Butuz

Best way to stay awake in work is not to go clubbing till 3am Unfortunately for me - I'm so old now that if I did go clubbing mid week I probably wouldnt make it in to work for several days Butuz

Good luck! Butuz

Welcome to the forum Straight Talk. I for one am very glad you’re here to instigate discussion, and also hopefully give us advice! A lot of people are fearful of their future and jobs under the scheme, I am sure you can understand that sometimes people react harshly to BSF topics because all they initially see is the loss of their job in the school that they have grown to love. I am 100% sure that if it was being suggested that teachers be replaced with managed services from large educational training company's - you would be getting the same sort of negative reaction on teachers forums too! Infact you wouldnt be getting the same sort of reaction, you'd be greeted with outrage from teachers, parents, unions alike. I want to reply to all of your points - have not got time now. But I would like to say one thing: Some schools have excellent ICT provision, and already achieve everything that was featured in that video above. Some schools have extremely poor ICT provision, and would be most happy to be upgraded through BSF. In all cases though - do you agree that it is actually the SMT of the school that are totally responsible for lack of ICT integration and lack of proper ICT facilities - rather than simply blaming poor ICT Technicians that probably get very little technical training, and also may actually get paid around the same kind of wage as a receptionist? It's just that it always seems to be “our fault” if ICT provision is not acceptable - but of the schools I have been in that have had very very poor ICT provision in my opinion has been totally down to lack of leadership within the school from the top down. It’s up to the leadership team to realise the importance of ICT, the importance of recruiting a good ICT Technical Team, and the importance of good ICT funding – and schools that have not done this are the schools that are ICT failures. Butuz

Tell you what - instead of giving me an ICT budget of £30k a year (or £40k if I am really lucky) give me £1.5 million for the next three years, and then £100k a year from then on - and I'll give you ICT like that, too! In fact, it'll be even better, as me and my team will be on site, integrated with the school and able to provide support within seconds rather than minutes, and I'll make sure every penny of the millions goes as far as humanly possible, much much further infact than your managed service, as I will have no shareholders to answer to, I'll have no company agenda to adhere to, I'll have no requirement to fund the fat cat's Jaguars and Learjets - my one and only agenda will be the School, it's teachers, and it's pupils. It would be nice to become an “ICT Professional” under BSF though. Unfortunately Wales doesn’t get BSF yet – so I guess I’ll have to remain…..err… well unprofessional for a while longer I suppose? Butuz

Yep all the above is correct - I would reccomend using XP on CC3 rather than Vista. If your workstations come with XP Pro Pre-installed use Smartclient to add the PC to CC3. Or if your workstations come with Vista Business you will have to a full rebuild using RM Workstation Build Manager - in this case you will probably have to load the Sound/Video/Network drivers into RM Workstation Build Manager manually. Butuz

Sorry cant help in that case - suggest you email HP directly! Butuz

Ive got one of the Pro HD ones to try - and it records stuff as MP4 which media player and movie maker can not read!!! Have yet to look into a way of getting it to work but not had a chance so far. I would prefer not to install random codecs really. Anyone can shed any light? Butuz

Moodle newbie here so go easy! Our LEA are implementing moodle - but it does not seem to have any kind of messaging system in it (instant, or not)? You can send someone a message but it actually sends them an email and it's rather convolouted. This is not what we are after - we wish for teachers to be able to send each other quick and easy moodle based messages rather than emails. Anyone know of any soloutions I can suggest to the LEA? Cheers Butuz

The Windows versions of the T5135 are much better. The linux ones are horrid for sure. Try an Axel thin client - much cheaper and better than the HP's! Butuz

VDI is the best of both worlds! If you can afford it! Butuz

2003 Here Butuz

You can buy a little amp/watt meter for £15 odd from places like RM and Maplin. Soooo handy. Butuz

Yep agree with this - would be real handy to be able to actually bolt/screw the units to the VESA mount. Butuz

Hi Gareth. Glad to see you too are interested in Virtualisation. I've been using VMWare ESXi 3.5 (the free version) to some testing with regards to Virtualisation and P2V. On the whole I am very impressed with the way VMWare and Converter works - I have tried converting XP Workstations, CC3 Workstations, CC3 Terminal Servers and Vanilla Windows servers and all have worked correctly. In the short term, over the next year or two depending on funding, we are looking to virtualise 5 or 6 of our physical servers (not our CC3 domain controllers). Unless I get a big budget hike, I am going to be using the free version VMWare ESXi 3.5 coupled with a SAN of some kind. Now I had planned the SAN to be an off the shelf iSCSI box such as Adaptec Snap Server or a HP 2000i. But having just discovered "Openfiler" I am going to install that on a test workstation to try it out. I think the SAN is really important as one of the biggest benefits of virtualisation is divorcing the software from the hardware, and if you use local storage in your physical hosts, you are not divorcing the Virtual Machines from your physical host's hardware. If your RAID array fails, or the server fails, you are stuck with not being able to access that storage or those virtual images until that physical host is repaired. With a SAN however, if a physical host is lost, you can simply connect another physical host up to the SAN and get your VM's back up and running quickly. If course, this puts lots of reliance on the SAN - but your SAN should be specified with hot spare drives, redundant PSU's etc, and also it should be a big iron server from a big name manufacturer, with the required same day/next day support. You should also make sure all SAN data is mirrored onto another SAN, or NAS, just incase! I am planning to use three of our existing servers as virtual hosts, plugged into the SAN, and then convert our servers onto the virtual hosts. Hope this helps! Andrew

If it was that twitchy then there was something seriously wrong with the suspension as they are pussycats! Butuz

Wow - things are getting interesting on this thread for sure! I wonder how long it lasts! Nice to have some insider knowledge coming to edugeek!! Butuz

No - because Microsoft didn't charge you £1000 per server licence, £90 per Workstation Licence, £5k for commisioning, and £3k a year for support.......for a network that apparently doesn't do as advertised? Butuz

Schools in England? Taff's not allowed? Butuz

Any experience is good - so keep at it! The RM network will have come with several manuals and a couple of training CD's - very handy to read through. See if you can find them! If not drop me a PM and I'll see what I can do. Butuz

Use HP4250N's here in our ICT suites for the last 4 years - theyre nice and fast, very reliable. Everyone is really happy with them - have had no complaints. Toners last approx 20,000 pages which tends to last quite a while. As for printing 1000 pages per lesson - that is bonkers, 30 pupils printing 30 pages every lesson? I think your ICT department may actually need to read their schemes of work with regard to Print Previews etc!!! Also bought Kyocera FS-4000n and whilst that is cheap to buy and run compared to the HP printers - it definatly cannot handle high volumes. Fuser's gone in one already after about a year. HP fusers have lasted 3+ years. Butuz

We are working towards this hopefully to get the ICT mark early next year. It is driven by Senior Leadership down - you can't really just fill all the boxes in yourself. You then have an assessor come in once your ready for a tour of the school and interviews with SLT, pupils, etc. Butuz

I am using Sharepoint Services 3 on a VM with no problems. Not sure how other versions of sharepoint fare. Butuz

Be careful with using DAS on ESXi. Why? Because ESXi is not very good at moving VM's around between storage devices. If your using DAS and your raid card failed, or motherboard, you could be looking at lengthy downtime while the server is repaired. If you use iSCSI SAN you will not be reliant on your server hardware, i.e if your server fails, you could simply unplug it from the SAN and then plug another totally different server in and get it up and running fairly quickly with little down time. Butuz

My Reccomendation would be using VMWare ESXi 3.5 (it's free and you don't need to install a Windows O/S to run the VM's on) and configuring the 4 drives of the server into Raid 5. Not using RAID on any production server is totally bonkers, and if it is going to be a mission critical production server - the person that told you above should be ignored from now on! Butuz

If it's going to be a well designed and fully documented vanilla win2008 network built using MS best practice, then there is no real problem. Any Win2008 centric person should be able to jump in, read the documentation and work out roughly how everything works fairly quickly. Have you not an LEA that can support you? If not then I guess it would be handy to have a company you can cal on for advice, as well as a technet subscription. Butuz