Butuz

Wow thats a nice big IT Suite!!! Good work!! Butuz

F-Series Replacement Fascia/Button Kit The buttons are weak so get a few in

You can buy them from RM. F-Series Replacement Fascia/Button Kit Part number: 12R-590 £2.38 each. Bit of a bargain because that includes the entire cream/blue front facia with button, and also the actual internal switch and cable.

4 x servers for 4 x workstations?? Thats a darned impressive ration you got there!

Successmaker Enterprise is the newer version and it is much more robust than the old version of Successmaker. It's actually alot cheaper than the older version was, too! We've been using it here for years and it just runs - dont really have to do anything with it at all! Butuz

Edugeek Joomla is a great way of doing it - all you need to do is pay for some Linux web hosting for £50 or £100 a year and you can set up Joomla and either have a dedicated person updating the website or actually allow staff to update their own parts of the website.

This is standard behaviour of the RM SIMS Packages. When a user first tries to run SIMS - the set environment message comes up once. If the user clicks OK, then immediatley logs off, and then logs back on and runs SIMS - the message should not come up again. Clearly there is some kind of data that needs to be stored in the users roaming profile and logging off and logging on the user transfers their roaming profile to the server. When you reset a users profile it is as if they have not logged on before, thus every time you reset a user's profile, you reset the change that SIMS makes, and Set Environment message pops up again. Andrew

Password policy is applied per domain, or per subdomain... So you could theoretically create a subdomain for staff, and a subdomain for pupils and apply differing password policies there. EG If your domain was myschool.com you could create students.myschool.com and apply a lax password policy here, and staff.myschool.com and create a strict passwoird policy here. Of course, the relavent users need to be located in the correct subdomains.

Waiting for CCBC to implement Moodle here!

Yep got 28 here. PSU's are weak and can fail - keep spares in. Serial boards are far more reliable than USB ones. Don't really have many problems with them to be honest.

Move my school to England!!!

Seems to be very hard for NM's to get to SLT without any teaching qualifications or experience. Grumbledook is the exception rather than the rule I recon.

I guess you firstly need to decide if this upgrade is: 1) to serve your own personal ambitions and career aims, or 2) to provide your School, it's Teachers, and most importantly its Pupils with a robust, secure, well supported network. There are numerous ways to go 1) Stick with CC3 2) Move to CC4 3) Move to Vanilla 4) Move to another system (ranger, etc) All of the above are feasible. Which ever way you go though make sure you spend the money in a way that uses the latest technology to reduce total cost of ownership to the school, increase performance, increase reliability (e.g Virtualisation, SAN, Thin Clients, etc), and remains flexible and supportable by someone other than you... (incase you get run over by a bus). One question I will ask - apart from your career aims, why do you want to move from CC3? Is it slow? Unreliable? Insecure? Too secure? Too expensive?

Quoted for the absoloute truth of it. Once you start working unpaid overtime your on the slippery slope to becoming a rug for people to wipe their feet on. For my school - it was when I had to let all the little jobs go (as witch suggests) for so long that the constant pressure on SMT from the teachers finally drove them to agree to appoint a full time technician. Things have been much better since as the little things are attended too as well as the big things.

hello boyos!!!

Agree with Toledo - hot spares are well worth having. One thing that could have happened - if you did not have Background Consistency Check enabled on the controller the Array parity could have slowly become slightly corrupt over time and now that a drive has actually failed is is too currupt to re-build the array properly.

I AM GOING TO MAKE IT IN 2009!!!!! Even if it kills me! Andrew

I've tested SIMS.net on my Terminal Server (RM CC3 network) and it actually worked fine. I did not do any performance testing however - but I suspect that as SIMS.net doesnt like to run very well on a workstation with less than 512MB ram - it would need at least one hefty terminal server with as much ram as possible (8-16GB) if you want to run 120 concurrent staff users. Solus updates would be much simplified though - it is a good idea. Other things to look at could be SIMS Learning Gateway to provide web based access to SIMS data. Butuz

I was going to say - many schools are offering 16-18k for technical staff now, never mind a Network Manager. Good luck with it - I hope you get a 25k network manager for your 16k - but the chances are you won't. Butuz

Just a word of warning IDE/SATA write performance on Raid 5 is dire. If your planning on backing up multiple servers to the nas device at the same time you will find your backup times shoot up compared to backing up just one server at a time. You've got a few choices: Raid 0 - Maximum capacity and maximum read and write speed. Minimum Reliability. Raid 5 - Good capacity and maximum read, but poor write speed. Maximum reliability. Raid 10 - Sacrifice 50% capacity but good read and write times and still good reliability. I am running Raid 5 on mine and the write performance is unaceptible if i back more than two servers up - I am going to change it to Raid 10 over half term. - will lose 500gb of space, but should get rewarded with much faster backups. Butuz

We had the same thing last week of term - crack boom flash say bye bye Cisco router! I'll be building it into next years plan top have APC protection in every rack cabinet.

I guess thiss will be a lesson to you in why RAID-0 should never be used for anything other than making 3d games load faster. If you lose one drive, you lose all your data off both drives. A data recovery company could probably get some or all data back but its gonna cost you alot.

The only current downside is the Axel units do not pass through sound from the server, infact they don't even have a headphone socket! This would not really a problem for me as sound is not used in the areas I currently use thin clients in. I did some multimedia testing with watching videos etc and the Axel client performed pretty much identically to the t5135 - they both could not display full screen video very well, though if you made the video much smaller, they could display it much better. Both were able to display flash sites e.g games, and animation, but not flash videos. This though, is the same for all current "cheap" thin clients, and the Axel is by far the cheapest! I've no doubt one of the more expensive HP Thin Clients would fare much better with multimedia - but then at £300-£400 for a thin client I would expect it to do alot more than multimedia too!!! (make Coffee, take me to and from school, etc...) Butuz

Congratulations Tony. A fair few people may moan about SIMS but I'd like to see them use some of the other alternatives available. You have obviously become an expert in SIMS - out of interest how long have you been using SIMS, and how did you learn it? Through courses - or through use in another school? I am interested because I am now SIMS Manager here and I have recieved no formal training, the learning I have done so far is simply through using SIMS, and so far this term, fixing some of the problems we have encountered with T6 and Cover 7. Cheers

Got 30 Linux T5135 and 70 Windows T5135. The Windows ones are faster and more streamlined. The linux ones are a bit clunky and slow, but are more configurable and easier to set up to auto-rdp - I cant seem to find an easy way of setting windows ones to automatically RDP to a server as soon as they boot up - anyone help? To be honest with 100 of them - I will not be buying any more, the Axel units available on this forum are far faster, far easier to set up, far smaller, and VESA mount from the box, oh and far cheaper to boot! Wish I had 100 Axels instead!!! Andrew