maniac

You could get round this by putting a manual entry into your DNS so it resolves the IP against whatever name you want, i think this should work. I fooled traffic on our network that was directed at our school website to divert to an internal server by putting a manual entry in my DNS server, worked like a charm! Mike.

Version 6 because it's much more lightweight than the newer versions, and works fine for us! Mike.

I think HP servers come with a Diagnostics disc, but I'm not sure about their Desktops/Laptops. I use something like Main Page - SystemRescueCd to run diagnostic checks, works well on most PCs. Mike.

I pay £47 a month to Virgin, that's for their Top TV package with 2 set top boxes, basic phone line and 10mb internet. Sounds like you're paying way over the odds for your sevices from them, ring them up and negotiate as they can move on their prices. Mike.

I think 'YearOfEntry,Surname,Firstname' is easier for this school, as I bet no students know their admission number, and getting this information out to all students at the beginning of next year would be difficult without annoying the staff too much, and as I've only been here 2 weeks, I don't want to start annoying them quite yet! I also know students will forget it too easily as well. I don't think the change I want to make is going to go down well anyway, as apparently they've been doing it the same way for years so staff are accustomed to the way things are so the smaller the change is, the better really. Good suggestion thou. Thanks for the options that people have suggested, ADmodify looks like it might just do the job, but anyone know if it will mess up CC3? I know I'm going to have to re-create all the profiles in their new names, and do a lot of messing around with home areas, but will CC3 complain about the username changing? I'm just aboout to try it anyway. Cheers, Mike.

LTO3 all the way, it's exceptionally reliable for a tape system. We had the quantum LTO3 tape changer at my last school, although we only had one tape carousel for it, so it only held 8 tapes which was more than enough. It makes some strange noises when it works, but does the job well; 2 years of operation and not a single hardware fault! Mike.

Morning all, The current school I work in has it's user names setup using a yeargroup prefix, i.e Year7 is 07, Year8 is 08, year9 is 09 etc. They have been renaming the accounts every year I want to standardise this to the more commonly used year of entry prefix that I think most schools use, (all the ones I've worked in anyway) Is there anyway of doing this in bulk through RM CC3 or Active directory, or is it really a case of renaming each account seperately? If I were to do this in active directory, would RM CC3 pick up on the change, or does any account modification have to be done in CC3 its self? Many thanks, Mike.

It's worth noting you can quite happily connect 4 speakers to a 2 channel amp, as long as the resistance of the speakers falls within the range for the amplifier. e.g if the amplifier is designed to work at 8ohms, you can connect 2 suitably rated 16ohm speakers in parallel to each channel which will give an 8ohm load to the amplifier and work absolutely fine with no damage to the speakers or amplifier. You can also connect 2 4ohm speakers in series, but you tend to suffer a loss in power output with speakers in series. This is a good guide, and explains all the technicalities to do with power amplifiers, including all about resistances! Power Amplifier: Buying Guide Mike

That sounds familure. . . . . The school my dad taught at had the bright idea to employ a local firm to write some software to do assesment and grading in the early 1990's (before SIMS was capeable of these functions) The program ran in DOS, and the school made a hefty investment in laptop computers (which were serious money at the time) to enable staff to use the system. Needless to say the system was a total failure, not least of all because it relied on the data input on the laptops to be uploaded via disc into the 'mainframe' machine which did all the work. Data got lost, grades got entered wrongly as there was no validation routine, and the whole fiasco caused more problems than it solved. They scapped it all after 1 term, after spending who knows how much on the project. The laptops that were brought; Compaq and IBM 286 and 386 laptops which were very expensive at the time, were still in the ICT office when I started work at the same school over 10 years later, untouched and un-used since the day the project was retired! Mike.

Win98 errr. . . . . ok congrats on job Mike.

Good viral marketing campaign too . . . .

I think it's an opportunity that works both ways; it lets the employer meet potential candidates before an interview, and it also lets you talk to your potential employers and decide if an interview is worth it from your point of view. Of course it can and probably will have an influence on whether you get selected for interview, but if you're the right person for the job anyway then it should be a positive influence. And contory to popular opinion, first impressions don't always count, I was 15mins late and managed to drop a cup of coffee before I'd even been asked a question at an interview, and I still got the job! Mike.

Well I've worked with a different manufacturers education system (Viglen) A vanilla network with ranger on. A vanilla network built by myself and my old network manager in 2006, and now in my new post an RM CC3 Network. The System from viglen was good, as AD remained pretty un-molested, and the web management interface was good. It also utlilised ghost for duplicating workstations, and was very reliable; mind you we only had 60 workstations. It was not an outstanding product, but it was functional. The Network with ranger on it was very slow, but this was in the main due to major fiddling by previous network managers, and a bad installation, totally in-adequate for the size of the school. Ranger its self was a good product, although it slowed logins down, and at the time didn't support mandatory policies properly I seem to recall. This network was re-built by us in August 2006 to a vanilla 2003 based network with a few add ons, many custom scripts and Net Support etc. it still runs to this day in my old school very reliably, and I'm quite proud to be associated with the development of it. The CC3 network I've just inherited is a bit different to what I'm used to, but having worked with it 2 weeks, I can see the good and bad points. It's certainly easier to do certain things once you work out the RM way of doing things, no need to mess with scripts and GPO's as RM does it all for you. That way you know you can make that change without accidently messing up your network - mind you note the viglen classlink system could also do all that, so it's not unique. RM support seems to be a lot better than I was expecting, they are very patient even when asked the simplest of questions (like how do you map a network drive for staff. . . well I didn't know!!) Their support contracts are a tad expensive, but when you break them down into their componants, they're not as bad as they seem, like £500 a year for server SW support, that's only about £10 a week, which isn't too bad if you think of it like an insurance policy for your network. When you do get serious problems, they do respond quickly, our main DC was recently replaced just before I started, and it was covered by the support contracts so I don't think it cost the school a penny (except for the cost of the new hardware as the old server was beyond repair) but the labour was all part of the contract. However, if we were to have the oppotunity to re-build the network we would probably go with a vanilla network with a few purchased management tools to enhance it. Why? Well mainly because the things they want to do with ICT in this school really need to be out of the contraints of RM, so we are basically now outside the catchment audience for their product. Also I know myself and the technicians here have the skills to setup and maintain a reliable vanilla system, and with the proper documentation produced anyone should be able to take the network over in years to come and not have any hidden surprises. As has already been said, it's all about whether the RM solution fits your school, and not really about how good the product is, because the product on it's own is very good. It's when you're outside the limits of that product where it becomes a problem, and most of the complaints you'll see are along the lines of 'it won't let me do this, or it won't let me do that' Well that's because it wasn't designed to do that, so schools saying that should have picked a different avenue. Mike.

You might get away with just 6 drives, i.e 3 pairs each in RAID1. 1 Pair for the system, 1 Pair for the Database and 1 Pair for the Logs. Because you can now buy drives in such large capacities, quite often RAID1 with 2 drives will do the job. I'm not sure what the performance of RAID1 compared to RAID5 is, but I don't think there's much in it. The exchange server at my last place was set up so we had 2 drives in RAID1 for the system, and 4 Drives in RAID5 for the database and logs, which was partitioned into 2 logical disks. Not ideal, but it was the only way on that server we could get the size of partition we needed for our database. I'm not sure how the exchange server is set up at my current job, not got that far yet! Mike.

That's what we're doing at the moment, which is what I meant by RM build tools in the post above! Still getting used to their terminology, so many things on the RM system seem very odd compared to what I'm used to working with. Mike.

I wonder if it's the same trick someone was using on our exchange server. What they were doing is sending messages to accounts on our system that doesn't exist, so it then bounces the message from our exchange server. The trick is the message has modified headers, so the message bounces to a different address from which is was sent, with the origenal message attached, so they are effectively using your server to spam people by exploiting the default 'not delivered' policy in exchange. There is a way of changing this so it doesn't attach the origenal messgae, just merely sends a cannot be delivered message, which makes it useless for the spammers, so they'll move onto someone else. There is a good guide on exchange servers and spam problems here Exchange - NDR and Open Relay Spam Clean Up | Amset.info Mike.

Thanks (I think!) Looks like we've got a busy summer ahead of us, only been using CC3 for 2 weeks and I'm already disliking it. Most of the machines we need to rebuild can't even be built with the proper RM build disks, as the correct drivers arn't loaded into it apparently, so they're currently being imaged with a basic build using Partimage, then being added to RM with the RM build tools manually. I really need some training on RM, but don't have the time to fit it in before we need this completed! Ah well, at least this will only need doing on this scale once! Also, when re rebuild them with a different name, will the RM software realise they are the same physical machine, or will we end up with loads of redundant machine accounts in the system somewhere?? Mike.

We have a lot of laptops in the school I've just started in, all on RM CC3. They are due to be moved into different departments this august, and really need re-naming as the naming convention is the department name, then a machine number for ease of identifying the machines. I've been led to believe the only way of renaming a CC3 workstation is to re-build it from scratch, which is going to take a long time when we're talking about 300 or so laptops, so is this the only way, or can the machine simply be renamed in the conventional way without screwing up CC3?? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I'm *very* new to CC3, so I'm not sure what it will and won't let me do yet, I'm used to a vanilla 2003 network. I was going to just try renaming one, but ther might be other reasons why I shouldn't do it that may not show up straight away, as I know CC3 can be tempermental, so I thought I'd ask the experts! Many thanks, Mike.

You don't get any management tools with them. The HP 1 series of server are aimed at data centre type places I think, hence the reason they are 1U to use less space, and have PXE boot turned on by default as most large organisations have automated deployment of servers which will load the OS, and make it part of their organisation totally automatically so they can deploy on mass, you can imagine places buying these in bulk, installing them in their racks and just switching them on; they don't even come with a CD-ROM drive as standard which is what leads me to this concluesion. However as most of the componants are from other manufacturers, you can quite often find tools that will work, e.g I found the network card utility from Broadcom that allowed me to team the network cards in a simelar way to the HP utility on the DL380.

AS I see it, it should be fairly simple. First step, install Operating system and add to domain as a member server, ensure it is fully patched to the same level as previous server. Second step, install exchange from origenal media, and ensure it is working 100% properly. Set up a test mailbox and ensure it is sending and receiving properly, you now have a functioning exchange server. The installation of exchange will sort out the extended schema for AD, although this should already be in place as your AD schema will be stored on your other DCs. Setup your mailbox store etc. You should now be able to restore all your mailboxes and mail back into the mailbox store, and hopefully with any luck the associations within AD should still be there and it should work! If you find they don't, you may have to re-associate each mailbox with their relevant AD account, which might have to be done manually, but with anyluck if the new exchange server has the same credentials as the old one, it should work without having to do this. There's a a basic guide on backup and restore of exchange using NT backup on the the msexchange help site, the basics should be the same whatever backup software you're using. Exchange 2003 Backup and Restore with NTBACKUP Mike.

Thanks for that, Interesting article it is too. I'm going to be really interested to see the outcome, probably like many of you on here, as *if* they managed to get their hands on the cash without having to subscribe to the managed service, I think that will open up the possibilities for a lot of other schools in their position, or soon to be in their position. I hope someone manages to keep us posted on developments. Mike.

Is it just me, or is their site down at the moment, wanted to read that article! Anyone got a copy of it, or is it too long to post?? Mike. EDIT: Don't worry, it seems to have come back!

Nice one, always good to know those hours planning disaster recovery are worth it. Make sure a full report is filed with your SLT as unless they are told, they probably won't have a clue that it's all down to your hard work the school kept running as usual. The school I work at recently had major problems with it's main DC, and as a result I'm told almost a weeks worth of down time, totally un-acceptable in this day and age! This was before I started, so yet another thing on the agenda in the next few months, write and implement disaster recovery policy! Mike.

Not sure about SIMS, but SERCO let you do it with their facility product. We had an upgraded laptop running the full CMIS program, eportal etc on its own local database which we used for testing their upgrades before we rolled it out onto the live system, and it was very useful to have. The only thing you'll need for definite is another license for SQL server, as you'll be running a new instance of it, however I got Serco facility working on SQL Express which is the free cut down version of SQL server, so that might work for SIMS as well if you're lucky! Mike.

I've also had a demonstration and quote for the extricom system, and I thought the quote was very reasonable for the size of our buildings. We had a simelar quote for a traditional wireless network based on high quality AP's which came out significantly more. Unfortunitelty we never went ahead with installation, as the money was re-allocated somewhere else in the end Mike.