Tricky_Dicky

This is the most depressing thread I've ever read. With knocking on 800 kids we have 1 suite of 30 machines and 4 working trolleys of 30 laptops. We just don't have any more room for a new IT suite and we are having to take in more children this year due to the population density in the area. Any ideas how to improve the ratio? Rich

Link2ICT. We had a meeting about it yesterday talking about whats good and more importantly whats bad. One of the things we discused was that the Zimbra interface is the ugliest interface known to man and is difficult for the children to navigate and suggested they embed it into Moodle so it's easier and saves the children having to navigate to another site. This was met with a look of dread and fear and so I thought I would ask the professionals if you could help. Rich

This is where I'm trying to get to, sounds like heaven. Do you use MDT for this and then just choose which programs to install for individual departments?

If you would be willing to do that, I would be forever grateful!

The schools appointed IT person should be able to phone Link2ICt and put in the change request form. They are probably going to be very off with an outside person asking for changes to the firewall. The usual number is 0121 303 5100 Let us know how you get on. Rich

That looks really good. Going to have a go at hacking that apart for Moodle now

Hi all, We use both Moodle and Zimbra here (provided by the LA but that's another story) and was wondering if anyone new of a way of embedding a users inbox in to their Moodle front page. So kind of like the way you can get your gmail if you are signed in to iGoogle. If it can't be done at the moment, would anyone have an idea of where to start? Cheers Rich

Personally I would try and stear them away from having Exchange in house. Would a cloud solution not suit them better, such as Live@Edu? Rich

Lol, go play as it is very funky once it gets working. My workflow is basically as follows (once you have captured your windows and Mac images): Partition disk ->Restore Mac image -> Configure and rename computer ->AD Bind for mac side ->OD Bind -> Restore Windows image. These are pretty big images but I can do the whole suite in about 30 minutes.

The best thing for this is Deploy Studio. We've got it set up so that it deploys both the windows and mac image as well as binding to the domain and a few other bits and bobs. It works using a workflow type design so you can add tasks quite easily. The down side is that it is run on the mac server. So how many clients do you have and could you stretch to a mac mini for a server? The beauty of the mac server is that you can lock down the preferences centrally (like GPOs) and it makes managing them so much easier. You aren't far away so if you want to pop over and have a look at our setup you are more than welcome. Rich

Which Server 2008 courses did you do? Rich

Which Windows 7 course did you do? I'm looking at "Planning and Managing Windows 7 Desktop Deployments and Environments" M6294.

Thanks for that. Suppose it's like anything, the most boring subject can be made interesting with the right teacher.

I'm looking at doing my MCTS courses in Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 before I deploy them both next year and was wondering if anyone had used QA training? The prices seem fair and they offer a good range of courses, a lot of which seem to be run in Birmingham which is handy. If you haven't used them, is there anyone you would recommend? Cheers Rich

I always leave the servers locked from the admin or another account so they can't login. I like to know when people are going to be remotely messing on the system.

Would you have an idea of how often the machines boot in to Windows Vs Mac?

Have you looked at AMX for this? They provide control systems that can do that and substantially more (lights, blinds, AC etc) However it's not cheap..

For controlling and monitoring the Macs it's an amazing bit of kit and can do a lot more than just simple monitoring/control. I haven't played with controlling the windows machine side yet but it should work fine with VLC as I believe it uses similar underlying tech.

The main websites do, but if you go through the youtube app on the main screen then it should work fine, just like an iPhone but I found that for some reason they don't. BBC iPlayer has a mobile device page which doesn't use flash as well but again doesn't work. How are you finding them?

About 1:4 of machines the children can use. Most are laptops as well due to space. That's in a primary school with 800ish children, 1 IT suite, 5 laptop trolleys and a few breakout areas with 6 machines for small groups.

I've tried the iPad a few times with the BGFL and have never managed to get it to work properlly either. Does YouTube and/or BBC iPlayer streaming work? Apparently it's got something to do with the amount of ports that the iPad requests and it won't route everything over port 80 even if it's asked to. I'm hoping the update in November will sort it out as in the right department they would be great. Rich

I've been trying to put our network shares on the iMac desktop using the method above and getting some strange results. If I map the "common" drive for the students it shows up as a drive on the desktop and all is well. However if I try and mount the same one for the staff it doesn't show up on the desktop. It appears to be mapping to the server and if you go in to find you can navigate to it but that's kind of missing the point. Any ideas what could be going wrong? Cheers Rich

Ok, have done. Can one of the mods please delete this thread? thanks

Hi, Our Year 6 year group leader has decided that he wants every child in Year 6 to be able to create their own website. We are going to use our Mac server for this as it's pretty under used and I was wondering if anyone knew of a script that could create the virtual server/ftp directory from a CSV file? Thanks Rich

Hi, Our Year 6 year group leader has decided that he wants every child in Year 6 to be able to create their own website. We are going to use our Mac server for this as it's pretty under used and I was wondering if anyone knew of a script that could create the virtual server/ftp directory from a CSV file? Thanks Rich