simpsonj

Myself and @foofighterjim had a very similar plan over the summer, except we had Aerohive instead of Ruckus, but I imagine the differences are probably quite minimal...

Might be worth having a read of my blog entry to see if that solves your problem?

Is there anything better than having a long day, look for snacks, and then OH MY GOD! The Chocolate HobNobs the teacher had given me! Get in.

I think my first job is to finish reading that book, hopefully Santa will bring something to make that easier

I do have a copy of that in my kindle library! I did find it concentrated a little too much on linux for me, but your right it's general themes are spot on. I would aim for something more aimed at Education and all the little foibles that it brings

Just splurged some thoughts onto my blog Any feedback welcome

* May contain technical elements. Just as a warning this blog post is not going to particularly well structured. It's more of a writing down of some ideas that have been floating in my head for awhile, and I would certainly appreciate some of the ideas being discussed with other technicians and Network Managers. Disclaimer out the way... It's always struck me as odd that there's no 'official' guide or training offered to Technicians. Yes, there's the FITS Foundation but it costs money, doesn't run all that often and I'm not sure it covers everything an IT technician working in education needs. But even if we took FITS as the required training, the only place I see FITS mentioned is on EduGeek. I've not seen it as a requirement on any job posting, nor did it come up at any County level technician conferences (back when Oxfordshire could afford to host such events). It leads me to a key question: Where, as a new or inexperienced technician, are you meant to go to find out how to do your job? Also, Where do you find best practice to ensure that what you are doing is actually what is required for your school? I guess this all stems from a realization I had a few days ago, if I didn't read the edugeek forums, there would be great swathes of my job that I wouldn't even know were part of my responsibility. I took this job as a junior technician, under a brilliant ICT-Coordinator, but I was the only member of the tech team. For months I didn't even realise there was another server dealing with the admin side of the network, hidden away in another office! As I continued, I slowly realized that there were things that I should probably be taking care of, but never explicitly told about (back ups, web filtering, software updates etc etc). Now some of these were largely dealt with at County level, but now with the advent of acadmies and MATs and free schools, these areas are now down to the school (and their IT support) to figure out, maintain and control. Thinking back, this was around 10 years ago, and there was a lot less pressure on the computer system back then. Only around 4 members of staff used email on a daily basis(!) and the reliability of computers was such that, if they didn't work on that day, it didn't matter, teachers would just do something else that lesson. Of course, this has changed dramatically now, and IT is heavily relied upon by all aspects of the school. I digress, my point is that there is no central body, website or guide to being a technician, no one stop shop that says what you should be doing, and offer solutions on how to achieve it. Don't get me wrong, edugeek is a fantastic resource, but the answers it provides are scattered over hundreds of different threads and blog posts. What I would propose is the creation of the "Technicians non-technical guide to being a technician". I don't know what form this would take, possible blog, wiki or old fashioned book, but more importantly I do know what I would want the content to be: useful guides on how to setup, maintain and troubleshoot an education based network. What I wouldn't want is a bunch of technical how-tos, I would want it to be as device/OS agnostic as possible, but to go into as much detail as possible where it suits. Of course, the trouble with such a guide is who would write it. Whilst I consider one of my skills is the ability to translate the technical into the non-technical, I've only ever worked in one school, and whilst I have 10 years here, I have no real authority on what is best practice. I'd like to think I'm doing a good job, but then I get the worm of self doubt after I read another edugeeker has created a some amazing server infrastructure that I completely fail to understand, or the fact it took me well over two weeks to get my head around vLanning... But perhaps I should aim smaller, and just write about my experiences, and not claim to be anything other than a Network Manager who's managed to get a network into a reasonable state, rather some authoritive body on the best practice of a education network. Ultimately, I feel that if I had been given some kind of guide when I started this job, it would have made my life a lot easier. Not a specifically technical guide, like a Mastering Server 2003 book (which I did have, and was pretty useful!), but something that explains: What is expected of you as a technican/network manager in a school What your responsibilities are What isn't your responsibility, but what you should probably keep an eye on and report to your line manager What software could help in your job (Helpdesk, Server elements such as WSUS etc) The importance of documentation The importance of budgeting Any other bits and bobs that would be useful to know As I said at the start, any feedback on this would be appreciated, would you find this kind of thing useful? Are there better sources of information out there that I don't know about? Please comment below. I also realise that this could very well just be me, and I'm unique in the way I found out all the ins and outs of my job, however I suspect that's probably not the case... In the mean time, I think I'm going to start sketching out how to write this. My inital idea is to do a series of blog posts, and then maybe try to tie them together, but we'll see how it goes...

The moment I read that sentence I added your site onto my favorites and will check regularly for updates Found it eminently readable too

Might be worth seeing if you can get EduSweep up and running, though it hasn't been updated in awhile...

Don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth! Besides, Hob Nobs don't go off, do they? Surely eaten long before that happens.

... that make your day. Heading through reception and a teacher stops me and hands me a whole packet of Chocolate Hobnobs. No issues or technical problems, she's just an awesome teacher who knows how to look after us techies!

Might be worth talking to your account manager at Misco, we managed to get them to waive our delivery charge as we order so much through them.

Agree with @CAM, largely enjoyed the WiiU as a console companion to my Gaming PC. The quality of Nintendo games on release is a marked difference from most other games that need a day one patch to work properly. That, and Xenoblades Chronicles X is released very soon...

Apologies for raising this thread from the dead, but also looking for opinions on RM Broadband for a secondary school. They don't appear to be getting the same positive reviews as other School ISP's seem to be, but wondered if anything had changed over the past 6 months or so? Would you trust to RM's own filtering, or is a Smoothwall or similar device a necessity? Quote we've received from them is very reasonable priced, but adding an additional web filter would obviously impact the cost substantially...

You may, if it's like Fallout 3, need to give companions the ammo for the weapon you want them to use as well as the gun itself. They never run out of ammo for their default gun

Do you guys buy Veeam direct from the website, or use a reseller? If a reseller, any suggestions who I could talk to? Sounds like its an ideal solution for me judging by this thread.

A fix on Windows 7 (though YMMV with Windows 10) was to ensure the Power settings were on High Performance, or at the very least, Wireless was given 'Maximum Performance'. Worked for me anyway!

In fairness, it's not just GfL that have given short time spans to organize big projects. Oxfordshire CC gave us a year to move broadband provider, and gave lots of guidance and setup a conference to talk it through which was very reasonable. However, they gave us 3 months to transfer our MIS system, and even less than that for email... In any case, a lot of food for thought from the thread. From my standpoint, I need to find out exactly what our SLT expects from the school's ISP in terms of monitoring, filtering, BYOD, speed and bandwidth. I'm glad to see people are happy with the LGfL, and that very much makes it an option. Whether it's the most cost effective option will depend on the school's expectations. An awful lot of what LGfL offers we already have, so the added value that LGfL offers, on the face of it, might not be worth much to us, but a lot more to another school perhaps. Thankfully I do have a fair amount of time to decide this, and I'm not being rushed by any company to make a decision

Yep, scratch my suggestion and go with Dave's with the SSD as an option and you've got yourself a rapid laptop!

Lenovo Refurb laptop - Core-i5 For £110 each, with a SSD drive (around 30-40 depending on size required), which you'd have to buy and install separately, they absolutely fly... May also be worth investigating the wireless of whatever laptop you buy, nothing worse than fast laptops that have a slow/unreliable wireless connection!

Thanks again for the updates, it sounds like I might need to get in contact with a certain sponsor! If I've guessed right, I was planning to approach them for a quote anyhow. As we're not currently a LGfL school, we have most of their offerings in place anyway (Desktop AV is sold to us through County at a very low cost, Email is though O365 and I've no interest in changing that (again), and we have SECURUS onsite). But I'll certainly not rule out LGfL, and once I've got some quotes together it'll come down to value for money, as it usually does.

Shameless self plug I now do this as standard on all machines that don't have a SSD as a hard drive, otherwise everytime Windows wants to use your hard drive for updates or similar, it slows to an absolute crawl... If you don't want to read the story behind it, try the following: Right click the bottom left hand corner of your screen, this should open a drop down menu, choose Device Manager. From Device manager, expand Disk drives. Right click your disk drive, and open properties. Choose the Policies Tab. Tick the tick box next to "Turn off Windows write cache buffer flushing on this device." Click OK.

*Sigh* Spoilers guys! X-13 reply came up in my email and I instantly knew what he was talking about Turns out there is a way to avoid the issue by changing your emblem, but it's a little late if you're past that mission. Also it only freezes the issue, rather than resolves it...

Thanks for the comments, some food for thought. The school hasn't been part of a larger group since our County network split up 2-3 years ago, and I've become used to being on our own, with the flexibility that brings. I guess ultimately it will come down to cost, so it'll be interesting when all the quotes come in how competitive LGfL will be. Have to say, I'm not a fan of having another portal/username and password for staff, even if it is linked to AD and/or SIMS, but that's just a minor niggle in the scheme of things. Has anyone used the Web Screen 2.0 and Smoothwall? Would be interested in a direct comparison of the two. One aspect of Smoothwall I've liked so far is the fact that they recognise the Smoothwall box is yours, and you can open up any ports you want and configure it how you want. Admittedly I can see some config errors cropping up, but I like the fact they recognise the tech support in a school can be trusted to make changes. All this talk of restrictive tech support makes me wonder about taking up LGfL, not least for my own CPD. If I can't see how the firewall works, and actually manage it, how am I to learn how it works? I don't want to put this ahead of the school's needs, obviously, but as long as I'm supported by a company, I would prefer to have control rather than deal with an uppity support team. In a similar position to you @MrFrostmaul with the slight exception that we want something that can handle BYOD a bit better than Virgin's Palo Alto.

We're currently using Virgin Media for our Broadband and are pretty happy with the service, although it isn't particularly educationally focused. After asking our account manager for a renewal quote, we're being pointed in the direction of LGfL as a potential connection, so I was hoping to gather some opinions on LGfL from people who use it. Specifically on: Web Filtering Speed of connection Reliability Tech Support Value for money Any opinions would be welcome!