jamesfed

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We've had problems left right and centre with edge10 - in almost all cases its been a internal PSU issue (to the monitor). Are you using those RM Y power cables? Ages ago when I used to be at a RM school we had big problems with them not quite sitting in the monitor power port correctly - took a while but we kicked RM into sending us some better ones.

I would just go all out with either a VPN (we use TMG for ours) - that way you will have full seamless remote access to your network (has been a big hit with out teaching staff). That or have a look at Forefront UAG - it gives you that 'web portal' like experiance you have described.

One of the reasons I love App-V so much! Only shows the shortcuts for the programs the user has access to. Anywhos back on track - its possible to load x86-32 printer drivers onto Server 2008 R2. We still have a fair few old brother printers still cluttering up the place with their dusty rubbish drivers - just wish we could move to the world of a few good photocopiers dotted around the site and nothing else.

x86-64 on Windows 7 and x86-32 on any of our XP PCs. Will be pure x86-64 by end of April. The primary we look after is pure x86-32 Windows 7 (mainly due to legacy software compatibility).

You are going to have to come up with a plan quick - even RM have started talking about the end of CC3. TBH the view of many schools on here is to go vanillia (having said that there are a number of people on here with happy CC$ sorry CC4 networks...). Either way plan for Windows 7!

About £60 per concurrent user - however since they have been bought by Citrix the price may very well be lower now.

DFS and DFS-R are actually probably your best options in this case - you would have two storage servers with equil hardware and then use FQDNs for your network shares which would then balance/replicate out onto both of your storage servers. The latest updates to DFS in Server 2008 R2 have completely thrown out the old file/folder limitations in previous versions so you are pretty much free to work with whatever you want.

It just talks to Hyper-V - it'll install a client on your server to allow the management side of things (which runs as its own virtual machine) talk to Hyper-V. Do have a good read through the setup guides - they will explain all If you do run into any problems just PM me and I'll see if I can help.

Have a look at Citrix VDI in a box - it'll do just what uve asked with a golden image ect...

Did have a look into this myself but haven't come up with anything yet. It is possible to talk to the Lync API though so maybe someone could do some custom code for it?

Sorry I only have experiance with the problems that Squid gave us - maybe it would be worth getting a trial of ISA Script and seeing if the script thats in a link in my previous posts will work? All the same over the past few months we've noticed a decline in the number of Droid users with phones that don't support proxys so I can imagine within the next 6months-1 year we will be rid of this problem anyway.

I will always do a hard drive wipe using 3 passes of eraser(Eraser) (just for my peace of mind) but there are more than enough company’s out there who will take kit away for free and do a secure wipe of drives. We use a place that’s local to us (in Abingdon) but other edugeekers will no doubt come up with some better options.

What kind of applications are they looking at running and what kind of problems are they looking to solve by using thin clients? I am a great advocate of thin client techonlogy (we use them at my secondary) however I wouldn't look to use them in a primary without a very good reason.

You are never ever tied into the LEA - as a school you are free to buy what kit you want from any supplier you want (indeed its always a smart move to get at least 3 quotes for any new purchase). Could you let us know what you intend on doing with this server (server roles/what your current (and future) file storage requirements are) and number of PCs in the school? We just kitted out a primary with a new server which flys along for just £1,000 - on average us as a large secondary will be spending that kind of money on a normal server.

If AMD can squeeze a E350 (or simlar) processor into a Windows 8 Tablet then I don't see myself needing a full notebook/work PC/any other tablet ever again (well besides swap outs). But note one thing its still a x86 processor so I can run anything I ever want - not just cut down versions of applications that are designed for the mobile world (although the idea of Metro style apps in Windows 8 is looking nice).

Server 2008 R2 of any edition will boot from a UEFI volume. With our non UEFI motherboards on our HPs I create two logical disks using the HP RAID controller one about 120GB (for the OS which is MBR compatible) and then use the remainder as a non bootable GPT disk.

It sure is and why I hold a thing against RM........ All the same as I understand it includes aditional software on the PC (AV ect) but then again haven't been at a RM school in 2 years and are loving basic Microsoft lic costs

Novatech have a few options in their range - Home PCs and Home Computers from Novatech can't vouch for them (those models) thought but I know they can do pretty good custom jobs (adding a SSD ect) if needed.

Personaly I wouldn't ever use dynamically expanding VHDs for anything production related (I think its best pratice as well to only used dynamic for testing purposes only). For drive capacity even a well stocked WSUS database+update store won't chew through that many GB anyway.

Works fine within UAG as well - thats what we have running here. Have enabled Single Sign On with Windows Authentication and the link within UAG goes right to the documents page.

As said above I would never ever use XAMPP as a web host - just tooo many security related things could go wrong with it. As you are running on 2k8 I would suggest that you use IIS instead - also are you running any kind of firewall (TMG/Smoothwall/ect)?

Have done it before - our old 2000 server was running something called bookingpro (or something simlar) - as said already I just stoped all the services on the sever and did a live P2V using VMWare converter (at the time). Ran it inside a VirtualBox VM until I got everything moved over to MRBS. Now adays I'd just do it using SCVMM onto Hyper-V (as far as I understand 2000 runs fine in Hyper-V).

Video now up on YouTube Link a ma bob

+1 for this being a management issue, the services to reg the students are there and resonably easy to use. Your staff should be fully capiable of doing this themselves and not need a gadget to prompt them.