Butuz

First line of defence for a network - disable right click for pupils!!!!

Last few Suite's I've built have come to around 30k per room. But that's with thin clients. The rooms will also pay for themselves over 5 years due to low power usage (compared with fat clients).

I am using Sharepoint Services 3 to design an intranet (hopefully becoming an extranet). It's so customisable, configurable and powerful it's great. So far I've created my own ICT helpdesk with integrated harware and software inventory, and an hoping to create a room and equipment booking part too. Spend some time and you can do anything on it!

I wish I was you!!

Ah I've been meaning this altiris thing for a while as I've got 100 of these now! Butuz

The SATA 500GB hard drives are your weak link because despite being big, they are slow and unreliable. The rest of the server spec is great - but the hard drives will become a bottleneck at some point in the future. I would reccomend if you can afford the extra you go for 4 x 300GB 15,000RPM SAS drives including hot spare - so you will actually only have 600GB of usable space, but you will have much more speed and also if one drive does fail the hot spare will automatically take over.

The easiest way to do it is to use the shortcut as their "permission". Allocate the shortcut to a program set when you want the pupils to be able to access the game, then deallocate the shortcut when their done so that no one can access the game. If you create a package then the shortcut will automatically appear on RMMC. If you install the game manually on each hard drive make sure you install it to "C:\Program Files\GameName" and then make sure you copy and paste the shortcut from the start menu, into the Shortcut bank on "X:\Group Resources\Shortcut Bank" you can then use the RMMC to allocate the shortcut to a program set at will.

"Yes - give us a chance to show we can do it and let us continue innovating!" Show?? Most of us have been doing it for years. Take a few minutes to think where ICT would be in schools without "us" over the last 10 years? Of course, some schools (I've been to some and it's not pretty) have suffered with really bad tech support (or none) but lets face it, surely this is actually down to poor decisions by SMT/Govenors is it not? After all, if you employ a totally imcompetant Network Manager (or none) you can expect an incompetant network! BSF isn't hitting me yet as I am in Wales - but from what I can see I honestly think we could do better than BSF if we were given the same money that BSF is throwing around. If 10% of a BSF spend is ICT - I can only dream of having 10% of our anual turnover to spend on ICT. Instead - this year I have had roughly 0.9% of our anual turnover. If i had 10% per year over the next 5 years ICT in this school would be a whole different ball game. Butuz

Exactly. My school has a 30 year relationship with RM, and frankly we've been let down by countless other companies both big and small, who have tried and failed, but RM have always been there. RM were helping us (and making money out of us) here before our LEA, before the Welsh Assembly, before the many govt organisations such as BECTA, ESIS, etc. They've done alot for education as a whole. Yes, we have had a few rocky periods, you can't expect every deal and decision to be rosy over a 30 year period. The question is - if not RM then who who would you have take on these BSF contracts? RM have a fair amount of experience with large projects (e.g, Ireland, Scottish GLOW). At least RM is and has always been dedicated to education - I'd rather an Educationally biased company make money out of BSF than some random company who just see it as a cash cow. I honestly don't think RM see BSF as a "cash cow" they see it as a way to continue doing business and continue serving the education sector. Lets face it - there is no market for selling PC's and box shifting. Dell can do that much more efficiently. RM are the largest PC builder in the UK and they have not moved their hardware assembly to taiwan or china, or gone bust. They are dedicated to education, and they also seem dedicated to keeping jobs in the UK. I respect them for that! Butuz

Ooh google calendar sounds an intersting idea. Currently I use Outlook on Exchange to organise diary/calendar etc, linked into a bog standard PDA which i keep on me whilst in school. Unfortunatly this is the corporate email system and I can not access it via web/from home. My tech does the same except without the PDA. I will have to look into how google calendar can help. One thing I am working on (very slowly when i get 5 mins) is setting up a Microsoft Sharepoint for my ICT Support Department - this will have a helpdesk, asset database, and shared calendars/meetings/forums etc. Hopefully when i finally get this fully set up me and my tech can use this, and this only in order to keep us really organised.

We tackled this in two ways after our 2006-2007 toner bill was £12k. 1) For pupils use printer credits. Eg they get 50 credits per week and mono pages cost 1 credit and colour 3. 2) Ink for departmental printers funded out of the departments capitation rather than a generic stationary department. Both of the above together have really cut the amount of printing. Software like papercut would be nice though.

We are about 1:3 at the moment which considering the shockingness of our IT budgets is a miracle.

Salary looks fine to me. The job is not a manglement job, you have no real responsibilty in that the system is already managed and supported from a technical point of view. Your just expected to drive forward VLE use from a techie/training point of view. People suggesting that's worth 30k are nuts! Should be in interesting post for someone who is web-centric! Maybe a current technician who wants to branch out into VLE/MIS stuff. Butuz

So you shouldn't use snapshots on DC's?? That's a shame as snapshots are great! Butuz

It's RAM that's the problem, as soon as you run out of RAM and the system starts using the pagefile - performance takes a nosedive. Really, if you want to run these programs on a terminal server you will just have to reduce the number of thin clients per server and possibly buy another terminal server. Not ideal! Butuz

Sorry cant risk breaking the edugeek server...

By the way can anyone give me an idiots guide to SAN interfaces? I am looking at various san's on HP website and I have no idea how they actually connect to a server? Cheers

Great thread. I am in the investigation stages of Virtualisiation and threads like this with posts like that reeeeeealy reaaaaly help - especially with no official training provided. Anyone know of any good books on the subject? Cheers

You can buy licences that are CC4 and CC3 compatible.

Yeh I am desperatly trying to get hold of a short throw projector for the hall myself as the crappy old one I use for assembly's recquires me to decimate about 4 rows of chairs in order to get a decent sized picture!!!!

AlphaJoker - Out of interest why is USB so rubbish over distance when basically its just electricals going over copper cable like anything else?? Butuz

If they'd set their active directory up correctly they would be able to deligate administrator access to each school. But as they have not set their active directory up coprrectly, any admin accounts they create are admins across the whole county. Our LEA is the same - that's why we are on our own network!

We use MyMaths here alot but will send a message to the head of maths now about Mathletics.

Also if you need a breakdown of how big each folder is use Treesize or "WindirStat" I think both are free and very handy.

At the moment here the use of mobile phones etc is not allowed at all, let alone plugging them into our PC's. If you happen to be browsing a kids phone or copying photos and you inadvertantly view/copy a photo of that pupil naked for example, you could end up in serious trouble. Don't forget LEA/Schools suspend first and then investigate - are you happy to be suspended whilst the issue is investigated? What if someone leaks it to the papers - you've seen what can happen when papers go mad, jobs lost, careers ruined even if not guilty. It's a really dodgy area, and it's all very well people saying oh you'll be ok if you've got an AUP - but I wouldn't put myself or my staff in that position. If your deputy head is willing to put you in that position then maybe suggest that _they_ transfer all pupil images on _their_ pc...