digone52

ICT Network Manager required at The Ashcombe School, Dorking, Surrey. Closing date is noon on 5th November. Eteach - ICT Network Manager 610943

A very good question. I think that the person who reported this to me is going for a lie down! I suspect no more to be done.

We have a user who needs to access teachernet.gov.uk DNS lookup of that domain fails with non-existent domain. It has been down for the last two weeks evidently. I wouldn't know who to contact. Any thoughts? Ta.

Windows NT 3.1 boxed copy on the study shelf - lots of floppy disks! Not Windows memorabilia, but memorabilia nevertheless - in the garage ... I loved my Model B!

We use Papercut, and it's been a fantastic product to track printing by department by pupils and staff. However, after implementing Papercut and a chargeback mechanism to try to keep costs under control, our printing costs may have actually gone up 2014-2015. There are suggestions of scrapping the chargeback as it costs to administer it. Can I therefore ask if possible - to reduce the printing costs of a school, is it reasonable in your experience to expect people to print less volume on an existing infrastructure (with many printers), or are the cost reductions more to do with centralising and reducing the number of printers?

Have you looked at services.msc to see what is set to automatic start and has not started, and event viewer to look for errors? This is where I'd start.

Hi Jason. I think that what you've done is great. At our school we have yet to go down the tablet route, but I think that your chart would be really valuable when we have to come up with a choice. I did try to fill in your questionnaire, but fell foul of the "Which device platform did the framework suggest for your school" bit, as you are forced to say what your school chose - which ours hasn't done.

Hi. Thanks for the reply. We do, but in the "admin" domain we wish to merge into the one with the .local address - hence I want to get it right before merging. Doing an Exchange transition will be painful enough though I'm sure.

There is a recipe to rename the domain here https://mizitechinfo.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/simple-guide-how-to-rename-domain-name-in-windows-server-2012/ which I guess we can follow in our test environment as we are using Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 for DCs, but just to confuse me even more, in this example it illustrates how to move to a .local domain name!

Hi. Excuse if this is the wrong forum for this topic. We have a .local domain which we are about to move our "admin" domain resources to. I'd prefer that we have the domain name right before performing this move. I've been reading on Edugeek and elsewhere that .local domains shouldn't be used - that ideally we should be using a subdomain of our .sch.uk domain. Presumably we should therefore use something like "local...sch.uk" as a suggestion? I know there are issues that you can't get certificates for .local domains, but so far for us this has not been an issue. Two questions then... * What are the full implications of having a .local domain? Are we storing trouble up for ourselves in future going forward with a .local? * As long as we test-test-test, should we rename our ".local" AD DNS domain before performing our "admin" domain merge? Many thanks.

I had a go at some of our video stores, and took down the space utilised from 300GB to about 100GB, so probably worth it. I used the divx converter, in batch mode, going through folder by folder. It has a queue, but you unfortunately need to go through a folder at a time, so is time intensive. I also found that some .wmv files ended up with a time lag with audio, so I put them back to the originals. A reliable tool to do this in one hit would be excellent - *even* if we have to pay!

We stage everything on disk before sending it to tape. I believe that full backups on remote systems straight to tape can work well. Incrementals can be more problematic. When writing to tape, I think that to stream effectively, you need to keep the tape streamer fed with data, so have a good path from remote system, across the network and to the tape drive. Bottle necks can cripple backup performance. Loads of small files can cause issues too.

In Schools internal ICT departments that get busier and more pressured as time goes on, are customer SLAs important or not? The reason why I ask is that we may soon be under an SLA. We have happy customers, but we need to be more visible and accountable evidently. I assume that when you're under an SLA, then you have to document everything you do, and do so promptly to ensure that job opening and closure is logged. While we have a helpdesk portal already, it does not exactly drive our jobs in this way. I'm concerned that while the job is extremely pressured already, we will have added burdens of doing an enormous amount of logging, looking over our shoulder to ensure that SLAs are being met, producing management reports to ensure compliance, and so on. This all adds to a job that cannot be fitted into the number of working hours already. I'd be interested in your views.

You've summed it up. Google's safesearch may not be wholly appropriate, but try an unblocked HTTPS search engine without safesearch. They're out there. SSL interception is far more important for these IMHO.

Hi. Thanks for the info. What is the impact if they do forget to change the password before the holiday. Is it just email access stops?