steveg

I just brought what was cheap at the time! For one server we have a set of 500gb disks, and the other uses 250's. If I was buying some now i'd probably get some 1tb ones, something like Seagate 1TB External Hard Drive Hi Speed USB - Retail Expansion Piano Black - Ebuyer I found that these often dont work out vastly more expensive than large cpacity tapes, and you don't have to pay for the drive. If you're only backing up 200 gig, then you could fit 2 or 3 backups on each disk, which would allow you to retain data for a bit longer which is always useful. Steve

How much data have you got to backup? We use external usb hdd's and 2003's built in backup program and find it works really well, just have a set of hard disks, and swap them each day. Steve

We use an old pc with a capture card in it and running zoneminder for our birdbox camera. We also use this on another box to run our underwater pond camera, and night cameras in the nature area. For what you want to do with the one camera, it looks like this might be what you are after ACTi ACD-2100 One-channel video server ¦ use-IP Ltd I've never used it before, am only going by what i've read on the descrition! Steve

Your solution is the proper solution - they should all have the same ssid and security settings, but different channels. Ideally you'd like a nice managed system, whereby you just change it on the main controller and it takes care of the rest of it, but with what you've got what you have suggested is the best solution. Steve

I've been playing about with my one of these for a few days now, and have to say overall I'm pretty impressed. I used it to replace the 4-gang on my pc that powers my pc, speakers and 2 monitors. When everything was switched off before, it was still using 41watts. With the device attached this drops to 7watts once it has switched off. (a little disapointed it uses this much still, but there is a definate saving!) Doing some maths on this, I only use my pc for aprox 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 47 weeks a year, so thats 6880 hours a year thats its not used. This device saves 34 watts, so thats 234kwh a year its saving, or aprox £23. (so its paid for itself in less than a year) As for the device itself, it looks similar to a normal 4gang, but is slightly larger, and slopes the sockets forwards. As well as the normal power cable, there is another lead with a switch which is used to wake it up again once it powers down. It switches everything off automatically about 30 seconds after you shut the pc down. I personally can't see these working well in a IT suite type enviroment - the extra on button will be confusing, and will get broken pretty quickly. - and trying to wire up 30 extra 4-gangs is not going to work. These are best suited for use in admin areas, where there are often quite a few 4-gangs already, and you're likely to get some savings. I will be trying this out on a few other pc's over the next few weeks, and once the bursar is back we may look into ordering a few to extend the trial. Steve

We pay aprox £7.5k per year for 2mbit. We're a primary school. Stupid price if you ask me, but we have no choice, if we opt out they keep all but about £2k of the money anyway. Steve

Robocopy just works slightly differently to say xcopy, you specify the source folder, then destination, then file type(s). Using xcopy you'd specify source folder and file(s), and then the destination folder. Steve

Yea, it is. Google the title of either of those 2 problems, then click the link on google, scroll down to the bottom and you'll see the solution. Steve

Argos has windows 7 home premium for £49.99 delivered, which seems pretty reasonable to me. Not sure about the best place to get a pro version. Steve

I think the main reason for not using copper between buildings even over short distances is if each building has a different earth connection, there is a potential voltage difference between the 2 earths, so the network cable could carry this voltage. (pretty unlikely though) Steve

What about the hitachi CP-X5? 1.3 - 1.5:1 throw ratio, and 274 x 59 x 205 dimensions. Would you squeeze the extra 3mm in? Steve

I've got a three one on contract (£5 / month as I already had a three phone) and i've found it to work pretty well. (I am connected using it now!) It seems that they are all pretty similar, so probably best to just go for whatever one has the best coverage in your area and is the cheapest. Steve

Although surely power cables are going to have to be run to these islands, assuming they dont already exist? Personally I would be worried about doing it all over wireless - yes you can get 30 clients to work, but not with a cheap wireless setup. If you're going to spend the money on a good wireless system, you might as well spend it on hard wiring. Even if it's as mentioned above just 1 cable per desk, and then a cheap switch for each. You can get an 8 port unmanaged gigabit switch for under £30 now, so that would give you over 100mbit bandwidth per pc, as opposed to less than 1 with a wireless setup. Steve

We use netgear WG302's for small wireless deployments and they cope fine with trolleys of 16 laptops. Just make sure its on a different channel to all your other access points if your going to be moving it around the school with the trolley. Not sure where in the country you are, but i'm pretty sure i've got a couple of spare ones in the office if you wanted to try one out before you get one. Steve.

I haven't used the specific kit your looking at, but we've got a 5406zl with a zl wireless conroller and 12 access points and it works very well supporting over 120 wireless clients. One thing to check with that controller is how many access points it has licences for - I know ours will support up to 200 odd, but is only licenced for 12 to start with, and they are quite expensive to add extras. Steve

We use class logons for years R, 1 and 2, and then they have thier own username and password from year 3 onwards - which is first name and first 2 letters of surname. Passwords are 4 or more characters long. We dont let any pupils change thier own passwords, and issue a list of usernames and passwords to staff. Steve

I'm pretty sure its a proview one that misco are selling for a few pence more than that (rebraned as Misco value) Misco will want to charge you over £18 shipping on that many though! Steve

Misco have got some 15" tft's @ just over £43 at the moment, or if the budget will stretch, 19" widescreens @ just over £60. We got our last big lot of monitors from them when we got rid of the last of our CRT's. Steve

Thanks for that, the Yawcam software looks pretty good, I might even get away with an old laptop and a reasonable quality usb webcam mounted in a box to do what I want! Steve

According to the Xibo site, the client will only pull the content from the server once, and then check for updates at set times. So if you only update the content once a day, thats only 200mb a day, which is nothing really. Steve

Why not have a central location for the powerpoint file on the server, and a simple batch file to copy this to each pc. You can run software on the pc's so they automatically play the lastest powerpoint file. It might also be worth having a look at xibo, i've only dabbled with it, but it looks realy good and should be a bit more powerful than powerpoint for this soft of thing. Steve

Ok thanks, yea we already use ghostcast server, and are moving to wds so I wanted to seperate it off. Our ip phones also use the same dhcp option to download their config files, so really didn't want a third thing on the same network! Steve

Thanks for the advice, has cleared a lot of it up. It will only be accessed internally (we have a seperate Terminal server for external) so that makes licencing a bit simpler. I've had a play with thinstation, and will probably run this on the clients. My current idea (do tell me if this is a bad one!) is to vlan off all the thin clients. Then on this vlan have a DHCP server, that will also have all the necessary bits on to network boot the clients, so I can remove thier hard drives. The terminal server will then have 2 network cards, one in this new vlan, and one on the main network. - Clients will then connect via one, and the server will access the network via the other. In reality the DHCP server and TS will all be on the same box, so probably best to run both as Virtual servers? I have a server 2008 enterprise licence availible for this box. Steve

Starting in october we have major building works going on at the school, and it has been proposed that we setup a webcam to allow people to watch the progress, in a number of ways. We want it to: Take a picture every 5 minutes all day every day, and store these so we can make a short film at the end showing the whole construction process. Allow a live view from the classrooms, so local network only. Not essential, but ideally we'd like it to also upload via ftp a new picture every from minutes to our website, however it must only do this during certain times - i.e when there are no children around. If this isn't possible we'll just upload one manually every few days. The camera is going to be located outside and, as usual we haven't been given a budget for this, so it has to be as cheap as possible! Any ideas? Thanks Steve

We normally go hp procurve if the budget is there or if its a big deployment, and Netgear if the budget is tight. Can get some pretty good education discounts on the hp kit. If forced to choose between 3com and dell i'd go 3com. Steve