dwhyte85

... We have a room between 3 of us with a rack, all toners, laptops, photocopier, cabinets... it's not that bad considering we have no space. Each holiday we clean it, by end of week 1 it's a mess again

Hmmm. Will this mean we have to go to AUS for support or does it now mean we have no support route (or at least soon to have no support route).

Where did you find this?

It's frustrating as something that should be simple is made so difficult to do

Not a direct answer... You've said they're likely to change, that's fair enough... but if this is going to be more than just a report have a process to get latest data, input into a temp table and create a link this way? Home Tel & PCode are unlikely to change unless they change for both primary contact and child, of course this wont help when parents are separated...

Some schools think SIMS.NET qualifies as a single system alone, VLE another & then the network - not sure what definition of system they use, it seems interchangable - sounds good though. CTO or Director of ICT are great vanity titles for the CV...

It's difficult, I've tried to ask for training for my staff as I understand they feel a little bit 'stuck'. The issue being with the school is offering the training would mean they'd have to lock the staff into another year at the school... they want ROI - not sure they want that! Is your NM/LM fighting your cause on this? Learning on your own is a great idea but, your school can offer leave for training dependant on what your policy is.

Anyone played it yet? Reminds me of TD and very addictive, played 3 1 hour games

No, it's not rocket science & yes NMs and techs should take some responsibility but, a limit has to be drawn on ACCOUNTABILITY I do it and I'm not particularly happy doing it as I don't have the adequate storage for the policy drawn out. If one day some crackhead decides to steal the pretty yellow cartridge from my flat after sifting through my drawers and thinking because it's hidden it must be important... I want to know that I'm not going to get a savaging for it.

@RingOfFlame I think the issue is that what-if the situation is bad, like you've said several times nobody knows what is going on... but better to be safe than sorry?

The last picture is AWESOME!

In terms of cost, is this really doable - I read that a fairly decent instance of a server on EC2 would cost a fair chunk a month...

I vehemently disagree with the above post... Backups taken home are then your responsibility, if then through no fault of your own you're burgled, fire, leak... who is at fault? It should be kept in a safe with a member of staff with some level of responsibility in SLT IMO. I argued that i'd carry the cycle tapes but would create drop tapes purposely for a member of SLT to take home and keep safe in-case of a disaster or tape lost. This way if you have to do it and do lose it through no fault of your own somebody else has a backup... albeit it may be slightly older in terms of data.

Yes, I totally neglected budget... We have 2 technicians (very, very, very capable techs) and myself, we support around 680 machines in total inc Servers & Macs. We have a pretty much upgraded all areas for computers/laptops - our life is relatively easy but very busy because of the volume of issues that get raised... give it 5 years we're going to be up the paddle if degradation is bad and we have no budget to upgrade (based on the old hardware we ripped out for degradation & financial situation and cutbacks). I neglected to mention expectations of ICT support, we do not solely fix computers, setup rooms & keep the network running... we have other jobs that fall under our area

You can have 3 awesome IT Techs and a degraded network, you just can't fix everything at once... The value is just abritrarily chosen, I can't see that any hard statistics based on the average technicians skillset or average computer network spec! Does it account for speciality software, other OS's than the assumed norm... etc A lot of poop.

It's possible a company is 'trading as' another name... not sure how that relates to your issue but be careful... if the reg company no is correct they may well state they are trading as. EDIT: But in terms of tracing an IP it's not illegal, no - i'd be worried if they were using a hide details type service for 'anonymous'/private domain reg though, especially if they're supposed to be a business.

From the post i linked you can also create admin accs and enable / disable accs. Pretty sure it does, anyway.

You can use: Change Your Forgotten Windows Password with the Linux System Rescue CD - the How-To Geek It works for XP & Vista, i've heard vista is a bit flakey - worked for me though on Ultimate.

Trying to get edugeeks to rage, best to ignore these types of threads ;-) I use Edugeek like Wikipedia with a hint of Yahoo Answers, I search for things, I ask things and contribute where I can. It has a wealth of info within the forums & Wiki relavent to the edu sector - i've not seen anywhere close with the info i need, plenty of technical sites on the web like expert exchange but none like Edugeek... although, I would say Edugeek is an expert exchange for the edu sector. Size is relative... this isn't necessarily aimed at every IT Tech in the world - educational IT workers are probably the primary audience, consider that maybe a school has 2-3 IT Techs... it has quite a large audience...

I wish I had the go ahead to get SmoothWall... it looks very, very comprehensive. We use a Sophos WS1000... it's OK, it's just not that flexible. We have used a CachePilot, that was dire++ OpenDNS is a potentially free option but not very customisable & not really a filter but offers some filtering.

I take it back, it is fairly easy to setup - not sure why I struggled so much prior: A guide below: OpenVPN Windows HowTo | IT Support London - runPCrun

I've used it for other purposes, IIRC you can just run a VM with it pretty much setup and ready to go on the server side. Users would need to have a client installed on the machine, it's actually CMD line based but openvpn.se has a client which works (Sometimes). Not as easy as you'd imagine, I don't think.

HT should make an exception for the child then enforce a protocol for confiscation... simplest way as it will be the case things don't get lost if they are taken from children. We have safe in our front office for all confiscations... all confiscations are recorded and put into the safe.

Some cynics may say you're trying to befriend people with the posts to gain business. I don't know, maybe the lack of a relentless has made me grumpy today.

I think what you're referring to with the poll is actually a sneaky way of advertising :-)