Soulfish

That's great to know. Currently looking at buying one of these (although given the conversation I had yesterday it may be turning into two!) later this week

We've got pricing for just the filtering and reporting aspects of Smoothwall, so it's certainly possible. John

When I was looking at it for our school we were probably looking at anywhere from £10k - £20k depending on which access points we went for. Unfortunately SMT aren't interested in blanket wireless coverage at the moment!

I got pounced on in a similar manner a couple of weeks ago. Just put in proposals for some new servers (including a SAN and virtulisation stuff), a load of new desktops and a plan to implement Smoothwall. Now I'm just waiting to see what they're actually going to agree to purchase!

That's exactly what I wanted to hear . Didn't want to purchase this all to suddenly find that actually I need to splash out another £500/server for extra network ports!

The offer is the Matching Grant Program that kmount linked to. You can find the UK price list at http://uk.sun.com/specials/grantprog/pdf/MATCHING_GRANT_FY09_H2_GBP_ENDUSER_02MAR09.pdf. We're looking at getting our stuff from the Cutter Project, and Andy has been amazing at answering all the questions I can throw at him! John

Hey, Currently looking at getting rid of an end of year surplus by taking Sun up on their "buy one get one free" server off, and half price SAN offer to both update our server hardware and to virtualise as many of our physical servers as possible. The hardware we're looking at using is 4 x Sun Fire X4150 servers and a Sun 7110 SAN. The software we're currently looking at using Citrix XenServer Enterprise (or XenServer Essentials Enterprise when they eventually release it) for the HA, live motion, and workload balancing features that it would give us. Each of the servers and the SAN comes with 4 x gigabit ethernet ports (lights out management is a separate port), but after talking to Dell they seem to recommend at least 6 and preferably 8 network ports per server when using iSCSI + virtualisation. For anyone that is using an iSCSI SAN and virtualised servers how many physical network ports do you have, and how have you set them up? Is the Dell recommendation correct, or is it overkill compared to the 4-ports that I already have? Cheers, John

They keep trying to sell us a site license and the price keeps dropping . It's still pretty expensive though!

When I got a price for Nod32 turned out to be roughly 30-40% more then we're paying for McAfee (that would be for a three year contract). It's a real shame as I much prefer NOD32 to McAfee

Out of interest which resellers are people using to get Nod32?

Just been told by SMT that we're not buying Toshibas ever again - too many problems with them failing (or small faults) that they're refusing to fix. Add to that we've had a huge number fail very soon after the warranties finished and both myself and SMT are fed up with Toshiba!

Under the EU-US Safe Harbor agreement ([ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Safe_Harbor_Privacy_Principles]International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]) EU data is now able to be transferred to the US without any data protection implications providing the company involved is accredited by the US department of commerce. Unsurprisingly google is an accredited company.

Just signed up

Congratulations - it's a great feeling when you find out that you have actually done enough to pass and get that degree after all that work Now go celebrate!

Thanks . I believe that Oli is running a company now. First time working in Education IT! I've already had the Network Manager meetings mentioned to me, and should hopefully be going to the next one. Do you have any idea when it might be? The other job was Ratton in Eastbourne. John

Thanks for all the tips everyone As a lot of you have suggested/mentioned, I'm planning on observing for a while and seeing how the current system works before starting to even think about improvements and changes. And don't worry about me lurking - I'm sure I'm going to be needing advice on lots of different things, so expect to hear more from me in the coming months!

so hopefully BSF won't be along for a while

It's a Secondary School in Bexhill, East Sussex I was very lucky - I also got offered the network manager position at another school at virtually the same time. Since I've been looking for 4 months it was quite a shock to finally get offered not one but two jobs! I've been told that the existing network manager should be around for a few weeks, so hopefully I won't be going in totally blind!

Hi Everyone, I've been lurking around for a while and recently applied for a Network manager position. I've just found out that I've got the job so I'm over the moon Thanks to you all for the great advice and tips that I've found scattered throughout the forum - it was a great help while I was preparing for my interviews. I'm hopefully going to be starting in a couple of weeks, so does anyone have any tips for those first few days? I know the school pretty well (I was a student there!), so I'm hoping it shouldn't be too bad! John

Windows Server 2008 R2 is dropping support for 32-bit only CPUs. Windows 7 will still support them however.

The next release will actually be the one and only release candidate (see here), and then after that the final RTM. It's a very very short cycle for this version - the beta is actually feature complete. Speculation is currently for the RC to appear in april, with RTM appearing 3Q/4Q 2009. RTM means that it starts shipping with new OEM PC's, with retail release normally 1-2 months afterwards (volume license release is somewhere between these two). However MS have also mentioned that they're going for a much shorter time between RTM and retail, so I'm currently expecting Windows 7 to be out 4Q 2009/1Q 2010.