Soulfish

Well we run somewhere in the region of 20-30 VMs at the moment and are likely to add another 5-10 over the summer. As others have said if it works for you then it's not too much.

We're just about to go through a network refresh this summer so we've got some HP network kit for sale. Due to some major changes (plans changed from a 5-year refurb schedule to rip + replace!) it's all less than 18 months old, and I've included the purchase month next to the items. Some of the fibre modules are brand new still in their sealed boxes. All currently in use until beginning of August, and ideally we'd prefer collection although if you wanted to arrange collection by a courier I'm sure we could sort something out. Finally we are open to (reasonable!) offers., particularly if you'd like to purchase multiple items. We've got some offers from third party companies but I wanted to offer it up to fellow EG'ers first. Items: 4 x HP Procurve 2910al-48G-PoE+ J9148A - (1 purchased April 2010, 1 Feb 2010, 1 Nov 2009, 1 July 2009) £1700/ea 1 x HP Procurve 2910al-24G-PoE+ J9146A - (1 Purchased July 2009) £1200 1 x HP Procurve 5412zl-96G 12 Slot Chassis Switch with 96 gigabit ports and 8 open slots J8700A - Purchased March 2009. There may be upto 3 blanking plates missing if we can't locate them £3900 2 x HP Procurve 20 10/100/1000 + 4-Port Mini-GBIC (J8705A) - 2 Purchased March 2009 £1250/ea 1 x HP Procurve 24p Mini-GBIC Module J8706A (Purchased March 2010) £1400 20 x HP Procurve Gigabit SX-LC Mini-GBICs - 8 New in box, 12 in use £120/ea If anyones got any questions feel free to ask

Personally I'd be looking at holding off until you see what services are being offered (and what the quality is like) of the FTTC offerings. At the same time I'd be exploring a few different options with leased lines. I know Virgin for instance are typically much much cheaper than BT for the same leased lines. Have you considered bonding several FTTC connections? That may give you much higher throughput at much lower cost? If it's supported as an option of course!

We're replacing full core + edge network this summer due to some (well lots!) of problems with the current network equipment and setup. We'd have 1 spare edge switch, but with a redundant core (so 2 x core switches) and NBD warranty. Not looking to replace any of this for 7ish years based on the level of kit we're speccing.

Ohh you sure do like your L glass there Ric . Must have cost you a small fortune

Pfft - the stand was lovely after 3 days!

We have a bank of these with the high capacity battery. Just to warn you the high capacity battery makes the netbook very high, and with it it can't actually fit into any of the standard netbook trolleys. Other than that we quite like them. At the time we bought them Dell were the only people offering 3yr NBD warranties on netbook - one of the main reasons we opted for the Dells.

Happy Birthday John Hope you're having a great day

+1 I use OpenID for other sites and it's a great feature Even more so for a tech website like this

Supposed to be getting a presentation from Capita on this at our next local network managers meeting. Be interested in any schools that are using this, particularly if you moved from parentmail or one of the other providers?

That's great

Interesting we're not listed but in the outstanding list but I was told that we'd registered our interested. I suspect our school sent a letter and didn't bother to check the website

On the print server go to printer properties for the printer. Go along to the advanced tab and within that click the Printing Defaults button. Change the default colour in there to black and white and press OK. When the printer gets deployed it should now have black and white as the default . It's what we do here with all of our printers (including the C420DN) and it works well

+1 on the Rack tool. Although if your buying new racks they tend to come with a rack tool and a pack of cage nuts (never enough mind!)

We've got 2 HP 10k G2 racks. Cost us around £600 each. The HP racks are great, and the HP PDUs are good and soooo much cheaper then APC . We did look at the Dell racks, but they were much more expensive then HP

Didn't net-ctrl end up swapping the mobotix camera for one of theirs as we couldn't get it working correctly? It might be set to one of their passwords possibly?

I've had this with a number of suppliers - Dell, HP, Netapp, Brocade, Compellent, Appsense etc. Essentially the first person to bring them the business tends to get the best pricing. Shame really but seems to be how things work with a lot of large companies that operate through reseller channels. I have had HP phone me before and ask if I had a preferred supplier when they had 5+ contacting them for pricing. I said no, to which they said they'd offer the same pricing support to everyone then.

To be honest I wish microsoft would just rewrite their remote access licensing for schools. The fact that it can be practically impossible to license students correctly to access MS systems from home doesn't entice us to offer MS products for home access. Why should we both trying to license office for remote use when we can just offer Open Office?

11 - 16 secondary school with 1020 on roll. We currently have 4 physical servers with a SAN running around 30-35 virtual servers. Looking at adding another 3-4 physical servers to run a VDI and Virtual app (App-V/XenApp) deployment.

Do remember that the £450 appropriate limit (Guide to fees - Ministry of Justice) isn't to be charged back to the requester. For requests that cost less then this limit (factoring in appropriate time to find/collate the information etc) you can charge for disbursements (such as photocopying and postage) but only at reasonable rates. If you calculate the cost to be greater than the appropriate limit then you should inform the requester how much you believe the FOI request would cost to fulfill.

I'm planning on upgrading our Xen hosts at the start of the summer. After the hassle with the last service pack for 5.5 I thought I'd leave it a little while to make sure all the bugs are gone

My notice period is two months

Thanks for the great conference and a great couple of days Looking forward to the next Edugeek event now

Well James had a great idea...and managed to get you to purchase the domain name for it . He did promise you last night that he'd pay you back - but you could always just hold the domain hostage

You mean you can't remember? You didn't have that much to drink last night did you?