sonofsanta

For teachers, I map the K drive to the root of the wwwroot folder, so they can access all the student work as well. Similar to how the kids are mapped, I've added the K drive mapping to the usual staff drive mapping GPO and used Item Level Targeting to check membership of the PHP Users group. If it meets the criteria, map the root of wwwroot, where I've manually added NTFS permissions for the relevant department (i.e. curriculum IT). Means they can create their own folders & structure to their heart's content, as well as look at any code they need to when assisting kids, and means I can drop example code in there for the stealing. I suppose you can easily enough tweak it so it maps to wwwroot/staff/%username% if they want it working exactly the same, depends on how much confidence they have in the kids' ability to understand "your K drive is here, look, I can show you" Glad it's working well for you, it ain't half been a lot easier here than faffing around with FTP!

Cheers all. Most servers can stand to lose the data - I happily restore VMs from last night's snapshot when something goes horribly wrong - but if, worst case, a storage server went down in the middle of lunch we would lose a portion of sales. I suspect that "five minutes of free meals once a year if you're unlucky" is less of a total cost to business than the differential between local storage and an iSCSI SAN, though @VeryPC_Ed - my concern with DC was a DC coming back up with outdated data and corrupting the AD environment, in much the same way as restoring a DC from a snapshot would do. I suppose if you're manually powering on, though, you can be paying attention to boot into non-auth restore mode - still a bit of a faff, but again, hopefully it's a solution on the better side of the cost-benefit analysis Certainly be interesting to see what Windows 10 Server (Server 2015?) will bring to the table, and what options there will be come 2016 when the refresh is scheduled. We have a dual controller SAN at the moment, and whilst HA and CSV is absolutely bloody magical, dealing with a SAN has its own set of quirks (hardware VSS providers are still a PImyA).

This has been a thoroughly fascinating thread to catch up on. Our servers will get renewed in a couple of years, and I've long been planning to do it differently. I had still planned on getting a SAN and sticking with the CSV HA cluster, as it does work well, but I'm intrigued by much of the talk here. Question for those of you with local, replicated storage: how do you handle failure of a database server? e.g. cashless catering server, finance server, where restoring from a backup even an hour old would cause grief (not to mention domain controllers!). Can replication be set up to be live?

One single device. Cheaper per page is cheaper per page, so a decent colour will be cheaper on mono prints as well. If nothing else, there's the electric costs (not insignificant with laser printers) and the footprint of the things - most decent laser printers are monsters still.

CNAME is an Alias type, so you'll already have an A record for that server based on its name (e.g. print_server, whatever that machine is called in Windows), and you don't want more than one A record for a device. @SovietRussia is mixed up - as was I, until I actually looked at my DNS and realised I was thinking back-to-front So right click your DNS zone (e.g. school.internal), choose New Alias (CNAME), type in printing in the top field then the normal server address in the FQDN field (e.g. printer_server.school.internal). Easy as that! @pantscat method is a bit more involved but useful if your users need hands holding a lot.

Absolutely genius. The Balloon Approx! Sounds like a band name for a shoegazing indie bunch from Sheffield. Will has the hair for it, I suppose. (Speaking of which, aren't you lot long overdue to add him to your team page? How am I meant to do ridiculous Photoshops otherwise?)

I love the N64 rainbow

We run a HyperV failover cluster on a single SAN with dual controllers, interconnected through two switches for complete redundancy. I don't know why you'd go two SANs instead, to be honest, certainly not on a school budget (and there are people here who question spending on one).

Moffat has done complex, season long arcs - more or less everything around Amy, Rory & River Song - but everyone complained that "it was too complicated for the kiddies!" so he backed down. One more example in a long history of grown ups underestimating kids, I think. I thought this and last week's (Mummy) were better than anything else this season thanks to the lack of gigantic plot holes, and we're starting to see some interesting nuances to the new Doctor; I liked the whole "lie to her, just get her here" in the Mummy episode, building him up as completely callous and cold, when really he was going to save her. But they definitely wrap up too quickly. And did we really need his big cheesy speech in this week's episode?

Installing PHP and MySQL on a Windows server is about an afternoon's work. I wrote the whole thing up on here: Installing a PHP/MySQL Development Server for students on Windows Server 2012 - Part1 - Blogs - EduGeek.net Installing a PHP/MySQL Development Server for students on Windows Server 2012 - Part2 - Blogs - EduGeek.net Been working a treat for us for the last year and a bit

It's the security group we're all members of, that is itself a member of Support Staff, that is a member of All Staff... I've considered setting up an Exchange rule to redirect to Helpdesk (except Office 365 has a bug when using a security group as a target in a transport rule) but then we'd miss the emails sent when someone is leaving, and an email is sent to everyone by expanding All Staff until they can remove the departee. I'm trying the education route instead, but, well, we know how long and rocky a road that is! (Just to clarify, as it wasn't obvious in my original post, Staff Support IT is a distribution list with all of us in, so we all get an individual email, hence can't tell when it's been replied to)

I suppose a nice Nikon D750 with an appropriate selection of lenses, and an Aston Martin to drive to various locations, would provide a very pleasant hobby to fill the days with

Honestly, that amount, I really would give most of it away. I'd have to, for my own sanity. If I could pay my mortgage off, get new cars for me and the missus (both will have gone to the scrapyard within four or five years) and set aside a chunk for retirement and similar chunks for the kids, I'd be set. I honestly don't know if I'd give up work (and I feel all kinds of weird saying that) because I'm a right old mardy pants when I don't feel like I've done anything useful in a day. I like my job and my workplace, and the financial security would mean I wouldn't ever need to look for another job for reasons of payrise. I really am an old man, now aren't I (Saying all that, early retirement would give me some chance of catching up on my Steam backlog...)

How do I deal with them? What I do is, I enable the desktop alerts in Outlook, so I get a little pop up from my system tray for every new email, and on that popup is a nice big X to delete... It is one of those unsolvable problems. Like many others, we have lists for departments, year group form tutors, teaching staff only etc. etc. and I still get no end of useless guff. I almost don't notice it now, I'm so used to deleting on reflex (to the point of sometimes missing information I actually need). My pet peeve is staff who email Staff Support IT instead of our shared Helpdesk mailbox; on the latter, I can see when something is flagged, completed and replied to, but if they use the former we end up doing the work four times, not realising someone else has already dealt with it.

If you have Creative Suite installed, as we do (and a lot of schools do), you can use Acrobat to merge files into a singe PDF to print from. Comes in handy at UCAS references time - select all the folders, right click > Merge to PDF, save out as a single file and print that. Saves going into 150 folders of 4 or 5 documents each!

Can't believe it's Monday again. Can't be bothered to do anything. So here's a representation of how @VeryPC Al is sourcing this year's prizes without overspending on his meagre marketing budget.

I suppose the answer is "run a benchmark on a random system and find out"

Blimey, turns out that wasting a whole weeks' worth of brain cycles on cheesy puns really can pay off. Who knew?

I of bin to busy wit mah work innit blud

*Should have. This is the internet, grammar is important! What will people think of you if your level of written English is demonstrably sub-par? I have not been able to be in this thread anywhere near as much as I would like to be. It's almost as if people think I sit at this computer just waiting for them to interrupt with their problems. Stupid people!

And think of the 6 as a replacement for the 7, perhaps...

"I know I don't need to overclock a work PC, boss, but I want to try..." (disclosure: one of my techs has actually overclocked his CPU for all the video encoding he does. He has not, though, set fire to anything as a result. Not yet.)

We've had a Panasonic VX500 in recently, that's 5000 lumens so plenty bright (1024 x 768 4:3). Was <£900 ex VAT, which strikes me as a pretty good price for the brightness. Installed etc. by KPMS in West Yorks, as all our kit for the last five years has been.

This is why we're replacing Pentium 4 machines.

Ah right. Don't know if that was even an option three years ago when we installed, but all our classrooms are fixed desktops so the VLANs haven't been a problem. I did briefly try and experiment with the broadcast/multicast options but couldn't get anywhere on the switches, so gave it up as it was only for my interest/benefit so I could control machines site-wide from my office. I fear I'll be no help to you! Daft question, have you tried ringing support? They have actually been useful for me in the past.