Johan

I've struggled to decide which forum to post the quandary... I have been offered some ad hoc support for a primary school, sorting out the IT messes they have, with a question looming as to what fee I would want for my time. Does anybody have any experience of what a fair day rate would be for a NM contractor in primary schools? I want to be fair to both sides, and probably prefer to error on the side of charging too little, with the hope that it might turn into a regular thing?

Another way would be find out how many PCs are logged into the domain, which I could do each period over a timetable rotation.

Good afternoon, Whilst having what seems like a huge number of ICT suites, I've been told there still isn't enough. However, I can't help but notice the number of times I pass a suite in the middle of a period, and find it empty. I would love to be able to easily collate the % of time or number of hours a day the PCs within our school are logged in with a user account, rather than left at the ctrl-alt-del screen. I realise I could log login and logout events in AD, but that would take some serious collating! Does anybody know of a nice solution to do this automatically? Arguing to make better use of what we have seems far more practical than adding more and more expensive kit. Kind regards, John.

Thank you for all your replies. As my current line manager (who I get on with/like) may be retiring soon, I am very concerned about the person who would most likely replace him. Given this, I hoped a better alternative existed I can suggest when he does choose to retire, as otherwise I love my job & get on very well with our bursar.

That is interesting soulfish, the setup sounds ideal. Will you become a member of SMT?

I work in a large (1700 student) secondary school, and as the Network manager I'm currently managed by a Head of E-School, which I beleive is seen as job to be fulfilled by a teacher. May I ask network managers out there how secondary schools manage their ICT, and how well does it work? Is the head of e-school a very standard role that exists within all secondary schools, or they managed by the bursar like other support services (such as site team)? Kind regards, John.

We use VMware ESXi (yes the free version) extensively. However, given the performance issues we have, I want to make use of all 8 cores for the one virtual server. I would love to keep it on a VM platform, but the enterprise plus version is seemingly £600 a physical CPU & from what I understand, is what I would need! Interestingly we did see an IBM blade, totalling about 20 CPUs and 40gb of RAM & inbuilt cisco switch. Whilst an amasing beast, I decided that they would probably be an extra level of complexity to learn & configure before Capita arrive next month.

Thank you. We already have full SQL, and suspect you are right about the RAM/CPU. The DB is 5GB, so suspect 8 x 3ghz core & 16gb RAM should do well! Kind regards, John.

That is extremely useful, thank you. Processing power is surprisingly high, will focus on this! Kind regards, John.

Dell 1900, not sure on memory itself. It currently is running VMware ESXi (which makes it tricker to find details). Ideally, a Dell server with a remaining warranty. The thing that I am really unsure on is how much power will I need given the size of the school?

We have a 2 & dual core @ 2.992 Ghz, with 16 GB ram. RAID 6 HDD (the HDDs are slow and rubbish though). Realistically we can afford 2-3k, but could go beyond that if needed/justified. I really just want to get it right!

We have 1800 students, 750 computers & 300 members of staff. We are blessed with Capita coming on site next month to help us move our SIMS databases onto a new server, with a fresh setup. Not wanting to waste this opportunity, I want to buy a new server to run it on, to ensure that SIMS runs as quickly as we can reasonably make it (the reality is it'll have to be an Ebay special). Capita have advised 2008 64bit enterprise for the OS, but am unsure how much server power will be needed. Are their any IT geeks from large schools who already have a good setup that runs well? Our current server spends most of the day at 90-100% CPU usage. Kind regards, John.

Thank you all for your time

Starting with the wonderfully useful script provided on edugeek's wiki, I've tried to change it to only reset home folder ownership, as NTFS permissions are fine & changing them without any reason scares me. Here is my attempt: Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set ObjShell = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell") ShowSubfolders FSO.GetFolder("I:\path to folder containing home holders") Sub ShowSubFolders(Folder) For Each Subfolder in Folder.SubFolders WScript.Echo "Folder = " & Subfolder userName = SubFolder.Name ObjShell.Run CMDLine1 CMDLine2 = "chown -r " & userName & " """ & Subfolder & "\*.*""" WScript.Echo "Running CHOWN..." ObjShell.Run CMDLine2 Next End Sub Would someone with a better understanding of VB than me see if I have made a stupid mistake!? Many thanks, John.

Having serious problems with 2X, I am looking to revert to using the HP ThinPro software (which actually seems really good). I don't know what other peoples experiences are? Anyway, I am trying to setup the HP/Altiris software to manage all our thin clients. I have followed the link & installed the software it downloaded, but it has installed a massive suite of Symantec stuff that looks nothing like the MMC like software shown in their PDF. Hopefully someone out there will know where I'm going wrong!? Here is a link of what I have installed: http://jjesse.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/022010_0309_introductio1.png Compared to what I expected: http://www.symantec.com/connect/sites/default/files/images/DS%20Icons.jpg Kind regards, John.

I would have thought it unreasonable either, but apparently the thin client isn't on their HCL. The network card is though, so it seems as ridiculous position to take. The last suggestion I had from them was to post them a thin client to them. I wonder if the linux HP tools that come with the thin clients might actually be a better bet...

Hello, We have just received 60 HP t5745 thin clients for installation over the summer into two new classrooms. We currently use 2X as our means of connecting thin clients to our windows terminal servers. However, we have found that 2X does not have the needed drivers for these thin clients. They use a Broadcom 57x NetXtreme card. I am hoping/dreaming that someone out there has experience of adding drivers to 2X's base client image!? Kind regards, John.

That is fantastic news, your HP server is very similar to the VM platform we will be moving to. I am encouraged that it might make a difference now! CHeers, John

It is nice to know that Capita are consistent then! I challenged him to the logic of what he said, particularly as I was only talking about virtualising the DB aspect. At that point he said it would be fine if I did after all! When it comes to wanting to virtualise the SIMS application portion, I will contact them again with the hope of getting to speak to somebody different! Are there schools out there who run SIMS for 1800 pupils and 300 member of staff (ish), where SIMS is running quite well? I am a little uncertain if throwing more hardware at the problem will totally resolve the speed issues!!! Thank you, John.

Hello, Our SIMS system is very very slow, and I suspect the existing server hardware isn't helping (one mediocre Dell 1900 running the application shared & both databases). I am thinking of moving the DBs for both SIMS and FMS to a new & much more powerful server - this seems easy enough following the advice I had from Capita (time will tell). However, I was hoping to move it to a VM platform (like most of our servers now), but I am told by Capita that isn't supported. I know Microsoft SQL server & VMWare mixes very happily. I was wondering how other schools out there have setup their SIMS system & whether they have used VM/any other virtualisation system as the platform for their SIMS server? Kind regards, John.

Does chrome automatically take a DHCP lease? I can't see it on any of my DHCP servers. I have made the proxy config changes, but it looks like it is isn't actually on my network. I had created a virtual NIC for them! I really hope/d google were going to make this easy & brilliant!

My guess, 142

Thank you, I'll give it a try shortly. Would I be right in thinking that if I point it toward an OU with a test user in, then it would just apply to them? Kind regards, John.

exactly.

An example: profile path for new students: \\server1\001234 (where the number is their sims number, and AD UPN). profile path for most older students: \\server1\smithj1 (which = surname>). However all these older students have a username of e.g. 002345. both naming system reside on the same server share & folder. Unsuprisingly year 9/10 students are having problems remembering these old usernames. I would therefore like to change the name of their folders to match the convention used in the younger years. But, most students will have there stuff in these folders, so rather than just deleting & mass re-creating their accounts, I wondered if a script could mass rename them all using a csv. One column = their old foldername, the next column = their new foldername. Cheers, John.