SeanVin

Part of our IT policy is that computers in class rooms and other curriculum areas should not have access to MIS or other admin files and resources. Passwords do become compromised, and staff do leave PCs logged-on when they leave class rooms (you can't legislate against stupidity!). It is a current issue for us as we are combining our admin and curriculum networks. We have set up scripts and GPOs to ensure admin resources are only available in offices and team rooms. (I am not condoning staff letting pupils use their accounts – Our AUP clearly states that pupils must not use other peoples computer accounts, I would suggest it is very unprofessional for staff to allow them to do so.)

Strictly speaking there is no such thing as an electrical fire - electricity does not catch fire, however it can act as a source of ignition, which makes all the stuff around it catch fire!

We use these Sahara Presentation Systems > Wall Mounted Active Speakers they have a built in amp, wall brackets and 2 inputs - we connect one to the IWB PC and the other to the face plate for Video players or staff laptops. There is a long fly lead connected to small on/off switch and volume control.

I am working on the assumption that we have to update our CALs for Sever 2008, however if we have to run at Server 2003 functional level to support Ranger for Networks (see my last post) then I am not going to update the CALs.

We’re combining or Admin and curriculum networks by building a new network from scratch, our current networks have evolved from the original NT4 servers and it shows. Although it is ‘ambitious’ to use a brand new operating system, it seems short-sighted not to take advantage 2008. We’re wanting to use NAP, to have better control of printers and TS looks good too. The one thing that I’m not sure about is if Ranger For Networks will run on Server 2008 (has anybody tried it?). It needs to run on a DC, if it won’t run on 2008 then we can only run at 2003 domain functional level and lose all the extra server 2008 AD goodies.

Toms Hardware has a little more info Samsung Announces 256 GB MLC SATA II SSD Here's a quote from the item.

I have had a chat with the music staff, and they do have the same problem. It is a particular pain when they put students work onto their laptops, as they have to reset all the sounds and are never sure they have the ones the pupils intended. Seems like a major flaw in a piece of software that is heavily promoted in the education market.

We’ve just bought a pair of HP FC2012fc SANs, we got a very good deal that included the care packs to install them. The main reasons I wanted a SAN was storage consolidation, scalability and redundancy. I am very interested in virtualisation, but I have wanted a SAN long before I discovered that they were a pre-requisite. We considered iSCSI, but it runs over Ethernet, fibre channel is designed for fast throughput and has much higher bandwidth utilisation, in short 4gb fibre channel is more than 4 times faster than 1gb iSCSI. To my mind if I’m taking the hard drives off a very fast internal SCSI connection, I really want the fabric to be a fast as possible. Every time I Googled ‘Advantages of iSCSI’ there was only one answer ‘its cheaper’. Well I was told to make the network faster (10x!!!), future proof, and not to be constrained by budget, there was only one choice. From my research it became very clear that setting up a SAN is not straight forward, even our consultants bottled-it and suggested getting specialists in. It was the care packs that sealed the HP deal.

I can verify that the accident did happen and that it was caused by a disconnected control rod. I was in the RAF at the time (I did 24 years as an engine/airframe technician) and I remember it very well. It was the first fatal accident caused by a maintenance error for a long time and every engineer sat up and took notice. I really feel for everybody involved. Luckily I was never caught up in a board of inquiry, everyone I know who has, have said it is a very unpleasant experience. They have all said that by the time the board had finished with them, they believed it could have been their fault, even if they had nothing to do with servicing the actual aircraft involved. As reggiep was one of the last people to work on the aircraft he will have had a particularly hard time.

We have fibre links between buildings and mixture of 1gb/100mb switches. I don’t see the point of running 1gb to the desktop if you only have 1gb uplinks. We have some Cat 6 cable that was installed before my time with cat 5 plugs! I’ve never had a problem with 1gb over Cat 5e which is a lot cheaper and easier to handle. I would love to go to a 10gb back bone, the press have been saying it will become affordable in 12 months for the last 3 years!

Friday night Food shopping. Saturday – 1 1/2 hour drive to mothers to help move bed, then three hour drive to Mother-in-laws to fix hot water tank (probably needs replacing). Sunday – Fill car with stuff to take to mother-in-laws new house, then putting up shelves. Monday - probably fitting ‘soft draw closers’ and other jobs in mother-in-laws new house, talk to builders about coving and plastering, then 3 hour drive home. Monday evening – probably cleaning up after teenage daughter has had weekend home alone. Tuesday back to work – No kids very few staff ( I’ve told them the network will be down so even less than normal) I can hardly wait!

We only run Sibelius in one room, however we have two different types of sound card. As far as I'm aware we do not have a problem, at least it hasn't been reported. It may be that the music staff just ensure pupils use the same PC each time or are configuring the program when required. I think it is only the GCSE and A level groups that use Sibelius so it should be easy to manage.

I ordered LC-LC pre-terminated cable last week, our consultant implied we should go straight to the switches to reduce connection losses, however I am going to use patch panels, I just do not feel comfortable going straight to the switch.

We’re running Sibelius 4 on a ranger network without problems. As far as I can tell, as long as the program has the IP address of the Sibelius licence server, it will run. It works quite happily with teachers laptops on a different domain.

Sorry for butting in. Firstly thanks for all the suggestions, we want to run our curriculum laptops as stand-alone to reduce network traffic, but need students to get to their home folders. Secondly I do not think rdp is the best solution, however if you go down this route you need to be aware you need to buy CALS if you want more than two simultaneous connections.

We’re using NAS for backup (2 x Thecus N4100s) for daily differential backups and use the USB ports on the NAS boxes to do weekly full backups to external drives (on a three week cycle) that we store in safes in separate buildings. It works very well, much better than the four different tape drives we had previously, and file recovery is quick and convenient. I would not recommend the Thecus enclosures though, as they were a nightmare to set up, and we’ve had two drive failures in less than a year.

Never knew it existed

We have an NM and 3 1/2 IT technicians, 2 AV technicians and a data manager. We have just over 700 PCs/Laptops (130 are 'laptops for teachers'). We are kept very busy, but Looking at other schools in the area I think we are very well off. One school, which is the same size, only has a NM and one technician!

Ouch! Ours cost £5000 which we got from the Head Teachers fund, as he thought (quite rightly) the previous site was old fashioned and was not a true reflection of the school. Ours is certainly better than we could have done with Joomla. (See post above for link)

We out-sourced our web site because we simply did not have the time or expertise to do it ourselves, the hardest part was choosing the supplier. After that it went very smoothly, we gave them some ideas, they came up with a design, we asked them to tweak it and they built the site. The process took about two weeks. It took us another 2 weeks to upload the content. It is a CMS which our [non-techie] Copy and Design Manager keeps up to date. We also pay for hosting so I don’t have to worry about DMZs, reverse proxies, back-ups or redundancy. If we have a problem or want to tweak the design, up until now it has been sorted within an hour. You can see the result at Northgate High School, and I can whole heartedly recommend INCO (INCO Software Solutions)

I could not get it from the school network, but was OK from home, I balme the county filters

Have just managed to set up MLH, we had exactly the same problem, after a little bit of Googling we found the the following which solved the problem Right click on your website in IIS, click properties -> home directory -> configuration -> options -> enable parent paths SeanVin