Achandler

I think the script I have works, as it worked on most users, the ones it didn't work on I suspect is because they don't have a personal onedrive yet (basically they haven't clicked on OneDrive, so I need to find a way to force the creation of them for everyone

Which of the two servers is the first DNS server? I would do an nslookup on both the T110 and the virtuals erver, make sure they both connect fine outside and can lookup websites. I reckon the DNS is failing on the T110, and it is also the first server that clients are using to resolve the web sites. It is failing to do it but is trying hence no Internet, if it was off then they woudl use the 2nd DNS server and there isn't an issue.

ID Mobile is run by Carphone Warehouse and is on Three (but usually cheaper). They are new to the game though, been fine for me though (3 months in), personaly I find 3's coverage lacking comapred to EE (was on it through Virgin) though. A lot of Virtual Network don't offer 4G so read the small print, Virgin for example don't or do Life and The People's Network when I checked.

I think its more the principle of you must be an academy by 2020 that the government is pursuing. So as oppose to being given the choice as inevitably Good and Outstanding schools that aren't academies right now are clearly providing the level of teaching required, but they might not want to become an academy.

The real question is, if an LA has Good and Outstanding schools under its control as such (although it reality LAs don't actually control schools), forcing them to be no longer part of the LA for no other reason except political ones is of no benefit. You can go from an LA with full control of your own school to being forced into a MAT sticking its fingers in more, when in reality each school is different. Even centralised purchasing has limited benefits, bulk buy might get more equipment cheaper, I wouldn't dispute that. But I go round other schools and see their equipment and think, that wouldn't last 2 minutes where I work. We have to buy often more expensive but tougher equipment, so centralised purchsing either gives us inadequate equipment or costs everyone else more. Similar types of schools in a MAT I'm sure work great, I'm also sure secondaries and local feeder primaries is also a good combination. But I often see MATs that consist of "Outstanding" schools that have selective entry, pupils who work harder and virtually no pupil premium or FSM children, that then sponsor a school which is made up of over 50% students who are EAL, most of pupil premium and a lot are completely disengaged from the education system, with no support for schooling from home. Even years later, the exact same situation exists because it isn't necessarily the school that is the issue, its the intake they get. It's happening already, I've seen schools join MATs and get worse (whether or not its MAT related who knows). I'm also fed up of politicians telling the public that all students need to be in schools that are better the average! Its an impossible task, every school can't be better then average, maybe the polictians need to go back to schools to learn what average actually is.

Same tills as us then, except a lot of our tills seem to be stuck together with duct tape now. To be honest the software itself seems clunky and old as well, so not sure how much better new tills would even be. We need to have wifi on one of ours tills to, which adds to the fun and games. Apparently when Cunninghams installed the network cables (2 of them) they didn't do them properly and they simpyl don't work, so much so thast they gave up and put wifi dongles in them.

What PoS devices are you running? We need to upgrade our tills here they are currently rather old and falling to pieces but ofcourse cunninghams want an absurd amount of money per till and then an installation cost!

If you swap to Kerberos you can can deploy the Smoothwall Cert easily with a mac server.

You can set Smoothwall to redirect certain sites. I can't remember where though or how. Personally I would use internal DNS to redirect it though as it simple the better option.

Ignoring the obvious bias of the article (its done by a company charging people to move to the cloud). Please note the above school is a independent Primary School, and not a secondary which it never states in the article. They still use on-site servers to play DVDs.... assuming there connection isn't good enough to stream them. The cost saving are also dubious, and re-using the server room for teaching and learning (despite still having servers on site) as a benefit seems a little far fetched in most schools.

I look at houses quite practically, Are its walls structurally good? Is the roof good? If both are fine then you can buy it and do everything else later. In your case you have a few issues with the wall, so get a builder to come and take a look and get a proper price for the work, get a roofer to look at the roof if you want too. Sellers don't mind you getting someone to look at the work that might need doing because it shows your intent to actually buy the house as well. If you just go to a seller and say we want 5k more off with no facts except a surveyor syaing it "might" cost this much then you are only going to annoy them.

I think they are all sold as P3000 but you get different versions of it. The drives, I guess it depends on the versions of the machines, ours here are LFF, and you can buy both SANs in both SFF and LFF I believe. Also turns out we bought the P4500G2 in the end not P3000, apologies. The P4000 when you google it is again a range, where there is lots of versions as always with HP. Personally, it depends where you are looking to go in the future, onsite storage offsite cloud storage etc. Don't get me wrong I like the SAN we have, it seems quicker then the old P2000 I have used, and it is split in two locations which is a massive help should you ever need to do maintenance to the SAN itself or the power has to be turned off in areas of the school. It also helps with disaster planning etc. With that said, splitting a SAN means you proably need to run fibre if your putting it in two locations in a school and you have to consider if its over the top for the school requirements. I am currently looking at the possibility of creating a hybrid file server with OneDrive (waiting to see what MS do), and if successful we might move more to better leased lines and away from onsite file servers for, reducing the onsite footprint of servers so making the SAN less necessary. Not fully sure personally, that I would be wanting to spend probably £15k-£20k (list prices) on a new SAN setup unless i knew I would need it for 5 years+ guaranteed.

You'll be fine with that few items, I use to run one with about 500 BYOD on it, not all being used always obviously. There are places with 1000+ devices on them. I do also know of a school though that had 1 to 1 devices (Apple) and had to replace Unifi because it wasn't up to it.

I know it doesn't help you, and I ahve used a P2000 in the past and know they are a nightmare to update. We have a P3500 here and it is easy to update, we can jsut use the controller software and tell it to update, live in the middle of the day, its not fussed, it does each half of the SAN one by one. Rebooting it all etc, however, they are much more expensive!

Two DCs on Two Virtual hosts wouldn't be all the eggs in one basket though, its two DCs on different servers. It also has no effect on licensing if the hosts are licensed as Datacentre.

If you not using shared storage or a cluster then personally I would have two DCs stored locally on two Virtual Hosts, purely on the basis that if one host died then the other still has a DC. HyperV as a cluster needs a domain to work as far as I am aware, so if you have a cluster or shared storage then again, I would have two DCs either both stored and installed under the local admin on two different hosts, or one physical DC. Thats totally up to you. This option stil requires backups but is better for redundancy. With backups, personally I do it two way, one with an offsite Data Protection manager box which is probably not needed for you, and secondly I do the old fashioned Windows backup dump to an offsite server just in case. Then I could rebuild the whole domain in theory from my offsite server.

A server doesn't cost £1500 a year to run, so if every service cost £1500 then your saying Schools pay yearly £45k on servers (including power et al) Ignoring that fact though more moving to the cloud also costs extras with regards to Internet connections which cloud providers never mention in their "costs". Especially if an MIS is so improtant you have backup lines. Then moving on to all MIS providers, the amoutn of botched updates that come regularly from MIS providers is shocking. Yet these same providers who can't make the updates decent to start with want us to let them install the updates and maintain the software, its like you are becoming the guinea pig for updates and paying for the privilege! It annoys me anough that some updates from providers are only the 3rd or 4th revision after they have only been out a month! That's a little off-topic though.

Jumping the gun, maybe a little it might depend when your current agreement runs out ofcourse. People may have two years to "go live" with a Linux backend, which we all know really means 2 summers and 2 Easter (if your school allows downtime then). If the Linux backend works fine for students, such as file server etc, then you could reduce your CAL requirements massively to only Office staff or not even Office staff depending on your MIS requirements. You can easily move from linux backend to the cloud too, so planning to tackle the costs through a Linux backend is probably a good idea. Then when Microsoft finally give more detail on their plans you are already ready either way.

I did joke that a 2nd leased line is more then my current MS bill anyway. So even if they made everything ont he cloud for free I would be losing out.

Although I agree that Office365 may be a way forward, MS will be pushing it and you can use Office 2016 etc if you have an Office 365 subscription, you can move home drives to OneDrive etc (we were planning too). I am willing to embrace moving in this direction more, however to do that you need to know Office365 costs from 2018 onwards, it is free now as part of the MoU. If it is going to be no longer free, then you need to know if you are working with paying a subscription based on FTE or on students access because thats a massive difference. Again you need to know the costs involved, for example, Business Premier is £90 a year currently. Based on FTE thats workable, based on Students and its ridiculous, but MS aren't able to tell us long term plans there either, which is where the issue is.

Slightly off topic I know but the way the new MoU reads thoguh does imply that from 2018 there will be a cost for Office 365 though which if you look at the current per user costs offered is a worryingly high cost.

Go to reporting, then Custom. Fill int eh anme and all that a stuff. Under sections choose User Activity, then on the "User Activity" section, on the Options, I have Display top "20", Unit "Hits", Category (whichever you want). For group I use everybody (I don't limit to students). Then on Advanced choose DENIED and DENIED POST

I have 4 reports (Weapons, Terrorism, Violence and Pronography) a week sent, with Users with "Top Hits" for certain categories. They are emailed me on a Friday afternoon and I deal with issues from there. So far the only category that gets hits is Pornography which is in 99% of ases so far false positives, from innocent images being blocked in image searches. Haven't had anyone getting hits on the other categories yet... I do like the idea of a seperate block page for PREVENT categories though, I might look into that!

As stated earlier the piece fo software I intend to look at syncs from your file server to OneDrive (in theory, i haven't tested it yet) and as such in school people would be able to use the local file server but at home they could access files still. I'm going to give the software a trial run in Feb half term.

We got round it by teaching the teachers how to use extended desktops! Emphasizing the advantages of being able to do work on one screen while the students see something else without having to use freeze on the projector! We also showed them how to turnt he displays as cloned instead, using the Windows Key + P technique. if they have both choices then they can manage by themselves.