Rydra

I've recently started at my new school, and one of the things that has crept up more apparent over the last few weeks, is the state of our licensing, or possibly a better description may be a lack of it, or documentation thereof. I'm in the process of getting quotes and details on the MS agreements, and I'm rather keen to move over to the Schools agreement, but the headteacher got the idea of using Open Office from somewhere, and I suspect when I give her the news of "We are unlicensed for X,Y,Z, and it will cost THIS much every year to correct this" that I will find myself doing a lot of uninstalling, and writing a self installer for Open Office. So here's what I've got to work with: Primary School 3 servers running Server2003 (possibly a 4th coming which will be Server 2008 R2), one of them a SIMS server. 100 devices 600 users (students+staff together) Mix of Office XP, 2003, and 2007 Mix of XP, Vista, and windows 7 (plus 1 win 95!) NO documentation on CAL's, or number of licenses for each thing. Under the select agreement, the cost of getting a 'uniform' Office suite would be £2-3000, most likely towards the higher end of that. Then there's another £300 in new CAL's, and another £150 in server licenses to get them all up to the same Server OS. Total: £3,450 To add the Windows licenses to this, adds another £24 per machine, bringing the total to £5,800 And gives us no future proofing, no work from home agreements. The School's agreement which covers the CAL's, the Server OS's, and both Windows and Office, including the HUP and WAH + software assurance is £2300 per year. The 3rd option, would be to dump all our current office packages (save for admin) and move to Open Office, and just go with the server +cal costs on the select agreement, which is definately the 'cheaper' option, but as far as keeping the Students using the same tech as they would be using in High school and beyond, it is a step back 10 years. So onto the point of this little thread: I want to get a picture for what 'others' are doing out there, to see if I can argue "All the others are doing THIS, therefore we should" Or if I should succumb to the OO crowd. What are you currently using? -Schools agreement (annual subscription, with some sort of software assurance/futureproofing/home usage rights) -Select Agreement (Buy it as and when you need) -Select + Open source/free solutions -Something else!

I was lucky enough to get a job within a mile or so of where I live, and TBH it'd take a LOT for me to move to another job further away. When I look at a job offer, I consider "How much time do I put into the work", "How much travel time is involved ON TOP OF the work", and "How much more money would I get by working that far away." Now my original job was 6-8 miles away, and about 30-35 minutes drive. I now work about 1 mile from where I live, and less than 10 minutes drive (cannot wait for weather to sort itself out, so I can finish building my shed, and cycle to work!) I was offered a job recently working 30-40 miles from where I live/work now, the salary was £3,000 more, involved longer days, and more of them (I currently work Term Time+a bit extra). I may have got some expenses towards travel costs, which would have boosted the salary a bit, but I considered adding another 3 hours of driving to my day each day, and the added wear/tear on my car not to be worth it, let alone working another 15-20% of the time. Education, like pretty much every government based work, hasn't moved with the trends in the private sector; once being a teacher, or a doctor etc meant you were the top of your game, and paid better than some, often better than most others in a similar field. But that pay hasn't really moved much in 30 years, whereas every other profession, and even private equivalents to the same professions has gone up and up, and often those in education or government are seen as "Substandard" to others. If you pay peanuts, expect to employ monkeys?

So 24 schools out of what, 250,000 schools, probably more, and we're all law breakers? As a 'southerner' I could crack a joke about schools in Manchester, but as already pointed out, all schools are basically the same, and though the kids are possibly more Devious than they used to be, they are still pretty much the same kids as we had 50 years ago; You get the idiots who pick on anything and anyone, and you get the kids who get PICKED ON by anything and anyone, and most sit somewhere in the middle. An interesting study would be, would be to pick one of these "Prison" schools, and remove ALL CCTV that doesn't cover main gates/entrances etc, and then publicise it fully. I'd wonder how long till someone sets fire to something, how many fire alarms are set off, or someone gets badly beaten up. The one thing I disagree with is putting these CCTV in classrooms for the purpose of "watching Staff/Students". The reasons for putting CCTV up are for safety and security of the school, the equipment and the people in it. If you need to watch a Teacher or a class, then you have another issue at hand that CCTV does not solve. If you have a problem teacher/class, the CCTV will not SOLVE it, just make you aware of it in a different way. It is cheaper to put in 1 camera in a corridor, room or watching some area, than it is to replace a door, or a window, or a computer a few times a year due to constant abuse. Is one camera watching a regular spot for bullying or other trouble not worth catching the person who has been dealing drugs, or regularly bullying someone, or purposely vandalising something. If you cover all the areas where trouble happens, yes the kids move to somewhere else to continue, but chances are it won't be as secluded, and increases the likelyhood of getting caught. If the kids never did anything bad, then we wouldn't need CCTV, and CCTV rarely (I won't say never...) causes the trouble, it just captures it for later review. Half of the trouble of 'modern society' is that children do NOT see any boundary's. 50 years ago, hell even 15-20 years ago children would barely have the guts to speak out of turn to a teacher, let alone swear at them, as there was a boundary, with repercussions for crossing the said boundary; You'd get a telling off, your get detention, your parents would find out, and you'd likely be grounded. "Detention" now is bragging rights, Suspension is a free week at home playing on your Xbox, and "being grounded" means sitting in, watching TV, playing on the computer, and eating junk food. And now there's talk (heard it on the radio yesterday, cannot remember which station I'm afraid...) of making schools who EXCLUDE children (aka expell them for the oldies) must now take them back! The reason a child is excluded from a school, is because the child is disrupting others, has shown no remorse or will to stop the disruption, and is no longer responsive to the school system. It is then the parents responsibility to see to it the child is educated according to the law, as the child would not respond to the original school. Sending the child BACK into the place that obviously didn't agree with them is sticking a child in a place for the sake of following "The law", and will help noone. Sometimes a change of scenary works, sometimes it won't. But NOT doing something, and REMOVING the final sanction is a horribly bad move for all involved. Imagine in the world of employment, if the worst thing that could happen was that you were sent home for a week with no repercussions other than "Someone wrote it down in a log", and you could never be fired. How many of us would ever turn up to work ever again, ever adhere to regulations...

Sorry if this is answered elsewhere, I have a dislike for searching the entire internet for a solution. It makes my patience twitch. I connect to my LAN via a good old network cable on an onboard NIC to desktop, running Vista (oh how I wish I had a spare win7 license atm!) But I also use my Mobile broadband dongle from time to time. What I want to do is, keep one browser, either IE, or firefox on the LAN, able to get to the server etc, and preferably able to see the work's proxy. And have the other browser, and one or two apps able to connect to the Mobile broadband (namely, mIRC and/or Teamspeak). In theory, if I set IE to the work proxy, and firefox to auto, firefox ought to see the broadband connection, and IE see the works one, but in reality neither will work since Windows Vista is so epically fail, and the fact that windows keeps insisting on putting proxy settings on optional software instead of building it into an external option. Any ideas of a way this can be done? do not mind software solutions, or if changing OS will allow me to do it. Buying hardware or expensive software not really an option, unless it's really cheap...

Something to consider.... Cat5e has been around and in use for what, about 8-10 years? And it's still working. Also consider, that cat5e will handle quite happily up to 1gb of transfer rate, while Cat6 will handle up to 10gb. Something else that they don't frequently advertise.... cat6 cannot run parrallel to mains cables; it causes interferance.... Fun when installing in ICT room trunking, or on trunking to projectors, IWB's, or near pretty much every normal desk in existence! I've just had my entire school rewired (BSF funding for my primary school, thanks to the high schools for taking the flak while I get the money), and they have put cat6 cable to each socket, approximately 215 wired sockets throughout the site. I haven't however invested in 200 cat6 patch cables,. Most schools, do not (yet) need or warrant 1gb to desktop, except those doing bulk video editing. For a start, for a single mini-suite of 10 workstations, running on 1gb connections, your going to be hard pushed to get a device that can handle moving data at max capacity between them all. Most network backbones between servers, switches etc run at 10gb at most, very few run above this yet. Why does my teacher running a flash program off of the network share required a 1gb network connection, when my NAS is max 1gb connection to the switch, and there are 20 teachers attempting to access that one device? PC with 100/1000mb connection <-> Cat5e rated to 1gb to panel on wall <-> Cat6(a) to switch up to 10gb<-> DC server with 1gb NIC... Add 100 workstations all talking to same said DC.... guess where the bottleneck is? The short answer is, by the time we see a NEED for ALL devices to have a 1gb connection at minimum, cat6 will be long gone. Storage devices such as NAS, and server side NIC's are not yet on the consumer level capable of handling that level of workload, though they are getting there. And half of the network traffic now is to internet connections, again these are not even close to matching the speeds required for most schools; my school is STILL running on a 2mb connection, which I can beat with my mobile broadband service costing me £5 per month!

What Vikpaw posted, have a tutor group list pre-printed which tutors mark against who is here, and when collated missing persons can then be checked off against the absent list/appointment list. Any tech solution that relies on network connectivity is not going to work unless you plan on installing a second wireless suite operated on it's own mains circuit, battery backup's on all devices, with an externally hosted dynamic link to your attendance suite; Living in a dream world if we think any schools can afford this.

Posted reply on your response blog! Wish my ICT budget was £75k... I've been informed we have a £6k budget and 8-10k capital funding.... and that's it! Primary ICT is even more underfunded than secondary, they rely on grants once a decade to keep up to scratch. The problem is, Secondary school's budgets invariably go into flogging the dead horse of a network to keep ticking along as long as it can, meaning no money for peripherals like whiteboards, visualisers etc. Primary's rely on grants to buy equipment, so tend to have a good amount of IWB's and other learning aids, but their core network is generally years behind what it should be.

The questions I hate is things like conflict resolution. I resolve conflict by not getting into one in the first place. 7 years of working and the worst I've had is a stroppy teacher being an arse (she kept blaiming my equipment for her students being crap, where it was in fact her students that were crap!). At which point I promptly informed my Network Manager, that it might be best he should deal with any/all support calls with said teacher for the time being. This was further assisted by the fact that they refused to acknowledge my existence for about 6 weeks, including not emailing me when they had a problem, only my colleagues I tend to wind people up that way though, I'm not easily intimidated, or wound up, I tend to remain calm and quiet in most situations, which when someone is trying to spit fireballs at you, tends to increase their anger!

I am 25, have been a NM for about a month now. Was a technician for about 3 1/2 years before that at another school, and before that did a few repair/installation type jobs. I started my first IT qualification 3 months ago, doing an OU degree in Computing, before that I have some AS levels in maths/chemistry/physics, and 2 years of OU chemistry degree study. It's ALWAYS worth applying for the highest ranking position; a school can hire someone who ran a multi-million pound IT corporation with more CISCO and MS certs than I can list off the top of my head... But Education ICT, as most of us know, is a WHOLE different ballgame. In business, most people specialize in one specific area; customer support, networking, desktop support, hardware, server, etc etc. Us poor buggers in Education have to do ALL of it, in one role, for usually about 60% of what most of the 'specialists' make.

Completing the work in phases.... Well they were due to leave the old network in place until the very last couple of days of the work, was the plan as far as we were all informed. In reality, the network was all but a memory within the first 2-3 days at most. And normally I would agree, but the school has waited over a year for some of this work to be done, and a phased rollout of that level would take weeks to do, so could only have been done during the summer holidays, and the work could not really have waited until then for completion.

As to the cost of running cat6; half the cost in these works is the actual installation of it all, rather than the equipment itself. Cat5 is largely defunct now, and Cat5e is like a minimum standard; for the sake of saving a few pennies and pounds at this time, when in the next 5-10 years cat5e will no longer be used, and may not even be usable at the data rates required, it makes sense to put in something that will not need to be replaced any time soon.

OK now that I don't have a rush I'll add a little more detail to some of this stuff.... 210 points includes the points for the Wireless AP's, we have 2 PC suites of 16 PC's, with 22 points in each of those rooms, the rest went into classrooms and admin rooms. The project was first started back last May as I've been told (as stated, I only started here mid January, so what went on before then is a little hard to guage). But in my interview in December it was specifically mentioned that February half term would be the install date. I since found out that this was the expected time for the works from about September time. in my 2nd week here, about end Jan/early Feb I had a meeting with the SLT of the school and the managers for the Network install team; one project manager, one cabling manager, and one switch/config manager. At that point, they showed some reluctance to install at Half term, but did not directly state a problem with it. A week or so later, about 12 days before the install was due to start, a final assessment was done to work out exact routes for cables etc, and the cabling manager decided it was not feasable to run over the roof; they had planned to run in metal trunking with external grade cable, but apparently they are not able to do it as it would cause the roof to leak! Show me a building anywhere in the world that you don't have to reseal the roof after bolting stuff to it please..... And a company that actively spec's to loosely throw cables over the roof! It was at this time it was decided they could not complete the work in the 9-10 days of Half term stating "because we cannot run over the roof now" as the reason it would take longer. They wanted to do it during the Easter break instead, the problem there for us being the school is OPEN during easter for school clubs of various sorts. This would have meant they could not have unrestricted access, and some facilities would have had to be required. We argued this point, and they agreed to install during half term anyway, saying that there was a possibility of runover into the Term Time. The fact that they had to put their engineers through around 150 hours of work each in 9 days tells me they did not spec enough people for the job; They were SUPPOSED to only work 8am to 6pm. As an approximation, that would have been in the region of 6-700 man hours of work. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but in my mind if work is due to be done and completed by a set time, I would make sure there is enough manpower to complete the project in that time, and if I missed my deadline, I would be pulling out every stop to rectify the problem immediately. Though a few of the problems are due to the engineer's negligence, I find it hard to complain about the workmanship of a group of people who have worked for over 60 hours without a break, and worked 3 times the man hours most human beings endure in the space of a week. The actual quality of the work was great; I have never seen cabling run so neatly, and the cabinets look immaculate. Compared to my attempts at running the patch cables at least! Instead I find myself pointing the finger of blame in the direction of the Management; how someone can specify 7 x 9 hour days to complete a job with a 2 day runover/grace period, only to take 9 days of 12+ hour days and still not complete the work is beyond my comprehension, and then allow the project to be left in an unfinished and barely working state for 3 days before evening beginning to rectify the faults....

The High schools within my local borough are going through BSF at the moment, work having started in the first of the schools last summer. As part of this, Some monies have been granted to the Primary schools so that their ICT infrastructure is up to the same sort of standards as the high schools are getting. A lot of primary schools have neglected ICT requirements over the years, and certainly the school I joined recently has had a bad run of luck with their equipment, budgets and providers over recent times. Well 1 month after starting my new job as Network manager here, and having a busy time keeping up with all the various happenings, I have had my new network installed (or thereabouts, more on this as this saga goes on!) and thought I'd share my experience, and see if it's just me who is utterly frustrated with the whole thing, and wondering how these companies are allowed to do this? When I was first interviewed for the job, I was asked as to my availability to work February half term, as I would normally be employed term time only. I was informed that the school had got a grant to have it's network infrastructure upgraded, and it's server's overhauled as part of the BSF projects. The project had largely been finalised before I'd even started at the school, with time plans drawn up, initial surveys completed, and proposed plans had been released but not yet reached final approval. 2 weeks before half term, we meet up with the project managers, and I get my first glimpse of what's going in... Fully managed Layer-3 network, with a managed wireless that covers the whole school, seperate vLAN's for admin/curriculum etc, full Cat6 cabling, the works. We said that we hoped for the work to be carried out during the February half term as planned, and arranged for the cabling team to complete a final survey a couple of days later. So 2 days on, the cabling manager comes round, and decides that he cannot run the cables over the roof (we stated that there had been a history of vandalism from local yobs up there) and it would have to be properly trunked, and the building was a flat roof... Which apparently meant that they could do this.... When I asked why they could do it, they answered "Because we're not roofers?" (LOL to a company that throws 200 network cables loosely over the roof of a school, and cannot do something as simple as SEAL A FLAT TAR ROOF!). As a result, they decided the work could not be done during the half term week as had been stated/planned for 6 months, and it would take 2 weeks or more, and would need to be done at Easter. This wasn't possible, as the School is open for events, holiday classes etc during the Easter holidays, and the school was only available during the February half term, or the summer, which was far too long a time to wait, as a number of issues had stacked up in prep for the new network install. So they agreed to do it during the half term only a few days beforehand, as long as we noted "That there is a chance of overrunning". Work began on the saturday morning, and I made a point of popping in every couple of days to see how things were going. I was officially to work on the thursday/friday to begin the prep work for getting the network back up and running again ready for the return on monday, like config, putting back the PC's etc. I had already pre-warned my head/deputy head that the work was likely to run over to the weekend, and I would probably have to work overtime at that point. Well on the friday the work was not even close to completion, and the workmen, of which there was 4-6 of them at most, had been working 12-14 hour days up to this point. I rang the project manager to get his viewpoint on how things were going, and when work was expected to be completed. -At 10am, completion time was Saturday afternoon for all work -At 2pm, it had moved back to Saturday late evening -At 6pm, i was told that the workmen would be working THROUGH THE NIGHT, and that the work would be physically completed by Saturday evening, with testing to be done on Sunday, when I would be needed to complete the configuration. So I turned up 9am Sunday, to find the workmen STILL working, and that they had indeed worked through Friday night, and then did the same thing all the way through Saturday night as well... Not only were they still working, there was nearly 10% of the school still uncabled, and work had only just begun on terminating some of the cables. Myself and the config engineer began installing and setting up the switches regardless, The 2-3 hour install job taking a total of 6-8 hours. The workmen were still running cables and terminating at 3/4pm. I had started putting the suites back together, and tidying up. At 7/8pm, half of the workers have had enough, and decide they want to go home (60 hours working with barely 2 hours sleep tends to make you rather unwilling to work....), leaving just 2 of them to complete 20% of the terminating, along with all the testing, and then clearing up afterwards. The site agent comes in about 10.30/11pm, and the two of us start cleaning the school and tidying up, making good on as much as we could, finishing about 1.30am, when the 2 remaining engineers had packed up their stuff and headed home as well. The result from the last 2 days would be a slightly more thrilling tale, and would also make me sound like a whiny teenager, so I shall avoid going into detail. The TL;DR is that after working their workers beyond the point of exhaustion for 10 days, my network is a mess. -17/25 Wireless access points have not been installed -20-30% of the network ports are completely unlabelled and unconnected -50% of the network ports are untested -3-4% of the ports are faulty, damaged already, or weren't installed yet. -The phone lines to the nursery which is housed in a seperate building were cut, and not repaired. -Mains sockets have been damaged -Large chunks of plaster and brick missing from walls around the school -Mains cables that used to be in trunking are now loose and in hazardous places -Ceiling tiles not put back -Trunking not tidied/finished -No documentation -I've been told I am not allowed access to the Switches for port configuration in case I decide to maliciously mess around with it! -Equipment damaged in our storage areas -Cannot lock one of the cabinets as it is not deep enough and cables are pushing against the door -Wireless controller box does not fit in the cabinet, and is on desk in my 2nd ICT room! And probably more I've forgotten due to the excessively long list of things not working. I am looking to wait another 2-3 days before any of this will be fixed as well. A quick rundown of what we've got: Approximately 250m square area of building, with 25 wireless access points, 210 network points in about 35 rooms. 1 Main cabinet with core switching, with 2 sub cab's linked by optical cables, one of them in a building about 3 metres from the main building. If anyone has any comments/questions or just feels like adding to the love, feel free. I will not for the time being post details of companies involved, though an astute person with good search skills may be able to discover who it is anyway. Im setting myself for another 2 12-14 hour days later this week while they finish their work! I now have to go as my site agent is kicking me out (he wants to go watch the football! )

Luton has been won by Civica, work started summer 2009

I had tried this with a value in the 'value' box of 30. I could try a higher value, but this fix appears to apply to older versions of Win Server? I'm reluctant to reboot the server too often, as every time i've done so up till now, the thing hasn't come back online only after a fight, and the raid array throws a wobbly.

personally I set them for file, Web, Mail (where people use outlook etc), Intrusion detection (aka firewall), and turn all the others off. Updating policies/rules/settings on clients is ridiculously easy too; simply goto the policy you've created, change/add what is needed, and hit save; it will then push out those changes as soon as that client is next visible on the network!

Yes, it is fairly straight forward to install and setup, most of the steps being pretty intuitive to do, and those that aren't, there is a very good step-by-step guide available for it. If you run into any problems, I found the Kaspersky labs technical support to be EXCELLENT. I just rang them up, and they talked me through every problem on the phone there and then. As to uninstallation on the workstations, as long as you do not have some custom modified versions of the antivirus, such as RM Virus Protect, Kaspersky has the ability to uninstall most of these (though it does have the odd bit of trouble removing the trial version of McAffee Security Center).

I have tried searching for this, and not had a lot of luck on it. Server 2k3 (winsuite somewhere in the mix), I'm attempting to add a laptop to the domain, and keep getting the error: This is the 3rd of 3 laptops I've done in a short space of time, the first two added fine, this third one refuses to add. Laptops are Toshiba, Windows 7. Server does not have a problem with storage, 46/68gb on C, 112/120gb on the 2nd drive. Memory wise, just over half the memory usage. Have rebooted the server, and the pc with the problem a couple of times each (I'm not rebooting the server again unless I REALLY have to; I have an occasional/regular problem of server not coming back up after a reboot, and it having to do a check/repair on it's raid array, which takes 6-8 hours) I have applied the fix as suggested here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2000-2003/33619-not-enough-server-storage-available-process-command.html before the last reboot, and still no joy on this. Anyone else got some ideas, cos I'm running out of them, and the will to live trawling dozens of Google pages that have nothing to do with the problem.

Bit of a late response on this, but I too have inherited Winsuite from precessors inability to operate windows server. It seems someone tried writing some GPO's, but I can't for the life of me tell if they are actually active or not, as I just cannot get my head around Winsuite; a software suite that's undeveloped for over 5 years, no documentation, no support, and last I checked the developer no longer acknowledges it's existence on their own website! I cannot wait for the council to sort itself out, and decide when they will let me buy my new server, so I can rebuild the whole network from scratch, without that ancient bit of technology to get in the way. On a side note, anyone recommend a reasonable (aka, free, or at least not too expensive) management tool for adding domain users, and/or simple management of them? That's the one thing I don't look forward to, importing all the new users...

The best option I can think of, is to create an account(s) that has LOCAL admin priviledges, which can be used for installing programs on local machines, but not have domain admin access. Then have a seperate domain admin account(s) which can do all the fun stuff you do on domains, but only use it on your server/specific station. This way, even if the kids discover the 'admin' account, they won't be able to cause too much trouble on your network, only install silly apps on the local machines. This is annoying, but not catastrophic, and easily fixable.

If you suspect there is clashing IP's between standard devices (such as PC/laptop) and some of your switches, make sure you run the ipscanner once with the devices on, and once with them off, as an ip scanner will sometimes only see one of the devices, whichever one is the prominent device. While your at it, see about setting reservations, and write up a list of attached devices, mac addresses, and ip addresses; this may help you in the future!

BSF project that is live for the high schools in my town, and thankfully they worked out that if they are bringing High School's into the 21st century, they need to do the same with the primary schools, many of which are a decade or more behind.

I am going to put forward 2 weeks for essential work where there will be disruptions to learning (ie, things will be on/off while I work on it) with a further 2 weeks of working but not fully operational (ie, some policies will need fixing, maybe some printers not fully up by this time) to include getting staff laptops, which invariably in these situations are never around when you need them. I'm no expert on any of this, and have never commissioned a full network from scratch before, therefore I expect large amounts of trouble, and can be pleasantly surprised and look uber when it is ready early anyway. This then gives me the "Scotty" factor of being able to do the majority in a week if it's deemed that 2 weeks is too long, expanding the "fix period" by another 1-2 weeks after as a result. I aim to get the new DC up and running initially in spare time (which I have a decent amount of, since I can pawn some troubles off with "It'll be fixed by the new network!", and start work on the GPO's with a test machine. I will then start decomming the old servers, porting sims and the AV management to them as a rolling scheme. Once all up and running, I'll then start by rebuilding the admin workstations, (without sims etc school doesn't operate, primary kids can wait 1-2 days if needed due to computer problems), and do the staff laptops as a rolling program in the fix period.

if only that were the case. at the moment, unless i've grossly misunderstood it, each school that goes through these sorts of processes, their individual technicians will be expected to manage it, it is not being done centrally by the LEA or any central organisation. This would probably be too simple.

The school desktops and the admin pc's are all on XP at this time. But the staff laptops have been bought with a mix of XP, Vista and just recently Windows 7, and I did not see the point in nerfing a perfectly good laptop down to a 7 year old OS when there isn't much reason to do so, other than "It matches the older ones"