steveg

I have a project coming up with effectively 2 schools in one building, does anyone know if it is possible to install 2 fms (and sims) databases on 1 server, and if this is supported? I assume I'll just install 2 different named instances of SQL server, but not sure if this is supported by Capita? Has anyone done this before? Thanks Steve

Are you sure there is not interference or another problem with your existing network? 30 lots of 3mb doesnt sound like a lot to me, even when you factor in all the other data transfered during a logon. Whilst we don't have roaming profiles here, we do happily hang 30 netbooks off of one netgear ap on a managed system, and all access files off the network, go on the internet and print with very few problems. I know the netgear kit wont scale brilliantly, and the stuff like Ruckus is in a different league (got it at 2 schools) but you should be getting better performance from the netgear ap's than you currently are. Where I have the netear kit is only a small village primary School, but it copes with the 80 netbooks they have accross 6 classrooms. Steve

50/125 was invented in the 70's and started being commonly used in the 90's so that may not help. Steve

Most cables should have it written on it, if not might be worth looking up the spec of the exisiting media convertor, - it may only work with one type of cable, so you can fairly safely assume thats the type of cable being used. Steve

The campsite is here Brecon, Powys, UK to Unknown road - Google Maps If you look at the satellite images you'll see there is a car park there, you then carry on through the car park and onto the stony road, and will normally see people camping all along that road. We've never booked before, always just turn up, and the owner comes round most mornings and collects money. Couldnt tell you how much it is these days, haven't been there in a few years, since I had kids! The roads to get there start off quite small, then get a bit smaller, and finally you end up driving down a stony path and through a river. All good fun though! Steve

How many facilities do you want from a camp site? Where we normally stay is near brecon, but the only facilities it has is the stream that runs through it! (The nearest toilet is about 3 miles away) Always a good laugh though, u can have fires, get very drunk and not disturb anyone! Last time we went (about 3 years ago) it was about £3 a night. Steve

I wouldn't use acer projectors again if you paid me! We've had 6 of their short throw dlp projectors for 2 years, and there hasn't been a day in the last 18 months where we've had them all working. Some have been back over 6 times, they often get sent back to us still faulty of break again within a week. Of the 6 we've now been given a refund on 3 of them because they can no longer repair them. Our av supplier has no luck with dealing with them, and have now stopped selling acer projectors. Even out usual IT supplier finds it hard to get hold of someone at acer even if they're trying to buy 50k worth of kit from them! We have a lot of acer laptops and generally have found their support for these to be ok, we just won't touch any of their av products again. Steve

Is anyone else doing something for Red Nose Day? Three of us from the IT team here are having a leg waxed, in the staff room at lunch time! Seemed like a good idea when we suggested it! Steve

Have you tried a different router with sky? Some of the ones they use are useless. When I first went to sky I would get aprox 4meg and would drop at least twice a day, used my own (quite expensive) router and I got a very solid 8meg connection, that actually ran at 8meg on multiple tests. - My parents who lived a few hundred yards away only got between 4 and 6 with both BT, and now talk talk. Steve

The extra expenditure really depends on the school. If you have a very tight budget, and have other priorities then go for something cheaper than ruckus - no point putting a great wireless system in running of 100mb hubs and an old server at the back end. Equally if the school is planning to have 1 laptop per child in the near future, something like ruckus (or some of the other bigger setups, I haven't used them, but there are alternatives that are as good) is definately worth the investment. Cost wise, for a 12 ap setup, inclduing controller, the netgear kit i mentioned is around £1400 including the controller, but will never support more than 16 ap's. Their top end controller that can be stacked is around £1400 on its own, but you can have up to 3 working together. Ap's are around £80 - £100. For a 12 ap ruckus install a very ball park figure is £7000. This will include a maintenance contract, so you do have additional support available, although so far I haven't needed support for either setup. Individual access points are not necessarily difficult to manage, its just more time consuming. If you only need 3 or 4 to cover the school then its pretty strait forward to look after them, when you get beyond 10 or so, it gets a little more tricky, especially if you ever want to change something on all of them. Typically you would use the same ssid on all access points. With managed systems you can easily have multiple ssid's on different vlans, for example a guest ssid that has limit accesss, perhaps only to the internet. With individual access points they would need to be on different channels, for a 11G based network you only have 3 different channels that dont overlap - 1,6 and 11 so you need to plan you ap deployments more carefully. The managed netgear solution lets you upload a map of your school and ap locations, and will then work out the best channels for you. Ruckus kit works in a slightly different way, and certainly from my experience you don't have to worry about channels at all. Steve

We use ruckus and netgear solutions for all the schools we support. If you can afford it, the ruckus kit is great, I haven't really touched ours since the day it went in, and it happily has 100 wireless clients running of it with no worries. For schools on a tighter budget we use netgear kit. A lot of schools have the wg102 ap's in, with no controller and these have worked very well, gets a little tricky to manage if you have a huge number of ap's, but they happily support 20 odd clients each. These can be flash upgraded to work with a WFS709TP controller at any point in the future - we have one of these in a small school which has 75 wireless clients with no problems. If you never want to have more than 16 ap's, then the WMS5316 controller and WNAP210 ap's look to be a good solution - this was recomended to one of my tech's by a netgear rep this afternoon, we haven't yet deployed one of these, but will be shortly. Hope this helps Steve

Comms express do custom made pre terminated fibre - we've used them before for this sort of thing, have a look here Custom Multimode Preterminated Fibre Cable - should be about £180 for 80m of 4 core. you do need a good sized hole into the building though, as the end comes in a protective case for when you pull it. Also need to protect the exposed fibres after you install. Then i'd put in one of these at each end - NETGEAR ProSafe 24 Port Gigabit Smart Switch - Misco.co.uk 24 port gig switch and comes with a free gig fiber module! Total cost is about £480. Steve

Stock up on toner, paper, blank cd's etc etc, could probably easily spend at least half of it on that - will then free up some of your budget next year when you may need something. Steve

We've been buying a lot of the hp 620 and 625's from Misco recently, their cheapest one is £262 at the moment for a dual core athlon with 2gig of ram and windows 7 pro, so probably cheaper than the ebuyer one after you add an os licence to that one. Steve

I think the rate per day is fair enough, but 4 days seems a bit excessive to me? Guess it depends just how much stuff you've got on there. We normally charge for 2 days when we do this, quickest we've completed it start to finish was 7 hours, longest took around 3 weeks! (Discovered there were major problems with the domain that meant it wouldnt replicate to another server, only discovered it when we installed the second server! What you've been quoted certainly isnt excessive, but equally isnt the cheapest ever. Make sure u get a very clear list of what they are going to do, and any support you will get if things arent quite right afterwards. With servers that have been doing thier job for 4 or 5 years its very easy to overlook something it does that no one has touched in years! Steve

They need change permissions on the share as well. Steve

I'd be cautious about using robocopy for backups, as i'm fairly certain it wont copy any files that someone has left open, unlike backup software which normally can. Steve

I think it blocks based on url, but gets its list live from BT somewhere. Its never going to be as good as a proper proxy based solution, but it never let anything bad through in the couple of years we used it. - very young users though, so no one determined to bypass it! Steve

The BT router we got with a BT business broadband connection supports exactly this. It lets you set the default filtering that any new pc gets (groups like children, young teens etc, or you can make your own groups from their filtering lists) as well as specific filtering lists for pc's once they are connected. The blocking page gives the option for someone with the password to override it for a set ammount of time. We used this very successfully at a nursery for 2 years until we managed to link them to our main site with a wifi link. Steve

We use a phone system here made by epygi, it was very cheap for what it does and has been very reliable. Took about half a day to get my head round setting it up, but it works very well now. We use it for external calls but could be used for just internal only. On the client side we use SNOM 300 handsets, they are pretty cheap, are POE and have an extra network socket on the back for a pc to plug into so you dont need extra sockets. Now its setup its just a case of plug the phone in, it boots and downloads its config from the system and sets itself up. We also have 3 voip wifi phones which work brilliantly, even roaming between access points. Steve

So next time we find a teachers laptop with an illegally installed piece of software that they have installed do we: A. Remove said piece of software and advise them that this is not allowed. or B. Do nothing and wait for them to be caught with the software on their laptop and prosecuted for it? Steve

I went from a G1 to a desire z about a month ago, took a little getting used to because the keyboard layout is very different (numbers are alt functions on top row of letters now, not thier own keys) but once I got used to it its fine. The phone sorts pretty much all of the problems with the g1 - like a flash for the camera now, and is very very quick. Only thing i'm not sure on is the keyboard slip mechanism, and if its going to last! Steve

Its a laserjet 4600n. I've attached another pic looking the other way, the office has got a bit messier since the first one was taken. Slightly wierd looking walls because of the panoramic pic, but you get the idea! Steve

Its an hp colour laserjet of some description, haven't had a chance to have a look at it yet! Hard hats are because we get involved in some projects quite early on with IT design work, so end up going on building sites occasionally. There is a big window, photo was taken standing in front of it - will do another one looking the other way tommorow. Steve

Have been moved in a while now, but only just had time to sort out a picture and get it uploaded. This is our new office, currently has 5 of us working in it, its definately a lot better than the old boiler room we used to have (which was a lot better than the bit of corridor we had before!) Steve