RallyTech

Unfortunately, there won't be too much IT related work with my systems engineer position or at least none that I am aware of.

Well it looks like the school year is winding down and I will be making a career move but I have to say my first year in a public school has been interesting. Edugeek is a great resource for IT /w a focus on education. It doesn't show as much on my posts but I've lurked all school year long. I will be moving to the private sector now and be working as a systems engineer. I wish there was a site on the Internet for systems engineers as well developed as Edugeek but I doubt it. My thanks to Edugeek!

Almost all our computers are laptops from a mobile cart so any kind of rotation is definitely not user friendly.

Well it looks like some kids at my school figured out this annoying feature. I will implement some of the solutions like disabling the tray icon and right click. However, I'm looking for a script or something that can reset the screen rotation to normal on logon or logoff. This will alleviate a lot of time spent by me constantly telling everyone how to fix it. Does anyone have a script that can run on logon and logoff for WinXP computers to reset the rotation to normal? I've tried googling around and haven't found anything but I did find a whole lot of complaints about screen rotation.

I recently did the same thing as you and had very little to work with as this was the first time IT had a budget. In my budget I had a misc. category for random things like Ethernet cables, power adapters, replacement parts, etc. You might also want to put in a category for any support contracts you have. I'd also try and avoid having ink and paper under your budget unless IT is the one doing the consumption of those supplies. It's better that the departments or whoever it is that does the actual consumption of the paper and ink budget it under their respective budget. IMO, it's a bit of a hassle to manage other people's consumption of supplies under your budget. I agree with the other poster that you should have a multi-year outlook on IT budget. You need to account for hardware refreshes and planned infrastructure upgrades that don't happen every year. Unfortunately, I did not plan that far ahead as this was the first time I had done a budget request. However, since we're a small school it's not as critical for me.

We're looking for 2 things right now: an affordable VoIP and an auto dialer. We're located in California, USA. We're on an antiquated Nortel MICS system. There are about 12 phone lines here and every office has an ethernet port. Right now, I've been looking at Asterisk but am interested in more information about Cisco's solutions and people's experiences with it. We're also looking for an auto dialer that can easily be easily used by our office staff. We spend a large amount of time having office staff calling parents. Typical calls home right now include absence, tardies, detention, suspensions, school events, state tests, etc. The only service that I have found right now is One Call Now but I'm looking for a solution that we can host in-house. I'm looking to hear about free or paid products (within reason!). Our needs aren't overly complicated as we're a small school but something that's better than the Nortel system and easy to use for office staff would be great. If it's a paid product can we get a ball park figure on pricing.

We just recently had an issue where some students copied some inappropriate things on our networked copy machine. As a result of this, student permission to print to those copy machines were also revoked as deemed by administration. However, teachers who check out mobile carts still need their students to print documents. One teacher has over 120 students and it would be impractical to have all the students e-mail him and then have the teacher download each attachment one by one and then print it all. We have a Windows 2003 server acting as our print server. I'm looking for free solutions on how to handle this. How can we still allow students to print but keep it monitored?

I wish we could get MPLS or fiber. I'm not familiar with all the technology involved but I believe in our area there is no significant existing infrastructure for fiber or MPLS so costs for such technology are not reasonable for our small school.

Yes, it's a x3 T1 bonded connection and according to Google $1400 is about 1024 Euros. From the multiple quotes I received, it seems like the pricing I'm getting is within the norm.

We don't have an existing fiber node at our school so from what I understand the vendor didn't even give me a specific # because fiber is on another order of magnitude to even get that to our school. As for x2 DSL, we actually have that but we're on the highest plan and the upload speed won't go any faster than 768Kb. That is insane how you only pay roughly $7000 a year for a 100Mb line. I would give an arm for that:eek:. Are you in a new area with existing fiber everywhere?

I'm trying to explain the difference of a simple aDSL connection vs. a dedicated bonded T1 (E1 in the UK?) connection to administration. They don't understand why a 3Mb down 768Kb up connection that costs less than a $100 a month but a 4.5Mb bonded T1 connection costs nearly $1400 - $1800 a month. I try to make it practical to them as with a T1 we will have symmetrical outbound speeds so email attachments and remote connections to the school network will be faster. I also explain that we will have a SLA with support and we won't have as much connectivity issues as we do with our current DSL line. The general speed for the school will also improve as there won't be a huge slow down when multiple laptop carts are checked out. I think they understand that it's better but they're skeptical because of the price difference. Why such a huge price difference is essentially what they're asking and I explain to them the difference of a dedicated T1 line but I guess I'm not being clear enough. I show them quotes and say this is industry standard pricing. I have looked into alternatives such as cable or metro ethernet and the like but our location is not great. We have no existing cable line to our school or even to the servers. Fiber is astronomically expensive and from what I understand after talking to multiple vendors T1s are our best bet for the kind of speed we're looking for.

I don't think that company will do service with schools in the US. All their customers appear to be in the UK.

The person in charge of yearbook at our high school told me that the publishing company they use prefer that they use Adobe Indesign. I'm not familiar with design software and licensing concerning Adobe software so I thought I should get some more input from people here. We're located in California, USA and I was told the retail price at Adobe's site for Adobe Indesign is about $500 and the listed academic price is $400 but I checked some popular software resellers like CDW and the academic price seems to be about $200 which is more workable for us. We're only looking for about 5 licenses. Is Adobe Indesign an ideal software to use for yearbook design and what kind of prices should we be expecting? What are the alternatives to Indesign or is that the defacto standard?

This is about how I feel about the situation. I run what I do through my supervisor and get my approvals through administration so it strikes me as odd to include finance on IT related procurement aside from available budget and handing off purchase orders.

How much is finance involved when making IT purchases in a small school? For example, IT finds some great software the school could use. IT gets approval from administration to buy software, then IT gets quotes from resellers, IT then gives lowest quote to finance officer/business manager for purchase to be made. However, I'm being asked by finance to include them in the process from the beginning, including negotiations about the software product and how many licenses to get. It this normal?

Ahhh that would be great if I could but it might be a looong time (3-5 years till the next server) before our school makes any other significant hardware purchase. I'm going to get all I can in now and anything that breaks will be covered under warranty. On a side note I have to comment that this forum is great. It's such an awesome resource, I would think there would be more people from US schools here.

I added in 24GB of RAM but at a slower rate to try and make it more affordable. Can anyone else comment on 1066 vs 1333 and UDIMM vs RDIMM and single rank vs dual rank? I've looked at some of the Dell literature and Googled around. My impression is for our situation it might not be a big difference. Does any of this have a significant impact Virtualization performance?

Oh that's disappointing. Would this be a good idea? Using an external USB Hard Drive enclosure and swapping out 3.5" 1TB drives nightly? I imagine it would be much slower but this seems like a more practical choice for backups.

About the internal removable drive for backup. I've heard that you have to use Dell branded drives or something to that effect on their servers because it's all somehow locked? Can someone confirm or shed more light because I'd much rather just purchase a group of 1TB WD or Seagate consumer drives for backups.

We're currently looking to purchase a new server as our old server is simply running out of space and it's warranty recently ran out. Our old PowerEdge 2900 was an all in one Win 2003 server that did everything DC, DHCP, DNS, Print Server, File Server, WSUS, Anti-Virus, etc. We have about 20-30 users on each day and students use a shared student account. When mobile carts are checked out we can have as high as an additional 60 computers online. Only staff and teachers have folder redirection enabled for My Documents and most computers here are Windows XP. I've been looking into the PowerEdge R610/T610 servers and our budget is roughly 5-6k US $. I'm also interested in taking advantage of virtualization with ESXi or Xenserver free edition as we could use a virtualized Linux server to host a school intranet site and act as a content filter in addition to a virtualized Windows Server. I'm looking for advice on specs and how I should handle virtualization as I'm new to it. So far I have in mind the following. - x2 Intel® Xeon® E5520, 2.26Ghz, 8M Cache, Turbo, HT, 1066MHz Max Mem - 16GB Memory (8x2GB), 1333MHz Dual Ranked UDIMMs for 2 Processors, Advanced ECC (Ignore this memory loadout. Keeping this here for reference to original post) - 24GB Memory (12x2GB),1066MHz Dual Ranked UDIMMs for 2 Processors, Optimized (New RAM spec) - RAID 1/RAID 5 for H700 or PERC 6/i Controllers (RAID 1 for Virtualized OS/RAID 5 for storage?) - x2 160GB 7.2K RPM SATA 2.5" Hot Plug Hard Drive (Raid 1, any thoughts on SATA vs SAS? SATA is definitely cheaper so for our small school is SAS really necessary?) - x3 500GB 7.2K RPM SATA 2.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive (Raid 5) - iDRAC6 Enterprise - Broadcom 5709 Dual Port 1GbE NIC w/TOE iSCSI, PCIe-4 - RD1000, Internal SATA Drive Bay for 3.5" Chassis - QTY2, Internal Removable Hard Disk for RD1000, 160GB Native (should I use this as a backup method? currently use a LTO2 tape backup) I'm pretty open to how I should approach a new server as long as I'm within 5-6k US $ price range. I thought about a PowerVault NX300 for storage and a separate server as well but I'm not really sure if that's necessary for our school so if anyone can enlighten me please do. Update: Added Hard Drive quantities. Update 2: Added in 24GB of RAM

There wasn't a full time person here for a long period of time (years) so they used a consultant/contractor of some sort to come here once a week. The irony is I think he had an easier time making purchases since they were just rolled into the monthly bill from the company that was paid off by our school. I'm not really sure on that though. Unfortunately, I can't do the same. =( Things weren't really kept in order here for IT related stuff so there's a lot that needs to be inventoried and brought to a better standard since the consultant/contractor just didn't have enough time to do everything.

In this case of the order getting passed to finance does this mean finance are the people making the direct purchase or they just approve the purchase and give you access to a business credit card or check to make the purchase yourself? Can you elaborate a bit more on this "internal" order and how exactly the purchase is made? I really wish I had a budget myself approved for IT but unfortunately I came in after the budget for the year was set so I have nothing to work with that I can designate myself without going through others. Thanks for the comments so far.

I work for a small high school in California, USA. I'm the IT Admin. and the only IT related staff at the school. I know this is a UK based board but I'm still curious as to how other schools handle purchases in similar environments and even at larger schools as well. It's a bit difficult for me to make purchases and I understand someone needs to review purchases but it seems a bit overly complicated at my school. I want to see if I could improve the situation. I'm talking about purchases like website host subscriptions, domain subscriptions, replacing broken power adapters for laptops when out of warranty, getting replacement keyboards and mice for staff, etc.