Soulfish

Probably going to pop along and have a look round the Service desk show Tuesday afternoon for a few hours and then Infosec on Thursday!

Since it's only round the corner and I'm looking at firewalls at the moment it's hard to turn down a trip to InfoSec

Happy Birthday for yesterday Ric!

Ohh I hadn't realised that FOPE was free for all education now as well as those with Enterprise CAL suite subscriptions!

I loved Uni, and despite the cliché it was also some of the best times of my life. I am however someone that loves to learn, and always have done. I enjoyed school and college so uni was a logical next step. I was also very lucky - I graduated with a good Masters degree from a good university and stepped into a well paying NM role. I've managed to move on from there fairly quickly. I know from talking to people that interviewed and shortlisted me that they did so because I was so well qualified, but it's not what everyone is looking for! If your not the studying type then uni probably isn't for you and I'd be looking into working your way up within a company and gaining tangible experience and MS/Cisco/ANOther vendor qualifications.

Yup, the hardware was good but to be perfectly honest the Dell and HP hardware was also just as good. The real reason I loved them was their edu pricing was amazing. BOGOF on servers and all addons that you purchased was just too hard to refuse and meant they were normally cheapest!

I've sold a domain name before (about 8 years ago). Wasn't using it for email (that's my firstnamesurname.com domain that I'd never sell...well if there were enough 0's ) and to be honest didn't have any plans for it other than it was my nickname. Got offered a good price (in the thousands!) as this company really wanted it. As I was a poor university student the money came in handy for more alcohol!

Dell are definitely trying to position themselves as an end-to-end solutions provider. With their recent purchases (Force10, AppAsure, Sonicwall and now Wyse) you can see their thinking - trying to compete head on with HP/IBM etc. Will be interesting to see who they're eyeing up next as only things lacking in their stack now is really the software side. They already partner with Microsoft/VMWare/Citrix but will they try and get their own hypervisor (ala EMC) and purchase someone like Red Hat?

If you only want 100Mbps firewalling the XTM21 is cheaper . The watchguards do look good though

Gartner have just published their 2012 UTM report (Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management) and then there's the Enterprise Firewall 2011 report (Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls). Take what's in those with a bit of a pinch of salt (you need money to get into those reports), but essentially your looking at the normal names - Cisco and Juniper both being pretty big with Fortinet and Palo-Alto having strong positions (Juniper, Fortinet and Palo-Alto all stem from the same set of people buying/selling/creating companies ). How much do you have to spend? If your sure you only want firewall and will never want AV scanning or IPS or any other additional services then a Cisco ASA5505 or Juniper SRX100 or Fortigate-40C would all work. If you start looking at other services then you'll need to move to a bigger box to get full 100Mbps performance, but for purely firewalling those will all work and be in the £300 range without support/install costs.

Plenty of suggestions Palo Alto or Juniper depending on budgets and requirements. Used the Juniper SRX240 a few times very successfully, and currently looking at the Palo-Alto PA-4020 in a clustered config for a new connection Fortigate is another one to look at (and can work out very cost effective), but the GUI/CLI isn't for everyone. Finally Watchguard is popular in the SMB segment. I'm not a fan, but know plenty of people that like them! Are you looking for a UTM/Next-Gen firewall appliance with av scanning/IPS/Application identification or just a basic firewall? And what speed is your new connection? 10mb? 100mb? 1gbit? With some more detail can recommend specific products that would fit well

Ummm. What on earth did I just watch?!? We may have to add that game to the list of games to buy for the school Xbox 360. I've just realised that they've customised all the songs to make them fit with the star wars theme as well!!1

My understanding of the PhD process was that you applied to do a PhD within one of the research groups at a University and then the topic of your PhD thesis was decided on jointly by you and your PhD advisor. Certainly all the people I've known to go on to do a PhD didn't know the topic of their thesis when they started, and was really during the first year that it came together. Just remember that a PhD thesis has to be original and make a "significant contribution" to the state of the art. One of the many reasons you have to talk through your topic and ideas with a PhD advisor. Also just because you think you've come up with a great idea for a thesis doesn't mean your going to get funding for it

If your upgrading your current kit 10gb is a good way to go. Future proofs you for any future services - at the very least for that many PCs I'd be looking at multiple bonded 1gb links, but preferably bonded 10gb links. I'd also be looking at 10gb bonded links from the servers to the core (for virtual hosts at least) for iSCSI/general data etc.

I don't think SPSS (assuming your talking about the statistics package!) is comparable to a full blown MIS. A full blown MIS is more akin to a database (together with the tools to analyse and report on the data) of every bit of data the school currently, and could ever hold/record. For us that means that our MIS holds all our student contact details, medical details, grades in classes, exam results, exam predicted results, behaviour and rewards (detentions and credits/debits), staff details, staff HR details, timetables etc. You could certainly use SPSS to analyse student data sets, but a MIS should be about much more than that. As vikpaw has mentioned there are plenty of MIS providers out there, but you need to get your requirements down to ensure your signing up with a provider that gives you what you want/need. Changing MIS systems is not something you want to be doing - ask your finance department how they'd like to change finance systems after 2-3 years of using whatever they've decided on . It's doable, just a lot of work!

A better comparison is something like the i7-920 vs the Intel Xeon X3450 which is the single processor Xeon range. For the new Xeon the E3 range is single processor and the E5 range is SMP capable, and are the Xeon equivalents of the i7-2600 etc. Just remember that the PassMark software benchmark isn't a server workload benchmark - it's a desktop load benchmark which is very different to the sorts of computation that you'd see a SQL server/VM host/Exchange server doing.

Went to uni with the guy that made that site. He ran for student union president for a laugh (as a pirate!) but ended up winning

+1 to this. Happened at my last school. Made trying to roll out lesson monitor "fun" and took a lot of fixing!

A few companies offer custom front bezels from Dell that comply with standard Dell warranties - including Dell themselves Some links for you: Dell OEM Custom Branding Solutions | Dell Dell Custom Server Bezels from Drake Labels - PMS Match Paint or graphic skin | Drake Custom Colored Dell Server Bezels | RackSolutions UK Dell OEM Solutions Bezel Customization Tool

Generally I order most small consumables (and some larger items) via Insights web store. The pricing is good (and pre-discounted due to account terms) with free delivery, and I can browse whenever I've got a few minutes spare. Perfect for when I want to find a single cable to do a job, or order a single hard drive etc. For larger orders I'll contact our account manager but I find it can be a hassle talking to any account manager telling them what you want and then getting them to send you pricing and finally ordering it when it's only a simple thing. For our toner however everything is auto-ordered by the printers themselves. Beauty of having a managed print contract for all printers and MFDs!

We provide all staff emails on request and have no issue with parents knowing them. All students have full remote access to our email system and can access staff email addresses (and are encouraged to email staff with questions and issues) through the global address book (we run Exchange) so there'd be no point us trying to hide them! All staff emails follow a common format anyway, so it's not like it's hard to guess what an email address should be!

2 hour commute each way and an iPad means I watch a lot of tv shows/films, read a lot of books and listen to a lot of music

Suits and White Collar are two of my favourites atm, although I'm also watching Fringe, Community, House, Castle, Bones, Big Bang Theory, Glee and Grimm! Sure I missed some out...

One of the reasons I loved the CS course at York Uni was that a large part of the first year theory, and second year practical/theory and then third year practical/theory was based around assembly and compiler design/construction. Building AI-network controlled battleships games in assembly (and building the hardware the assembly is being run on from scratch!) is...fun...in a crazy sort of way But I'd fully agree what everyone is saying. Bash and other scripting languages just aren't comparable to "proper" programming languages.

Used Googles4U before. Didn't have any problems tbh. My dad's also bought varifocals from Glasses Direct ™ UK's Most Trusted Prescription Glasses Retailer before - they send out someone to double check all measurements etc, and was still cheaper than the opticians!