Butuz

Stumbled across this story from 2007 whilst viewing the Tupe thread above. Outsourcing overruns cost UK taxpayers £9bn ? Channel Register I guess that bodes ill for BSF? Butuz

Oo this sounds interesting I am forever borrowing satnavs of people. Butuz

Yep - Cutter Project have provided exactly what you are after to schools. They use Sun Ray thin clients and Sun Global Desktop for access out of school. Go an see an existing cutter project school. One thing I will say though is don't put all your eggs in one basket - as I have found out recently thin clients will save lots of money in the long term and cover 90+% of the school use, but there is always a 10% that is simply not suitable for thin clients, ask my head of Art, he wanted photoshop installed on a room of 31 thin clients. Answer had to be no Now we need to find other fat clients for him to use, which is proving a pain! Butuz

Why is 3.5 gig on XP not going to be enough for showing presentations in assembly??? Butuz

Simply put - they can't. This is why people on the chalk face should be the ones who are asked for advice by manglement. IMHO. Butuz

Lucky lucky!!!! Running round like a blue a** fly here! Butuz

Oo I did not realise apcupsd existed! Sounds interesting! Too late for me as i've just bought 3 network management cards with environmental monitoring built in! Butuz

Enable remote desktop on the XP virtual machine and then have a shortcut in the Startup Folder of the Vista PC to open an RDP session? It should work - but the problem is the shortcut in your startup folder will probably run before the VM has actually finished booting up - not really sure how you would get around that to be honest unless you could somehow set the vista box not to actually log on for a couple of minutes.. Butuz

This problem is nothing new and it affects all UPS's. If you want to shut down 11 servers off one UPS you have to buy an add on Network Management card for a couple of hundred bucks. This has a cat 5 connector and plugs into your network, you can then give it an IP address and all your servers can then communicate with it. Butuz

Do you have 4 core or 8 core fibre runs? IF you buy new switches, you can use trunking/port aggregation to enable 2GB links over 4 core or 4GB links over 8 core. Its not 10 gig but it's considerably better than 1 gig and it's faily cheap to implement unlike 10 gig. Butuz

Lol - if it was not for HP you would still be paying £2500 for a 24 port Cisco switch. HP have driven Cisco to where they are today IMHO by 5-7 years ago offering 95% of the functionality at under 50% of the cost (originally). Now cisco have lowered their prices so much there is alot less in it I agree. Butuz

This is the problem though is it not? On CC£ that would not happen as neither staff nor pupils can save to the desktop because teh GPO's are very wel set up. This is the problem with vanilla - it takes a lot of work and many days of GPO tweaking and testing to get near what you get on CC£ out of the box. Most LEA vanilla networks I have seen are no where near as well set up, secure, easy to manage and user friendly as RM CC£. This is why so many schools are with RM, including mine, and half of the secondaries in my LEA. Butuz

About time someone noticed! It's frankly bonkers. Butuz

That's a good plan - I've been wanting to do this for a while but just don't seem to ever get around to it! Butuz

"We do not accept CV's." Interesting! Butuz

Yep 512 to 1GB makes a big difference! I upgraded some PC's from 256MB to 1GB and they were like different PCs! Butuz

Can someone PM me the per server price of Xen essentials to? It's hard to find out this kind of information without getting in to a lengthy unneeded discussion with a sales rep. Butuz

Spend £20 odd on extra RAM for each PC. To be honest upgrading from a P4 2.6 to a P4 3.0 your not gonna see anything spectacular - sounds like an awful lot of hard work just to end up with machines that are only slightly quicker. Slapping some RAM in will give them a nice speed boost. Butuz

Virtualise your servers with a 64 bit hypervisor such as Citrix Xen Server - then you can shove as much RAM in the box as you want and allow your 64 bit or 32 bit VMs to use what they need. I had to put only 16GB in each of my XEN boxes due to cost contrstraints but will upgrade them to 32GB or preferably 64GB next year. You can never have too much RAM available for your VMs! (you can on the other hand definatly have too little RAM). Butuz

What is your disk usage like? Butuz

I'd be really interested to know what actual jobs those guys were doing for 34k and 31k. I mean it could be that they were actually being overpaid? Butuz

But that's the wierd thing - they do seem to have it available - it gives the option in windows to choose 1680 x 1050? For example if I plug a viewsonic 22" in instead, I can run that at 1680x1050 and it works fine, plug the Sun back in and hey presto the image doesnt fit the screen! Butuz

Pardon? Butuz

Cheers for that - I did fathom that Nvidia actually did HP drivers on its website even though HP don't - but the motherboard drivers are not quite right, there were two unidientified bits of hardware in device manager that the nforce driver did not cure. ACtual CPU perfomance was good - but graphic performance on XP was terrible, e.g if you did something strenuous the mouse would actually stutter. IT was all fine on Windows 2003 thouough. Seems to be to be purposefully castrated by HP on XP as the low end servers like this totally outperform and undercut HP's desktops Butuz

Hmm it's 80+DB constant in my server room - if anyone argued that I should be using it as an office I'd lock them in there for a few hours and I'd be pretty confident they'd sign off a new room (once their ears stopped ringing/bleeding) Luckily didn't have to go that far! Butuz