AHeighton

Hey, how good are you up a ladder? There's a really good antenna that eBuyer sell: TP-Link TL-ANT2424B Antenna 802.11 b/g outdoor 24.. | Ebuyer.com Claims to be rated up to 35km (about 21 miles) at 1Mbps, and up to 4.4km (about 2.7 miles) for 54Mbps. These things are so directional it's amazing, 7 degrees is the angle is includes, excluding everything else. The most common complaint is no signal, when actually it's just not quite perfectly aligned. I'd expect that with a pair of these, properly aligned, you could easily get a usable connection over a mile. Mounts on the wall with something like this. We're actually trying to get a wireless link between our school and the one next door for remote backups and this is the dish we're looking at using. Hope this helps Alex

I accept that RAID6 is slower in some scenarios, yes, but personally I wouldn't dare risk it. The chance of a second disk failing during the long rebuild would just scare me too much! Also, yes sorry, I was thinking RAID51, which loses 50% for the mirror and then 1-(n-1)/n for the redundancy. I think it depends on your personal strategy on catastrophic failure. A striped array made out of RAID5 arrays is understandably nippier than the Belt-and-Braces RAID6, but again, if two disks fail on the same side of the stripe, you've still lost all your data. You can put the same number of disks into a RAID6 and get the ability to continue functioning if any two disks fail, whether they're both in the first half of the bays or the second. Whichever OP picks, it's clear you would go 50 and I would go 6. I think I know who trusts their backups most!

Yeah for some reason I too always seemed to upgrade my own machine last. It is nice to have something speedy. I went for an i5, used to be AMD all the way but the Intels just run so cool lately. To be fair I've not tried an AMD for a while... Is that graphics on the board/cpu/

Personally, I'd look at RAID6 if I were you. RAID5 was fine when the chance of a drive dying was pretty low and the time it took to rebuild an array was short. Now drives are pushed so close to the limit of what's possible, the chance of seeing a single drive fail when you have 6 of them is more like 50% for a given year. RAID6 has two recovery volumes rather than one, which protects you against the scenario where one drive fails, and then during rebuild, another fails too. With RAID5 you've lost everything that hasn't already been rebuilt, with RAID6 you can continue the rebuild. Of course, that means having 4 drives puts you at data/data/recover1/recover2 = 2/4 = 50% drive space available to use Or with our 8 drives in RAID6, that's data/data/data/data/data/data/r1/r2 = 6/8 = 75% drive space available to use. A RAID50 configuration doesn't give you as much protection as you might expect - a single drive can fail in either half of the pair, but if two drives fail in the same half, you're still just as screwed. And you've only had 50% of the drive space available to you in the first place. So RAID50 bad, RAID6 good, in so much as available space and fault tollerance goes anyway. If your card can't do RAID6, you're being sold a dud card. Alex

Hi, sorry for the wait, you may have worked this out on your own. All the different modules allow for different players to access the stream, so you could have vlc serving up the media and using mms, watch it on Windows Media Player. If it's just vlc-to-vlc, you should be able to use any module you like. Personally, I've had the most success with the http module. Cheers Alex

I've not used Expression Encoder at all. If it's any use, vlc has been updated and is substantially better in many respects since I last posted. The streaming is easier to set up too. Hope that helps Alex

Hi all, thought it's only fair I let on who I am. I'm Alex, Network Manager with 1 understudy technician at a large(? is 800 kids large?) secondary school in Leicestershire. I spend my days working towards ideals when I'm not refilling toner cartridges or explaining that your wireless has stopped working because that switch on the front of your laptop is set to "Off". Been in IT jobs since 1999 in a highstreet computer shop, then a telecoms firm doing VoIP (fun but demanding), then a bank doing hard-boiled (name clue) web support, then in their network team then here at the school. On a personal slant, I have a caravan (yes, at 26), two cats, a beautiful fiancée and an immune system made of sticky back plastic and empty washing up liquid bottles. Being around 800 snotty kids all day was perhaps not the best career move to make! All but 1 or 2 of the staff see eye-to-eye with us in IT and we try hard to make each others' lives easier. Some people just don't get it though and for them, I just take a deep breath and try not to stab anyone in the face with a plastic fork. At the end of the day we're all trying to do a job but "please" and "thankyou" are free and go a long way. I'm not a Vista fan and I heart my WiSpy dongle (google it, they are ace). I drink more tea than average but feel each cup brings me closer to restoring my super powers. I cannot fly. Like everyone in IT knows, I often suffer the problem that if you do your job properly, people find it hard to tell you're doing anything at all. Err and erm... I don't own a TV.

Easiest way to do this that I've ever found is vlc - VLC media player - Open Source Multimedia Framework and Player Our art and design teachers do this to show closeups of techniques on the projectors. Cheapy webcam pointed at what they're doing, and vlc will quite happily open it as a "direct show" source and show it full screen. It can also be streamed across the network or saved if you like. Freeware and pretty good too.

Sadly they didn't learn their lesson with their older models, we have over a hundred Optiplex GX620s and I saw a capacitor on the board physically explode. Had a capacitor in an exhaust fan physically explode and they replaced that even though it was outside warranty because when I said the word "explode", a manager came on the phone sounding a bit worried! It's such a shame they let their machines down by cutting corners on capactiors that cost pence.

Can say for certain that it does affect activation status if the board is very different and comes with new CPU. Replaced the board in my old desktop, formerly a server, P4 HT, with a truly stunning Core2Quad and board and the activation whatsit threw a hissy-fit and DEMANDED that I re-establish my link to the collective (THEY ARE BORG, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE). However, activation and licensing are not the same - you need to re-activate XP when your hardware changes a lot, but it's not counted as a different machine, simply the same one that needs re-activating. I'm fairly sure that after about 2-3 activations, they'll grill you on the phone to find out how many machines it's on, whether you bought it in a shop, all kinds really to try and catch out bad backstreet computer shops selling the same OEM license over and over.

I was self employed consultant in 2002 and charged £35 an hour, which worked well for me and clients although I suffered the same fate as anyone who did a good job, as mentioned here before, it would be rare to see the same client more than 2-3 times in a year. In the end I had to find a contracted full time job somewhere that guaranteed a monthly income. Enter school support job. If I hadn't ditched it when I did, I wouldn't have a pension pot now and I wouldn't have been able to meet rent as work could be very busy then months of barely a peep out of anyone. Consultants who are worth their price are few and imposters are many. It's often hard to tell if a consultant is any good until after they've finished. With a bit of initiative, me and my team of 1 get just about everything done ourselves. We stopped our support contract as they were no good to us, they only provided the kind of service we could provide ourselves and no longer covered replacment on any kit. We spent last year's money replacing kit and haven't looked back. Of course, having a decent budget for rolling upgrades makes that kind of strategy easier. £15 an hour is a good rate for support, consultancy is a different game. Like it's been said, after covering costs if you can afford to charge £15 an hour, you're doing something right, but may be working a lot of hours before you're a rich man. All the best Alex

We have a £3k budget for 800 kids and 100 staff, last year though we only spent half that. Since I've worked there, I refill toner cartridges instead of replacing and results are indistinguisable from the original toners. Several Dell 5100cn color laser, several brother 5250dn mono laser, 3 Dell M5200 mono laser, an epson colour laser and the odd inkjet in SMT offices that does about 3 pages a month, so barely relevant. Website I use is Toner refills. Do-it-yourself toner Refills. U Refill Toner based in birmingham but there are plenty of other companies offering it. My advice is to avoid anyone selling "one size fits all" toner as it certainly does not. When I first started trying it out I got desperate and put dell toner in an epson laser, it worked for a week then clogged the cartridge solid. It really has to be right and in my experience, theirs has been. Works for me, Your Milage May Vary. Cheers Alex

Managed to speak to Adam today, his advice was to take an image of a working till if you can do. Hard disks do fail and, at the moment, nobody can reinstall the software for you. If you have an image of a working till, at least you'd have something to fall back on. Personally, I think there will be something happening with Infineer, whether it's a buyout of the entire company or just parts. In all honesty I don't think anybody knows and it's a case of "watch this space". I have a ghost boot cd I use for taking images of working machines. It's made using the tools at NetBootDisk.com - The Universal TCP/IP Network Bootdisk for M$ Networks and a version of Norton Ghost 8.2, it works pretty well. email me at the school if you need help making one - "aheighton" is the start of the address and then "bushloe.leics.sch.uk" is the end. Wishing everyone the best of luck keeping things ticking along, Alex Heighton

Hi, we're in the same boat. Luckily I managed to stay in touch with one of the support engineers, Adam. He's a nice chap and seemed genuinely concerned that schools would be stuck without the company backup. He phoned me up on my personal mobile, from his personal mobile, to check we'd be alright to start the new term. Luckily, we are, for now. I'm trying to come up with a private support arrangement, where we pay him for support as he knows it better than anyone else. I think that might be a good way forward for anyone else stuck in a supportless-situation too. I don't know how that will work yet because quite simply it's not been decided, but I'll keep you informed. As for now, I am happy for any network admins to contact me at the school if you're stuck. I'm sure we can work something out between us to keep our heads above water. We spent £13k on our new tills and revaluation machines under 6 months ago so, needless to say, we don't want to dump them in favour of the competition any time soon. I can say from personal experience that the tills and revaluation machines they provide are pretty good spec windows machines capable running software from the majority of the competition, so if you are quoting for jumping ship, don't be persuaded to dump your tilt-screen tills and touch-screen revaluation units for the competition's on grounds of speed, you don't need to. Adam was not sure whether the company would be bought out and rescued and I hope for his sake at least that it is. He did a good job. I honestly didn't see this fold coming, I thought they'd be pretty solid. Will keep in touch, Alex Heighton IT Network Manager Bushloe High School, Wigston, Leicestershire