ICT KS3 SATS 2007 Preparations

[Chafftech]

Is anyone making any changes to their network for the 2007 pilot based on experiences of the 2006/5 pilots.

For example we here had 120 or 90 pupil sessions which is way above the recommended 60 but had reletively few crashes and those that did happen we could attribute to printing being on that server. So my changes so far:

Moved printing from this server to a new dedicated print server
Moved the staff shared documents from this server area to new NAS box
Ordered additional memory to upgrade from 2GB to 4GB RAM by xmas.

I am interested in what people have to say on this.

[bossman]

We are looking at doing the very same as we have a dedicated workstation doing the job at the moment 1Gb ram and pentium4 2.8Ghz processor 80Gb harddrive 7200rpm, but we will be looking to purchase something a little more powerful but not too expensive.
We too ran 120 workstation sessions with only two crashes which we restored back to the session with added time displayed (actually worked). Have spoke to iCT co-ordinator and we have come up with a better session plan for next year, we ran back to back sessions which did not allow for any crashes or failures of equipment, but this next year will see one morning session of first exam and afternoon session of second exam.

[Jake]

We wont be making any changes, we ran aroun 140 sessions and had no crashes, so we will be going with the same system again

[Sylv3r]

I was quite happy with how it went last year also, so dont think we will make wholesale changes. Possibly start the classes doing more training sessions in lessons earlier then last year, so students are fully prepared with what to expect.

[tosca925]

We ran 130 sessions at once, one 120 esion in th emorning and one 120 session in ht eafternoon. We had a couple of crashes but all came back after being restored through the console.

[shahidemran]

We had ADS Installed on the server, I just uninstalled it and now KS3 ICT is not working. We also had AutoTest which is still running perfectly fine. Still the IP, Server name and other stuff is same, Any suggestion what shall I do. It says Page Can't be displayed.

[plexer]

I am installing the software on a dedicated Dell SC430 3.00ghz 2gb ram server as I also have the edexcel online testing to do as well.

This was purchased as a test server for ICTSupport but it's being used for testing now and I'll have to buy us a new testing server next year.

Ben

[beeswax]

We had ADS Installed on the server, I just uninstalled it and now KS3 ICT is not working. We also had AutoTest which is still running perfectly fine. Still the IP, Server name and other stuff is same, Any suggestion what shall I do. It says Page Can't be displayed.

you may find an answer here it's a long post but there's a lot of info here.

[Disease]

We wont be making any changes, we ran aroun 140 sessions and had no crashes, so we will be going with the same system again

We are running the APS on a Twin 3gig Xeon with 4 gig of RAM though

[shahidemran]

We had ADS Installed on the server, I just uninstalled it and now KS3 ICT is not working. We also had AutoTest which is still running perfectly fine. Still the IP, Server name and other stuff is same, Any suggestion what shall I do. It says Page Can't be displayed.

Don't bother guys...Its sorted, again was something to do with stupid users, tomcat & postgres.

[Shouou]

After the 2005 test we upgraded the systems in the classrooms, still get a huge problem if more than one test session is run at the same time.

2006 test, Nothing major just at the end of the test it seems to take forever before the test data is uploaded to the server

[Nij.UK]

We are leaving things as they are, dont have the money to upgrade much anyway, We ran loads of sessions with about 30 pupils max per session, this is cause we dont have the machines available to run large sessions.

I thought in the documentation it told you now to run more then one session at a time?

[Ravening_Wolf]

We ran three sessions simultaneously last year without major problems apart from speed. And the software being generally poop.