maniac

Reading between the lines there, you sould like you are basically dis-satisfied with the way your NM is running the department, in which case I think an informal meeting with them to raise your concerns may be in order, or you can do it in writing formally if you think it's necessary. Then, and only then, if you still feel like you're still not getting anywhere and you're still 'concerned' I think it would be fair to raise the issue higher up. It's only fair to talk to the person directly first thou. The thing is if you go down this road, be prepared to ruffle some feathers and probably make a few enemies on the way as people hate it when you step above their heads, but sometimes this is the only way. I've seen it before where the NM was so good at talking the talk that he was able to pull the wool completely over the headteachers and management teams eyes. It was only when someone else came along and told it to them how it was, with supporting paperwork, they actually realised how far off the mark the origenal NM had been. Of course the other option is to up-sticks and gain employment somewhere else. Mike.

In my opinion I would say that 10 people is excessive for that size of system. Most schools I've come across would have a team of around 4 or 5 for that scale of system, but it does depend on what other tasks fall within the remit of your department, e.g maintaining websites, intranet, VLE etc. are all time consuming tasks that are on top of normal day-to-day maintenance, some schools have other people doing this, and some have their ICT support people doing this. Every member of staff should really have a performance management review once a year as a matter of course, and possibly more often if the school feels there are problems. Clear measurable targets can be set and a review date specified at the time. With a team consisting of many people, it's important to define roles and responsibilities within that team, invest in training to support those, and make sure that everyones time is used effectively. If no performance management has been carried out recently, then that may be a place to start. One of the first things I did when I started at a new school as network manager was make my two technicians write down in a general way what they did with their time, then it gave me a good starting point to find out what each member was good at, or areas where too much time was being spent, and areas where not enough time was being spent. Mike.

Blimy, 10 members of support staff, that's quite a sizeable team. If you don't mind me asking, what size infrastructure are you supporting?? Mike.

hmmmm, intrigues me as to why it has an old IP number then, as I know for a fact that KCN migrated all schools to a new range of IP numbers in the last quater of 2005 as I worked at another Kent school at the time, unless for some reason this particular school wasn't moved, or for some reason gave the Switch a number in the old range for some bizarre reason. It's one of the jobs on my never ending list, to get everything on the correct IP range, all my managed switches and Wireless Access Points have IP numbers on a totally different range to the rest of the school! I'm genuinely intrigued now, as I presumed that switch was older, which in some ways is a good thing! Mike.

No, definitely mean the 54xx series switches, the 41xx are even older and now dis-continued I believe. I know the 5408 switch we have must have been here more than 3 yrs, as it's still got an IP number on the old IP range, and KCN changed the IP range for the school in August 2005. I don't know how long before this they were around, and I expect they will continue to make them for a good while longer, as I believe the 41xx series switches were in production for about 7 or 8 years or longer. Mike.

The 54xx series switches are getting on a bit now, we have one in my current school thats been here about 3 or 4 years so I understand. However, they are still good switches, I brought one as a core switch about 6 months ago at my previous school as it suited the requirements of the school. At the end of the day it it fits the requirements then there's no reason not to go for it, as the adapters and modules will be available for a good long time yet even if they do discontinue the switchs themselves. Mike.

I have a few screens around the school. I've actually gone one step further and used a VGA to Composite converter box and then a composite to RF modulator and plugged it into the areial loop in the school. I have 2 different feeds into the loop on different channels so any normal TV can tune into one of 2 different feeds. We also have a digi box pushing it's output onto a 3rd channel and a DVD player and video player hooked up to the system as well. We can send all the devices outputs down the same cable, and choose on each screen what source we want it to receive, as they are all pushed over a single bit of coax, but each one on a different channel. RF modulators are £29.99 from maplin and are great as you can send up to 30 to 40 different video streams down a single bit of coax! Mike.

I havn't used that particular switch, but I can throughly recommend HP switches in general. They are very reliable and if you do get a problem their warranty is excellent and they are good value for money. My last school had exclusively HP switches (apart from a few netgears that were clinging on in the dark depths of a couple of the cabinets) and the reliability of the system was outstanding. In 2 years I only had a couple of fibre modules fail and they were replaced by HP and delivered the next day, even though they were about 5yrs old (lifetime warranty really does mean lifetime!) Mike.

While in general Linux is a secure operating system, some of the smaller distros that are used, for example, on the Asus eee have well documented flaws in them that can allow users in the know to run and install programs on them, and basically gain super user rights on the device. (there are ways to remove these flaws thou) However, the risk to your actual network is small, the worst they could do is to install software on the device itself, and this would only be if they happened to know how to do it. This can be detured by ensureing the students who get issued these devices sign an acceptable usage agreement, and then you or your team doing random inspections of machines, and taking appropreate action against students who break the rules. We sucessfully rolled out 45 Asus eee machines with the Asus linux build on at my last school, these were on our network system for internet access only and had been locked down using tips and tricks available on the Asus eee users site, and some firefox plugins to remove access to preferecnes menus etc. An image of this was then taken using Partimage meaning a machine could be restored back to normal in a matter of minutes if necessary. As far as I know they have had few problems with them since they were issued. (I left the school the same week they got handed out, but did most of the ground work in getting them ready) Excuse me a second for being slightly critical, but rather than 'try and find a way out of it' how about changing tact slightly and try your hardest to find a way to make it work. In the long run you'll earn a lot more respect from your management team for doing this. Linux in schools does work if it's done the right way. Mike.

I've just downloaded it myself to try, been looking for a decent (free) program for importing users. I've always used CSVDE (until I changed jobs to a CC3 network that is) which is OK once you've worked out how to format the CSV file, but this looks a whole lot easier and may come in handy if we decide to ditch CC3 next year. I did have a go at writing my own VB.NET program based on a (probably the same) VBS script, but never got the time to finish it. Mike.

Without using 3rd party software, your best bet is CSVDE, which is a utility that comes with Server 2003. You will need to preapre a CSV file from SIMS with the correct data in, but that shouldn't take too long. Good article explaining how it works here; CSVDE - Examples Import Export of user accounts Active Directory Mike. EDIT: or you could use the utillity that ChrisH has posted, it looks easier than CSVDE!

I've had over 60 printers connected to a single server before, and experienced very few problems. I have seen this problem before, and it normally occured only when the printer was left on and idle for a while (over 24hrs) turning it off and on again seemd to fix it for us. What's the latency like between the server and printers? trying pinging one of the printers from the server repeatedly and see if it's taking a while to reply, or if there's sparodic missing replies. If so, it could be a comms issue. Other than that I'm stumped! Mike.

All 3 of us have Dell D830 laptops here. Very useful for all sorts of stuff from setting up in assembly for playing a DVD, troubleshooting wireless problems, going away to the staff room to work if I need to get away from the phone ringing, all sorts of uses. Mike.

We are, but the principal doesn't want a managed service after the disaster that it's caused at the other 2 academies in Kent (Particulalry one of them, who after 3 years has only just got a properly functioning system) We're looking at 2-3 yrs before we're in our new premises, so in the meantime we need to do something. The Domain we have needs rebuilding anyway for the simple reason that the domain name is still the old pre-academy name, so while we're at it we may as well make some improvements.

I must ring SCL too, I like the look of those all in one PCs, they are my prefered type of PC at the moment. Less to move around, less cables and less for the kids to fiddle with! Currently getting quotes for new PCs for 1 of my ICT suites. Hopeing to do a second one later in the year, but it depends how much quotes for revamping the servers and backend of the system come in at. I like the layout of your room ICT_GUY, lots of space in there which is always a plus. Unfortunitely I will be stuck with horrible benches in lines which were installed years ago, there just isn't the budget to change them. Mike.

Our ICT provision and support is far from excellent at the moment, although I'm working on it, but years of under investment and a sucession of different network managers before me have left me with a lot to sort out. However we are getting there slowly. You are however welcome to visit me, just to see what we're slowly trying to do, and how we're going to be doing it, and just to share ideas. Plus it's always good to know other people in the county. I'm in Canterbury if you're interested, PM me. Mike.

It was well over a year ago now when we did this, and I've moved onto a different school since, but as far as I can remember you will have to log onto all your ranger enabled workstations as the 'rangerremove' user first, which uninstalls the ranger componants from the workstation. After this was complete on all the workstations, we simply un-installed ranger in the normal way from the servers using add remove programs from control panel. I don't remember it being that complecated at all. Mike.

10MBs Fibre (Both ways) from KCN (SEGFL) Around 500 machines Works well most of the time, but they've been experiencing some problems recently which slowed things right down. KCN are just upgrading their setup to support speeds of up to 100MBs and beyond so the future's looking good. No idea if we have any contention ratio on the KCN setup. Most schools in Kent will have the same, although at varying speeds depending on what the school has payed for. 10mbs is the lowest offering, and I don't see the need to up this at the moment, but the introduction of a proper VLE may change this. Mike.

I'm in a secondary, and we have one colour and one B/W printer per department, unless the department is particularly small like French, where they just have a B/W laser printer. All our ICT rooms have a B/W laser printer, with 2 colour ones available between the 4 of them. There is a Fast Xerox B/W laser printer in the staff room which all staff get mapped on their laptop, we prefer them to use this for printing, as it's very cheap to run. We also have a networked colour copier in the library, which acts as a colour printer for Admin and SMG, and a fast B/W laser printer in there as well. Most offices have a networked 2015 laser printer, apart from a few who have non-networked ones that were brought a long time before I started, so we're kinda stuck with them. Printer allocation here is a bit poor, as like everything else there was no one rationalising it until I started, so teachers were ordering any old printer from their own budget, so we've ended up with a lot of different makes and models of inkjet printer learking around the building. However we don't support them and this was made perfectally clear when I started. IMO inkjet printers are totally un-suitable for a modern school environment, particulalry secondary schools where the sheer volume of stuff that gets printed continues to astound me! Mike.

You could get PCMCIA cards for laptops that talk to this network, but it still only gives you access to bromcom services and no internet access or simelar, because the comms for this entire system was through a single serial port of the Bromcom server! Unfortunitely it would be difficult to reuse the cabling as well, as the Bromcom RTU's were run on a single run of cat5, with the cable looping in and out of each RTU, then onto the next one making it useless for anything else other than Bromcom itself. Mike.

Yes that's true they were generally pretty reliable, but I had many many visits after lightning storms when I suported a Bromcom system, as we had quite a few RTU units in outside mobile classrooms, and the wires strung overhead to connect them up made brillient conductors for static in the air.

We only have the origenal OEM licesnes as well, but I used a windows key discovery program to discover the Dell Volume key that is used when dell pre-install XP onto a machine when it's new, and used this in my sysprep.inf file. I know this isn't completely the right thing to do, but seeing as Dell use it when they distribute the machines to us, I don't see any harm as the machines are all Dell. Mike.

Might be worth contacting Bromcom, as I think they buy back old equipment as spare parts to support schools that still use that system. I know they used to do that with the Bromcom Pads, they may well do it for the RTUs as well as I'm guessing they don't make them any more, but I bet there are some schools out there that still use the old Bromcom system. You won't get a lot, but anything is better than nothing! Mike.

We brought some of these at my last school Video Recording and Transfer Software - Dazzle DVD Recorder They worked well, and I seem to remember you could get a live view using VLC player as they are Directshow compatible (file . . . open capture device.) and they only cost about £30 each. The beauty is as they are USB you can use them on laptops etc. Mike.

Now that's a neat solution if it works, going to have a play tomorrow as that would solve a lot of problems I think!