I've been looking for a cloud backup provider for a bit, but to be honest, I've been busy, other things on my plate, etc, etc (always an excuse!). I've also been looking at implementing Chromebooks because of their simplicity and the cost - but of course you need G-Suite for that. So, even though we're fully signed up and committed to Office365 I pushed through an application and this got agree a couple of months back by the nice people at Google - why can't we somehow use both?. And, the 'Un
I'm currently playing about with Windows 10 and various GPOs and GPPs to try and lock things down a bit.
One thing that was puzzling me was that I could not turn off the option within the new fangled file explorer to show hidden files. I don't want our students being able to do this as we have some folders that are hidden for various reasons. Up to Windows 7, this was nice and easy with the GPO under User Config > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components/File Explor
I've just dealt with for the fifth time on various machines an issue with Outlook 2013 running on Windows 10. One of these times was on my own home machine but after dealing with my neighbours last night, I guess its worth putting up something about here so others can see if it's searched upon.
These machines have been running Windows 10 and Outlook 2013 for sometime, all configured to send e-mail using IMAP connecting to a service like Gmail and everything works as expected then suddenly fo
We moved over to Office365 and Office 2013 this summer and all has been good so far.
One of our governors complained to me recently that important documents sent from the Head and the Bursar were not coming through but just an attachment entitled 'winmail.dat'. Further investigation lead to the fact that she uses an iPad for reading e-mails.
Further investigation has led to this website: How to stop Office 365 sending those pesky winmail.dat attachments - Dear Geek - it would appear that
This Summer we're rolling out Office 2013 ready for September. We've been using a KMS server like most schools to activate Windows and Office 2010 - these generally have been without issues. With Office 2013 you have to first install the Microsoft Office 2013 Volume License Pack, and this has a nice GUI which has you entering your KMS key for Office 2013 and activating it for you. I did this sometime ago during the various months of testing I've done.
Like Windows activations, KMS requir
There are plenty of discussions within this forum with regard to how machines are setup to allow scripting, coding ,etc. With the GCSE Computing and this drivel from the government regarding getting kids coding they obviously needs the tools to do this.
In an ideal world, we give them the tools on the desktop for this, things like Python, Small Basic, Eclipse, etc, but we work in schools where for obvious reason, we keep things pretty much locked down. I'm sure many Network Managers have sh
Haven't blogged for a while, but like too when I get one of those 'I didn't realise that' moments.....
We've got a number of Visually Impaired kids here at the school, who make use of the Magnifer built into Windows 7. I've got them in a seperate security group which switches on an extra folder in the Start Menu giving access to the Ease of Access tools. Always thought it worked well, select magnifier and a docked version of the application runs. However, I was informed today that it shoul
Monday was the big day for us this week; we've switched over on Friday afternoon to our new fully IP based system consisting of a Splicecom Maximiser 5100 Call Server supporting 118 phones. So far, so good with it all appearing to be working well and recieved well by all staff.
It has however been a long time in planning; with support from the community on here as a whole I felt it only right to detail my experience over the last few months.
I've been fortunate that a couple of years ago
So, I've got all the VLAN in place ready for VOIP, just a few tweaks to be done to servers and stuff but nothing major. I'm still trying to nail down the exact QoS configuration but I've put that ball in the court of the supplier for now . I've got a 10 more Switches with PoE on order in places where we don't have the capacity.
Further discussions with the supplier states that the system needs to be able to Multicast, and with the Softphone feature on the desktops PCs it looks like we need
I had one of those moments today; the mist cleared (only slightly) in sorting our network out with a VLAN ready for a VOIP implementation.
The various posts here on Edugeek once again proved valuable, and I'm chuffed to bits that I've got it sorted to a certain point (have yet to tweak various Server gateway addresses).
Next step later on down the line is to start segmenting the next work into logical parts but need a NAT box of somesort to do that correctly.
Pete
One of my Summer tasks has been to get SIMS migrated from our ageing server onto a new Server. I've gone down the route of hosting it on a virtual machine based on a XenServer Host. First impressions are all good so far.
In all the planning of this and arranging for Capita to do the migration, you suddenly realise how many other systems feed off your SIMS database and these too need either migration or re-configuring. These include simple things like the Frog SIMS Extractor right up to our
Had one of those days today that we all dread as technicians/network managers. Walk into the office this morning and pounced upon by various members of staff shouting "No one can log on!"
Into the Server room and all the servers apart from one is switched on and running. The main DC which also houses the CSE Database is dead as a dodo.
Initial indication would be a power failure, but no, all others UPS' are running and not reporting an issue. Power up the UPS and powered back up the s
There I was, thought I'd have a go at implementing a VLAN on the Core switch yesterday. Just to prove the concept and make sure I've got it clear in my head what to do. I telnet into the Switch and start tweaking some settings, next thing I know connectivity to the Internet Stops.. What have I done? I look at the steps I took, and all seems well. I then revert all the settings back to their initial settings and still no Internet.
Quick phone call to SWGfL and it would appear an outage
I've been in my post now for just over three years; I'm loving the job but there is one thing I've noticed since I started here.....
I seem to be suffering from higher than usual amount of colds, sniffles and other such horrible things. Normally, I wouldn't take more than a day off per year due to some sort of sickness, but since being here I feel like I'm taking more.
I guess its working around all these little darlings that does it. But, I just seem to feel like crap at the moment and
We've come back this term with a whole load of machines complaining that Windows 7 is not genuine. How nice; after all the money we spend with Microsoft and the various backflips we have to do to get our KMS server working correctly we're being accused of running illegal software!
It would turn out that during the Xmas break I created a new Prism Package which was the new SIMS Update installation. Rather than let SIMS update itself this time round (because it doesn't always work), I thought
We've had a XenServer running since last year, and have been impressed so much that we introduced another one this year and both hosts have some eight Windows based servers sitting on them.
I've got a small Linux server running on an old workstation that hosts the Xibo Signage System and also looks after LimeSurveys as well running on Ubuntu. My plan was to move this to another VM on the newer host as it has more than enough capacity.
It would seem that only certain distros of Linux are s
Teacher preparing for OCR Level 1 ICT Functional Skills, and this particular guidance note took my interest:
So, blocking Internet - no problem, Impero will do that for us. But how are they expected to access my Exchange 2007 Box with Outlook but not recieve/send e-mails??
Pete
Been tasked with looking into implementing an internal VOIP phone system to link up some buildings that don't have phone lines installed.
Have been looking at things like 3CX and AsteriskNow (with Freepbx).
Have to say that I really do like the look of 3CX; windows based, really easy to setup and configure but its going to cost if we want to have more than 4 people talking at one. Also been told there is no money.
So, looking at AsteriskNOW, and its stretching my Linux knowledge abit b
We're in our third year of Electronic Registration, and we looked into Registration during assemblies using EEE-PCs. The excellent Asus EEE-PCs 701 4G were the netbook of choice back then. Using the wonders of nLite we created the well documented slim installation of XP so teachers could use SIMS and register their classes during assemblies (and in other locations).
All has been well until recently, I never like XP running on these devices; it never seem to have any slick-ness which is not
We've had fun with the SIMS Server over the past couple of weeks. It's been perfectly happy until a Hard Drive failure occured a couple of weeks ago. Not a problem, RAID5 in play so got in touch with HP and a new Hard Drive was dispatched next day, installed and all was well.
Unfortunately not, somehow a couple of directories had become corrupted which we can only assumed happened when this hard drive failed. Still, managed to recover them with no issues but couldn't delete these folders w
Today was something different; our recent refurbishment and asbestos removal program thats been running for nearly 18 months is finally coming to an end. The last phase being the main hall. Being a Performing Arts College we've had a new acoustic ceiling installed with a new lighting rig put in place, new sound system along with a new projector which has multiple input points around the hall.
This new rig is some 7 metres up, which obviously will require the stage technician to climb a free
Today we did a real world test on our Windows 7 system.
We've built a ICT Suite that is due to come on-line this September and invited 5 students to come in and try it out. I moved their accounts temporarily into the OUs we have setup for Windows 7 and moved them to the appropriate Security Groups and got them to log in. Sophos was installed and running, along with Impero V3.0.38 and we're still using CSE but not using their Workspace, purely using the CSE System to build and administer the
Following on from a blog way back: http://www.edugeek.net/blogs/fragglepete/129-licensing-why-do-i-have-jump-through-hoops.html
I've finally got round to getting the KMS Server setup ready for when we start our Windows Deployment in a few weeks. It's a bit odd that you can setup a KMS on a Windows 2003 Server and a Windows 2008R2 server but not a Windows 2008 Server! Not if you want to activate Windows 7 Clients!!! My domain consists of a number of 2008 Servers and a 2003 SP2 Domain Contro
Had a hard drive failure on what is known as our Recovery Manager Server yesterday. This is a box which sits seperately from our main server room. The main file server has an agent installed which monitors various shares; every time a user hits save, a copy is written to the Recovery Manager Server. Users are then able to recover up to 10 previous versions of any file and folder held in their home area. Its a sort of an extension of Volume Shadow Copying and saves a lot of time and effort as
Our Windows 7 Testing is continuing. Testing is going well and so far so good. A few little issues to be resolved by third party software suppliers which I'm hoping will be fixed soon.
Had an issue with a new Dell Optiplex 380 that wasn't playing nice with WDS, but Fatmas seems to have fixed that now.
Office 2010 has been released to Volume customers, so I'd thought I'll take a look and see wether or not including Office 2010 in our Windows 7 deployment would be an upgrade too far. Head
