Butuz

While you are at replacing all your servers you should look into virtualising all your servers on to one or two high spec servers with a SAN. Butuz

Excel is rubbish if your staying overnight - there is nothing much around there apart from one hotel, some concrete and some water. Glad its staying in Olympia to be honest!! Butuz

Give it a few months it be down to 400 then 200 then free I wait 6 months for em to be free as the birds! Butuz

Ah so you get dings in real life too? I thought it was just me! Butuz

As long as the link between your Terminal Servers and your File servers is nice and fast then the network and server inftrastucture speed shouldnt be a problem. Infact it should be less of a problem on thin client than it would be on fat client as you won't have fat clients all over the school dragging massive amounts of video data round, and also your terminal server should have considerably faster disk access than a workstation, particularly for reading data. All true. Anyone expecting to be able to run any kind of whole school network (thin or fat) through LEA/RBC provided 100/10Mbit broadband connections is going to be in for serious dissapointment. Frankly in my oppinion wireless is not worth using either. I don't have 1 WAP here. True. Butuz

There are two main things that dictate what kind of software you can run on your thin clients. 1) The spec of the actual thin client itself. Less powerful entry level clients have serious trouble animating even simple flash games. Here, it doesn't matter what kind of servers or network you have - any animation will be poor. A much more powerful thin client will run animation/video considerably better - in some cases very acceptably. 2) Number of thin clients per server. If you try and run 40 copies of Photoshop on one average spec server you are going to run into serious problems. So put simply you need to find the correct balance of clients per server for whatever application you want to run. If that means running photoshop on thin clients forces you to only have 10 clients per server, then so be it. Thin client devices and servers and software are getting better and more powerful all the time. The old addage that you can only run Office and some Internet on thin clients is now utter nonsense. Butuz

Any suggestions on good web based office suites??? Butuz

I've been looking a the 300GB Western Digital Veliciraptors and whilst I fancy one or more - they're quite poorly designed, as has been mentioned in 2.5" guise their much thicker than normal thus don't fit into laptops or removable hot swap bays, in 3.5" guise with the built in heatsink and mount, the SATA connectors don't line up as per normal SATA hard drives - so you can't use them in any 3.5" hot swap drive bays either!!!!! Sillyness! Agree with John though. They call them Deathstars for a reason. They used to be IBM Deathstars, now they are Hitachi Deathstars. Same s**t diferent label!!!! By far the most hard drives that have failed over the last 7 years here have been deathstars. Butuz

Half of the programs the teachers want to run here won't even run on windows - how on earth are you going to run them on Linux? Also - with no Active Directory and thus no way of centrally controlling workstations users and software - how on earth are you going to manage the network?? Butuz

I've got my DNS set to static and the two DNS entries are the two DNS servers on my network. Butuz

This is all good stuff guys keep it coming! Butuz

TBH that looks to be set up exactly the same as my test server. Is your managment network IP address on the same IP range / subnet as the rest of your network? Butuz

Cheers - downloading and printing now! Butuz

Thanks for the reply. OK the scenario is this. Currently we have two physically seperate networks, a curriculum network and an admin network. The curriculum is in good nick with HP Procurve managed switches, The admin network is a state with a mix of Cisco switches and hubs, some of it is still on 10mbit. So what I wanted to do is use the curriculum network to host at least two vlans, one for the curriculum network, one for the admin network. So I can move both networks onto the same physical infrastructure, yet keep them seperate (to comply with LEAs outdated security) using vlans. This will kill a few birds with one stone 1) Curriculum and Admin networks still cant see eachother. 2) Admin network instantly gets upgraded to Gigiabit managed HP Procurve, for free. 3) Consolidating reduces the number of physical switches etc, this saving money on upgrades now, and in the future, and also saving electricity. Thats what I want to do. Using more than two vlans to segregate traffic on the network even further will be a bonus. Butuz

Great thread - I need to do exactly the same never used vlans or been on any courses like that - need to implement vlans in April/May. Idiots guides more than welcome!! Particularly with HP Procurve! Butuz

Of course but not to my office!

Standardised on Win2003 Server, XP Pro, Office 2003 and it will probably stay like that for the next three years. Butuz

At the moment just got a RM Expert 3030 Core 2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66Ghz with 4GB RAM and A WD Raptor 36Gb 10krpm Disk. Performance is sprightly! Just need to upgrade the fiber here to gigabit now for ultimate performance! Also just realised that it has dual monitors built in so will be setting up another 19" widescreen later to make 2 x 19" widescreens! Butuz

Excellent read!!!!!

But are they? With each BSF contract being £multimillion - it makes me wonder exactly how important single schools are to their bottom line. Butuz

Google uses 26 watts on my 19" TFT. Blackle uses 27 watts on my 19" TFT. So if you use blackle, your actually killing trees, puppies and making the planet inhospitible for future humans. Damn you!!!! CAN'T YOU SEE WHAT YOUR DOING TO THE WORLD!!!!!!!!! Moral of the story is - don't believe everything you read with regard to environmental issues. Butuz

Do you have a current RM Support Contract? If so Sign up for RM Communites forum, there is a CC4 section in there which makes.... er.... interesting reading. Butuz (sticking with a working CC3 network!)

Yep - they'll work nice as thin clients as the onboard lan can PXE boot. Just take the hard drive, cdrom, floppy etc out and bobs your uncle! Butuz

"Circular classrooms give maximum teaching flexibility. Can you imagine the teacher can be in the middle of the room, middle of the classroom, on the edge of the classroom" "It's also got some novel features such as windows that open in the roof" Lol. Makes me proud to be welsh! Butuz

Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online - Scan.co.uk Butuz