[sims] Setting Solus 3.4.103

[jamiedonaldson89]

Has anybody setup Solus 3.4.103 for an lea to control and authorise sims upgrades across a district?

 

we are need few bits of information.

[matt40k]

You mean .107. What do you want to know? Are you just authorising or actually managing schools pc direct? Are you going out of your area (county)?

[jamiedonaldson89]

We are wanting to deploy this to schools from one central station and manage centrally.

 

We currently have 3.4.103 installed on a test server and we are wondering if we register in this for testing deployment to a few schools for documentation/testing, will we be able to reset this up again or would that be it?

We couldn't find a 3.4.107 setup so we thought once its installed we would upgrade it.

 

what spec server does this require when local authority is hosting it and managing/authorising sims/fms upgrades to high/primary schools?

[matt40k]

Yer, you need to upgrade from .103 to .107. Or wait for the new release.

 

For highs I would install a local SOLUS3 server which is what we do currently. Somerset has there's set to auto deploy (or rather they will from Monday when .118 comes out which allows Discover\S3 auto deployments.). Not sure what we're going to do for Primaries just yet, Neil Gregory @ Bolton would be the guy to ask if you want to add primaries to your LA DS. He's already done it. We've unfortanetly not got all our primaries on a single domain and have mainly p2p networks, so it'll be a nightmare.

 

As for reinstall. Basically if you mess it up, delete the s3 database, reinstall it - ideally reinstall windows, re-authorise it and you should be good to go. Just be aware any test agents will reconnect when the server comes back up. If you don't reinstall windows you may get rsa key errors - basically delete a few files.

 

One other thing to watch out for is if you authorise something, then reinstall the database, the history won't be downloaded onto your database. So anything you authorised previously won't be displayed on the new server but it will still be active with Capita - just incase you have a few packages authorised to schools which you can't think why they are authorised.

 

Also make sure you archive any schools that haven't been setup, it'll help when you come to authorise. Otherwise you end up authorising to everyone and then when you setup the school they have hundreds of releases.

[Rawns]

Somerset has there's set to auto deploy (or rather they will from Monday when .118 comes out which allows Discover\S3 auto deployments.).

 

Yup, yup yup. That's how we're going about it. At the moment, we have 40+ schools with SOLUS3 and the majority of them are all secondary & middle schools, all with their own deployment environments. With the impending release of version 118, I'm looking forward to being able to enable the auto install of future SOLUS3 and Discover updates. Then we can authorise centrally and the upgrades should install themselves saving a fair old bit of graft.

 

Some primaries are using SOLUS3 it too and they also have their own S3 instances and all of them will most likely be set up that way. SOLUS3 has been installed into more primary schools with the intent of deploying Discover but it's on their servers only at the moment. I think hosting primaries at the LA would have been a good idea, but we would have to go to Southwest One for a server to stick our S3 instance on and they would most likely charge billion quid for it. therefore, our S3 Authorisation server is a small P4 base unit!!!

Edited April 27, 2012 by Rawns

[jamiedonaldson89]

our high/primary schools are all on there own domains.

 

so how will these effect us for managing and deploying? we have high schools that do buy sims/fms license from us but do there own installs from within the school (same from some primary schools that are non subscribers for support but by the sims/fms license from us?

Edited April 30, 2012 by jamiedonaldson89

[matt40k]

Unsupport schools get S3 from LA, school setups up local S3 DS. LA then authorises releases. School deploys releases - either auto deploy which they setup in school local DS or manually applying - I would recommend getting them to setup alerts so they get an email (to the correct person) when your authorise it.

 

School wants LA to manage, school pays LA for (top-up) support.

 

School does not purchase license\support from LA, but direct from Capita. LA still sees school in LA DS, but Capita can authorise releases directly.

School with LA license, Capita cannot authorise releases directly.

 

Problem we're going to have is the schools that it's not worth setting up a local DS (ie 1 admin pc), but they don't by into (top-up) support. It's either overkill S3 or buy support or something else...