
ready for school use.

For an overview and detailed instructions on using ePass please click here.

Please note the only impact on users when ePass is rolled out is that they will need to enter a new windows password the first time they logon after 11 March to synchronise their identity in ePass and windows. The first time most people will need to use ePass is when they require a new account or want to change their details or move to a different school.

Hardware

Teacher Laptop Reallocations for Semester 1
Just a reminder that schools have been asked to check the nominal teacher laptop allocation, the actual number of teacher laptops recorded at the school. Please contact Sue Coward to advise if these figures are correct or not.

Details of the numbers of teachers and laptops currently allocated can be found here.

School Purchases of Dell Computers and Notebooks
The ntschools image for the new Dell Desktop model has been completed and these can now be ordered on the Dell website.

Networks

Excess Internet Usage
Investigations of poor network performance at a number of schools have identified excessive use of bandwidth intensive web site by students and staff as the main culprit. The new network and internet connections are much larger than their LATIS equivalents but the capacity is finite and heavy Internet usage can affect all users in a school. If you have slow response times on the Internet please check if student or staff activity is the cause.

Red Lists are Back
The ability for schools to block specific domains has been re-introduced. To block a domain for your school you can enter the domain name in to the following file s:\blocked-list.txt and it will be applied to your school access when your server is restarted each night.

The blocked-list.txt file contains instructions and syntax for adding entries.

Satellite Network Performance
The network issues above are even more critical on sites that rely on satellite data communications links. Changes have been made to the Telstra network over the weekend to improve performance for clinics and police stations who share some of the capacity. These will have the effect of slightly reducing the maximum capacity for schools.

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