Whilst reading up about who these people "reporting" the security issues are and what they do, I stumbled across an odd mentality. It seems to form around "free speech" and many believe nothing should be withheld, monitored, watched, tracked or have any other sort of restriction imposed on them in school. That's something I can't understand in my boolean mind, it doesn't quite compute. Notions such as "death to all RATs" (Remote Access Trojan/Tool) certainly amused, as they're not seen as a tool, they're seen as an orwellian surveillance system. The fact that these tools can help large schools with low numbers of technical staff diagnose faults and help users without having to trek across the site, usually to remove a space from someone's username, seems to go unnoticed; the good points are typically ignored in favour of the "evil bits".

So why is the restriction and monitoring of staff and students seen as evil? In some contexts, absolutely. If our Head insisted on having control of such software and spent the majority of their time watching how staff are teaching and what the students are doing then they're clearly the wrong sort of person. Yes, of course this can be the case and I have no doubt has happened. That's not the fault of the software, that's the fault of the human beings using it.

The idea that students should be free to do as they please on school ICT systems seems ridiculous to most. Let's say by example that students have unrestricted access to everything on the network with the exception of confidential files, MIS data etc. The mind boggles at just how much harm could be done, particularly by the clever ones, the ones wanting to learn more about things by breaking, hacking, working around things. Those users need nurturing and need to have their skills pushed. However as a teenager, the majority don't think that way. Just like the boy that's intent on flushing John Smith's head down the toilet daily regardless of how many warnings he gets, there's always someone who want's to cause havoc just because they can.

Filtering is similarly frowned upon by many groups; teach responsibility they say. Most would naturally agree, but they should go hand in hand, not one or the other. It's shocking how many fully mature adults struggle to get through a working day without spending 4 or 5 hours glued to Facebook - teenagers (and indeed younger children) are worse. Keeping them on task to better their education is, in my opinion, every bit as important as teaching them to use the Internet and other resources responsibly.

It seems to boil down to the fact that these "hackers" or "security researchers" believing these things are rather like the hippies chaining themselves to a 400 year old diseased tree to stop it being cut down. Idealism; ideally the tree wouldn't be diseased, therefore it wouldn't need removing. That isn't the case. Ideally, children would all wake up in the morning, happily wander to school, sit and learn all day long without breaking concentration once or feeling the need to draw mustaches on the sperms on page 54 of their biology book. They wouldn't have overactive hormones and rowdy pals urging them to search for boobs on the internet or see how one would sign up to fight for some extremists in Madeupistan. They also wouldn't have parents who would be going to the media like a shot should a school not be helping to protect their children from these things.

Idealism shouldn't be the driving force of the world. It'd be nice, but whilst human beings exist, it will never work. Realism however....

What does someone want in a console?

Get home from school/work/the pub and you want to relax.

Feet up on the sofa.

Controller in hand.

Unwind with game of choice.

That game "only" cost £30. The console was a max of £200.

Everyone's happy.

So what has changed?

Time, to start with. At no point did anyone intelligent sit and think "in 2013, we'll still be playing on antiquated platforms designed for a single purpose with any other functionality added on as an afterthought". The companies punting us this hardware have been saying something like "Let's keep punting something they don't need because it's making us a shedload of cash".

Why is that? Why don't we need consoles?

The Xbox One is the nearest thing we've had to what we "should" have. An all in one, unified entertainment system handling most of what we need for our large screen TVs. If the already debunked rumours of Sky handing XB1's out instead of HD boxes I'd be even happier, but there's no reason for anyone to have optical media players, streaming boxes, tivos/sky+ hardware and gaming consoles. So why don't we? Because it won't make them as much money. If Microsoft had brought out the Xbox One with 360's base specs and getting rid of the preowned/internet connection issues, I would be confident in saying Sony would have long pulled out of the console race and concentrated on handhelds, or perhaps unified TVs instead.

We're being held back because of money. That's only natural, they're corporations and they exist only to profit. Fair enough, but *we* collectively are making it happen. It would be naive of anyone to think for a moment that anyone actually wants things to improve.

So is that all?

No, of course not. Cost. The cost of modern consoles are ridiculous.

Let's use the Playstation 4 as a base example because it's the cheaper of the two next gen consoles.

The unit on it's own costs £350. Controllers have been cited to cost upwards of £90 but I don't believe that - let's say £50 is a more realistic figure (but still expensive for what they are). Game prices are the most expensive at £55 a shot. It would be fair to say from industry experience that £400-420 would see people walk away with a bundle of console, game and extra controller. I'll therefore use £420 as the total starting cost.

That's a high cost, and not even including the £5 monthly for the online gubbins. "But you get a free game every month!" I hear you cry. Oh, woopy doo.

Back to my first point, in an ideal world we'd have a unified system for home entertainment and the vast majority of people (excluding the tinkerers and enthusiasts like many of us) would need nothing more than a laptop or really basic PC for "office" duties. A chromebook or cloud based system would more than suffice in this day and age.

But as we're being forced to keep on down the console route, it's right I continue to make this point.

£420.

£350 will get you a decent off the shelf system. A core i5. Maybe not the dog's nads, but good enough. Memory costs nothing. That system on it's own will be enough for casual gaming and quite a lot of other more powerful 3D games besides, especially if you're talking the AMD FX range. That includes OS and everything else you'd need.

Obviously that's not quite equal stakes - add some zombies, guns and full "HD" graphics. You'd need a beefier graphics card. £130 is more than sufficient to run anything on a core i5 at 1920x1080 (eww, horrible TV resolution!)

So that's £470 for something that'll be equal, at least in terms of the quality and playability of the games, to the next gen consoles. That's £50 more than a console.

But it's not just about the consoles though. One thing we do know, is the cost of the games.

The confirmed pricing for several AAA titles so far has been cited as:

PS4 - £55

XBOne - £54

PC - £30

So that extra cost would be saved buying the same AAA title just over twice on PC compared to console.

Oh, you might want a controller for your PC. So that's £20 for the Xbox controller (don't fix what isn't broke!). That's the difference in price for 1 game. Maybe you want 2, but let's face it, a PC isn't a console and you probably won't be hooking it up to your TV for after-pub COD with your mates.

Or should you? Why not in this day and age?

My PC starts up faster than your current gen console. It's not stupidly powerful.

Once installed, so do the games.

"PC's can go wrong!"

So can your Mac Pros, your Xboxes, your Playstation 3s and your Toaster.

"You wouldn't have to wait for your mate who knows computers down the pub to fix your console!"

No, you'd have to wait to deal with some warranty muppet or the same support centre in Delhi. And they won't just swap out that one faulty part, or the one bit you spilled coffee on/jammed pizza in.

This isn't the dark ages. It's more than possible, with no tinkering or difficulty involved, to get a PC up and running easily. It's rarely any less "plug and go" than that console when you first got it and spent more time setting up your bloody Wee-Mee's, avatars, xbox online profiles, inside leg measurements and selling your soul to EA sports in that licence agreement you didn't read.

But we don't. Other than the Xbox One, the PC is the nearest thing to a unified entertainment system we have. But it shouldn't need to be; the PC should need be little more than a typewriter that blogs. We all do that on phones anyway, so typewriter is probably about as advanced as it need get for the majority. The PC (or indeed Mac) knows it's place and isn't holding the world's entertainment industry back. Consoles are.

As usual, this is of course opinion and I've tried to keep unbiased on it. My interest is always value for money and actual betterment of our experience, digitally, financially, personally. When we're being artificially held back, it doesn't sit right with me and I like to vent about it. So if you're on my facebook friends, you've already had half this rant anyway

How so?

Let's start simple.

This thing is rapid. Even on a hard drive, it's lovely and quick. But that's where my joy ends.

Yes, it's a server OS. But PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me change the colours to something that don't make me think I'm using a Tomy My First Server.

I'll say that again. It's a server OS. So why am I hovering over nothing to bring up menus of nothingness in an entirely counter-intuitive fashion. At no point does intuition mean "reading minds" before anyone says "You just have to get used to the changes" No, stop right there buddy. Intuition means looking at a screen, and working out for yourself what you might have to do to achieve a target or goal. It doesn't mean "right, I can find my way around enough to start up a browser so I can google "how do I turn off this ruddy computer". One positive is, googling/finding out about that silly popup thing on the right hand side also shows me a few other bits and bobs.

But that's entirely counter-intuitive. And silly.

What was wrong with 2008 R2? Ok, it didn't have a "touch friendly" interface. This is a server.

How about putting the backend improvements on 2008R2 and making 2008R2v2 or something. The only possible reason for any of the UI rubbishness is to force people's hands into core installations. Sorry but I moved to running Windows systems because I tired of remembering countless unix shortcuts and AS/400 oddities, yet it feels like we're being pushed back into it.

Perhaps MS is fearing it's making things too easy for people and their technical people might lose their jobs soon...

The little niggles aren't anything that would interest anyone. We've worked through a fair amount of software deployments, and I'm really pleased with SCCM - deployments aren't quite as easy perhaps as RM systems but they're so much better. And so far *all* of the packages created for RM systems just work when imported as applications into SCCM! Bonus

The only real large niggle that's been a thorn in the side is DFS. No "on sale" sofa's though, file replication. In testing, this was a brilliant idea and worked really well. Keeping the two sites synced whilst people access a namespace for their documents seemed a great solution and added a wonderful failover/resiliency level, to the point where I could turn off 2 major servers and noone would ever notice.

But as the network got more and more heavy use, it started to stop. Files got backed up. I found that I had left the staging folders at too small a size which upset things when someone transferred 14GB to their Documents in one go. This broke replication for all users.

So we decided to help this by setting up separate replication groups for each group of users - associate staff, admins, students, teaching staff, governors etc. We did this in a "testing" situation so the replication was live yet the namespace was only pointing to one server. Should have been fool/failproof.

It wasn't.

Today, 2 vital members of support staff lost the majority of their documents. There's no audit trail - DFS hasn't "owned up" to it, and Impero's logs show nothing's been deleted. However DFS is the only logical reason this may have happened. So we've decided to pull DFS-R off user areas and keep it in use only for shared drives that aren't constantly accessed.

This of course brings us in line with Microsoft's recommended best practices - the assumption that testing with a few users would apply to over a thousand users hammering it was a silly one indeed. So we're about to roll back to the "good old" method of splitting users over the servers. Not great for failover purposes but at least shadow copies and decent backups will keep things rolling. People will just have to be a little more patient with it should something happen to a server.

I will be thinking about how best to limit damage in case of a failure. It's all well and good having the backups there, but if something goes wrong to one of the main servers, how quickly could we get everything transferred to another. That's something I need to think about, probably later this week.

Apart from that, things seem to be in line. I still need/want to move printers over to item level targetting instead of printer-per-GPO however as things seem to be working just fine, I'm tempted to leave it be. There's a lot to be said for "don't fix what isn't broken".

All this has gone on in the background and I've been trying to sort out 2 minor niggles this week.

First, folders called "My Documents". It's a PITA for sure, there's plenty of fixes and we've tried one (using FSRM to block desktop.ini works) but another is another "Best Practices" fix. Our home drives are mapped to \\namespace\users\%username% - Best Practices dictates it should be \\namespace\users\%username%\Documents. So that's something we'll implement in a staged approach.

The other issue is seemingly random. Our test users documents library doesnt work for unknown reasons but I can't find any staff who share the problem. They either don't have the problem or haven't noticed. (i.e. Documents from the start menu points to the local "Public Documents" rather than the home drive, but the home drive is mapped in My Computer just fine).

I've no idea why that's the case but needs more investigation.

Joys!

It's not been a bad day - users thoughts seem largely positive or non-existent. NM made it very clear at a training day session that we've got a whole new network built from the ground up and there *will* be glitches, there *will* be niggles and there certainly will be missing bits of software. As and when you find those bits of software that used to be buried away deep in the depths of the old system, give us a couple of weeks to get through them!

It started off fairly badly yesterday morning when the print/papercut server fell over and croaked. It wasn't exactly a beast, it was an AMD X2 system running Server 2008 on Raid1 hard drives. Basically stuff we knocked up from spares a while back. We only found that out when we kept getting further printers not mapping correctly/at all and the server restarted itself a few times. So a new proper server was knocked up sharpish and finally got up and running.

So roll on today. The bulk of the problems were either printing or "Sims isn't on my machine/not working". A few copied connect.ini and SIMS installs later the majority were sorted throughout the day. Printing though kept cropping up randomly, and despite having copied printer names word for word the daft printer sharing system decided to choose names other than what I had actually typed in. Some head-scratching and adjustment later, that was solved.

It did become apparent though that perhaps our GPO per printer setup is a little unwieldy, but thankfully quick to apply. Mostly down to OU structure more than anything else - for instance it's easy to apply one printer to one room but it soon gets confusing when some of these rooms have a computer which needs to be in another OU , meaning you need to link the GPO to each particular OU. It's not difficult or complicated, but doubling things up. Perhaps when things calm down I'll move it to item level targetting instead.

Windows 7 is certainly a little harsher on networking than XP. Some of the cabling that's been in place for <long_period_of_time> had been fine before but caused lots of random problems with 7. Positively it gave us a chance to sort it out and maybe also solve some long standing performance issues it caused.

We also had some problems with permissions which we couldn't get our head round for a good deal of yesterday. We use DFS namespaces and replication across the two main servers for both the user directories and public/shared/staff folders. The users side of things works perfectly (so far) but people couldn't seem to get the right permissions to the shared or staff folders. All 3 of us had gone through share and NTFS permissions with a fine toothcomb, checked DFS settings were set to inherit NTFS permissions and couldn't find anything. Thankfully late in the day yesterday my colleague stumbled across Share and Storage Management console, and setting the permissions there sorted it out instantly. Still none of us know why that would be any different to doing share/ntfs permissions any other way, but as it works all we can do is leave it like that! We'll put it down to a foible of 2008 until we do know

Ah well, Roll on to the end of a very busy but ultimately positive day. Around about the time when one of us had set schedules to shutdown on Impero previously and entirely forgotten about it.

Thankfully he'd also been remoted into a couple of machines in time to notice the "You're being forced to shut down. You've got a minute to save your work."

Cue phone calls. Lots of phone calls. Bugger!

My colleague gets through amongst the panicked staff to be greeted with me dropping a cup of tea over myself and then the phone, followed by some brief swearing and laughing, of course she's wondering the same, noting that one of the servers had followed suit.

Bugger!

All 4 main servers had it too, and of course had no-one to press Cancel.

So, got those restarted and thankfully seems to have not caused a massive problem. One person had been working on a huge powerpoint all day and was very worried about losing it (although autosave should work, I'll check that tomorrow I think!) but once servers returned full access was restored and everything worked as normal. That was a huge relief and our first unofficial test of a full server failure which was great in a way - on CC3 when that sort of thing happened, clients had to be restarted fully before they'd ever behave again!

So a panicky end to a long busy day. I recall saying that if we got back to a manageable helpdesk in January then I'd consider this whole migration a success. I'm extremely optimistic and confident in that, although it is early days.One thing is for sure though - all 3 of us intend to have all or the majority of October half term off. It's well deserved, I think!

To Do:

Find some time to relax.

Documentation, both for users and for ourselves/reference

Do some reading on the finer arts of SCCM

Keep Calm and Carry On!

Not sure why - bad planning, bad luck, best intentions etc. It'd certainly have been easier if we were allowed to stay for full days but on the other hand I think all of us were appreciative of half days when it was nice out!

We were severely held back by an email hack; we believed at first it was easy passwords but further probing of the staff involved showed this wasn't the case. That was about 3 days of only half concentrating on the task at hand, but it's sorted and thankfully without having our ISP cut us off.

Printers proved to be a little difficult - after thinking we'd sorted it, it reared it's ugly head again today but that turned out to be drivers that just wouldn't install for normal users. Other printers were fine, but still it was a few hours lost.

WSUS wasn't quite working as it should but half a day this week got that sorted without issue.

Software deployment I think has been a bit of a learning process. I had become expert in the commissioning of SCCM however there's still a lot to learn for all of us about the runnings. Quite a few MSI's just worked off the bat which was fantastic, and better still a lot of packages straight from the RMPackages folder of CC3 just worked straight away, however the amount of time spent on getting Solidworks 2012 working was ridiculous. In the end we just used Impero to push it out. Solidworks is clearly not designed with deployment to enterprises/schools in mind, the deployment options they have are just daft. (Deploy via email is their preferred method).

A surprise package was Serif (Drawplus and Webplus). They're not great programs, in fact I think they're bloody awful; one huge saving grace though was the fantastic deployment documentation. It just worked. Even Adobe CS5 was rather quite painless!

We've effectively gained another ICT suite by the removal of a library, so we'd spent a good bit of time unpacking new computers, networking it up and getting CCTV sorted for it once they'd completed the works in there. We're quite pleased with that, however it'll always leave a bitter pill for us - losing the library also meant we lost a valued, respected and generally lovely colleague who was always there for a conversation. She'll certainly be missed, there are not many with her spirit left here.

We've decided to hold off on further software - there's so much that's built up over the years we think the best way forward is to get what we know done (which is done) and leave everything else. As and when stuff is *actually required* it'll get installed.

So I think we're there. There's still a lot we'd rather have a good week to finish off, mostly testing. It's all done entirely from scratch with nothing imported, so no doubt there's going to be a few people doing things they shouldn't be able to, but the important security stuff is clear.

All we can do now is wait for our new broadband provision! We'll miss EMBC, they've been absolutely cracking for reliability and service through the years, but we must move with the times and must go somewhere that represents value for money. School's Broadband have certainly been more than supportive and look forward to seeing what they can do. Was rather hoping we'd be up and running already but BT Openreach are yet again proving their usefullness in the communication industry by not having a clue where our own circuit is. I wonder if they tried looking behind the sofa?

I'm not personally too fussed on his actions. He did something naughty which showed up someone else to be doing something naughty, that someone else being someone with the power to punish him for it.

That's not a particular problem. He deserves to be punished, but certainly not by someone backwards enough to believe the Death Penalty would be appropriate. However I think that's just a term that's being thrown around to sensationalise something quite small.

Whistleblowing is a risky business and by doing it, regardless of any legal or civil sanctions to protect those doing it, you can expect some comeback. Especially when you're doing it to the public.

But as said, this isn't about Assange's rights or wrongs.

This story has involved many countries and their respective governments, and *everyone* has something to say about it. For some reason half the internet are piling on Assange's side without having one ounce of a clue about the truth - because the only people that do know that are Assange himself and the people he's having problems with. Everyone else is throwing themselves into a "side" based on assumptions or sheep following.

The world is split up into lord knows how many respective countries and governments, and a silly proportion of those people are doing nasty things and pretending it's all good. Assange has apparently uncovered and leaked stuff that proves the US doing it. Our government does silly things. Ecuador does silly things. Nearly everyone does.

Yet often I am attacked for "sitting on the fence" or "happily sticking my head in the sand".

It's a safe place to be. As long as my family are safe and healthy, I'm happy, and the less some corrupt buggers have to do about it the better. The problem is that things seem so far gone, there can't be a way to "correct" everything. One country can't fix another without upsetting someone else, nor can a country stick their head in the sand or plead ignorance without upsetting someone either. Therefore

First week was always going to be a bit iffy as there were still a lot of staff in. But a great opportunity to build the majority of the ICT suites and break the back of the heavy moving.

But why, why oh why did we have to do that in the one week it's constantly 30ºC?

Despite the email updates and reminders to staff we still had one member of SLT complain when I reminded everyone that Friday was D-Day for the old network. Held off until Sunday night after spending all weekend remoting in (well, remoting in for 5 minutes, starting a robocopy for one batch of users then leaving it for an hour or so) copying all users off the 3 servers onto the new namespace, followed by RMPublic, RMShared Documents and RMStaff.

It's astonishing how much data piles up. Data in the above shared locations and all users My Documents tallied 900GB. That's a fair whack considering we have a special NAS for large media, images etc, but a quick run over it with Treesize Free shows there's still a lot of people not making correct use of those facilities. If anyone has a handy way of blocking a combination of certain file types over a certain size (for example .avi over 400mb) from home folders then I'm all ears

So we tallied 900GB of current data. 2.3 million files. Wowsers.

Monday rolls around and I'm itching to turn off the old servers but we needed to play it safe and check it over several times - sure enough we found a few other resources we will/may need so copied those over. Tuesday morning, the bullet was bitten and all 3 RM CC3 servers were permanently removed.

This proved to have a particularly positive effect on one thing at least. Our NM came in not long after I had done this and put the new server in it's place.

Near silence.

CC3 Server 1 has MASSIVELY loud power supply fans.

NM sits RIGHT next to the server/switch cabinet and we've often wondered how we can convince people to move either it or us due to the high level of noise. We'd previously pulled some favours to get a decible reading done and it fell about 5db below the threshold for H&S to play a part, however no doubt there would be differences due to it being constant and right next to him. But we had other things on our minds and let it be. With this server decomissioned, the noise difference is MASSIVE - we can hear the phone clearly, we can have the radio on at a volume that won't annoy the people in the next town and we can hold a conversation without sounding like a pair of 80 year olds.

Eh?

What? Speak up young man...

As mentioned in a previous blog post, our intention was to re-use the chassis from our most recent RM CC3 server (a high quality Chenbro unit with redundant PSU and a Sata/SAS backplane in place) to house the second new server gubbins. The above noise issue won't be a problem as it's being housed at our other site in an unmanned server room.

All went reasonably well - fitting was easy, but the chassis had some welded in standoffs that sit in the wrong place. Just 2. One isn't a problem, there's nothing on the motherboard that it interferes with, but the other sits right underneath the second batch of RAM slots and even when covered over with plastic tape, it renders 2 RAM slots unusable. So down to 20GB RAM. If it causes a major issue we'll have to rebuild it after yanking the damn thing off but for now we're not too worried.

Secondly, the power supply being slightly older only had a single EPS12V power cable. Bugger - can't run dual CPU with only one. Searching for adapters online came up reasonably fruitless - adapters either converted a 4pin ATX and 4pin Molex to 8pin EPS, or some very dodgy looking single molex to EPS. The current flowing down those things, I'm not taking the risk. So for the time being, we thought we'd just build it with half the RAM and single CPU to make sure it works OK. Not a problem - just pop the plastic protective cover back onto the empty CPU socket and F***! Slip of the finger and I've bent 2 or 3 of the pins on the CPU socket. Big swear words. I'm glad no kids were present because both F and C bombs made frequent occurrences.

With the help of NM and having the board removed again from the chassis, a steady hand with a phone-torch, magnifying glass and a jewellery screwdriver, we managed to get it looking vaguely straight. Cleaning bill for the pants, please!

Later, revisiting the EPS thing, I made my own adapter - twin molex to EPS with suitably large gauge wire. Works a treat, and I trust my own soldering skills better than some of those cheap cables from amazon! Thank god for the army of spare cables I hoard at home

Wonderful. No going back now, the old server is dust. Almost literally - blowing it out before putting new stuff in it caused a dust cloud of epic proportions. I did it in the hall and the guys chopping up rainforest amounts of wood in the room nearby wondered what the hell had gone off.

Server built. Hard drives installed. ESXi installed.

Woot!

Unreliable though - vSphere kept flaking out and I couldn't keep it up long enough to warrant copying over the new VM's to it. Bugger - I hope that standoff isn't causing more problems than initially appeared. Maybe it's the 4 port trunk. All cables out - no, still pings fine. Hang on - all cables out - still pinging. Gack, something's stolen my IP address!

5 minutes later and a rogue NAS moved to it's correct IP, problem solved.

Domain Controller 2 moved. Powered on. Success!

SCCM Server 2 moved. Fail.

I had both the above VM's on the initial new server along with the other 2, and I had set up DFS-R to replicate all users and all shared directories. Filled up the datastore damn quick. I didn't worry too much, it'll run as well with 1 server as it does with 2. But trying to move it across to the new server with plenty of space, it was clear the 2 larger virtual drives were corrupt. Thankfully it's no big deal, in interest of keeping things as modular as possible I had set up 3 virtual HDD's for each server instead of partitioning one. So OS could be brought up and the other two remade within 5 minutes. Replication is currently taking care of the users and shared stuff, and just re-setup the server in SCCM on server 1 to reinstall the site server gubbins, distribution and software update points etc.

Bingo.

In the meantime, my colleagues were making considerable headway into building/replacing/upgrading the 450 odd stations around the school, almost entirely unaffected by my server moves and tweakery. That makes me very happy, that's failover working exactly as it should. And of course moving the plethora of other servers and services to the new domain - terminal server, Moodle, email servers, websites etc.

So from now on, we just need to concentrate on the "little" bits.

Gettiing GPOs and security just right.

Printer deployment. Still need to figure out best practice on that. Many people have many methods. Some have a single GPO with all printers with massive security filters so the right machines get the right printers. Some have a GPO per location, some have a GPO per printer.

The latter method seems to suit us best as our locations in AD aren't always sharing printers. So I think that's just make an empty GPO for each printer, lob in the correct machine/location assignments and use Printer Management in 2008R2 to deploy to those GPOs.

Software packages and deployment.

There's some big buggers in there. Solidworks made me grind my teeth on CC3 however I seem to recall last year that doing the same on vanilla was considerably better documented. Adobe CS5.

SIMS (for future use - currently we've a separate image with SIMS installed already).

There will always be a few odd ones. Most the little stuff we have in our base image like VLC, Irfanview, Office etc. But I'm happy enough with that. And if there's anything too awkward we can always just throw it out via Impero MSI deploy

So, things are looking positive. We're on schedule, there's been a few swear words uttered but things are working as expected. My ultimate aim is that we can have some time off at the back end of the holidays without feeling worried about anything. We only do half days in the summer as it is but 2 out of 3 of us have kids and would love to spend just that bit more time with them whilst the weather is still good,ish!

But enough being sentimental. Today marked the first bit of proof for me that things really are moving in the right direction. We got the first full ICT suite built onto the new network, and yesterday the second important admin staff got their new system too. One member of staff nearby (our main SIMS person) had been on our new system for the best part of a fortnight already and we'd been pleasantly surprised with the lack of problems. Just a couple of niggles, one for me to work on next week with a small issue regarding SIMS and Word 2010 security (gack) but that shouldn't be too hard to solve.

SCCM 2012 is a peach to work with. I've had a lot of practice as I've said before, but being able to just fire up a whole ICT suite and PXE boot the lot with 0 trouble (well, apart from one machine that couldn't decide if it was a PC or a calculator and was just generally crap at being either) then half an hour later seeing the whole lot on the new domain, ready to roll was a huge relief. It's only the base image - but it still contains a lot of the basic stuff like Office, Audacity, Image Resizer, VLC, Irfanview, Chrome, Flash plugins etc. We could have probably rolled that out sitewide a fortnight ago with minimal fuss but nothing makes good preparation like testing.

So, 24 computers, imaged and working. On the new domain, in the correct OU, relevant SCCM client installed, Forefront working and updated. Fantastic.

We face the next stretch of 6 weeks getting the nit-picking done. Another 2 ICT suites to roll out (set and forget) and we can start the heavy stuff next week. Migrating incumbent services to the new domain and/or making sure they auth to the new domain. Zimbra, Moodle and Papercut/print server are the biggies. The bulk of the time will no doubt be ironing out little issues due to testing GPOs, drivers on those odd machines, those bloody awkward peripherals we entirely forgot about (receipt printers and ye-older scanners; grr!) and plenty of time to dedicate to making sure we're not going to get hammered when it all starts again in September.

Also got another server to build - currently one ESXi box is handling all 4 of the new servers (2 DCs, 2 user/SCCM servers) and doing a spankingly good job but we need 1 of each over our other building. Our main currently CC3 server is donating it's chassis and RAID card for this new server. It'll certainly need a clean after god knows how many years of sterling service.

People may knock CC3 all they like; I can certainly have a bash at some things, but it's been damn reliable and quite a time saver. I sincerely hope that once running, SCCM and Impero will do the same in the future.

Impero itself though is stunning. We've been using it for the last couple of months and kept finding new things to play with every time we loaded it. It's also instilled a sense of "They're watching us" into a good size group of "the kids who WILL mess around" which is damn handy as a deterrent and they've no excuse when they're pulled up for doing something they shouldn't. I'm not a great fan of the "surveillance culture" as it's often called but sometimes it can be a great thing. We're not particularly using Impero for that purpose, all in all it's 90% a remote administration tool and as from September it'll be part of a large "DIY service portal" for teachers for password resets, internet/site blocking which will take a large load off our minds.

Come October time, we hope to be able to sit back in our chairs and watch things just work. That may be a pipe dream, but I've got enough confidence in the plans, the hardware/software and our team to not worry. The only thing I really have to worry about is a small one - making sure I understand enough of my own documentation to be able to translate it into English for our records.

Things are positive.

"OMG we can't get in!" "We can't park" and "It's ALL SILVERSTONE'S FAULT".

Why do people get a bit annoyed (understandable tbh) then after seeing someone else's annoyance, automatically attach to their state of mind and change from a sensible human being into a mindless moronic sheep. Sheeple.

Some thoughts for anyone who moans or thinks about moaning.

1. Consider exactly how much money Silverstone will lose, refunding all those unused tickets for yesterday and today. That's a hell of a lot of money, especially when you consider that

2. Silverstone is one of the few Grand Prix circuits in the world with NO GOVERNMENT FINANCIAL BACKING. It runs entirely on it's own merit, with it's own organisation and as it's own entity. And it succeeds the majority of the time. But sometimes, bad things happen. Like

3. Extreme weather conditions. People are CONSTANTLY blaming Silverstone for the weather. The majority of car parking is on grass. Oddly enough, we have a bit of a bad week with that so the majority of said parking is either damn soggy or the bottom of a pond. The same goes for some of the camp sites. Some things just can't be helped. Silverstone are looking for more major investment to tackle problems just like this. It's often said that they've spent all the money on extra stands but no parking or better traffic management when it's just not right. Stands cost nothing in the grand scheme of things. Roads and car parks however are something else.The traffic management around Silverstone is excellent in normal conditions but there's a lot to take into consideration should we have problems like this year.

You can't just concrete over a few fields for the sake of 3 days a year. You can't build the sort of road system capable of what we have to handle this year just in case it rains heavily or some other problem causes people to have to be turned away. You can't offer to put people up in hotels because the risk they're taking to camp didn't pay off.

The problems are down to 2 things. Media and People. Media crosses both - idiotic newspaper and website articles spouting Daily Mail levels of panic. Social Media transcends the gap between people and media, and when people turn into sheeple, Social Media is the platform to which they take their usually wrong opinion. Twitter and Facebook are both full of absolute idiots currently uttering rubbish like

"Silverstone should lose the GP for this"

"They should have seen this coming, it's Britain after all"

"Donnington would have done it better"

Not one of these people has actually THOUGHT about what they've said before saying it, and as a result each and every single one of them looks stupid.

So, considering the conditions, Silverstone are pulling out all the stops to make sure people are safe and the race goes ahead. With the right amount of planning, the majority of people will still be able to see it without a problem. But if you can't think, you can't plan.

You may not hold a person against their will. You may certainly not hold a person against their will to make demands of another.

Therefore why on earth is it legal to hold the general public hostage to "make a point" to your employer?

And stop that comment you've already started typing.

I am simply trying to understand one simple thing about striking unions, and yes this is regarding HMRC today. I'm no politician so excuse any ignorance shown here.

I'm not against the idea of industrial action. There are obviously times when large groups of employees may feel grieved about something. Their union may ask them to join forces and act upon it.

Why is the only form of action a strike? Something that is no less idiotic than "Do what we ask or this kitten gets it." Ok, so there's no feline lives at stake but they may cut off his food supply and stop it prowling around behind the sofa and washing machine like normal. Does it REALLY have to impact the general public so much?

I am *strongly* against this, obviously and feel absolutely fed up that other human beings - friends and family included would partake in such action knowing how much of a problem it could cause other innocent people. There's collateral damage and then there's extracting the urine.

So, back to school and the proper good gubbins has arrived for the first of two new servers - shiney new Intel pedestal server chassis with redundant PSU's and the works. New mainboard (Intel S5520HCR), CPU's (pair of E5620) and 32GB of DDR3 to go in along with the RAID card we had lying around (Adaptec 5805) running 4x2TB Seagate ES drives.

Plan was simple. Each server would run ESXi with 2 guests - a Raid10 system which hosted the datastore for the main SCCM server and users, and RAID1 on the onboard host based RAID which ran one of two DC's which ran AD, DHCP, DNS.

Fail 1. ESXi doth not like HBAs No worries, got up and running on a single drive. Got all 4 virtual machines up and running, SCCM installed and configured to liking, and starting to play with ADMT to migrate from the old system. Dreamy progress. In the meantime, we'd also been shopping for another RAID card to go alongside the Adaptec, ideally one of the intel jobbies that integrates with the mainboard via a special PCIE slot. Supplier let us down unfortunately with no stock in the channel so had to plump for another solution. Get an 8 channel RAID card, and use the 5805 with another older RAID card in the second machine.

Couple of days later, our new card turns up - a shiny new Adaptec 6805. RAID10 set up again, everything transferred, perfect! Right, let's get the RAID1 set up.

Plugged drives in.

Turn on server and fire up the RAID controller thingy.

"Changes found. Accept the changes to alter the settings?"

No dumps me out and leaves me powerless to do anything. So it must be "Yes".

That "Yes" instantly wiped the data on the RAID1 (one of which had my backups on... fool!) and removed the RAID data from the RAID10 array, making it RAID1 instead.

F***!

F***!

F***!

F***!

Right. Time for the weekend. Relax, don't let it panic me. Didn't stop me coming home with a face like Boris Johnson's babysitter though.

Wednesday rolls around. I'd got a HDD with ESXi already installed so stuck that in, hoping it might see some datastores. Wouldn't boot. Bugger - reinstalled ESXi anyway, fired up and yay! after re-creating the RAID10 array it hadn't lost any data! It'd still definitely wiped the single drive, but that's no biggy, I'd only lost the second DC - so one unimportant machine out of 4 was great news.

Lesson learned. I'm not going forward from this point without a backup. Right, where's that spare 2TB drive. Stick it in, let's copy those VMDK's over. Didn't know that regardless of the file system (VMFS5) any copy or move action converts thin provisioned disks to fat. Dammit! That's about 8TB of provisioned space that I just don't have! (despite only currently using about 50GB in total). Lot's of learning, prannying around with VEEAM and my saviour came with learning about VMKFSTools - easy method of copying thin provisioned disks and even converting fat disks to thin.

If anyone's interested in that method, SSH into your ESXi host (obviously enable that first) and do the following:

vmkfstools -i original.vmdk -d thin ../backup/newdisk.vmdk

Absolute lifesaver, although it's always disconcerting when you watch progress creep up very slowly yet disk activity doing absolutely nada. It worked though!

Very happy man. Now I can go in this Monday and start the heavy stuff. GPOs. AD user migration. Mandatory profile setups. Application management. Some proper testing. Can't wait!

We're waiting for the start of Summer before we built the second server as we're reusing one of the RM chassis in the newest of our CC3 servers, which makes sense as it's a decent chassis with redundant PSU and a SATA backplane already. Shifting the second server and DC to it will be a piece of cake! Gotta love ESX

Anyway, after many successful years of CC3 (I only joined about 16 months ago, personally though) our school has decided to take the bull by the horns and update just about everything. A choice that started in our department mostly catalysed by the end of support for Windows XP and no doubt CC3 soon after. CC3 has been pretty much solid, it's been easy to manage and problem solve, and I consider myself fairly good with it. I've had some of the best tutors in the country though before this particular job and to those guys, I'm internally grateful. You know the sort of person, the type of guy that's easily forgotten more in the last week than you believe you'll ever actually know. Despite that experience, I've still kept learning about it and can honestly say that it really is a decent educational network system. It had it's difficulties like CC4 did, but maturity and the length of service from XP has certainly helped.

We looked at many options. We're a fairly large secondary school with the added complication of having a split site, one campus is a good 800m away from the other, connected with single mode fibre between them. That, and having only 3 of us to manage it all, that's relatively few staff juggling between two large sites. So far it's worked OK, many thanks to a fairly reliable system, some reliable computers and a good existing infrastructure of support. Some things need tightening up such as use of our helpdesk, but efforts in the last few weeks have improved this massively.

So, what options did we have?

Firstly, what's the goal.

1. A modern network.

2. Windows 7 on the clients. Throughout.

3. Retain the ease of maintenance.

4. Increase reliability and failover.

5. Increase performance.

6. Give staff confidence in the network and the use of computers in school.

RM CC4

The first was CC4. This seemed like a good natural evolution, we wouldn't have to have much more training and I personally had a lot of experience with it, both implementing it as a system and using it as an end user/administrator. We toyed with this idea a lot; soon after joining my school I took the Network Manager to one of my primaries that insisted I continued supporting them and their CC4 network to take a look at just what it was capable of. He came away impressed, the flexibility offered over and above CC3 was huge and many of the processes were just so much easier. Building stations was better, packages was similar/better depending on how you imported them, software/update allocation was a huge amount better. We were all aware of some of the difficulties CC4 has had, and in my old job I had seen more than my fair share of schools having extreme difficulty, to the point where they were refusing to pay RM any money until it was solved. However in this particular primary, I oversaw the installation, planned it, planned the implementation in the classrooms etc and to this day it runs with very few niggles. It's been solid.

Vanilla Networks

The second choice was a vanilla network. This seemed like a good option on the price front, we were aware that budgets are tight and all 3 of us could manage a vanilla network with no extra training (but all agreed that training certainly wouldn't hurt, if we could budget for it!) Some of our existing network is already vanilla - the way some parts of the ICT system worked meanted that a separate network for music/media seemed appropriate, and it does work. So we're all comfortable with GPOs and logon scripts, but it does come with a level of fiddliness in network planning, implementation and maintenance. So of course, we needed to look at management options on top of this. Price naturally rises as you add options, the one that stuck out most of course was Impero - we'd seen what this software is capable of, we'd see trials and heard of it's reputation here on Edugeek of course. However it wasn't the only answer to resolve this particular problem, yet we'd come back to it later...

So where did we go?

After much staring at the numbers for CC4, we decided that perhaps cost would be a stalling point. It wasn't unaffordable, but we'd also had our eyes on the Microsoft EES licensing scheme. They would have had little to do with eachother, but EES gave rise to other options - the Microsoft Enterprise suite, notably SCCM. We played a bit with SCCM 2007 however found it very pinickity and awkward, and of course were aware of 2012 being around the corner (this was about a year ago). We knew what it was capable of, we knew a nearby school was using it with good success and decided to invest more time in testing it.

Roll on to April 2012.

At the start of the month, we're panicking. We wanted to get this done for Summer this year, but we couldn't do it on a release candidate of the software. We'd done lots of testing on RC1 and 2 and were extremely impressed with it's capabilities and power - both of which were far, far beyond what we would ever use, however it's so configurable and cost effective, plus with the EES scheme gives us scope to keep up to date, but really didn't want to have to wait another year. We drew ourselves a deadline - end of the Easter holiday for it to be released. We'd heard the same rumours as everone else, it'd be here during the MMS 2012 summit. Mid April, that was doable. Yet thanks to a post on Twitter via #sysctr we found it released far earlier. It was time to start implementing.

Installation was smooth as pie - the main systems both run on ESXi, so it was just a case of rolling back the snapshot before the SCCM RC's were installed, and carrying on from there. Completely separate from the existing domain name, we decided a fresh start rather than any form of migration would be the best move. ADMT will probably be used to shift over users when the time comes. Plus, I'd had plenty of experience installing SCCM 2012 now, with the betas and release candidates I knew the foibles regarding the SQL install and could easily install it now without the excellent documentation available at Portal - www.windows-noob.com. Never-the-less, I decided to use the documentation there as my implementation docs, taking out everything unnecessary, adding my own notes as I went along. All went entirely smoothly.

We've just decided on the rough infrastructure - there will be 2 new servers replacing the 3 CC3 servers. One on each site, the primary SCCM server also being primary DC, SQL server and user-store, and the other site pretty much just being secondary DC, backup DHCP, DNS, users and distribution point for that site.

One AD site set for each site (it was flat before) with a split IP range which would help with both the distribution points, keeping load off the inter-site link and better yet gives rise to a decision we made last week - using DFS with replication.

We've had a few problems in the past where if one server goes down, the users on it are unable to use the network unless they have a cached login somewhere. This can cause a major annoyance, and depending on the reason for the downtime can also cause major problems; for instance if it's not a quick job, we could move users to another server. But not all users, that takes too much time. So who do you decide is more important than the others?

The use of DFS, we believe, should be able to solve this. User storage isn't an issue; storage is still dirt cheap comparitively, and having to have 2-4TB of storage on each server rather than on just one isn't a difficulty. Users can go between both sites and automatically use the server closest to them, eliminating so much load from the site link. Should one server fall over, all we have to do is point the DFS namespace to the other server so if an issue is picked up straight away, we could have them back up and running in just a couple of minutes rather than "when the server is fixed"

SCCM 2012 is *massively* powerful. It can look a little too daunting perhaps from the POV of someone that's been dealing entirely with educational networks with CC3/4/Ranger etc installed, but with a little digging and removal of unnecessary clutter, you start to realise just how similar some of it is. There is a wealth of guides out there, including the excellent blogs on these very forums by @TheScarfedOne which will get you up and running in no time. I think it's certainly worth firing it up on a VM at home or at work just to get an idea of what it looks like and what it can do, because it could easily shape the future of your network.

So, I'm still nervous, yet we're so close to seeing something so futuristic compared to what we have now, I'm also massively excited. We're all looking forward to seeing how things run with this, we've all had input into it's implementation and design and just hope it doesn't get us all sacked CC3 isn't perfect, it does have limitations and many of the non IT staff are aware of that, so many of those are also looking forward to the changes. Of course there's a few staff that don't like changes but that's only natural; I look forward to helping them find their way around in the vain hope that they might find it a little bit easier, more intuitive.

I hope this will fulfill our goals set out near the start of this blog post. I expect September 2012 to be massively busy, and I will consider it a success if when we come back in January 2013 to have a helpdesk which is manageable and we can still have time to discuss new projects rather than existing problems. The months between September and Christmas 2012 I forsee will mostly be getting people used to the new network and resolving those teething issues that we didn't see during testing and implementation.

I'll start small. A couple of weeks ago, one of my HT's attended training at a local academy. This academy rolled out iPads for all it's pupils. Naturally he liked the look of this but with a diminutive budget, asked what I could do along the same sort of lines but for half a class.

The logistics were easy enough, just under £6k buys 16 ipads, a dock/box/sync/charger thingy and a Macbook Air. That was simple. So, what now? What do they hope to achieve with them? This is something from the start the HT didn't have much of a clue about. It was asked of me, so naturally extended some arms out to the community and some people in the know. Within an hour we had enough information to warrant the cost and make it worthwhile - it would benefit the kids. That's the important bit. We have some shining examples of ICT use in this local area and they're all only too happy to help (Northants BLT)

That's great. So what about that academy? What good would an iPad for all pupils achieve?

Perhaps plenty. It's not a topic I'm entirely worried about or bothered about - I'm sure there's loads they can/can't do with them but they are backed up by a solid infrastructure otherwise. And they are a positive thing for the staff, but I dread to think what some of these kids' handwriting is like after a full term.

That brings me to the thread here that got me wound up. Yes it's an academy but it doesn't mean they should be exempt from "what the hell are you doing" comments. A school who's senior staff want entirely wireless infrastructures, iPads all round etc. The cost is astronomic yet some people are throwing around numbers like £200,000 like it's pocket change. We struggle to get a 5th of that in TOTAL. But this isn't about them/us.

Education is in an absolutely DIABOLICAL state, financially. Every day there's a new headline that x is being cut, y are being sacked and z's pay is frozen. Budgets are shrinking yet we're constantly asking more of our ICT systems. Wages are not rising with inflation yet we are getting more asked of us. The majority of us will happily cope with that, knowing we are doing some good to the pupils who come to our schools. Some however just don't seem satisfied. Some would rather stick two fingers up to any financial shortfalls and urinate money into a vanity project. I will call such things vanity projects because frankly, in the grand scheme of things, what good will they do? What will a school's intake get from this sort of investment when they leave in 6 years time. 6 years is a long time - that initial investment is already old hat, the iPads are already 5 versions out of date, the wireless can't cope because the spectrum isn't large enough and the shopping center next door is disrupting half the usable frequencies. So within the educational span of one of these pupils, the school will have spent another £sillymoneyhere replacing them to keep up.

So what good have they gotten, over the state school down the road with a ICT budget of £30k, a smattering of wireless devices, a largely hard-wired network with VDI or fat clients, where they sit in front of a computer for set parts of the curriculum or in addition to parts of other subjects.

Please, tell me. Because I am struggling to understand if that investment of £200k is going to at least balance out for these kids. It's not, is it?

The moral seems simple to me, but please bear in mind I am quite simple and very black/white. If you're going to keep pissing into the wind like that, remember you have to keep drinking enough..

However as a parent of a 1 and 3 year old, I'm starting to be able to add "parenting" to the above list. It's not something I've read about in any books and I've never written about it. However many things have irked me in the past about peoples differing attitudes on how your children should or indeed should not, be raised.

These children are my life. I wake up in the morning and I'm genuinely over the moon to be greeted by the smiles on both of their faces. It sets me up for the day and makes me happy that I will be coming home to them after work. Of course sometimes I'd rather go to work for some peace and quiet, but that's par for the course and we can all get benefits from a break away from the norm. I would happily give up *anything* for the sake of my kids well-being, in fact in the year my son was born, we declared bankruptcy to rid ourselves of the extreme burden of debt. Happy to go to court and explain our mistakes and misfortune, and happy to have our names printed in the paper and ridiculed so our children can look forward to a decent future. I would do far, far more to ensure their happiness and health.

With that background laid down, I am constantly amused by news articles and passing comments by random people, some of which have never had children; people who see themselves qualified to pass judgement on the parenting skills of others. I care not if these people have doctorates in genetics, biology, family and social welfare or if they claim to be Supernanny - until they have children or even remember back to their own childhood I will not be willing to listen to their opinions on what's wrong with kids today. I've already said before the "generic problem" is a lack of discipline and it is fairly difficult to refute that, but it is not the only cause of today's society issues.

I've been watched like a hawk as I dipped my son's dummy into my pint of IPA and gave it to him. I've been snarled at as he picked up a bottle of Grolsch and supped the remnants from the bottom and I failed to recoil in horror. I've been shouted at because my son has run into the wrong garden in over-excitement. I've heard the comments as they listen to him in a hyperactive fit of anger/joy. The very people who are quick to made a snide comment about "what sort of parent does that" when they neglect to remember/care that their own parents would have happily thrown a double shot of whiskey into their mouths as children to help with teething - which is no different to rubbing it into their gums. The same parents that let their kids go out for hours on end into fields, annoying farmers and vandalising crops yet today won't let their kids go further than half a mile away without their mobile phone on with GPS tracking. Please don't preach rubbish without having the first clue about looking after small human beings with individual minds. There is no manual on raising kids, there is no right and no wrong. Obviously there is outright abuse which needs stamping on - but for day to day parenting, there are no preset values for each child that will make them turn out "right". Define "right" - because for each child, "right" is different. This can loosely be applied to education, but a system that is designed to try and be the best for the majority isn't going to work for all. If we could somehow apply the same template to each child, so they all grew up to be identical in manners, intelligence, expectations and dreams - what good would that achieve? It would blunt society, it would stop growth and cease innovation. Change, good or bad, comes from differences of opinion, arguments and personalities. If everyone agreed with each other - what sort of place would this be?

Think of films portraying the lack of/holding back of emotion like Equilibrium for instance. Is that really the way forward?

I have a HUGE amount of respect for a company that can get into that level of being, where their products' names are used synonymously (is that a word?) to describe larger groups of products in the same way that Hoover did. Is that a good or bad thing? It doesn't particularly matter, at the moment it acts as part of their advertising campaign. But like Hoover, that will soon die out, and people will be able to go into a shop (hopefully!), ask for an iPod and walk out with an <insert_generic_product_name_here>. Hopefully, because that means the trademark will be disambiguated from the company and competition once again opens up.

People often follow a company just because they like the company. Plenty of fanboys will follow Apple blindly just because they like the cut of Steve Jobs' polo neck, they like their ideals, or they like the brand of coffee served in Apple stores. Some just like their hardware. Others are just others.

So where does my opinion and point of view come in?

Dislike. I'm very much against Apple as a company purely because they so often feed their fans with absolute crap and they get away with it. "We are selling the world's thinnest laptop" - how they got away with that I don't know, there were a few thinner alternatives that were actually far better too, cost a lot less but were not perhaps quite as shiny. But they got away with it. They even got away with "The world's best phone". I don't understand that one personally, "best" is very subjective and I could have named 10 other devices I'd have before an iPhone. But that's my choice - I don't like iPhones, they're too flimsy, I spend far too long repairing the bloody things for other people and more to the point the cost does not justify the means for me. My Blackberry is a more rounded device - I prefer tactile keys instead of touchscreens, perhaps I'm just old fashioned. Hell yeah, I'd like a shiny nice HTC thingy because I like the idea of supposed openness, another criticism I have of Apple and it's products. I like to tinker and play, and you just can't do that without breaking rules, laws and voiding warranties.

Does it make iPhones bad? No, of course it doesn't.

I have plenty of experience with Apple products, but mostly on the hardware side of things. I'm a tinkerer by nature, and I like getting my hands dirty. Everything I own soon comes apart at some point. After all, I own it, I'm free to do what I choose with it. Obviously I don't own a console

I have grievances with Apple's design, and their apparent "form over function" ideal. The amount of overheating MBP's I have had to deal with isn't really funny, and frankly there are far easier machines to work on. Their design doesn't lend to efficient cooling and as a result the lifetime of the products can sometimes be less than you'd expect from a premium product at the premium end of pricing. There's been plenty of well publicised cases of poor design such as the reception issues on iPhones, iPod's that can only play tracks randomly (but really, I just want to play the album one after the other!) and god only knows how many other flaws.

Does that make them bad? No, not really. Plenty of other computer and electronic product manufacturers suffer from bad design flaws and suchlike, they're far from alone. Batteries exploded in other laptops too. Apple were not the only company to suffer with capacitor plague. Like the other companies, that was partly their fault too.

My problem with Apple products, especially in educational establishments, is value for money. Is the cost justifiable?

I will shout and rant and rave at someone all day if they so much as dare to tell me that "Apple's are so much better than PC's at xyz" because it's never true. They ARE PCs. PC, which people have conveniently forgotten, is Personal Computer. Your Atari 800, XL or XT was a PC. Your Apple Macbook is a PC. Your iMac is a PC.

Marketing and advertising has moved so far away from the truth it's unbelievable. And people actually fall for it and bait it. "Mac vs PC" is one of my most hated arguments AND my favourite at the same time, as the fanboys come out in droves to defend their corner.

What for? Are you scared of something?

So, value, in education. Apple products do have a fairly hefty premium in cost, with little to show for it in difference to a "PC" other than the operating system over the top. And some people have the balls to never use it and just use Windows on it. Nothing makes me laugh quite so much. The biggest use of Apple hardware I see in schools is media related. No reason whatsoever other than software driven, what is seen as the best software is generally best on OSX. There's plenty of software for Windows too, the hardware isn't any worse, but unfortunately it's tied down to the OS which is also tied to Macs only.

That being the biggest problem, it's also one of Apple's biggest strengths.

Unified hardware.

"PCs" are made up of tens of thousands of different components by different OEMs running tens of thousands of software combinations.

That scares Apple shitless. They are absolutely not capable of "buying into" or understanding that level of compatibility.

It's not only Apple that are worried about that - just about everyone that codes software or designs hardware for PCs has nightmares about. Thankfully there are things in place on a PC to help unify parts to make this far easier than it actually is - BIOS/UEFI, HALs, operating systems, virtualisation, stringent standards on just about everything. It's an absolute minefield. And I bet it scares the shit out of you when you have to install that one bit of software you know damned well isn't going to work. Yes, Digital Blue, I mean you!

So why is unified hardware Apple's strength?

With a far more limited range to cope with, it means their software and OS is far lighter. FAR lighter. As a direct result, there's less that can go wrong. Not that it won't, I bet noone here has never seen a Mac crash. But theoretically at least, they SHOULD be that touch more reliable. Things like media encoding should be less of a chore because it hasn't got 350,000 combinations of decoder/encoder hardware, processor instructions, memory types, operating systems etc to work through/past/over.

And it works, quite well at that.

I have estimated for quite a while (thinking back, probably for the last 10 years) that sooner or later, we'd see more Apple or Apple-like products with much more limited combinations in homes and businesses, leaving things like "PCs" for the enthusiasts and tinkerers. Even now I'd like to think that might be the case, mostly because it would have to mean massive failure in The Cloud - see my last blog post about that.

I do not believe that Apple products constitute a workable value for money in the education sector, currently. They are not less likely to fault, they are not less likely to user error, and they are not easier to use than a Windows 7 box. They are, however, different and popular. That alone means I would *love* to see more exposure to their products in the educational sector because it gives the students more experience with them. I would expect a degree of common sense to guide a student out of school and into work, but if even a little exposure to different products at school gives them that little bit of help in the workplace, it has to be worthwhile. Why spend 6 years learning German when you only ever go to France. Why spend 6 years learning Publisher, Access and Movie Maker when you leave to work somewhere using Photoshop, Final Cut and iPages.

So it's a bit of a catch 22 then. People shouldn't be paying that amount of money for something Apple make, IMHO, but at the same time they shouldn't be deprived of it. There's good arguments currently on the forums about the iPad in schools. Do I see sense in it? I don't know because I haven't really played with them much. I've set a few up for people. What about in the classroom? Forget about iPads for the time being, let's just talk tablets.

I see them being an invaluable teaching tool. I see the future being a teacher walking around his or her classroom, tablet in hand, which relays wirelessly to a large picture on the wall via projector. I see registration and behaviour being recorded on them, I see notes being read and taken on them. I see them replacing the PC stuck in the corner of the classroom running SIMS and the whiteboard.

I do not, however, see them becoming available for the students. I'm not convinced they're sturdy enough to start with, and they're certainly too expensive to trust in the hands of some people. But forgoing all that, what use would they be? They can't replace pen and paper - that's a given ability that needs to be kept alive regardless of technological advancement. I'm not sure they'd ever really be much more than a slightly more powerful version of the "classroom voting systems" that used to be so popular, and are now stacking up in peoples storerooms. I'm actually interested to see how many people offer those for free when my Swap Shop is set up.

However laptops in classrooms is increasingly popular - certainly in primary schools, and perhaps tablets can be an adequate replacement for those. Key skills must always be at the top of anyones goals but if there is something that can help them grow and learn, it can't be a bad thing, right?

I would perhaps like to see my above opinion proved wrong, in fact I'm waiting for some people from NorthantsBLT to share their experiences with a class that has been using such devices extensively. It's not really my remit in my new position however I still like to keep in touch with it all and retain an opinion; it may well help forge the future for my own school in different ways.

Ignorance is not the way forward. Despite really disliking Apple and what they stand for, why should that get in the way of progress? I still grit my teeth when someone hands me an iAnything, but only because I can see the logo on it. I don't grit my teeth at the user, or the product. I don't whinge endlessly about how bad it is to that person - after all, it's their item, they bought it for a reason and perhaps it just suits them. What can be wrong with that?

Let's keep thinking about how things can improve, how students can benefit from technology and how we can help them get the most from it. You might not have the budget to cater for Apple hardware but it doesn't mean the ideas can't be taken onboard. So the school down the road have a budget for IT bigger than your entire school's budget and have an iPad for every student. Perhaps 3 or 4 generic tablets can provide that little extra boost for you? Maybe just for your SEN department; I've seen the impact that a little touch and feel can have for a student with learning difficulties with interactive whiteboards and SMART tables. I've also seen it on smaller HTC smartphones with infant school children.

Just think about what you can achieve, and what your students could aspire to be. It doesn't have to have Apple stamped on it, but don't write them off just because of an ignorance of technology.

My thoughts on "The Cloud" have always been fairly negative, and it's highly unlikely my opinion will change on it until the UK's internet infrastructure is 1. up to it and 2. when 1. is able to do away with the home computer as a fat client.

I will and do talk about things like VDI, Thin Clients and The Cloud in the same breath, at least where education is concerned. Internal network infrastructures are good enough to allow a decent level of use in an educational environment, so companies such as The Cutter Project can work their magic and provide a low cost, low power, efficient network setup very competitively. I've always had the same argument against it though; I've watched a school buy in thin clients (iDesks), fill up their server racks with enough terminal servers to offset any savings gained from going fat-thin in the short term and then find themselves having to change their own curriculum. Is that a bad thing? I don't know - I work solely in IT and I'm not entirely aware of how curriculums are organised or why some schools use things like video editing a lot and others do not. If a school has a single suite of 30 PCs, then I could fully imagine a half decent Gb network and TS will handle that rather easily. But spread that out to a larger secondary with 6 or 7 suites of 30 PCs - the network structure would have to be something completely different, effectively a TS/Virtual Host per room, trying to keep traffic local rather than global. But here, I really would need to sit down with someone to understand how and what is possible over such a setup. I won't knock it too much until I fully understand it. I know enough to be able to write it off for my own school.

The Cloud though is a slightly different ball game. It's biggest failure is also it's biggest selling point, which is where I really struggle to understand why it's so well received by so many. It relies entirely on your connection to the outside world. A while ago, when working for a certain ICT support provider, I was enraged to be presented with a piece of software called Junior Librarian.NET. It had the same function as it's predecessor, yet entirely hosted by it's developers. Unreliable? Hell yes - for what was effectively a very basic database hosted off site, I'd never seen so many problems - firewalls, fingerprint recognition problems, even barcode reader problems; why on earth would that be an issue, a barcode reader is no more complicated than the keyboard I'm typing this on. Eventually, the school that was trialling it literally gave up and demanded to roll back to Version 3 of the software, entirely run and hosted by the school. Success. Because the .NET version was too Dependant on the external connection. What if the internet wasn't available - there was no library. That made me laugh a little anyway, because in my eyes the Internet is the biggest library in the world and has already replaced physical libraries in some schools, so this post does have a little irony. So, lessons had to be replanned, people were scribbling book barcodes on paper ready to sort out when the internet was back. Yes, you can have problems with your internal network, but that's entirely at your own control.

Then I was introduced to hosted SIMS - a good old friend run over Citrix. So what happens when internet dies there? No MIS. That's always been a big no-no for me, however that has a slightly two-fold problem. Hosted SIMS was a good and cost effective way to deliver an MIS system to a smaller school. Should that ever be the case? Why should it not be made more cost effective to host it on-site? Or even to a cluster of schools?

This brings me nicely to The Cloud as it exists today. Google Docs. Office 365/Live. iCloud. Online document storage has it's inherent problems anyway - someone I have a huge amount of respect for, Mr Grumbledook Esquire, recently posted concerns about the DPA relating to information stored off-site. If something was to go wrong, let's take an example of a child is kidnapped outside a school gate and the evidence already leads to the kidnapper having prior details about this child. Whether it's Facebook or any other means, the Police and other authorities would need to investigate a huge paperwork trail to gather what information is stored where about this child. If the documents are hosted in The Cloud, could you prove they are secure? Not interested in anyone saying "well, it's a secure site/it has SSL or TLS encryption/the little padlock icon is showing in my browser" because all of that is 100% moot if someone knows a single password. I really need to read up on the DPA properly to say much more about it but I do have severe doubts as it stands. This is all of course something entirely on top of "well if the internet connection is lost, we can't get to that data".

So when the authorities are chasing this information up, they need your cooperation as well as the cooperation of your data host.

I'm not going to say too much about iCloud because everyone is already well aware of my thoughts on Apple as a company. I will say that iCloud is too little too late from them, they were late into "the game" and charging money for what is effectively the same thing that Microsoft/Google/God Knows Who Else offer seems a little out of order/typical Apple. I keep reading blogs and website information everywhere that is touting iCloud as something that will effectively mean the end of localised storage. That's something I can't possibly agree with and I'm not sure the people that subscribe to that theory fully understand what is involved.

"It's an idea that will sell well to all the 'normal' computer users who just use Facebook, Email, the odd Flash game and browse the Internet."

Translated into real terms:

"The average person who doesn't game or do anything powerful with their PC would find this an attractive and possibly cost effective solution, however they won't be aware, or told, what happens when their ISP falls over/Lulzsec or Anonymous get bored one day etc. That SHOULDN'T ever have to be the case but there are more and more security risks coming to light every day, IPv6 is one that needs a lot more looking at as a good example."

So, I am rather anti-cloud. Not in total, though - it does have uses. So I guess I am just very anti-Cloud Reliance. I do not like seeing school curriculums reliant on ICT when it's local (Where's your backup lesson plan?) let alone when the system is entirely out of your hands/control. It has a long way to go yet before that is an achievable goal and a lot of it has nothing to do with the cloud providers - its the UK's broadband/network infrastructure, it's the EU and particularly the UK's naive attitude towards internet security and loads more besides.