Soulfish

I have looked into using Amazon S3 (and the Rackspace version of S3) for data backup offsite before. When you combine it with something like Jungle Disk you get the encryption and incremental backups. It's still not cheap though (many thousands a year for around 1tb of data). One option we've been thinking about is building a storage server and seeing if another school would be willing to stick it in their server room. Advantages of this is that we could get the initial big data dump done here, and as all schools within our LEA are connected it (hopefully!) shouldn't be too difficult to setup an incremental backup routine from a backup server located within our server room.

You know those units look identical to the CliMate units. I suspect they come from the same source and get a different badge stuck on them

We're a Secondary with around 450 devices. When I started I was in a very similar position to yourself - little licensing documentation and I could only track down purchase information for about 50% of our licenses. For us it was cheaper to move to a schools agreement then purchase the needed licenses. We also wanted to start to move to Office 2007 + Windows 7 so would have needed to replace the licenses we already had anyway. We also preferred the schools agreement from a budgetary perspective as well as we now have a fairly fixed licensing cost every year.

In the year that I've been here theres been a handful of vandalism incidents and a handful of items that have gone missing. In general it's pretty good. I've had one inkjet that's been destroyed due to paperclips/staples being fed into it and one laptop that's been stolen (although the Office had been left unlocked!) in that time. I know my line manager would love to put in some CCTV but convincing the governors that it's needed and getting the budget to do it are entirely different

Well we have 0 CCTV cameras and don't take any biometrics currently - although that looks set to change with the cashless catering demo we had today! Does that make us saints?

But don't get the RDS CALs get the VDI Premium pack license. VDI pack is about 0.50/device/year under schools agreement whereas the RDS CAL is about 2.50/device/year. But the VDI premium pack gives you the RDS CAL and a load of other bits.

As far as I'm aware you don't need a Windows OS license for a Thin Client. You do need a Windows Server CAL however, as well as the TS CAL. The confusion may be coming from the schools agreement talk. Because a schools agreement is very rigid in it's licensing terms if you want to license 100 copies of Office through it and then you want to also license Windows you have to license 100 copies. You can't mix and match numbers, so with a schools agreement you tend to over license when it comes to thin clients (because of the server CALs, office licensing etc) and so the thin clients end up with windows licenses as well. I hope that made some sense

Under a schools agreement you can only have 1 desktop count. Means that if you want to license CALs, Office and Windows but you have some thin clients you have to license them for Windows as well or purchase their licensing for Office etc separately

If you're going to be using TS then license all devices using the MS VDI Premium suite. This includes the TS CAL but is actually cheaper to license than the TS CAL on it's own. If you want to use VDI then you'll also need to license VECD for at least the Thin Client devices. Licensing for VDI Prem + VECD worked out at around £1/device/year on schools agreement. If you want to allow remote access don't forget to include the student CALs for VECD and VDI which work out at about another 50p/student/year. Edit: Of course you still need the server CALs, Office licenses etc that have been mentioned previously. The licensing I've mentioned is what you need to license to use TS/RDS and/or VDI.

PCI-Express slots are backwards compatible, so a x1 card will fit in all slots, x2 in all but x1 slots etc.

Running gpresult from a command prompt will give you a list of applied group policies and which DC they were applied from

Last time I tried to upgrade the simulator it didn't play nicely with me any more . Do you know if there's going to be a new simulator released with these updates preapplied at some point? They are great for testing on

Woo de-duplication support . I suspect that I may get told off if I apply the update now and take down the entire network. Time to schedule some down time so I can play with the new features

In my first year we got taught Scheme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)) and then Ada95 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)). Scheme was chosen as they expected a number of people to already have programming experience and wanted to start from scratch to get rid of as many bad habits as possible Python is a great first language though.

I've used ttcp successfully before - [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ttcp]Ttcp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

The Sun 9000 series of SANs are re-badged Hitachi kit, and as has been mentioned is being dropped by Oracle pretty soon. The S7000 range that we all rant and rave about is fully developed by Sun . For 5tb you'd be looking a the 7210 or 7310. I'd suggest giving Andy at the Cutter project a ring to see what he can do for you

I've had NFS timeouts from our 7110 before. Issue we had was to do with NFS under opensolaris carrying out a reverse DNS lookup on the connecting IP and not being able to correctly resolve it to a hostname. For us this only affected our storage network which was only being used for virtual machine images. Added a linux VM running bind with the correct rDNS and NFS now works perfectly

+1 for Tsohost. Currently using them for a couple of personal sites and they've been very very helpful. Getting a question answered in 5 minutes at 3am is great service Currently looking at moving the school site to them (when we eventually get around to redesigning it!)

I'll third papercut - brilliant piece of software that's constantly being updated . The latest version that was released this week added some very nice scripting capabilities that I've just started playing with

Exactly what we're doing here down to tracking them since September and charging them in April Just started using the papercut client tool to more accurately track people in multiple departments. People got a bit of a shock when the tool started indicating the print cost!

Ohh don't worry I'll be giving Andy a call to talk about getting a bigger S7000 and some Sun Ray thin clients once my budget comes through - I just used to like sitting and reading the EduPromo price lists for a rough indication of what we'd be looking at Really hoping that we may be able to get a 7310/7410 system in place by the summer

Snap . Ohh well I'll go back to looking at list prices and going "if only we had a bigger budget :("

Well I was going to recommend papercut, but noticed you're already looking at it

Meant to try this the other day. Looked like a nice replacement for XenCenter