I'm sorry but I don't have time for *nix because it is not only that has to learn about it. If I bring it into school then my staff and students also have to learn, which is obviously brought to them from me. Maybe in the future I should look into it, but at the moment I'm managing a network of 800 users, and ove 450 clients so I don't have time.
This sounds like a symptom of a deeper problem. It seems to me that you're overstretched and firefighting. Have you confronted your SMT about it and asked for extra staff?
unhelpful post
How many of you are there kerrymoralee9280?
Other factors come into it like has been said recently on other threads - age of PCs, competancy of users/ teachers.
I started here 5 years ago with 950 kids and 150 PCs/ 4 servers. Now we're well over the 300 mark and have just set on an extra tech as I was going under (literally!). Following my interests and as usual for us in this situation, I teach myself. Just so happens i've played a lot with *nix systems - i've enjoyed it a lot - great to be at the command line, just feel more in control!
I think you've hit the nail on the head Geoff. There are 2 of us now, but the second guy has been on the sick forever. We lost our network manager (to a new job) and they haven't bothered replacing him, or even bothered negotiating with us (they are just expecting us, and by us I mean me to do it).Originally Posted by Geoff
I have confronted the SMT, HT and the governors and wasn't getting anywhere. I thought about getting th union in but was offered a new job, with better pay and a completly better working environment so haven't bothered as I start there in a mere 2 weeks now.
The new school give the impression that they want me to be the best I can be and they want to push the technology within school forward, so in a few months when I get settled, I might have time to be less ignorant to different technologies and actually have the time to learn.
I think it's a case of me getting stressed out at my current job more than anything, and you may ask why when I'm leaving soon. I promised the other guy to do everything in my power to leave with a working network, but I guess that can go out the window.
I'm sorry for having a rant, and I hope you guys are there for me when I finally turn to *nix.
Cheers,
Well what a nightmare situation. At least your old place acknowledged the need for more staff, even tho' it's ended up understaffed.
I guess that must be getting common:
IT takeup > workload increases
Existing staff more and more overworked
Schools not recognising importance of IT, shy of meeting need & spending money
IT techs go off on stress leave
Don't worry about the stressed out rant ... we've all been there (I didn't always have a horde of minions you know!).
As a small suggestion you might consider downloading VMWare server and use that for playing around with when testing things. It will also give you a chance to play with *nix when you get round to it.
If you are looking for an easy *nix based Moodle installation that you only have to follow a wizard I would consider the latest build of Karoshi, but if you are looking at WAMP then consider a VMWare machine running xampp to start with.
This will then give you the flexibility to move to LEA based hosting if you want, or you will have a proof of concept setup that could help justify a dedicated box for it.
With me not knowing about *nix I don't think it would be wise to host the VLE on it, in case it went down and I didn't know what to do. I have already made three healthy installs on a Windows environment so I think that would be wisest (as I know about it).
For the less important and less critical stuff, I will certainly look into *nix when I can (for the school website etc, for something to learn with)
I have VM and have installed various releases such as Fedora, Ubuntu and Suse, without any glitches. I just haven't had time to muck around further with them.
Fair enough. My advice would be to just walk away. But you are already ahead of me there.
Since I am at about a similar stage, I rolled moodle out to the teachers about 2 months ago and they have been very happy with it, we use it to distribute staff notices and as a platform to share using forums etc.
But already with only 40 or so staff I, realise that I need to bring the whole Moodle inhouse because of performance. ( I have it hosted at a very affordable ISP) it was easy to setup and proved the point very well.
But here is my problem, as soon as I bring it in house, the outside world drops to 1500kb, (tis either them or us @ 1500kb) and I have to open ports etc.
In my case I will probably go for the Linux Option, because it is affordable, but then I guess I should ask what would be a reasonable specification computer for Moodle?
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