tsky

I'm waiting for the budget to come through to go ahead with the virtualisation project we're undertaking. Currently have a couple VMWare servers doing odd tasks, but started going the Citrix Xen route. Planning on having two Dell 2950's stacked with drives as SAN nodes with HA Failover between them, which will hold all my Xen images on an iSCSI container. On top of that, about 3 of the cheapy R200 1U servers decked with memory for processing in an N+1 capacity for failover. Currently have a lot of ageing servers that haven't been on UPS so their PSU's are all getting mashed and we've had to replace one PSU and one server due to the cackola power in the building. Part of the budget is nice rack n rackmount UPS to go with the new servers. If you're planning on complete new network, just consider what you want to achieve - we're going virtualised because we need to reduce number of out of warranty servers, increase speed in rebuilding / rebooting (trust me.. you don't want to have to reboot a Dell 4400 from cold uuurgh). It's also proving to be a good time to look at it for us ahead of the BSF. We're pushing forward with new initiatives to prove that the skills are available in-house and that by doing things ourselves and consolodating NOW we can have cost savings over the next few years, deploy half the things county said were impossible and provide better facilities for staff and students.

Depending on the age of your unit, capacity of the battery and suchlike it might be cheaper to go and buy a new unit Just don't short any of the terminals on your hands or arms... you'll get a hell of a burn mark! Just took one of ours apart as battery so dead it won't fire up the charge circuitry... more than the unit's worth to change the damned thing, so I'm ordering some nice rack-mount 3000VA units when the budget comes through. Whatever I get it'll still never be as good as the 6 foot high APC 3-phase 30KV system I had at my last job.. every part interchangable and manual bypass mode available for replacing the inverters. Ho hum.

You'll need to think about running some mac servers to get the best out of your network, client-wise you can always dual-boot to XP if you need Windows-based applications. They'll just have to foot the bill when it comes to training, new servers, replacing all your clients, software licenses etc. just put down on a spreadsheet all you have, all you need to replace and what it's going to cost. then start making a case one way or the other!

The new HeadVoice 2000 allows up to 40 friends plug their headphones in and listen to the voices in your head...

It's a fairly easy job to take them apart and fit new memory / drives if you have a few moments spare - a lot of the new kit has a couple of screws then a lever to eject memory or drives. Plenty of sites on the 'net that show you how to take apart the macs that are sealed. Depending what you throw in the spec you'll be two to three times the cost of a PC yes, but then again... if you just spec the lower end of the mac range it still has really good innards. I'm getting cheapest nastiest PC quotes of around the 480 bracket for PC's... and ideally I want a bit more inside them. Get memory from Crucial or Kingston instead of from Apple and it's cheaper, just like with Dell machines and their overpriced RAM updates. Don't forget the cost of the large high res screens are adding cost on the macs - it's not just about the motherboard/processor/drive.

I had a really bad experience of Performa 630's on an NT4 network initially which put me off Macs for about 3 years. The first "proper" mac network I set up was with G3 snow iMacs and a nice dual processor mirror door G4 powermac. From the point on I was a convert. I've since put in other labs and equipment and have started to move from standard PC platforms to macs with virtualisation for windows if and when I need it. I had a lovely lab of 30 x 20" iMacs when I was teaching - I had to set it up as the county were utterly useless at supporting it. I got applecare with it and they're still looking and working beautifully I'm told by the network manager, 2 years on from when I left the school. Apple products just *work* out of the box - I know I'm probably going to get flamed for that statement, but look seriously at the applications that are built into the OS... it's true! I had kids that had never used video editing software or music creation software knocking out music and films in five minutes of sitting down at the machines. They are more "friendly" and less "business" to kids and that instantly puts you at an advantage due to their mental decision to "like" the machine. Industry uses macs for editing ... Industry uses PC's for editing... it's a decision call that you're going to have to look at seriously and sensibly - do you want to expose your kids and staff to what they will potentially be using when they leave school or do you want them to just find out when they get to the next stage? Ultimately, you've got to consider your budget, what you want to achieve, what packages are available for the machines and if you want to recoup the costs a few years down the line. My predecessor leased PC's three years ago, this year I just bought the lab for utter peanuts - the machines are "worthless". We're looking to put in some macs in the next year and I'm excited by the opportunities this will bring for the staff and students. Yes they cost more, but consider what applications you get BY DEFAULT compared to those on Windows XP. Forget Vista, no one is going to use that on their networks, so your only comparison is what is on XP as default. Bottom line, get some gear on loan and find out what it can do - I'm trying to get eval units for the staff to reduce their fear over having another operating system. In my experience, once you guide them through a few things they're off and away and loving the experience. There are plenty of mac users here on edugeek that will offer help and support if you're concerned with the technical aspects, so don't panic!

Nagios is great and MRTG ...

I *think* I've got one at home in an old machine (stocked it out with DDS2, Jazz, Zip, HP Tapestore piece of junk) ... I'd have to check if it still works though, it's been sitting under a pile of computer bits for quite some time...

just sign it "Lots of love, Micky Mouse. x x x" see if anyone notices.

I had a nightmare start to the job here with predecessor leaving a stack of relatively unorganised paperwork and just some "overview figures" of what we were licenced for/ what was in place. I've had to quickly knock the budget together to work out what is needed in school and plan for 2009/2010 requirements whilst looking at 2010/2011 plans. Main problem being that we're becoming a BSF co-funded school so all of the plans have been thrown out of the window and I'm trying to get my head around what I can put in and move to the new building and what is just going to be written off when they knock half the school down. Plan of action for the next couple of months is to get a proper ICT strategy down on paper with the SMT so I can plan for the BSF build effectively instead of (what it appears my predecessor did) reacting to requirements instead of defining and planning for change. Of course, the IT support team have to provide help for every area of electronics / wiring / technical system so it's taking the whole team of us to draw plans up for what is possible and what is in place at the moment. Site surveys are interesting to undertake - asking lots of nice questions like "do you use...? when did you last do.... the systems that are in, what are your experiences of X Y Z?" etc. I think that we have to carry a lot on our shoulders and that should bring a sober reality to us - we're daily affecting teaching and learning, so we have to plan well with what we can and bring cases before management effectively where necessary.

Get a trial copy of ProPresenter and try it out for your event. Absolutely. Phenomenal. Fullstop. Renewed Vision - ProPresenter, ProVideoPlayer (PVP), ProVideoSync (PVS) - Mac Worship Software, Video Player, Church Presentation Software Used to use powerpoint and twinscreen stuff, got rid of it and got a copy of this instead. Easy to learn. Easy to use. Allows videos for backgrounds, conversion into a video 'item' and firewire input from cameras or webcam.

Has anyone had a problem with I Can Animate not firing up on an XP network? Something in our policy is causing issues with opening the program - we thought it was the home folder path not having a trailing slash (this fixed it before) but after changing policy it just provides the splash screen and then dies. Spent a few hours on this, next stage is trying to get memory dumps on a machine as it's opening so I can trace the system fault Wondered if anyone else has had a problem with the software? (FYI It's installed locally in the IT labs, not run from a network share.)

Blarrghhh.. I'm in exactly the same situation. Arrived here to find a mixture of purchase receipts and some older licences. Took me 2 days to go through all the paperwork. Noone can really tell me exactly what is in place. Schools + (Licencing options * Paperwork) / County Procurement processes = FAIL.

Does anyone have any costs for the new Netmedia version and the new Uniservity version? My LEA informs me that I can't know the costs because of the procurement process. what a pile of codswallop. Ditching their implementations and moving to Moodle if I get no answers from them.

From memory (the last time I had to get M$ licensing - and lord knows they keep changing their minds)... >If I purchase Server 2008 through Schools agreement, is this a one-ff purchase cost? Yes >If I add Terminal Server license to my Schools agreement, is this a yearly charge No I don't believe so - it's just tied to the box >If I add Terminal Server CAL to my schools agreement, is this also a yearly charge No - one-off (but I believe it's a named user) anyone else got any more info on recent purchases? been a while since I've bought TS licensing.... a long while :S

Check your PHP.INI file - you could try turning on Register Globals, often the cause of a problem with a lot of scripts where you're expecting passed variables and suddenly it doesn't work. remember to do a strip slashes strip tags on your input for a bit of security on your code! you could try a reassign of your session variables if you've got an include for starting sessions... $_SESSION['myvar'] = $myvar; one I usually use also is a cache control: session_start(); header("Cache-Control: "); header("pragma: "); this helps retain information page to page if input by users is buggered

Codestone have been brilliant at Citrix support and hardware provision for me... Codestone Business Software | SAP Business One I've got contacts at the Poole office - their phone number is: 01202 241124 Citrix info on their site at: Citrix Systems | Citrix Reseller | Citrix Gold Partner They're a Gold partner with Citrix

Yeah I think VMWare must be gearing up for a release with more bundled into it... I've got this running on an iSCSI SAN using OpenFiler - was pretty straightforward to set up. I'm sold with the central administration now I know it's free. Could be an interesting month of Citrix v VMWare v M$ ahead...

Just installed it from the ISO downloaded from Citrix and it is saying HA is available and booted several Virtual Machines in HA mode.... which is reporting fine. From what I can see, you get central administration free now with XenServer and they've bundled HA for free in this download....!? I just want central management - not overly worried about HA, but this seems to be running HA out of the box as it were.

Just signed up and grabbed the ISO and key for the XenServer Essentials... Oh yeah baby... two words.... HIGH AVAILABILITY! Sold... Downloaded... Burning... About to go on my servers...... mwuahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Oooooo..... crispy features! Does it really mean free.. or is it still a purchase product as there's a try/buy link on the right.

I've found that having certain patters in the surface (like fake effect grain) can make them jump around. Some of the Dell mice are the worst culprits in that regard, the Microsoft mice seem to fair better .... Why not try and push for matte black

Back in 2003 my line manager actually said I wasn't clever enough to write a VLE. Red flag to an IT Monkey.... wrote Virtucoll as my dissertation piece in 3 months fully documented and tested on a variety of platforms. It's still on Sourceforge though the system is very outdated nowadays.

Shameless plug for own work in this area.... Implementing a VLE - A Guide for Schools and Teachers Virtucoll VLE - Building a VLE from scratch

I've downloaded a copy of ESXi ready to test.. I don't need HA on the servers - I'm just going to reboot them if they croak (manually or using watch scripts) I'm putting it on a HA SAN underneath and will be scripting copies of systems between physical school sites. That's the bit I was concerned about - in a lot of the literature I saw you had to purchase the Infrastructure Client ( VMWare site info ) from VMWare and do it on a per-processor or processing node basis. Obviously I don't want to be forking out cash for each processing node just to manage the whole thing.