baxter

Extremely disappointed in the price increases for the iMac and Mac Mini.. Had planned to buy around 50 iMacs in the summer, but might have to consider a 'downgrade' to the Mac Mini and a cheap flat panel to keep within budget. Nice one Apple! Once again ignoring the education market.

i will be coming too... director has approved travel and hotel so i'll be flying into the UK on Wednesday evening and plan to spend Thursday and Friday! what the deal with the pizza?

we could, but we'd rather use something that's at least being kept up to date with fixes etc. I'm actually quite pleased we didn't go the route of buying the enterprise edition during the summer (workload meant it was postponsed) as it would have been 'fun' to explain why a system we'd only just rolled out needed replacing with a 10,000 euro hardware version!

not happy... Was just looking at implementing SSL-explorer on our existing clustered firewalls to allow access to our file servers from home and see that the same hardware solution for one box (with 5 year instant replacement) is gonna cost 10,000 euros! Are there any decent alternatives? We're using a OSX Leopard server as the file server. (don't suggest webdav as it's a waste of time) Is Adito basically the same as SSL-Explorer? cheers, baxter

We've just taken out of service 2 Apple LaserWriters 16/600 Printers. They're both still working - it was just time to replace them. Originally purchased in 1993.

we use this little baby... PA Server Monitor Free Edition We got a free upgrade to the lite version by posting a tiny hidden link on our school website for a month or so.. Scans the event logs of our 7 windows servers and emails the admin group whenever a error event crops up. We also use it for disk space checking as well.. It does a whole lot more than that. Great value tool for what it costs :-)

when you say that they increased it for each intake, does that mean that you - in your third year, also have to pay the £500 increase each year? or is the price fixed for the entire three years?

I signed up, registered for the Feb 2008 start, paid my 1550 quid fees for the year, and then received an email today saying that it was cancelled due to lack of students! The email then went on to say that I could re-sign up in September 2008, but the fees would increase to 2000 quid for the next year!!! not a happy bunny.....

CrossOver doesn't support fully our Maths applications such as Autograph, Geometers Sketchpad and the TI stuff... I have advised the teaching staff involved that this has serious security implications, but they just want the software installed!

Licensing is not an issue, I have had confirmation from Microsoft that we are allowed to install Windows as part of our MS School Agreement. They count the installed OSX as a base license so as long as the machine is covered by the school agreement we can install XP.! The software we need is specific Science and Maths software. Specifically, TI calculator software which will definitely not be supported on the Mac and there is no alternative..

We are under pressure to get our intel based Mac boxes up and running with Windows. They don't want to reboot the machines, so BootCamp is out of the picture.. Getting a basic windows image up and running in Fusion is not a big deal, but I am more concerned with students downloading (or bringing in on Memory Stick) VMware images of things we would not want running on our network such as BackTrack etc.. Anyone else looked into the security implications of VMware/Fusion installs..

very nice.... apart from it's no use in the education market... To be honest, it was an extremely disappointing keynote from an educational perspective.. Apple had a great opportunity to compete with new low cost notebooks from Acer etc - but i guess we will have to wait another year before they bring out something between the ipod touch and a full notebook. We're budgeting for the next school year at the moment, and i'm having to budget 200 euros more per mac this year than the last two years, simply because they offer no 'education' level machines and the price of the entry level Macs have been slowly creeping up .. rant over

i can see the kits being worthwhile for a site with multiple servers, but for us it doesn't seem worth it, especially as any parts which fail after the initial 12 months wouldn't be covered by the warranty... so we'd need to buy more spares.. plus the kit doesn't cover the Fibre card needed for the Xserve.. Another potential single point of failure...

We're considering replacing our Linux based Dell fileserver with an X-Serve/Raid solution to serve our cross-platform infrastructure.. My main concern is with support/warranty/repairs. All our Dell servers are purchased with 3 year onsite warranty - extended in the third year to a total of five years.. It seems that Apple will not support the boxes after the initial three years. We also are having a problem choosing a support option.. Do we go for Applecare, or just by the spare parts kit and do it ourselves. Our local vendor is also offering their own support agreement.. My question is what are other Xserve users doing for warranty/support.. And how reliable have you found the hardware.. thanks, Baxter...

Some RAID tips... RAID 5 can only tolerate 1 broken disk, unless your RAID system can support 'Hot Spares'. Our 2TB RAID has 8 disks. 7 are configured in a standard RAID5, the 8th drive configured as a 'Hot Spare'. So if a drive dies, it uses the "hot spare". This configuration essentially gives your RAID two lives instead of one, at the expense of losing the capacity of 2 drives. Most RAIDs devices also allow you to download the RAID config in either a text or XML file, and also in most cases to the RAID array itself.. Finally, RAID is no reason not to do backups, it's just another layer of redundancy...

Samba4 is still in alpha and waaaaay away from being stable enough to use in a production environment...

I think someone wrote 'year' instead of 'day' on the salary for this job... http://www.planetrecruit.com/show_job.cgi?j=4280001&k=%22it%22 very embarrassing!

Been using Ghost 7.5 for years but are slowly switching to Acronis Snap Deploy, and we've been pretty pleased with it so far..

Although our students are no angels, we have very little vandalism compared to when i worked in state education. The main difference is that in the independent sector, without an LEA to support/hinder you, you normally to have to build your own technical/purchasing/support infrastructure. This can be a good or bad thing depending on how much your budget is, how many tech staff there are, and how much you like getting your hands dirty talking to suppliers etc...

Our school is the other way round, 2 thirds mac, 1 third PC... Dual platform does double your skill set which is a good thing (for your CV) and a bad thing (for your workload).. Macs have some great advantages in the areas of imaging etc, but also some disadvantages in the areas of service. All our Dells are purchased with 3 year onsite warranty. Apple doesn't provide this service in Europe, so all faulty machines have to go offsite for repair which can take some time if they can't get the parts..

hi there! Long time lurker, first time poster.. Looking after all things IT in a large international school in Europe.. Been in IT for 15 years, over 10 of it in Education, the other 5 in industry. Seen both sides, but would still take education over industry any day (despite the unique 'challenges' of working in IT in the education environment). Baxter...