Butuz

Problem is you simply won't be able to achieve 2 second charges with the electricity supply you have at home, it would blow your fusebox to high heaven! So everyone would have to upgrade to an industrial power supply in the home, imagine what that will to to your electricity bills! Andrew

760 Desktops is SATA2 3g/s. Butuz

Anyone here run any kid of merit / reward system across the whole school? We just use merit stickers in the pupils school planner, but it's very ad hoc per department and are looking to standardise across the whole school all departments. Wondering if anyone has any experience. Cheers Butuz

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 3.5" Drive in the Dell Optiplex 760 i have on my desk here! Butuz

Agree - I did this with CC3 when upgrading from C2.4, had CC3 running for several months alongside in order to test and set up - then when ready copied all the user data and rebuilt all the workstations to CC3 and job done. I would do the same with CC4 too if thatv was the way I was going. Butuz

I can barely afford bread and water here never mind two of those How come they don't use 15k drives though? Butuz

Give us a lowdown of what you got first including any problems you can think of - no point in suggesting random stuff if it doesn't fit in with what you already have and what you may need! Nothing worse than buying a load of random stuff that will never get used just to spend some money. Butuz *wishes he had spare money here*

Would agree with David - running SIMS on a terminal server means you only have to apply the SIMS update to that server alone, not a load of workstations! I've tested SIMS on terminal server here - and it works. Just have not had the budget to actually implement it. Butuz

This thread and the "BSF Alternative business case" thread has succeeded in making me depressed and slightly angry. We may not be getting it in Wales yet - but we probably will as thats all the assembly seem to do is copy england 5 years late. Guess the future for Educational ICT really is bleak. Butuz

No. Now give me the blade server Butuz

Yes please share with us! Butuz

Wow - if a business case like that gets rejected there is no hope for any of us. So basically - one of the reasons the business case was turned down was because the school has decided not to waste hundreds of thousands of pounds on Consultancy, Legal babblings, and extra staff to "manage" the change. I have to admit I am shocked at reading this. It seems there is no way out. Sureley there must be some kind of legal avenue in Europe? If they can legislate on the shape of our bananas I am damn well sure they can legislate on schools being railroded into accepting inferior, overpriced managed services! Butuz

Well - our LEA is now in the process of implementing Moodle for all schools. I had my first bit of introduction/training last friday - and my school now has it's own moodle site! Wooooo!!! First things to do is to sort out a nice template and get all of our existing website moved over (going to use moodle as the main school website too). Usual LEA restrictions apply though - can't access the moodle folder structure directly, so every time I change the template, I can't test it immediateley, and have to email it to the LEA for them to upload. :/ Exited though. Been waiting for this for a while! All moodle accounts are provided from the LEA learning network. As we are on our own CC3 network this poses problems and questions. Can we get our CC3 network to use the LEA network accounts? Or will we have to move to the LEA network if we wish to use unified accounts... Butuz

For your £6k you should be getting the following: Dual CPUs each with Quad cores. 8-16GB RAM 5 x 300GB (or 10 x 147GB) 15,000rpm SAS drives in Raid5 with hot spare. 3 Year Warranty at the least, preferably 5 year. That should keep you going for a while, and significantly improve speed too! Butuz

You can do what you need to do with what you have. Just need to configure your Win2k8 server as a Terminal Server , buy the approprate client licences, and set up GPO's etc to lock it down so that the kids can't do anything they shouldnt whilst they are logged onto the server. Then all you do is point each XPE client at the Terminal Server via an RDP session and set it to be the default. Whenever a XPE client boots up it should go straight into the full screen RDP session. Citrix is great, and indeed I want it when I get some more money - but vanilla terminal services will do what you need for almost free (£8 per client licence). Butuz

To be honest, instead of spending possibly up to £100 per client just on XPe licencing, and then ending up with old, unreliable, power hungry, and possibly slow (with 64mb ram) thin clients - I think you would be much better off plumping for some new Axel clients as they will not cost much more than your XPe licencing, can be managed through the Axel console interface, only use 6w of power (compared to 30-50w) are fanless noiseless and maintenance free, and have a shelf life of at least 10 years. Thats my 2p anyway. Butuz

The defining factor between techie and network manager tends to come down to whether you actually manage any technical staff. As you say you do, I would suggest you should be a Network Manager. If I were you, before involving a union I would go to the LEA - they may not be happy that you are being forced by your school to do more work than you should be! Butuz

A-men to that! Next two or years are the best years of CC3 - Dual and Quad core workstations, Quad and Six core servers, loads of RAM, 15k drives, gigabit ethernet = one fast CC3 network! Best years of Connect 2 for me were the last year or two for the exact same reasons. Unfortunatly for RM the business case for an upgrade from C2 to CC3 was far more compelling than it is for CC3-CC4. CC3 offered massive improvements in security, managability, reliability over C2. What does CC4 offer over CC3 really, deep down? Butuz

Very good!!! Now keep it like that for when we win the 6 nations Butuz

The OP is talking about the 2510G not the 2510 - the G denotes all Gigabit ports. Basically from want of a better expression - the 2510G is a more basic layer 2 switch and the 2810 is a mroe advanced Layer 2/Layer 3 switch. For your iSCSI - your not really going to need anything more than the 2510G IMHO - as the bottleneck will end up being your iSCSi SAN's network interface itself and whether it supports bonding 2 or more gigabit links. Butuz

Or if you want a proper mic - can't really go wrong with a Sure. Butuz

Thats a good piece of work! Very Criss Currucular! ICT, Art and Design, English! Give them a merit! Butuz

There are three questions you need to ask your deputy head. 1. How much data can the school afford to lose? I.e all of it, some of it, none of it. 2. How long can each system be down during an emergency? 2 weeks? 5 days? 1 day? 3. Based on the above answers - will a suitable budget be provided, not just initially but yearly? E.g. 2 weeks to up time will require little cost really, just a backup drive, tapes, and server warranty, or the ability to order one or more new servers should the old ones fail. So say roughly £10k. 1 Day uptime will require Virtualisation, Storage Area Networks, multiple seperate server rooms, etc etc. Now you can easily be talking £100k+ for an average Secondary or anything up to £500k for a very large ICT heavy school/college. So you can either say to your deputy - give me your requirements and I'll give you a cost. Or you can say give me your cost and I'll give you your requirements. Both will work. Butuz

Oo - very interesting! Butuz

haha! those beans would be very interesting if they were spilt!!!!!! :ear: Butuz