ICT_GUY

The Secondary across the road is paying for a 40meg connection through the LEA but find it slow going at times. I think everyone has gotten used to poor connections. Unfortunately we are using more and more web based services so the problems are impacting more than they used to.

Nice, I built a binary counter shield with a 595 shift register. And played with this which was fun (and easy to build) Cheap too.

I have 11 years experience in schools, certified and have built my school network from scratch, more than once. I'm also full time. We have more than the typical primary expertise Still, moving away from the LEA is still daunting. I am only considering it because the current service is so inadequate. However, planning is going to be critical. :-/

If you want a school friendly supplier try here They do a 10% discount if you order a good whack of them. I have been using this brand for a few months and they work flawlessly. On ebay, the nano can be had for £7 pro mini for £4 and a Arduino Mega for £11 all delivered to your door from China. I have one of each and they all work and have had no problems.

These are similar to the digispark, a cutdown nano and less that £4 :-) What do you use your digispark for?

The sims issue has held us back before. I am not sure how to solve that particular issue. However the curriculum network is for teaching not the benefit of IT services :-P Filtering is an issue. I would be happier out sourcing it. The current filtering is erratic and slow. It also blocks random general sites and lets through unsuitable ones. But not in a consistent manner. Unfiltered also randomly blocks sites.

Ours has been down since Friday, has been working this afternoon.

We are about to invest in some Aduino Clones for our primary school after many months of me playing around with various projects. I have not found anything as easy to use and as fun as these little £10 boards. Well apart from this > Olimex DUINOMITE-MEGA maximite basic computer Is anyone else using them? Experiences?

I did a search and only found one old thread. The reasons are simply that our current internet through the LEA is broken. We pay for 4MB and get three. It's unreliable and unresponsive and costs 2k+ per year. We are a Primary with 100 PC's. BT Business broadband is offering a 40/10mbs connection for £50 per month. Including tech support, static IP and guaranteed fix if it does not work. Netsurf offers filtering for £600 per year. I would like any thoughts about pitfalls and best practices. Also hardware needs. The BTbuisness bub looks to be a little suspect! I would not be considering this move if the current set up was not so appallingly bad. In the past year we have had multiple loss of service with the worst being 10 days. It is affecting teaching and is a constant source of frustration. All thoughts gratefully received!

It's a single main server, we are a smallish school running 100 pc's. The self build will be a file server and run AD & DHCP I will probably rebuild one of our old servers as an application server. Failure is my biggest concern which is my thinking for the second mobo. Ram rarely goes bad, neither do processors. A quality mobo is probably going to last 5 years without a hitch. Power supplies are a pain, but self build = picking up a spare easily. So I agree totally with your view.

No criticism taken! Anything that makes me think is good. I have had bad experience with support, but that's HP for you. Half the price of dell for a reason!

Thank you for your input. Yes I had a problem with the firmware on my HP server. HP were less than useless, and it was only after I found out about there being a firmware issue did I get to the bottom of the problem. Putting together the sas controller and array is my biggest concern.

I'm going to go for server 2012. The warranty for the disks is 5 years everything else is 1 year but nothing is so expensive it can't be replaced easily (I would keep a spare mobo). Processor spares will be easy to come by as will hard disks. Testing might be an issue but an intel board is pretty damn standard. HP controller cards are easy to use. Building and maintaining I don't see a problem but this is why I am asking for advice! :-)

I was thinking of adding a ssd for the boot partition.

Has anyone here built their own server? I am thinking of it for a few reasons. I am responsible for maintenance of the server, if I build myself it's easy to stock up on a spare motherboard and drives. ECC memory is cheap for self build. £77 for 12 gigs. I get fleeced for drives for dedicated servers. I could happily build a very reliable server with spares for £1500 inc VAT with an intel server mobo, zeon processor 12 gigs of ram, 4 300gb 15k sas drives and a dedicated sas controller with a huge cache. It should be noted that I am a competent hardware builder and have had poor experience with previous warranty problems. I tend to prefer to fix things myself as it's usually quicker. I have included a spare motherboard and hard disk in the above. If there was a hardware issue I am sure that I could rebuild the server within a couple of hours though with the components selected I doubt that it would be a problem. Though I would budget for 2 x PSUs. So has anyone done this and Is my thinking straight? Comparable HP quote came in over £2k and didn't have sas drives. All thoughts appreciated.

This fixed my problem after a whole day pulling my hair out again. It had been working kind of after I got around to doing a firmware update. Disabling spanning and finally dhcp would work reliably with Ghost. Thank You!

Thanks for the replies. It looks like a bit of a learning curve. Looks like there will be a do not disturb notice on my office door for people to ignore for the next few weeks.

For the past 8 years I have been using sysprep and an answerfile for prepping images for the network using xp. It created a temp computer name, joined the network, then I manually renamed each pc. Nice and simple. Quick too. We are moving to windows 7 and there just does not seem to be a simple answer that I can find as to what the windows 7 method would be. Can I still build an image and clone it around the network? Do I have to sysprep? Will the VLK automatically activate either way? Links to a simple walkthrough, or just a brief description of the steps involved would be really helpful. Thanks in advance.

Power amp works well for me.

I have it on 360, very tempted to get it on the PC.

Swapped to battlefield 3 and not looked back yet, best game ever.

Im thinking of trading it in for battlefield 3

My phone runs emulators :-D

Picassa, supports raw formats too.

Never allow teachers to use no show, its the fastest way to kill the projector!