You should be fine deploying with 2K3 initially, I was running Vista for quite a while before moving off 2k3 to 2k8. As to the servers if you can take your time and do it right, go fresh and with 2k8 r2. You can migrate most services that are integrated into Windows quite easily and this will end up giving you the best and most stable result by far. KMS is doable but you do need to install the right stuff on the serverside to handle it, the other option there is using an always on Windows 7 pc as a KMS server as Windows 7 will happily handle being a KMS server by just entering the KMS key into the change key bit.
Thank you very much for your help. It ended up being that some how a proxy was turned on. A fellow co-worker has seen this a lot lately that malware is putting in a proxy. As soon as I clicked off the proxy the internet worked fine.
Firewall blocking port 80? What O/S? +SPs? When static IP did you enter manual DNS? Test using NSLOOKUP. Does PING resolve text based URL? Assuming Internet is available...
A new start! Why not look to ESXi to host your W2K8R2 DC(s) and W2K8 DC + members? Be aware of W7 laptops/notebooks having 64-bit by default - plan ahead for printing + sware integration. Check for 64bit compat. Have fun!
I would advise having at least one Server 2008 R2 server on site, as it makes the KMS and activation a whole lot easier. I tried making it work with both Server 2003 and Server 2008 and I failed miserable. Apparantly it is possible, but something to look out for.
6 months later and we just moved all the admin staff over to SSD drives. The 40gb value drives cost £62.99 and are perfect for client PC's. Virtually all the staff have commented on how quick their machines are these days and seem very happy. I have a few of the newer 200mb/s drives in testing but there is no difference in day to day usage in terms of speed so will be sticking with the tried and tested Intel-v drives for now. We've got 55 of them deployed now and not had a failure yet, another bonus.
When I first started in a school I was ill for 6 months constantly, but havn't had a cold in 5 years now. I guess the immunity built up
Good luck and welcome to the present, I have put 7 in to three primaries so far so as always, happy to help if I can.
Sounds like a plan.
Luck wished indeed. I might have to do some GPO comparisions with you
Agreed, my techy would agree on that as well, he came to us from Industry and has found himself, despite having young kids himself, that you get more sniffles and feeling pants within the school than out of it You soon build up immunity to it, my advice when you feel it coming, 1000mg Vitamin C tablets in a pint of water, that soon helps boost the immune system
I hate borrowing stuff.
Could you not have grabbed something from the school canteen and paid them the following day? I know I could in ours
I'm guessing your not in London. The RBC there (London Grid For Learning) seems to be the only one in that region with their act together. Good prices and services. If you do go alone. Make sure you are capable of managing both your network and connection. I've seen plenty of schools connections ruined by network admins not quite knowing enough to do the job properly.
Yeh they do offer more but in our situation is probably even more reason to move as we don't use many of their "extra" services - The VLE they supplied(netmedia) was awful and useless, no one ever used it as far as I know - The web filtering is poor and slow (I'd rather go for the best solution around, especially as I can't virtualize cachepilot right now) - The line monitoring is indeed good but we've had a fair few outages due to DNS servers going down, or router problems. In essence all it really means is the provider talk to the LA first instead of me being able to do it. - Email virus scanning seems inconsistent and I would rather have more control over the process, with office 365 that should be out of my hands anyway, but in a good way - I have no interest in the LA intranet anymore, it just made things harder to find from my experience
Good luck! Do hang around and you can always chip in with the private sector viewpoint.
Bear in mind LA services will be more then just supplying you with capacity. The grid I am connected to offers the following: - Web Filtering - Redundancy for reliability (both seperate line and seperate power supplies, both of which have been used recently!) - Connection to the LA IT Support Intranet which in turn has a lot of resources from upgrade notifications to e-Safety - 24/7 monitoring for connection failure - Attendance to the LA server farm within an hour on-call if something does go wrong - Access to VLE, Filtered and virus scanned Webmail, MIS Integration and other services If you change providers, can you supply the same things that your LA is supplying? Especially the on-call and redundancy sections.
Interesting, let me know how you get no also looking at moving away from the LEA/Grid Sai
I just leave it open for all, seems to work ok in our school
Best tool i found was, Password Policy - Stronger Windows Passwords | Specops Password Policy there is a free basic version available. I also found a "feature" regarding the message box that gets displayed if you try to change to a password that breaks the policy, it seems to allow the default domain setting to take precedence, we had to turn on complex for our whole domain in order to get the correct box displayed, on groups with and without complex enabled.
