Friez

If you plan to just IT Tech and the job is offered on a plate, I'd go for that. You can take a degree at any time of your life. To be fair, degree level qualifications aren't essential for an IT Tech job. That said.... I have a degree in computing and have coded commercial video games yet I ended up working as an IT Tech in a school. How'dd that happen?

From my experience of school (being a student in one up until 2001), they teach you diddly squat for what is useful. I code computer games in my spare time. Some fundamental maths that is generally required: Vectors, Matricies. Neither of these are taught in GCSE any more, let alone Binary/Hex. And my IT Training? The teachers couldn't tell the difference between a database and a spreadsheet (since Access/Excel both present things in a 'table' format). I'm reasonably confident that a lot of teachers don't know what normalisation is. Most of what I know I learned off my own back, and a few modules in my course at Uni taught me a few new things. But GCSE/A-Level stuff? What a waste of time! It is sad that some of these things are no longer taught. Instead these days its far more important to teach funky subjects like 'citizenship' to turn kids into 'global citizens'. What what whaaaaat?

Lol, took us 6 months to get our old head to return his laptop - he 'forgot' he still had it.... 8O That's the other classic one, staff who think the school laptops they recieve are their own personal property. Oh they can keep them. However they need to reimburse the tax man for the 17.5% VAT of the original retail purchase price. Can we pretend the laptop cost 10k?

Lol, took us 6 months to get our old head to return his laptop - he 'forgot' he still had it.... 8O That's the other classic one, staff who think the school laptops they recieve are their own personal property.

Hah! Shows you how ridiculous and petty some people can be! Why don't they set up another email account?

Google FTW.

You should also make a no liability disclaimer that they have to sign in order to use the systems that you maintain/set up for them If they have any legs to stand on in a court regarding this, they're most certainly broken ones. In a court a judge would probably laugh at the fact that a staff member is trying to claim that a company resource is infact their own personal property and that its the company trying to 'steal' it from them. The fact of the matter is that this individual has barely any evidence that this is true so they will have an incredibly difficult time trying to hold up a claim like that, let alone get any success in court. Of course that doesn't mean that they won't TRY to sue you, we know people can be incredibly... umm... stupid?

They legally don't have a leg to stand on since its an email address set up and created by the school, it is therefore your property. If they can prove that it is their property then they will win in court. However THEY CAN'T. How can they prove its their own personal email? If it was for purposes of use by the company (i.e. the school) it is therefore the property of said company, and such data therefore is business to do with the company. Under the data protection act when details/data of a user on a system are no longer relevant such data must be removed. You are therefore complying with another law. He/She is basically a moron, let him/her go to court and incur all the costs since (s)he has absolutely no evidence that it was his/her personal email address nor that it was 'hacked' (which it wasn't). You can buy in / use third party email accounts like easymail, they are your property. Hotmail/GMail/Yahoo/whatever should really be no different. It is an asset of the company and said obnoxious person will not win any legal battle in this case. To save yourself further future agro, get your own in-house email

This truely is yet another great example of the massive divide that exists between Support Staff and Teaching Staff. Everyone has their stories about stupid staff/techs/whoever, but what remains consistent across the board is how teaching staff in general still look upon the support staff as the underdogs/dogsbodies. Ever had a notice that states 'for all staff' when really they just meant Teaching staff? Out of sight, out of mind that is what we are, and I agree with russdev's comments about how undervalued support staff are. Tension will always exist while this unequality issue exists. I mean, you'dd get into trouble for doing the same to all female staff, or all black staff but its perfectly acceptable to treat support staff like scum just because of their job roles it would seem. This is what I think is the underlying problem that exists between Teaching Staff and Support Staff, and until it is addressed (by SMT's everywhere, who are mostly Teaching Staff too) then things will never change and everyone will say how horrible those damn Techs/Teachers are till the end of time.

To futher what HBJB said, you should have a forward lookup and a reverse lookup for each machine. e.g.: ping -a 192.168.8.1 should return not only the ping requests to any machine but also the DNS name of the machine too. ping MyServer will obviously resolve Name to IP, reverse lookup resolves IP to name. If you have absolutely NOTHING in your reverse lookup, make a zone (or few) for the IP ranges you have under reverse lookup in your DNS. In your FORWARD lookup you have A records, in your reverse lookup you have PTR records. All should automatically add themselves over time, except for the DNS server itself, which you'll have to manually create. If clients don't automatically add themselves and you're using DHCP go check the DHCP settings too. For some reason adding reverse lookup to our DNS made those errors disappear. Hope that helps! Now how much were those contractors being paid??

Regardless of what they *MEAN* most Employers / Higher Education look for GCSE's Grades A-C. Doesn't mean everyone does, but most places tend to look for at least a C in something or other.

I've got a modem kicking around thats seriously slow somewhere (less than 33.6k), it actually takes a good 3-5 minutes to load the google homepage on it. No idea how fast it actually is, but it probably beats your lo-score Not that I ever use that old hunkajunk anymore...

The day someones head randomly explodes near a wireless unit is the day I believe they are dangerous to ones health.

My PHP/SQL skills are awesome, but time is my enemy How much work is involved exactly?

OS-TAN'S!!!! Can I nick those desktops / any others you have? Cheers

Not really a 'decision' as such, but more of a trend of decisions by SMT here is to move stuff from A to B, then change their minds and put it back to A wasting our time, effort and ultimately our backs. For example: "oh can we have those 50 old pc's and monitors moved into this store cupboard in the space of 10 minutes?", "oh actually can we have it back in the area it was in?" and... "Oh can we move all the old whiteboards that were in science into (for example) maths, and give science the new whiteboards maths had?" I can't wait for the riot from Maths (or whatever) over that one and the day we have to move them all back. They think these things are like carrying a sheet of A4 paper or something?

I'm waiting for the cheeky jibes to turn into full on flamewar GUYS vs GALS.

Same here.

Oh dear, such cheesy and cringeworthy discussion.

The only monthly that I read that is even CLOSE to 'IT' is EDGE.

I had 100% no-illness record until I started work here, then I fell ill almost all the time. Most frustrating indeed!

Me + Sport = don't mix. Most memorable moment was being taken on a school trip and having to do an assault course race that included shuffling across a rope that spanned a river and falling into a river. Oh and I can't swim. The PE staff had a fit. Was awesome. Thankfully I managed to drag myself out of the riverbank (which was pretty much a deep trench, so it was like climbing a cliff), it was pretty difficult because I wasn't a particularly strong lad and was weighed down by heavy wet clothes. We lost the race because of it, but I was more talked about than the winners

Well its not just that he had a pop at HBJB but infront of the inspectors they'll clearly see either ICT Services as a problem, or there is a huge communication breakdown in the school (which I believe is something that the school could work on!) or both, when really he just can't be bothered to read messages that have his name on it! We've seen this before from staff when we had a large network rollover. We left them three memos in their pigeon holes in total, had it announced in staff briefing, put on the Intranet and we even offered a TRAINING SESSION on HOW TO BACKUP THEIR FILES for this very purpose. Not one person turned up for that training session and only 40% of staff actually backed up their work correctly while the other 60% insist that they were never informed of the admin rollover. We're definitely not at fault communication wise, we tell the staff what they need to know... and then some. It is not our fault that they are blind, deaf and dumb. As for a 'shining' report from ofsted, if they think there is a communication gap then that report won't happen. Tell that to all the teachers who are normally utter bastards who are treating us with utmost respect today. Good reports + Acting normal = haha! In short if theres a school out there that is perfect and does everything to the book and theres absolutely no problems whatsoever and gets a PERFECT report without changing ANYTHING just for the inspectors, I want to know what school!

Woohooo! Lets take time in lieu and go for a beach BBQ! Tis good weather for it! You might be able to but they want to talk to me. :? HBJB Invite them to the BBQ then!

To be fair most of the time you just need to quiz them about obvious things like: What does HTML stand for? In your opinion what is the best way to arrange a RAID? (this could get some colourful answers if the interviewee is computer illiterate!). It'll become blatently obvious who's a computer bod and who's "just after another job innit guv". Also ask them what they would do if they recieve a screensaver file in an email as an attachment, the clued would understand it's likely to be a virus and therefore eradicate it asap.