duncane

Sorry, this is a long message, hopefully the next sentence will garner your sympathy, and get you reading to the end :-) Over the Christmas Holidays we had a flood of biblical proportions in our server room. Everything's stable and running well enough (we lost a couple of days - most of which were due to the room being recovered), but I need to replace a number of servers (three of which died out-right, one of which I can't trust). My school will be closing September 2011, but another school will take over the site, decomissioning the site after a couple more years. The servers were in-place before I arrived, and I only took over a Manager position at the end of the summer holidays. Our two most "advanced" servers are our fileserver (Intel Xeon with dual cores, 4GB of memory, SATA disks and software RAID-5) and our SIMS server (Intel Xeon with quad cores, 4GB of memory SATA disks and software RAID-1). All our servers run Windows Server 2003 (some running R2). Our SIMS database is to be decomissioned, and will exist purely for historical data, once the school closes. We've a budget of upto £4500, and I'd like to get two/three servers to replace the four that perished. Ideally they would be capable of virtualisation. I could just get three (almost) like-for-like replacements (the SCL X-Serve Dual Quad-Core with 8GB of memory and 4 x 500MB disks at £1500 each) and do some shuffling. However these have software RAID, and I would have liked to try virtualisation. (I know I could boot off a another disk, and enable software RAID for storing the virtual images in the free version of XenServer, but it's not supported). So what do I need? New SIMS Server (only use SQL Express 2008, and will not need be written to in 6-months time.) New generic server for running ALAN testing, SuccessMaker, WSUS from. Server for running Smoothwall Net Guardian - I could move our fileserver to a new server, and repurpose the fileserver for Smoothwall. SATA drives were good enough for our original servers, so I'm wondering if I can get away with them - they're much cheaper. We only have 450 students, and that number is going to get fewer and fewer after we shut. Sorry for the waffling. Cheers, Duncan.

Is there any log of who did what in SIMS? I'm occasionally asked if we can find out who's changed something etc. Is that possible? (Obviously given knowledge of who has access to what, we can narrow it down, but is there a way to pin-point it?) Cheers.

I'll have a look. (Sorry I didn't get back earlier.) Thanks.

The "freeze" one could be the formatter board - I've recently had one die on me (works for a while, then freezes, powering off and on gets it to work for a while). I bought a used printer with a working formatter, and swapped the parts over, and it's working fine. I haven't tried to 'bake' the old formatter yet, but I do intend to try it.

I've used the automated tool before, I was hoping more for a real-life review - the tools can only go so far.

Is there anywhere that you can put up a website for review by other users (in an ideal world - edugeek) for accessibility advice? spekytecky - it might be a good idea to push your head to more appropriate websites. Perhaps even giving a critique about why they're good.

Just logged in to vent my frustration. Items on pages just seem to vanish of their own accord. You try to edit the page to put things back, the entire contents disappear. I have a frog voice database that says it's published - I preview it, and can see the threads, I view it live and the threads aren't there. Yes, I've filed a ticket. They're not exactly speedy at replying. I'm too busy to constantly keep on their case, and I don't really like doing that anyway. There's no FrogVoice to ask whether anyone else has had any problems - and just how long has FrogVoice on the Frog Community been down for maintenance now? Bah. If there were biscuits in the house I'd have eaten the lot of them by now. The left over apple crumble is calling my name...

Our school is due to close at the end of the new academic year... explicitly linked to the BSF process in the closure consultation process. BSF in our area has been canceled. Three other schools in the area were going to be refurbished and expanded to accommodate our students... the council hasn't decided what it's going to do yet, and is still pressing ahead with the closure.

I'm going to try and get back into running. I've even been walking around inside (and outside) the house in bare feet in the hope of trying a bit of bare foot running.

I'm a jinx!

I'm getting the occasional machine that claims that the flash plugin isn't installed, even when it definitely is, and shows up in the list of installed programs. The plugin will have been working fine for ages, then will suddenly give up the ghost. Has anyone seen this problem? Do you know why it might be happening and have you come up with a solution? The users of the machine can't install software, so it's not like it could be a failed upgrade (unless Adobe are doing something wrong?) Thanks.

I'm not sure about the reference to those without the "job security and pension worries" - as that seems to be a dig at the public sector workers (many of who have historically been low paid and not received the pay rises at the same rate as the private sector in the 'good years'.) That said I agree with the other part - it takes two to tango. It's not just that the banks lent more than was sensible - it's everyone who borrowed beyond their means - but given that that's ordinary people, it's perhaps understandable that they're trying to deflect responsibility. No one wants to admit that it's their own fault. Anyway, I've wandered off topic - normal service is resumed :-)

I've been looking at Concerto - it doesn't do video yet, although according to the blog it should be coming soon. It's open source, and multiuser - you can set up feeds that users can submit text and graphics to, and moderate them before they're displayed. It's geared up towards a central server with multiple client machines connected to displays - but I'm looking at putting both on the same machine because we've only got a single display. (I'm not sure whether this is possible, but if you could display a web page as a screen saver, you could co-opt all the school's PCs into being digital signage! )

I think you under-sell yourself. I didn't get anything like that clarity of information from my local authority, nor from the BECTA website. I feel I get more information from my peers (both in the virtual sense on here, and in real-life) than I've ever got from BECTA. It always seemed abstract, and distant from my day to day working life. (Maybe it was just its failure to communicate - but that should have been part of its brief... and if it was part of its brief, then it failed in my eyes.)

To be honest, I've found Edugeek a far more useful resource than Becta. I can remember trying to find a straight forward answer about the requirements for parental reporting on their site, and getting no-where. In the end, various posts on here (particularly by GrumbleDook) helped clarify things for me.

Edit: (This is in this section because it's Smoothwall - I wish I'd have made that obvious via the title - sorry.) I just made the mistake of installing updates and rebooting Smoothwall (which normally happens really fast, so I can schedule it into a break-time). Unfortunately I didn't count on this time being the time the file system would decide to check itself... Is there anyway to force a reboot and file system check - that I could schedule at weekends - on Smoothwall Network Guardian? (I know I can schedule updates for the weekend - but I'd like to make sure that if I ever need to reboot off-schedule, that I didn't have to chew my fingers down to stubs waiting for it to come back up.) Cheers, Duncan.

It's not the fact that we have debt, but its size that's the problem. The European Commission is predicting that our deficit will be 12% of GDP this year - the highest in the EU. (The austerity measures undertaken by Greece should reduce their debt to 9.3% of GDP this year.) It's also about our past history. If you're a good credit risk (you've always paid back your debt when you've had the money) you're not going to ring alarm bells with your creditors. If you live beyond your means, even when you've been getting bonuses and raking in the money, people are going to be lot more worried about lending to you when you've lost your job. The sames true of countries too.

What would the Conservatives have done differently during the last 13 years from Labour? I suspect that during the good times they'd have paid back government debt, which means that the overall deficit when they needed to borrow would be less. That would mean that we'd not be running such a high deficit as we are doing now, which means the cuts that are necessary wouldn't be any where near as bad. It's simple - just like your own finances, when you find yourself doing well, you put aside something for a rainy day - or at least you do if you're prudent.

Erm, "No". The purpose of a discussion forum is to comment or discuss - if you don't want to be involved in a discussion surely you shouldn't comment? Simples?

I've added a "Frog Learning Platform" link in the "Virtual Learning Platforms" section of the Wiki. I'm thinking of adding a section on how to create a handbook in Frog (we use this for our staff handbook), and possibly a section on embedding a JQuery component in Frog. Anyone have any other ideas?

I always feel slightly guilty writing anything that's mildly negative on Frog Voice, because it's Frog's turf. Edugeek has a more flexible forum, and there seems to be a lot more traffic. I can see it becoming a useful second resource for Frog users.

This relates to the automated mapping of students in SIMS to users in Frog. Frog creates a username which can be composed of a number of different elements from SIMS - including the admission year (but, like clareq says, not the year that they would have been in if they'd been admitted in Year 7). If your particular naming scheme can't be constructed using the elements they have available, you'll need to change them manually (or semi-automatically by exporting, changing and re-importing on masse). We have to go this route - but we have relatively small year groups.

You have a lot of flexibility with looks, and creating static content, but that's pretty much it. Without the PHP brick, you can set up forms, look at the results as a whole, but that seems to be it (other than export them) - you can't take data from that form and manipulate it within Frog. We can't easy restore data for users in Frog if they lose it: The toolbox recycle bin* doesn't tell us which user is associated with which file, and Frog backup is just a dump of Frog's internal directories (so we'd have to get Frog to restore the data from that file dump). Really, there's plenty of things that you realise you can't do - unfortunately it's not until you need them that you realise they're missing. I don't want people to think its terrible - it's far from that - but I baulk at the idea of its power for developers are opposed to users. * I'd need to double check if users have access to their own recycle bin via the toolbox - as an administrator I see everyone's and it's confusing.

If the Liberal Democrats had a real chance, then the other two parties would turn more of their scrutiny on them. At the moment the Liberal Democrats tend to get an easy ride. The Liberal Democrats best hope is to sneak to power, without people really getting a chance to vet their policies.

Actually - it needs that back and/or news content being regularly posted - the first page needs to encourage people to stick around and explore. Once articles start appearing regularly (as in one or two - at least - a day) that should do it. It's easier to have it be the forums though, as we're constantly writing them, so they're fresh.