Iain.Faulkner

We've requested the Thursday and Friday so I'm crossing all my fingers at the moment as we still haven't had it approved (despite making the request on the first day back after the summer!) :-(

I know what you mean Mr Drabble, nothing in the Northwest whatsoever!

Just seen this advertised at the school I used to be at Eteach: IT Technician, Stockport, Greater Manchester

I love this as a thread, lots of concerts people have already posted that I'm insanely jealous of and would've given anything to be there for.....the original Madstock Madness being a particular one!! My favourite bands/acts to see live are Richard Ashcroft/The Verve, Muse, Maximo Park and Starsailor, I think I've seen Maximo Park around 15 times now (yes I'm completely obsessed) and recently saw them at the Warehouse Project in Manchester which was the best I've ever seen them, such an amazing show so full of energy. In terms of individual concerts, I remember seeing the Verve at V Festival in 2008. Ashcroft has such an insanely amazing voice, and songs like Bittersweet Symphony, History and Drugs don't work send shivers down my spine. This particular one, the entire show was performed in the pouring rain, but it was weird in that it really didn't matter to the 50,000 or so people in attendance you just didn't seem to notice it (it was also the night I met my gf, and if she asks then that was what was memorable at V Festival that year!). Muse at Wembley 2008 - HAARP Tour - Amazing live band, always put on a quality show Kasabian - Manchester Apollo - circa 2004 (I think) on one of the NME tours just before they became huge, I'd never seen a band completely dominate a venue before, you just knew they were going to be huge. Coldplay - Manchester Apollo - circa 1999/2000 (again i think) Just before parachutes was released, I distinctly remember Chris Martin standing before us and saying that his next song was going to be the one that launched them into the big time...they promptly performed Yellow, and he was right :-) In all honesty though, I don't think I've ever seen a bad concert, I just love live music :-)

Morning all, Just a general wondering more than anything. Does anyone have one of these in their school - Roland RotoCAMM MDX-40AE We're on the brink of ordering one for our school, but I know nothing about them (I've always used Boxford in the past)...any recommendations for this product? Anyone had any bad experiences with them?

Manchester City fan here.

Have I told you all the one about the Magic Tractor....? It turned into a field

This has just been advertised in our local paper. Jobs vacancies | Stockport Grammar School

I'm having a play with Sharepoint 2010. I've trying to create a site based on a template I'm installed, but I'm getting the following error... "an error has occurred correlation ID:{4339d130-04c7-4da6-b4af-a0d01a30526a}" Anyone seen this before?

That's way way too detailed... Should it not be something like.... "Moodle doesn't work PC's don't work" :-)

Not seen this mentioned anywhere else, but just stumbled across these two posts... Current Vacancies | Loreto College

Do I need a young priest and an Old priest though? :-) The vent goes straight out to our roof, I believe. We're a single storey building (mainly) so there's only about 3 feet between the top of our server rack and the outside world.

It's a hell of a lot of drives! :-)

Thanks again to everyone who's responded. We've spoken to a couple of companies now who offer a service whereby they'll come out and do some analysis of our server room. Unfortunately the school is baulking at the price (you genuinely can't win, they don't want down time, they don't want to spend any money to work out what's wrong!). Just to follow on from Chris_Cook's response, pleasae see attached some images of our server room. With regards the questions asked in Chris' response.... - Nobody else has access to the server room. We have a locked door, with a metal roller shutter over the front which is also locked at night. As far as we know, we are the only people with keys. - Servers (as can be seen in the photos) are rack mounted. However before the rack was in, the servers were on a desk and we had exactly the same problems. - Don't think there is a problem with dust. When we removed one of the faulty sans I checked the back of it and there was no dust build up at all. The room itself is fine, it's pretty clean as server rooms go. - The room isn't carpeted, the floor is a vinyl type covering. - The room has it's own dedicated power supply running into it, when we were a viglen school this is something they said might be causing the problem so we had the dedicated power source put in. As far as I know we don't suffer from spikes/brownouts, but we need to do some research on this. - We have tried wiping the drives and reusing them, they always show as faulty and won't work. It is a permanent failure and we havebeen unable to access the data on another computer/server. - All our servers run through the UPS that we have. We had a full network rebuild last year and the company who did the majority of the work was responsible for the UPS and therefore it should be ore than sufficient for our needs. - No problems with damp in the room (although it does have a plastic sewage pipe running through the corner which burst over the summer!). - The failures aren't very unpredictable, there's no events that occur that could trigger it (that we know of). Thanks again

We use Cartridge world for our empty toner cartridges. They provide us with a storage bin for empty toners, when it's full I give them a call an normally next day they come and empty it. Every month or so we get a cheque sent which goes back into the Print Consumables budget. Not huge amounts, but better than nothing as they say.

We do have the room air conditioned, and as far as I can tell, it is on 24 hours a day keeping the temperature at a constant temperature of 20 degrees C (that's what it is currently). I am certainly going to check humidity in there, but I'm not really sure how I can check for magnetic interference (which at the moment is where our thoughts are as to what is causing the problem). With regards makes of hard drives, I don't actually know. All our servers are under warranty with their respective manufacturers. Hitatchi SANs I would guess use Hitatchi drives. Our Backup server has been using Seagate Barracuda drives by the looks of it. The frog box, I've no idea, as FROG know when the drive goes before we do and they just turn up and replace it.

We haven't checked humidity levels as yet, this is something I'm going to look at thought shortly. With regards how we know they are faulty, same way most would I guess. Servers start to beep, showing a faulty drive. Sans display warning light, when you go into the console it tells us that the drive has developed a fault. Of the two new SANs that Hittchi have sent us, one has developed an issue after just 2 weeks! As an addition to this, our FROG box has also chucked out a few hard drives over the 2 years we've had it in.

All servers are on a UPS..... Versions of Raid we're using are Raid 0 and Raid 5. There's been no error with the RAID though, it's the drives themselves that have developed the fault.

Morning all, Wasn't sure where to put this, so hopefully it's in the right place. We've had an ongoing issue with our Server room. 4 years ago we put in a viglen system (before my time) and for the first year or so everything ran fine. After this initial "honeymoon period" a couple of the servers started to cause faulty harddrives. In total over th enext couple of years we went through 25-30 server hard drives in one server alone. 12 months ago, we replaced Viglen with a vanilla windows environment and for 12 months everything has been running fine. However, as with Viglen, after this honeymoon period ended, we have had 1 server start to experience faulty harddrives and we've just had Hitatchi replace both of our SANS as they too have developed faulty drives. This, to me at least, is too much of a coincidence and has to be being caused by something else other than faulty hard ware. Does anyone know of a company who would come out and do a "Server Room Evaluation" or something along those lines? Essentially we are looking for someone to come out to us and see if there is something we've missed which might be causing HDD's to fail on a regular basis (low level static maybe? I dont know). The room already has its own air conditioning, and it's own power source but we still have the same problems time and time again. Any advice anyone can provide would be gratefully received.

Good points, I'll be constructing an email to the council to ask about this shortly. You are correct in that it's not just about cost and that you have to take everything else into consideration. But the prices being mentioned so far, some are a third of the price our council is asking for!

Thanks for the replies so far. The costs you've both suggested are significantly cheaper than what our business manager is quoting from the council.

Morning all, We've just been informed that our school broadband costs (as provided by our local council) are to increase by 50%! Apparently (according to our business manager) the council have said that the increased cost is as a result of them having the harnessing technology's budget significantly cut. My question/query, although I assume that most schools will use their local council for their broadband provision, does anyone pay for their own? If so, can I ask what sort of costs and pitfalls are associated with "going on your own" so to speak? looking at the price the council are expecting us to pay I can't believe it's not cheaper to move away from them. I appreciate that we use the council for filtering, but even with the added cost of bringing in something like smoothwall (other filtering firms are available :-) ) I believe it will work out cheaper. Any information anyone can provide will be gratefully received as always. Iain

I wish this was in the Northwest, looks really good.

Nope, still the same :-(

thanks hcrejazz, I'll give that a go :-)