dwhyte85

I hate to say it as I try to be as seller neutral as possible as I'm spending government money & think I should give everyone a fair shot... but Simon today has gone out of his way to get me in a position to order, has knocked a fifth off of the prev quote and given me sound technical advice and calmed my shaky nerves when I'm about to be spending a huge amount of money (at least it is to our school). As anyone who is from sales knows who is in contact with me... I'm not a great fan of being on the phone but he kept it concise & wasn't pushing me asking about the order and told me what I needed to know. He has given me a contact for a school and the chap wasn't selling Simon, he was telling me how it all worked - it's very difficult ordering a managed wireless system when you've not had the opportunity to use it... and being told by someone who was in a similar position with the opportunity to get more info for me this is priceless. The bonus being it's going to be pre-configured so I can roll-out immediately... dumbfounded how far out of his way he's gone today. I'm not saying this to get a thank from Simon or anyone else... if anyone reads my posts they can probably guess i'm a bit of a whinger, quick to complain not so quick to compliment - credit where credit is due.

I don't particularly want to say my budget but we're after 20-25 access points. If this helps 22.5k was too much :-)

Hello, After receiving a quote on Ruckus this is slightly out of our price range for the amount of points we need to cover our school. We need something ideally without a controller as our network layout isn't ideal - can anyone suggest any MESHING systems where one AP can act as the master? Cheers,

Having looks on the Slough Gov website... This doc makes it fairly clear: http://www.slough.gov.uk/moderngov/Published/C00000130/M00003359/AI00013979/SchoolsForum160909BSFCriticalPath.pdf Looks like Feb is when the ball starts rolling properly.

So... it's not a ghost car?

We have this problem on our Macs at the moment... it is very frustrating - they are pointing to the WS1000 but after a while they decide to not talk to the box or it's not authenticating properly. I am going to be assigning static IPs and making them allowed on the WS1000 - this might be easier than going through AD authentication on the WS1000? Oddly, this happens on both cable & wireless. We can't work out why it's stopping, we know the Macs on Snow Leopard have issues with AD but the details are entered manually in the network settings. Maybe the static IP/allowed IP route is a workaround for the moment?

Ramesys and Proband. Proband haven't been as competitive recently, Ramesys is always the cheapest for MS from experience of the bigger ones. Infact... if you mention Ramesys alot of people don't bother to quote :-(

SonicWALL is very good but it's a bit expensive (well, was in industry - not sure about edu).

Hello, We currently have around 20 macs within the school. At the moment the music Dept has 6 which are connected to the network but not AD, they can access shares through the computers but have opted for DropBox as it suits the HoD better. We have 14 which are sat in an Art room, we've gone through the process of adding them to the domain with directory utility, creating some applescript to map SMB & link to the desktop and have let the kids logon. Recently the 14 have become 'flakey', the binding to AD seems to be failing & generally it's acting up a bit - we don't have time to keep going around re-binding to AD - we need something that is going to be a proper solution. I have read about the XServ and i'm very willing to put this in but my question is how seamless can the integration be? Is it scalable? Is it easy to do when you've rtfm? Will this solve issues with AD auth? I really do not want to have two sets of logins/credentials - i'd like it to be integrated to AD as the kids can barely remember the current details they have. Obviously cost is something I have to bite the bullet with, learning curve is another which i'm more than happy to address - but is this going to be a solution to the problems we're having? Would love the opinion of a hardened Windows admin who has had to cross over :-)

Asda for £4-5 quid as said above if you're in a rush (no P&P then either).

I thought XP could format to NTFS :-S Anyway, gz on fixing it

Hello, It sounds like a boot sector -> MBR issue. Download SystemRescueCd Run TestDisk, follow the instructions and I think (hope) you'll get this solved.

We have 130... soon to be 270 netbooks. We do not have a managed wireless system, we allow students to collect to our normal Wifi - the machines are locked down & in general performance isn't super but it's useable. Thankfully ours are usually assigned to one user or one set of users, 100 are allocated to VI Formers (one per machine) & 30 netbooks are for our year 7s (each are allocated to a machine) - once it is cached it does make things a bit easier. In terms of speed easily 3 minutes for a new user with good connection, with bad coverage 5-8 minutes. We do not have a trolley, we have lockers which sit in certain rooms which means the children carry them round - not ideal but this is what the school had decided. I would like to make a 'Wireless Trolley' so it'd make things easier but they will not spend the money out on the trolleys as they are too big to lock away effectively. We give an AP to the member of staff (if they can plug it in by themselves) or set them up as needed in the poorer coverage areas - this is more reliable, 30 seem to connect fine to our portable WAG102's. Our build consists of: XP SP3 Office 2k3 with compat pack Google Earth IE 8 Flash plug-in Java updated Adobe Reader Sophos In all honesty it's a pain in the balls when they rely on the static APs we have, these are fine for general use but nothing as intensive as a full class all trying to access network shares. With the addition of the next 140 it is going to be near impossible as they all situate around the same area unless we either find time to filter Macs or get a managed system. Ideally I had said they'd just be saving to mandatory profile and uploading to the VLE but that was never going to happen, they wanted the moon on a stick. We don't have the money for managed WiFi but they want to keep increasing the numbers in wireless devices and coverage across the school, on top of many other things at the same time - but I like a challenge. As you can tell it's a bit annoying... but currently, once all the niggly problems were fixed in the first week of term we rarely get any complaints/support issues. We have to check 17 VI form laptops a day too which is a bit annoying but necessary on top of this as the VI formers use them at home. NC10s & NC20s (forgot to add).

We had a similar issue... turned out we had the wrong driver CD! I updated from the web and it was fine. The other option is to print as bitmap which should work either way (not really a fix but a workaround).

Sorry I meant the funding to schools would be lowered but the outsourcing would still be the expectation :-( It's bemusing because each school is so different, for instance a specialist in XYZ would surely be hindered by a rigid infrastructure?

I don't know... it's hard to decide, whilst if managed services were rolled out (after new builds) and everyone had a one-size fits all infrastructure where a bod from an SP could go in on a far smaller wage, cover more schools and resolve issues quickly it probably would in the long run save alot of money. Whether or not it is viable at the moment with the current climate is something only the government in power can decide, with my limited knowledge of politics and hearsay knowledge i'd be inclined to say when labour lose power (it looks that way) that tories wouldn't give the same funding but they'd probably still want to lower costs. I've had this discussion very briefly here when BSF was mentioned, the general understanding from our school was that we'd get the new builds and... we'd still have our jobs, she said it wasn't part of another scheme (I can't remember the name) so we'd be OK as it means we don't outsource support services. Obviously reading here has made me pretty sceptical!

I'd give it a chkdsk first :-) Is it as slow for both users? Could be scanning (as already said), could be the hard drive is near its end or it could be that the profile is dodgy... could also be that a service is running (not an app in the start up folder) which is failing a few times then stopping

Could alter the VBS script mentioned a couple above, remove unncessary vars, give it a couple of msgbox's and send that out - of course giving credit where credit is due for the script ;-)

This is going to sound a bit of a dim question to people who already know... I thought Cloud computing was as simple as FTP, if so with 3rd party software it could be mapped as a home drive/redirect to my Docs, eg, script maps X as ftp/webdav or software on machine startup as service and My Docs points to X? Netdrive and the original drive software from Novell would do this capably, I guess automation would be the issue on this but it must be partially doable?

We call ours the G drive, ours was setup by Capita long before I joined. Our G drive points to \\server\SIMS - I guess this would be similar to your S NTFS = Support Staff & Teaching Staff have everything up to Modify (no special and not full) Share = Everyone has Read & Change Obviously, it depends on your AD groups as they may well be different. I don't know exactly why it needs change/modify perms though, I thought this was all through SQL but none the less this is the default setup (or at least as I know it - this has been how it is). Presumably this must be recursive throughout the hierarchy within SIMS - I have no definite information on folders they write to and thus need perms :-(

We use SpiceWorks - it's very good, has lots of cool features but as said above no KB function. Although, we could just link to pre-created guides on our network by means of hyperlink/UNC paths but fairly confident staff wouldn't read it :-)

IF you did use a proxy and the sending of data fails the flash app keeps trying to re-send (and fails) you need to install a 3rd party app to see exactly what is being sent from the flash app to the server, you then need to copy all of this data into a compressed file (it's not quite a zip file, diff name) then mail it over - takes 10 minutes a computer and is a total PITA. It's annoying as the CEM tests you can just copy and paste them into a normal text file, takes 2 secs. The MIS exporting of data on SIMS is literally 10 clicks of a mouse - a custom report, the import has to match what they want of course, you need to check with your LM I guess about whether you should do it, my LM came to me and asked so I had no issues with this side of things.

Pop Up Blocker OFF Latest Firefox & Flash Direct Conn to Internet Headphones all of the above and you'll have an easy ride, some proxys cause issues... we had to recover data by obtaining the POST data from each machine using Fiddler, not something i'd recommend to anyone... especially on the first Friday back after summer! The testing is easy for the kids to understand and intuitive, I exported from SIMS and then imported - very easy process.

They had blocked the port... :-) 7 hours on Friday to unblock it.

Resolved.