Soulfish

We bought XenServer Enterprise just before Essentials came out for around £1100/server. Unfortunately we couldn't wait for the Essentials pricing to be released due to having to spend excess budget before the end of the tax year! Trying to convince sales people that they could still sell me Citrix XenServer Enterprise, even after telling them that Citrix had told me it was still for sale, was an uphill struggle For our licenses we used the TI Group. Be interesting to know who everyone else uses for Citrix licenses

Under the Safe Harbour agreement signed between the US and the EU back in 2000, registered US companies that agree to be bound by the agreement can transfer data to the US and still fully comply with the Data Protection act. There's more information at International transfers - Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and Commission decision on safe harbor data protection Google is one of the many US companies that have signed up to this agreement

I'll have a look through my notes and see if I can dig up anything. I'm fairly sure I've read a few papers on the subject and may even have some of them saved! Essentially you provide a set of constraints to solve your problem, and the solver goes away to figure it out. It get's a lot more complicated when you try to do it efficiently to reduce the search space and speed up the time it takes to find a solution, but typically most timetabling systems are in fact constraint satisfaction programs. It's a huge area with lots of work being done on it, but typically you prototype using a logic programming language like ECLiPSe (a dialect of prolog designed for constraint problems - ECLiPSe Home) and then once you've got it working well you reimplement in C or similar. Because of how it works you can get some very small programs to do hugely complex tasks, like solving any N*N Suduko using essentially 3 statements. There's a powerpoint presentation introducing CSP at http://87.230.22.228/reports/eclipse.ppt from the University of Kent and going through some examples in ECLiPSe. It can get a little mathematical though, particularly once you start getting into optimising the outputs to get you hopefully a good solution. If you want any more info just ask - hopefully I might even remember the answer!

Creating a GP/GA that has the correct representation and an appropriate fitness test is...difficult. I personally prefer Grammatical Evolution, but that probably has something to do with a number of my people at my uni being GE-biased and so heavily promoting it . For a timetabling problem you'd probably be looking at a fitness function that returned a default fitness if it successfully timetabled all classes, and then biased the results based on how many rooms were being used/what rooms were being used/how many frees certain teachers had etc. Representing the search space etc however is difficult, and would need some thought to produce an efficient encoding. My personal preference however is to solve timetable problems as a constraint optimisation problem/constraint satisfaction problem

Ours is coming in at the £3.5-5k mark for our new server room. Well that's what the Bursar's told me - I just supplied BTU figures and they did the rest!

Got the go ahead for Moodle last week, so we're ditching UniServity as well

I found the exact same thing. First time my 7110 hung at the RAID config, did a hard shutdown and started it again and it was fine after that.

If you're running Ubuntu you can even do a apt-get install moodle to have it download and configure it all for you

At the discovery day this happened as well. Turned out it was just the web interface rendering in the browser that had hung, rather than the box its self. They cured it by opening another tab and then moving back to the original.

DNA were great for our collection booked for the half term. As FragglePete says they just piled everything we wanted to get rid of into a van. Got the certificate of destruction sitting here

We're currently using FOG, and finding it great. We are going to try out WDS this summer to compare the two however.

Actually had a comment from a deputy head the other day that we should be given blackberrys or similar! May have to see what my manager thinks of the idea

For those of you that are running Thin Clients do you have a list of apps that just don't work at the moment? I'm looking into rolling out some thin clients hopefully during our next refresh cycle, but I'm trying to find out what can and can't be run from them.

I've been looking at the scheme for a while now, and we've currently got a 5650EN demo unit direct from Konica Minolta. LNL have been great in answering all my questions and organising the demo unit for us (we already use some Xerox 8560's so wanted to compare to the Konica). The "have to purchase consumables from us" line did set alarm bells ringing intially, but having looked into the contract and their pricing it seems that they are a good 20% cheaper then everyone else on Konica toner and that if you can beat their pricing they'll match it.

I've ended up adding a quad port gigabit NIC to our 7110 so that I had more ports to play with to separate off for different tasks. Do make sure you get a Sun NIC though. After speaking to Phil it seems that in the worst case Sun can turn around and void your warranty for using third-party hardware. You do get one of those disposable anti-static bands however Was nice and easy to install as well. Simply stick it in the correct slot (there's guidelines for which slots should be filled depending on what your doing to spread load across different IO controllers etc), switch the box back on and it's detected and appears in the BUI straight away

You've almost certainly got a SAS backplane connector on the card. Used to reduce the number of cables in a server. You'll need a breakout cable like: SAS to SATA Breakout Cable (Straight) - 4x SAS (SFF-8470) to (4) SATA (first one I found on google!). Hope that helps

If O2 hadn't pushed up the prices to silly levels I would be buying the new iPhone next week. Now however I've got to decide if I can really justify that much extra, when if I wait a bit longer I'll have a whole host of Android based phones to choose from on more then just O2. Decisions decisions

I now have a biiiig box of those anti-static straps from our order a while ago. It was like Christmas all over again

Cheers for this. My girlfriend had been looking to get out of her three contract for months. It's been nothing but a pain since she signed up - dropped calls, patchy coverage, crap call quality etc so she phoned up last night and now has her PAC to migrate away

I'd go for the Sun hardware based on the fact that the out of band management is great on Sun servers. Everything is included, unlike with other companies where you have to pay to unlock certain features! Sun also seem to pack much more then everyone else into the same size space

You don't need your polling card to vote - it just makes the clerks job much easier to find you . I've voted without it before, and it says you can vote without on the card its self.

And for those of you wanting to read about it yourselves it was on the OpenSolaris mailing list that I saw the mention of de-dupe ([zfs-code] ZFS and deduplication?). Looks like it's planned for this Summer

I was reading the other day about Dedupe support being added to ZFS on OpenSolaris (think it was currently in testing), so it wouldn't surprise me at all if the feature gets added to the 7000 series soon after

In a similar vein, is anybody going on the Tuesday Discovery Day in London?

I think that was an excellent post. Most people don't appreciate just how dependent they are on IT these days