Linfit

Have you considered a Dell VRTX ? We moved from a stack of Dell Poweredges and an EMC SAN onto one of these two years ago and I think its the best thing I've ever bought. Lots of options for how you want to spec it.

Have you considered a Dell VRTX ? We moved from a stack of Dell Poweredges and an EMC SAN onto one of these two years ago and I think its the best thing I've ever bought. Lots of options for how you want to spec it.

I have been in a similar situation in the past and refused to get invovled in that side of it. My job is to make sure the systems work, make sure monitoring is working, and the relevant staff have the information they need in a format they can understand. I'm not a pastoral person and not trained to be one.Whilst we all of course, have a responsiblity for safeguarding, this is one thing above all where there needs to be a clear chain of command and deliniation of responsiblities.Its an abdication of the DSL's responsibility to try and push this onto you.

I started on this from scratch beginning of Jan. I would advise you read any install/user guides you can find very carefully - read several of the on-line ones as some skip some parts or are not explicit enough. If you then follow accumulated information from the guides its straightforward, although time consuming, but miss a step and its a whole world of pain. In particular, get the structure/config/spec of the server its going on correct before you start. Be aware of the pre-requisites and make sure you install them all, in the right order, and all the relevant bits of SQL. I did not install all the reporting bits and that broke it sufficiently that I had to start again.

I don't think there is a way of doing it without a remote with a keypad - they are availalble on Amazon, about 20 quid I think.

I don't think there is a way of doing it without a remote with a keypad - they are availalble on Amazon, about 20 quid I think.

If you need to do calculations like that then its probably easier to export the data out and do it in Excel.

If you open a marksheet and click on the Summary button in the toolbar this will give you statistical information about the grades in each column. If you right click on a particular column header if it is using an appropriate grade set there will be an option called "Show Grade Distribution" which shows the % of each grade in the column. This may give you what you want depending on how the data in the marksheet columns has been set up.

Maybe someone was, and there are now 349 staff.

These days the only people who really need access to the S drive are those that use legacy apps, like Exams Organiser, Options, or Nova, and those staff that produce the census and CTF files. Inside the sims folder you can restrict permissions on the folders as follows: Exams - Exams Officer and anyone who uses Exams Organiser Options - Anyone using options STAR - Anyone generating CTF files and whoever does the census returns SNOVA - Timetabler Attend - Lesson Monitor users if they are using the standard template letters Other than that, if they are using only SIMS.net, which is going to be most teaching staff, they don't actually even need the S: drive mapped.

You will also need to check your DPR registration (or get the person resposible for it) to ensure it reflects the fact that you record and store CCTV images. If you haven't done that previously it may not be part of your entry in the register.

No problem.

They absolutely are not allowed to take a test twice on the same day. This is one of the things the invigilator is supposed to check when they start the tests. I don't think the software prevents it, but the second test would likely be disqualified when BCS aggregate the results, and the school might get into trouble for allowing the regulations to be broken. The fact that you can specifiy the number of attempts in the test restrictions does not invalidate the rule. They can of course take any number of tests in a day, provided they are different ones.

They wouldn't be able to get to their home shares, or use e-mail (both virtual servers) but profiles are local, so if they were using their normal machine, they could log on, use SIMS (which is not yet virtualised here) get on the internet, use Office and save to local storage - it would provide limited but useful functionality. I am also thinking of more permanent problems (like a fire in the main building for example) where the server room might be lost, but with a surviving physical DC we could make a start on rebuilding infrastructure more quickly.

Its not that I am tied to having a physical DC, its just I want the redundancy afforded by having it on the other side of the campus. If I had another physically separated Hyper-V host, I'd be happy for it to be a virtual DC, but all our hosts are in the same cabinet.

I do have a physical DC as well as two virtual ones - I am old-fashioned that way! Its in a different comms room at the other end of the site, so its not that I don't trust the virtualisation per se, its mainly that we wanted a physically separate DC as there are some scenarios where you might lose just part of the building.

Just the blades. I don't think the chassis failing when the power goes off would be a big issue. If the hosts are off there will be no disc activity at that point, so shouldn't cause any issues.

The two UPS's which power the VRTX have network cards - they are monitored by a separate physical server (which we use for general IT support stuff, run various consoles and admin stuff on etc) and this initiates the shutdown as required - it uses the APC software to run a script when there is 20 mins battery life left.

We run it and the invigilators are a sub set of our normal exam invigilators. They have to do the on-line training, and be registered with BCS for that role, but otherwise its no different to any other external exam. There is nothing in the regs that says that IT technical staff can't be in the room - some schools do and some don't, and will depend on how reliable the exams have been (getting them to work consistently can be tricky) but they are there to provide tech support not to supervise the exam.

Yes, they are web links, although you can put in links which allow direct download of documents I believe.

We have VRTX with 4 blades and run 26 virtual servers on it - all our server infrastructure pretty much, running on Hyper-V. We specced some additional 10GB network connections on the and filled the thing with storage, so we have no issues at all with performance, and it replaced an EMC SAN and a set of 6 PowerEdge 710's running XenServer, so we have a saved a load of rackspace, reduced our power bill and significantly reduced the load on our air-con in the server room, which was a real issue for us. I would highly recommend them. We have approx. 600 devices, 1100 users.

We have been using this live since Sept after using KKS for many years. Seems to work well and the parents like it. The App is very configurable so you can use it as a sort of portal to access other related online services: we have links in it to our online payment system, web site, various other stuff. It uses the same export service as KKS so the setup required at our end was minimal - the actual App content is maintained by our web site admin, and she finds it pretty straightforward.

Our solution to this is to have a "shadow" SIMS server. We have a high spec laptop set up as a SIMS server with an encrypted hard drive. It has a full install of server and client for SIMS and FMS. It gets updates automatically from SOLUS like all the other SIMS devices. We have a script which runs each night as part of our normal backup routine which stops the sims databases and backs them up. In the morning, I come in, plug the laptop into mains power and a spare network socket reserved for it next to my desk. It runs a scheduled task which copies the backups from where they are stored on the server and then Dbattaches them to the SQL instance on the laptop. At lunchtime, I pack the laptop up. It goes home with me every day. We have three copies of the USB decryption key, one to use at work, one I keep at home, and 1 in the safe. If the building burnt down I would have a complete working SIMS server with data on it which was never more than 24 hours old. I keep a simple 8 port switch and some cables at home as well, with a power inverter and some other stuff in an emergency bag. I reckon we could set up three or four staff laptops as SIMS clients running off our laptop server in our car park the day after the building burnt down. We have actually rehearsed this using one of the minibuses as an "office". Our local SIMS support unit helped us set this up several years ago and we have used this method ever since. We obviously also keep local backup as well - this is just a last ditch option.

Its virtually impossible to remove them from SIMS altogether - if they have been used for anything it won't let you delete them. You can hide them from Manage Classroom Staff though, by marking them as inactive or removing assignability. If the duplicates have a date of leaving in then they shouldn't appear in the list of current staff anyway.

Do you have it on a decent server ? It does seem to require a fair bit of resources thrown at it for it to work at reasonable speed, and 1300 is quite a big school.