Intro
One (of many) things that created discussion from my last blog post was the total amount of storage we provide to our users in school. Unlike some schools we do not limit quotas for user or shared areas but we do keep it very well maintained via automated and manual processes. Many people seemed to be surprised our total data store was only 500GB for a school with over 1,000 users. People mentioned figures such as 5tb to 20tb of storage which seemed very large to me. Some other network ma
Intro
I've been doing this job for many years and one of the biggest targets I have had in that time is to make our entire ICT ecosystem "Stable". By this I mean that things work as they should in a classroom or for our admin staff and dont break too often. In fact when something breaks it should be a surprise or an extraordinary event, not something that inevitably just happens. We all see jobs of "the projector is broken" or "the hard disk died" but these are entirely preventable if you buy
We are moving away from our LEA supplied broadband solution so the next step is to replace our ageing cachepilot. Having used the cachepilot for over 5 years now I can safely say its holding us back on creating a fast reliable internet service.
We looked at a number of different options for school wide filtering proxy including:
Equiinet Cache pilot
http://www.equiinet.com/
I've used the latest firmware version and I find it incredibly slow to scan and respond to webpages. It uses so
I run Sharepoint 2010 on a hyper-v server which I backup each term.
Now these backup images are starting to get pretty huge at about 50gb so I thought I would look into reducing the footprint on the sharepoint server.
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/5512/foldersharepointfolderi.png
After a bit of googling I came up with these solutions
- Turn off IIS logging
IIS Manager >> sites >> sharepoint >> logging >> do not create log files
Space saving 12gb
- Turn of
So we are now an academy and I've been looking at the future of the LEA supplied broadband service that we have been using for the last five years. The only advantage I can think of keeping it is that everything is bundled and to be fair it does work. But with the advances in video and multimedia on the internet such as iPlayer and YouTube we are consistently reaching our capacity so its time to look at our options.
http://www.meedios.com/zag/Fibre-Optic-Broadband-Speed.jpg
Disadvantages o
I came in the other morning to loads of reports of errors with sharepoint 2010.
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/2492/sharepoint2010box.jpg
After a while I found out the errors were only showing when people tried to add things to the database like files or announcements. On looking at the logs we have this error message
Source: MSSQL$SHAREPOINT
CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE failed because the resulting cumulative database size would exceed your licensed limit of 4096 MB per databas
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OK, so I heard a great quote on twitter a while back:
"In 5 years time, running an exchange server will be like running your own nuclear power plant to heat your home"
This sounds like a sensible statement to me and since we have an aging Exchange 2003 server I thought I would look into being an early adopter of their "Live@EDU" cloud based email system.
The benefits are clear:
- Virtually unlimited email storage (10gb or someth
I recently had a problem where we were running low on IP addresses. I looked in DHCP and had about 655 active leases over the last 7 days. Now I'm pretty sure I don't have that many devices in the entire school! It turns out that there were a large amount of IPhones and other unauthorized mobile devices attached to our wireless. I guess the kids managed to find out the wireless key again!
There are a number of solutions to this problem, the most obvious is to change our wireless key regu
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So recently our main ICT suite came up for its 4 year renewal. We use ACER 6410 laptops in there and they have done a good job over the years. Now I like these laptops a lot but they are showing signs of age with 512mb or Ram and slow 5200rpm hard disks. I didn't really want to scrap them as the laptops are working well, they just needed a significant speed boost. The first thing I did was to obviously upgrade the ram. I went with
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/6426/19248027.jpg VS. http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/3509/15041575.jpg
Most IT people will tell you that backing up data is probably the most important part of their job. I've lived through a few disasters in my career and so far, touch wood, i've made it through without loosing any large chunks of data. I've always used backupexec in all my jobs but recently heard about Microsoft Data protection manager 2010. We heavily use Microsoft software in school
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/7760/dpm2010.jpg
I've been itching to upgrade BackupExec 10d for a long time, but thought I would wait for DPM 2010 to be released. We use nearly all Microsoft technologies in school so it seems ideal to backup our File shares, Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL servers, hopefully even the Hyper-V stuff I've been playing with recently. DPM 2010 has now gone RTM on technet so I installed it today. First impressions are good, it looks just like backupexec maybe even a
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I've recently been looking into rolling out Microsoft anti-virus since everything else we use is microsoft. I took a look at security essentials and its pretty good but not licensed for schools and has no centralized management capability. Forefront security is their enterprise class anti virus but it seems a long way behind the consumer version. Installing it I got errors and it didn't work with SQL 2008 or Server 2008 R2. I eventually
