Soulfish

Personally we opted for the Ricoh Click scheme. Buy the printer and then pay a fixed cost per page thereafter. It's a bit wierd because you signup for a minimum period of time that you'll run the printer - the longer the period the lower the print cost, but because your only charged for what you use you can signup for the longest 5 year period, print only 1 page and not be charged for anything else.

That makes for some very interesting reading!

Looking forward to dedpue

Windows needs two partitions to have bitlocker enabled. Because a lot of people were caught out with that in Vista they decided to just create two partitions by default

We've just bought a very large number of Ricoh colour lasers (mainly the C420dn with some of the C232 SF) on the Ricoh Click scheme. You buy the printer then sign a cost per copy agreement with Ricoh. Our printers were bought through WStore and I have to say our contact at Ricoh has been a great help. Teachers seem to love the printers and for the most part we've not had too many problems with them.

Hi Liam, We're still using our old/current account manager but I was just wondering when we're told of who our new account manager will be, and when they'll be introducing themselves to us?

I have a love-hate relationship with our account manager. We've got access to Dell Premier Pages on their website, and we seem to go through phases when our account manager can't seem to get anywhere near the premier page pricing for equipment. Recently however she's been brilliant - although we're getting a new account manager from 5th November when they're moving the Education team up to a central site in Glasgow (along with their support engineers apparently!). Will have to see what our new account manager is like!

As John says I think if you go really small you won't be able to get any server class (or even mid-high end desktop class) motherboards. If you haven't got the flight case yet then perhaps something like this might work: Computer Server Rack Flightcase 10u With that sort of case you could get something like the Sun x2100/x2200/x2250/x2270 The x2270 for instance is 1U, capable of taking 2 x Intel 55xx chips, has 12 ddr3-dimm slots for a max of 96gb RAM, can take 4 hot swap drives and is a sun server Best of all it's only 650mm deep. Looking around the shallowest "server grade" hardware I could find is an Intel SR1630GP system. Intel Server Systems SR1630GP and SR1630HGP - Specifications It's 508mm deep (20in) and according to WOC Pricelist - category: Server Cases is £359 for the chassis.

Final question hopefully How short is short?

I take it your looking for component parts rather than a prebuilt server chassis?

Ohhh

Would be interested in which alternatives (if any) to adobe reader people are using

I'm personally against storing any form of biometric data, including (but not limited to) fingerprints. One major problem I have with biometric data being used for identification/authentication is the very fact that once you give it to an organisation you have no way of changing it should the data be leaked etc. If you're using a password/pin code should there be a breach it is possible to change the password/pin. However with biometrics this is simply not possible - you can't change someones fingerprint. As biometrics become more wide spread I can already see a market springing up to convert reference point data to an acceptable gummy finger alternative to "fake" a biometric. Even without the reference data it is very easy to acquire a biometric like a fingerprint should someone want access to a system that your biometric grants you access to. It is my belief that biometrics are over used and their full consequences haven't been fully considered by most organisations. There are very few instances that I believe a biometric should be used as a form of authentication/identification.

If you want to be able to see a VM from more than one server both physical servers need to be in the same resource pool

I'm just hoping that Sun continue with their matching grant program so I can keep getting servers + other bits and pieces at BOGOF prices

Knowing my recent luck I can see it happening to me as well

I was also due to upgrade this weekend, but didn't get the time to update. Seems like I might wait a little while to roll it out

Two solutions I'm considering are Zamanda (enterprise version of the open source Amanda backup software) and Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM). The DPM server license was a negligible cost as part of our MS schools agreement (£20-30/yr I believe), but like you I was slightly put off by the per-server licensing costs. That was until I was investigating licensing for SCOM/SCDPM/SCVMM/SCCM/SCWhateverelsetheythinkof. I happened to stumble upon http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/management-suites.aspx - a license pack that gives you a enterprise server management licenses for all of the above products and a server license to run SCVMM. It wasn't until I read further that I realised that it was aimed at those running physical servers with lots of VMs. Like the windows server licensing it comes in two main flavours - enterprise or datacenter, and like the server licensing the same VM rules apply. If you buy the enterprise license pack you can use the licenses for upto four OSE (operating system instances) on the physical server, or if you buy the datacenter pack (licensed per CPU) you can use the licenses for unlimited OSEs. Now the prices on that page are pretty high, but when I asked a few resellers to quote as part of my schools agreement I found that the pricing for a datacenter license was less than I was paying for server 2008 licenses in the schools agreement. The price for DPM certainly isn't £5,000 (with a schools agreement anyway!), and is actually several orders of magnitude lower making it a very attractive solution I'd definitely check out the price you can get the System Center server management suite datacenter licenses for, as the price we were being quoted by people it really is an absolute steal. I've rambled a little there but I blame it being late at night - if I haven't made myself clear let me know and I'll see if a good nights sleep will help me explain things a little better

I personally use ADExplorer to get the full ldap path for OUs in AD. Great little tool and saves the hassle of trying to figure out the correct path

In general I agree with this, but the one exception I know of is The Economist news paper, where for the vast majority of articles they don't actually print a byline.

For fog it normally takes around 30-40 mins to grab our images (which are in the 8-10gb range) and then around 15mins to deploy them to 15 machines simultaneously. Haven't got around to playing with multicast yet This is all on a gigabit switched network with Fog running as a VM within our XenServer farm. If it's just deployment you want to speed up have you considered adding a storage node or two? Having a couple of storage nodes spread around can help to spread the load over a few more servers, and depending on the client connection limits you set possibly increase the number of PCs you can image simultaenously

Bought the secret of monkey island special edition for my iPhone a few weeks ago. Was playing it earlier while waiting for some people and it brought the memories flooding back

Vaguely related (in that it's a power plug question as well ) but does anyone know where I can get a C15 -> C14 or C15 -> C16 IEC cable?

Client install is just a microsoft hotfix that needs to be deployed on XP/2003. Unfortunately to manage it you need a vista/2008 machine. Any older then this and the GPMC doesn't have the options to edit the Group Policy Preferences. Have a read of the link above for more info

We've just started using the Ricoh C420DN colour and SP 4100L mono based on the Ricoh click scheme. Been running them for about a week now and they seem ok so far