Butuz

They also turn over around £300million a year making it somewhat easy to afford some golf carts for the IT dept Butuz

With the new feed in tariffs (FITs) solar power is defiantly worth while. It may infect be an extremely good investment depending on your circumstances. You could achieve payback within 10 years, and then you have a further 15 years worth of profit, profit in yr’s 10 to 25 could be up to as much as £1k a year. You won’t earn £1k a year from £20k investment any other (legal) way. This does depend on a few key points though. 1) You need to be intending to stay in your newly solarised house for the long term, I/e for the next 25 years. If your going to move every 5 years and spend £1k taking your PV system with you – you will not achieve payback. 2) You have to have a south facing roof. Anything else is going to increase your pay back period significantly. 3) It has to be professionally installed and certified by a qualified electrician / renewables company using British standard / CE marked parts in order to qualify for the FITs. No buying some bits off ebay and having at it with a screwdriver and soldering iron. 4) If taking advantage of one of these "free PV systems" be careful as you need to consider the fact that unless you work from home, you will be using most of your energy in the early mornings or evenings i.e when the PV system is not generating any power. While you are out at work most of the power your PV system generates will go back to the grid and thus into the pockets of the "free PV company". You need to make 100% sure that you are able to claim the cash value of the FITs back rather than that money going to the “free pv company” If all the money goes to the “free PV company” and you don’t work from home you will see little or no benefit apart from having some rather expensive tiles that you don’t own. However if you do work from home or are retired and will be using significant sums of electricity during the day - these "free" schemes could be very worthwhile! I am a big fan of PV , solar heating and also Wind Power. Unfortunatly my current abode is a listed building with a west/east facing roof I thus and cant have any of the above installed. Butuz

Good work jin! I take it we'd have to rebuild the app every time we had a SIMS update though? Butuz

Wow this looks good! Time to have a play!!! Butuz

You need to make sure you are not going to be running any software anywhere in the school that could have problems on thin client. Programs such as video editing, audio editing, some design technology / animation may not function too well on your proposed solution. In that situation you would be better off having a suite (or more) of fat clients just for heavy application use. If it is just a bit of web browsing / office you should be fine. Do bear in mind though that some animated flash sites can be quite resource intensive and could give you a shock if your system does not scale. I would recommend some small scale testing first i.e one ICT suite before you go ahead and order 500 and possibly find that it doesn’t do what you wanted!!! Also - HP thin clients are totally outclassed by modern equivalents such as Axel M80. I would seriously reconsider your choice of HP clients. Butuz

Can we see a floor plan? I can see what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it. Unfortunatly some school layouts just mean that it is not possible to get away with a single cabinet to serve the whole school. If you've only got 4 buildings you don't sound in too bad a position. You could get away with 1 x main cab in server room and 3 x satelite cabs linked via 10 gig fibre. That would be ideal performance wise and shoudn't cost too much. We have 13 buildings and as the infrastructure has been slowly addded to over the years - cabinets and fibre everywhere. I would like to rationalise the cabinets as much as possible but realistically there isn't much rationalisation that can be done without taking a bulldozer to the site and starting from scratch. Replacing all cabs and re-wiring with cat 6 would be a luxury for most schools IMHO. You have to ask - how much value will you get from that estimated 100k spend. How much will teaching and learning quality improve via the use of that 100k/ The answer to both questions is not much / barely any. As such - I'd have to make DAMN sure there wasn't any other way that the 100k could be better spent before I committed to the network cab project. Either way - I am jealous that you are even able to propose such an idea!! Butuz

1050 x Students 90 x staff 1 x IT Staff (Network Manager) Butuz

It amazes me how selfless and dedicated Tony is to edugeek. I bow down sir, good work!!! Butuz

Not sure what is worse - archaic thread revivals. Or threads moaning about archaic thread revivals ...... Butuz

As Chris said - the APU provides electrical and hydraulic power to the airliner when the main engines are off. The APU is usually a small gas turbine engine (i.e a much smaller version of a jet engine). If you've been boarding an aircraft and wondered why there is heat haze coming out of the tail or why there is a whining sound and the main engines are not moving - that's the APU working. APU is usually field from the main tanks so if you run out of fuel - you run out of APU too! Butuz

Let's hope you never find out!!! Butuz

Yeh I guess it's useful if you want an unreliable backup nas box! Butuz

Simple answer is - no it is not a NM responsibility. It is a DM (Data Manager) responsibility. It appears your school are dumping on you in an attempt to save some money. Trust me I know exactly what that feels like. My advice would be to fight it. Butuz

Disagree with that! Raid 10 has it's place. The only Raid anyone can definitively be shot for using is Raid 0 and infact I think shooting would be too easy for a Raid 0 user – hung drawn and quatered would be more appropriate!!! Bear in mind Raid 5 has great read performance but poor write performance so be careful on how you use it. Good for a file server that has lots of data read from it, bad for a database server that has lots of heavy writes. Butuz

Using Raid-TP on my Sun 7110's (Disk Striping with Triple Distributed Parity). This provides the ultimate combination of reliability, quick rebuilds and performance. You do however sacrifice 75% of your capacity at this raid level. That is not an issue currently for us. It may be an issue in the medium term though in which case I will have to move back to Raid 6 to reclaim some more free space. Will cross that bridge when we come to it! Butuz

Strange. Are you sure capita don’t support it? Our LEA run SIMS clustered over two powerful servers to host SIMS for all primary schools. They told me "the servers are set up identically but one is always run in passive mode and only kicks in if the other server goes down. As there is only one active server at any time you only have to purchase one SQL 2008 licence." They are capita supported. I looked into clustering when I set up my latest SIMS server but decided it was a bit over extravagant for a single secondary school, and I didn't really have the spare time to experiment/implement it. We already have a fair amount of redundancy via VMWare and 2 x SANS. In an ideal world though it would be a good idea to have two SIMS VM's clustered as you can virtually grantee no down time then. Butuz

Cleaning non optical mice??? Butuz

Pics or it never happened!!! Butuz

SFF Atom type PC combined with 4GB ram and a solid state laptop drive are what I am looking at for the future. IMHO the SSD drive makes or breaks it as the usual 2.5" 5400/7200rpm drives are just soo slooooow they drag the rest of the PC down. Butuz

Ew. Backwards step IMHO. Butuz

Hmm. Supra / 300zx = heavy chestwig 80's tastic and cost a fair wack to run. Prelude / FTO = two of the best FWD cars made but still RWD is where it's at if you want a sports car. My vote: Nissan 200sx S14 or S14a. Amazing cars for the money. Proper mans sports car, turbocharged, RWD, cheap to buy run and insure, 0-60 in the 6's as standard and more importantly are very cheap and easy to mod. You can go from 200 to 300 horse power for about £500 extra. I've had a few and loved them and miss them still. Butuz

What??? Birmingnam has been hit by ICT problems???? butuz

I agree they are an excellent choice. They are my #1 choice based on the reason below: 1. Cheap to buy 2. Very simple to maintain and thus super reliable (they boot their own O/S from a BIOS chip so no hard drive/flash drive and no operating system installation to maintain) 3. Very fast to boot - because of #2 they just grab a DHCP address and boot straight into RDP in a few seconds. 4. Very low power - they only use 5 watts max. (A suite of 30 axels use about the same power as my Quad Core desktop I am typing this on!!!) 5. Very powerful - the M80 can play youtube videos in 360p and run flash sites and animated software with no problems. The same can't be said for the majority of other thin clients under £200 6. Easy to manage - the axel management interface lets you turn them off / on / reconfigure / upgrade bios etc of hundreds of clients with just the click of the mouse. 7. They come with a VESA mount as standard. Unlike the majority of thin clients which charge extra for this. They're a no brainer. Get one on trial and I challenge you to show me another thin client in the same price range that is anywhere near as good. I aint found one, and I've been looking. I could do with buying a lot more of them!! Now - anyone wanna buy 110 HP thin clients off me??? Butuz

Can't you use MS Backup in order to take a full backup of all drives with system state? When you replace the drive you should be able to check consistency and rebuild the Raid 10 array in the RAID BIOS with no dataloss? Oh and having Raid 0 for the O/S is a really bad idea. Good luck!! Butuz

Be careful as if you introduce your test network onto your live network you may run into problems by having multiple networks/domain controllers/dhcp servers etc running on the same network. You'd be better off using a 4 port switch and connecting them that way I would guess? Butuz