steveg

We are doing the same thing at the moment, although on a pretty small scale. We specified that we wanted a system that will work with voip in the future, will suport upto 16 handsets / extensions, and for the moment, work over an isdn 2 line. We also wanted all of our phones to be true ip, as cabling is split over the site, with fibre links between comms cabinets, so physical cable to each phone socket wasn't an option. We've had 4 quotes back, the cheapest being £1460 (self install) up to £5,999 which includes install. The 4 different systems were: Quadro 2xi from Epygi - This is the cheapest, and having read up on it looks to be pretty good. My only concern being after sales support on this device, as they arent exactly well known. Aditional basic phones were only £69. Avaya IP office 500- This is the next cheapest, and having used and installed Avaya kit in the past, i've always been impressed with it. My only issue is feature wise, it doesn't appear to offer much more than the system above, but costs almost £2000 more (does inlcude £500 install) Panasonic KXTDE100 - This was the second most expensive system, and as it was over budget, I haven't researched too much into it. Splicecom Maximiser - This was the most expensive system, and one i'd not heard of before. Again it offered little benefits over the above systems. At the moment its between the Avaya and Epygi system, certainly feature wise there seems very little to seperate any of the above. Let me know if you would like a copy of any of the quotes - all are from companies I have not dealt with before, so can't rate them for their service. Steve

Depends on what else its doing really, and what yours users do. Looks like a good spec server can support about 10,000 though. Microsoft Corporation Steve

Shipping will probably be a tad steep for what it is, but is this what you want? 4-Pin Molex 12Volt/5Volt 100-240V Wall Outlet AC Adapter Steve

Smart trousers, shirt and tie here, for both me and the technicains. Only wear a suit if i'm trying to persuade another school to sign up to our services! School holidays its pretty much wear what you want. Steve

At the main primary school I work at we are about 1:2.5 (doesn't include staff computers) An infant school we support has a ratio of 1 : 2.9 although this will drop after a new suite and laptops go in soon, to about 1 : 1.8 (perhaps a little over the top, as the oldest kids are only 7) Another primary we support has a ratio of 1 : 2.5 which will again drop to about 1:2 after new laptops are in use. One of the new primary schools we took on this April has a ratio of around 1:8, and will take some persuading to get anything new. Steve

We use: Lapsafes - by far the most expensive, but also by far the best quality, and their support has been excellent, - even got a free replacement lock after somone snapped a key off in it. Only ones of theirs i wasnt so impressed with are the ones that use the laptops own charger, as they dont appear to have anywhere to put the charger, so it got a bit messy. Lapbanks - (made my loxit i think) These are pretty good - they are well made, and we haven't had a problem with them in the 2 years we've had them. They are considerably cheaper than lapsafes, and since they use the laptops own chargers, are cheap to change when the laptops change. Home made cupboards - For £300 in parts and a few days work, i made up some individual laptop storage cupboards to hold and charge 40 laptops, with all the chargers behind. Have survived 18 months of abuse from children, and are still fine! Only used for static storage though. Steve

How about getting one of these retractacable.com ? Usb powered 5 port ethernet switch. Steve

The ebuyer value ones I got were shipped as belinea 101728, they look really nice, and include speakers. Very happy with them for £76! Steve

I would have said 1 full time experienced network manager should be able to cope with that size network on their own. At the end of the day it depends what you want from it, if you just want it maintained as is, replacing machines as they get old etc, then what you have should be enough. If you intend to develop ICT, want some innovation, expansion and training, then you will need aditional staff. As in ideal, I would have 1 expereinced network manager, and 1 part time technician. Although slightly different requirements, as I work in the primary sector, we support schools that have 450 pupils, 100 computers, 2 servers and 15 interactive whiteboards, who only pay for 4 hours of technician time a week, 40 weeks of the year, and on the whole this is enough. Steve

I recently ordered 5 "ebuyer extra value" tft monitors for my office, at the grand price of £76 each, should be delivered today so i'll let you know what they are like. Spec wise they look pretty reasonable - they have DVI and vga inputs, and a 3 year warranty. Steve

If you've got a backup device on another server, then you could just use NT backup on the sims server and backup to a file on another server. This would then get copied to tape that night, if scheduled to run before your tape backup job. Could even just use a maintenance task in SQL to make the .bak files from your sql database, and a scheduled xcopy job to copy them to another server? Steve

My old 1992 1.1 fiesta did 45mpg in town driving. cost me £125. Probably because it was so light where large parts had rusted off though :-) Steve

Ebuyer are doing an Hp proliant ML110 dual core xeon 2.3ghz, 1gb ram, 250gb disk and 3 year nbd warranty for £175 at the moment, assuming your not updating thousands of clients i'm sure that should do what you want. Obvoiusly will need a copy of 2k3 installing. Steve

I worked as a part time ICT technician at a local primary school when i was 13, only left at 16 to get a full time job. Started off being employed to do basic printer filling / mouse cleaning etc, but as I was the only tech there, ended up ordering and installing an NT server, and setting up their network before I left. Definately the best way to learn! After 3 years in the private sector, I came back to the same primary School 4 year ago, where i'm now the ICT support manager! One of my technicians at this school I hired part time when he was 15, now he's left college at 18, we've taken him on full time, and he's out supporting a number of other schools. Another of my schools hired someone at 14, and he's still with us a year and a bit later, slowly being given more responsibilities. I would defnately approach a few of the local primary schools and see if you can be of assistance - you'll end up doing all the basic jobs to start with, but should be able to develop over time. From the schools point of view it makes sense paying you a few pound an hour to do all the basic stuff, freeing up their expensive IT tech to do the more complicated stuff. Steve

We were told to make sure we run the solus update directly on the server this time, so it will update dbattach and a few other files on the server. Steve

All we have done for pupil accounts is in our outbound smtp connector properties, selected to reject messages from all of our pupil accounts. To stop them recieveing emails, we set each individual account to accept mail from authenticated users only. This means they can only send and recieve emails to other pupils / teachers. Steve

Roaming profiles could be a problem, although are things still slow once everyone has finished logging on? If you have no B devices around then setting to G only wont make any difference. B runs at 11mbit as opposed to 54mbit for G, if you get 1 B device on the network, everything off that point runs at 11mbit, regardless of if its B or G. Someone on here gave the technical explination for this a little while ago, cant remember what it is now! What model network cards do you have in the laptops? At the moment i'm thinking it may be new access point time! - When we first moved to the netgears, we managed to speak to a local supplier and get them to lend us one for testing before we purchased them, maybe this is something you could try? Steve

At the main site I work at with have used cisco Aironet kit, which has been very reliable with aroun 120 wireless laptops in the school, however at over £300 per ap this is not a cheap solution. At some of our smaller supported schools we have used the Netgear WG302 points, which are about £110 each i think. These have been excellent, and 1 ap happily supporting 20 laptops at once. - Note we dont have roaming profiles or too much else happening at logon, but 20 laptops will happily browse the net at the same time. The netgear wg602 you currently use does look more like a home access point, in the past we have tried cheap d-link points and found them to be very unreliable for anything more than 1 or 2 laptops. Only other things you might want to chech for your existing setup are: Do you have large roaming profiles, redirected folders etc which will use up bandwidth? Which type of encryption are you using? from experience some points work better with certain types than others. Are there any 802.11B devices still around the school and in use? try setting the access points to 802.11G only to see if that makes a difference. Is windows update enabled on the laptops? If so disable it - 16 laptops all downloading updates will completely kill a wireless network! Steve

I've just got back from work, spent all morning there! Only have to go in if there is server work that needs doing, or like this weekend, something that urgently needs doing for monday morning. Normally remote in both days of the weekend and end up doing something, and with all staff having remote access can get calls at evening's or weekends. If I've left my work phone on, its not unusual to get a call at 8pm on a saturday! Teacher training days are just another day as far as work goes, we're in as normal. Steve

Not sure if it applies to this switch, but most managed switches will have a serial port that will allow you to open up a terminal session and use the command line interface, which you will be able to use to view the ip address. Steve

This shouldn't really be a problem, only thing to check for is with the dvd burner software make sure it doesn't cache the files to the system drive before burning. Do you already own the DVD burner? A new sata dvd burner is £16 on ebuyer, would leave the ide channel free for the hard disk. Steve

How about getting a tablet pc? Will work out a lot cheaper than an IWB or overlay, and if its only being used by 1 person the small screen size shouldn't matter. Steve

For the price of 2 access points i would really look into getting it cabled, even if you dont run 5 new points, just run a long patch cable round the room and into a desktop switch for the 5 pc's. Its going to be a lot more reliable and faster than a wireless bridge. Steve

How far away from the phone exchange are you? BT will let you rent a direct piece of copper between the 2 buildings (via the phone exchange) that you can then connect your own SDSL equipment too at both ends, creating a private circuit. Data speeds aren't guaranteed, but provided your not miles from the exchange it should be fine. - Last place i worked for had a 2mb line running over it reliably for 2 years. Rental was around £700 a year I believe. Steve

Slightly unusual project we are doing at the moment is a system to monitor the school pond - Underwater cameras, night vision cameras, temperature probes and data loggers etc. Ties in nicely with a few curriculum areas and the setup is quite interesting.