msi_school

We are a secondary school of approx 1500 pupils with a 100mb connection and we are finding it constricting for normal usage with all our servers on site, I would agree with @AButters that you want a gig and a hefty backup connection.

We have Kyocera MFDs and use their toner take back service kyocera.takeback.eu and have found it to be very easy to use. Kyocera send you a large cardboard box or boxes for toners and waste toners and when they are full Kyocera will arrange a courier to pick them up. Obviously this is only useful if you have Kyocera toners

Make sure the contract covers sockets on one end of each drop and patch panels on the other. I am not joking I had an electrician put the sockets on then charge extra for not just leaving the cab end bare wire.

Check the measurements of your rooms on the plans, my 2x2 server room turned into a 1.5x1.7 with a duct in one corner, this meant you could not get round the cab on one side.

I am getting a bad gate way when I try to download version 3

1300 pupils 200 staff

We use it her and it great on the desktops because they get switched off every evening. On the netbook which tend to just have the lid closed we have got to the point that you can't log on because the machine has no resources left however, without user switching this would have been a case of you can't log on because the netbook is locked. We implemented it because we implemented a screen locking GPO but I would not take it off.

/31 addresses are valid (rfc3021) but don't always work because some devices don't like them. The unifi forum seems to suggest you cheat https://community.ui.com/questions/USG-PRO-4-with-a-31-subnet/86c07eee-54d6-4406-8fad-ba6417f90a19 Reddit says this

Good points @AButters & @localzuk I am obviously a bit stuck in automatically thinking RAID 5 BAD I might be tempted to go with the RAID 5 or a RAID 1 rather than a RAID 10 because SSDs are so fast

Just another comment about disks, try to stay away from RAID 5, it has a tendency to fall over on data recovery and it is very slow in comparison to RAID 1.

In my opinion the school should set its expectations of core hours and then the users should set up a do not disturb on their equipment. This allows the individual user to decide when they are going to be informed of messages and to manage their own work flow. Users how need to receive urgent email such as network managers have to set up their do not disturb rules carefully in order to triage these alerts however, if it actually urgent email is not the correct tool because the sender does not know if the recipient has received the message and is responding. If the school is actually expecting you to pick up these urgent emails in the middle of the night there should be a process in place to compensate you for it, breaking up your sleep like this on a regular basis is really bad for you.

I think we are agreeing with each other, I meant to say keep your SSIDs per AP to less than four due to overhead.

The problem is not the user bandwidth demand on each SSID this would be the same for a given number of users for any number SSIDS. It is the overhead for each SSID there is a quick description here and a nice calculator linked form that article here

I use Unifi in a business I support with no problems, but if it goes wrong you are a bit in the wind for support. I would try to keep the SSID number lower than four though, you will be effectively quartering your band width.

It's not a scam as such but it is dodgy in some way that we currently can not define

I would just say no they will not run Windows 10 and Linux, Chrome etc. is not compatible with our network setup. Stick to your guns remind the leadership that you will already be deploying one new OS over the summer with its attendant retraining and an other OS which will not work the Windows way is too much to ask for especially on such under powered equipment. If the school really want these machine money will be found to replace them. You are in danger of over promising at a time when you already have an increased workload.

They said it was too complex with the schools filtering and restrictions. it is clause 2.6 on their Terms of Employment (My Bold) 2.6. The Contractor confirms their contract to being involved in on-line/on-screen developments and to work in electronic formats in providing exam services. The Contractor will ensure that they have the IT skills and equipment necessary to support on-line/on-screen processes for the duration of their engagement. As a minimum such equipment must include a private PC or laptop with a primary current Microsoft supported Windows operating system, a broadband internet connection and a printer. The possession of IT hardware and software to the necessary standard is a pre-condition of appointment. The contractor warrants that work undertaken in an electronic format will not be performed in a public place and/or connected to a public network. The contractor is required to ensure that the use of any network does not contravene any local educational establishment policies..

This year we have had a number of staff doing exam marking using the rm assessor site, I deployed Silverlight to all of their laptops using DPQdeploy and it would not work after lots of hair pulling I reinstalled silverlight directly from Microsoft and this fixed the issue. Prompting more hair pulling. I had an other member of staff doing marking for the AQA but she could not log on to the site due to our web filtering , I don't know if she was doing different marking or not but when i spoke to the AQA tech support with her she was told that all markers are informed that they must use their own computer and not a school one.

For most of our pupil needs we use 11 inch netbooks staff use 15 inch laptops, I have had no complaints from either user group but I am moving towards a 14 inch laptop solution for both groups to simplify my supply chain. I personally find the 15 inches both too big and too heavy to comfortably move around the school on a lesson by lesson basis and the extra inch of display makes little difference to me as long as the display is over 1000 px tall

We have a lapel mic for the head a stand mic for other speakers, a couple of ambient mics and a theatre tech to control them, so sound should be a non issue (if you have jinxed me @mavhc I will probably cry) I am currently having trouble getting anything to stream across the network I have tried OBS and VLC and they are not connecting. I was blaming the ACLs on the VLANs but it is not working in the same VLAN so I am scratching my head at the moment, I am going to try this at home on my PCs which are far less locked down to see it is just a restriction on the school network I am not allowing for. As for DSLRs I have two problems, the camera positions are too far away for the lenses we have so I cant frame the shot properly and they turn off after half an hour as I just want to set this up before anyone comes in and leave it this is not ideal.

Thank you all for your advice. It turns out that we don't have any cameras that will frame the shot adequately so I am currently looking into camera hire as well now. I suppose I can't complain I have been given a couple of weeks notice not the normal couple of minutes.

I just use the same Windows 10 image as everything else in school.

I think this has been addressed before her but I can't find a link. Our new parents evening is coming up and we don't have a room large enough for them all to see the Head's presentation, so I have been asked to stream it to one or more extra rooms. I have asked if it possible to have the head do more than one presentation and if we can get an external company in to either do the stream or come in in advance and make a film we can show but these options apparently will not work. Does any on have any pointers on how to achieve a good result, I can just stick a camera in the back of the theatre and stream the whole stage but I have never seen this look good in practise especially as the head will be using a power point presentation on an unstretched cyc not a proper screen. Thanks

We are in a similar situation to the OP, I as NM am leading a project to initially look at new MIS products and then to implement a move to Bromcom, the DM and Deputy curriculum are in the group but the DH is too busy and the DM is not a project manager so I am leading the project. This has all gone well and we are hoping to change over to Bromcom unfortunately no one seems to have realised that we will have to pay for two MIS products during the change over.

I do like the Stone Cloudbook I have just finished deploying 66 of them and the teachers love them.