will_

Hi Steve, We're about to undergo some fairly substantial changes to our network (both expansion and tidying of the existing infrastructure to cut out some old, daisy-chained hubs). The end result will be one core switch feeding: - four edge switches (three data and one VoIP) - seven wireless access points - a few servers - a router to the outside world. We have a suite of 16 computers (with their own edge switch), about as many classroom computers plus a few admin machines. On the wireless network, we have a trolley of 36 netbooks and 12 staff laptops. The VoIP network has 4 handsets and capacity for 3 more. A lot of my specifications are for future-proofing: - The uplinks are currently copper but I'd like the ability to replace two of them (those furthest away) with fibre in the future. - 16 ports would be enough at the moment but I'd like a bit of headroom for future expansion. - Most of our wireless access points have mains sockets reasonably nearby but I'd prefer to power them by PoE as they are occasionally unplugged by "helpful" people. - I'd rather avoid PoE midspans / injectors. Our cabinet's already pretty short of space. EDIT 1: The requirement for a managed switch is so I can get some idea of traffic and prioritise certain ports if necessary. EDIT 2: I consider 100Mbit to be old technology and would rather deliver gigabit connectivity everywhere.

Ah, this looks interesting - particularly taking on board localzuk's comments:

But I am looking for gigabit! :-)

Why's that?

Thanks. This was suggested earlier in the thread. It's a bit above my price range.

Definitely nice switches but no PoE. Yes please. Perhaps some time tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon. I'll send you a PM with my number. Thanks.

I'd love to but it's out of my price range, unfortunately. Always do! I'm open to some persuasion on brand. I tried looking up the Netgear alternative (I think it'd have to be the GS724TP, wouldn't it?) but it ended up dearer than the HP. EDIT: No, the HP's dearer. I was looking at the wrong model again. Maybe Netgear will win after all!

Okay, fair enough. Thank you, everybody, for all the information so far. I think I have two remaining questions: 1. If 'V' is for Value and 'E' is for Enterprise, does that mean 'A' sits in between? (2. I've answered myself: the V1905 doesn't come in gigabit.) 3. Will a "smart managed" switch allow me to prioritise certain ports? Are they just missing the RS232 port or are there other restrictions? -Will.

Thanks, Luke. I might take you up on that.

Mmmm, but for half the price, I think I'd rather buy a new one after 3 years if necessary.

Quite right; my mistake. I meant the 24G version: Hewlett Packard HP V1910-24G Switch JE006A | Servers Direct What are the problems with the 3COM models?

Whoa, that's still pretty pricey. I was thinking more along these lines: MCI Diventi Ltd :: networks :: network switches :: HP JD992A - V1905-24-PoE Switch

Hi everyone, I have searched around a bit and found lots of discussion about switches but none answer the questions I have. I'm slightly overwhelmed by the range of HP switches. 1. What's the significance of the first letter? I (eventually) found out V stands for Value (and not Voice); what about A, E and anything else I've missed? 2. What's the functional difference between the V1905 and V1910 series (besides processor speed and RAM)? 3. What's the difference between "fully managed" and "smart managed"? Ultimately, I'm looking for the following: - 24 ports, all gigabit - PoE to at least "some" ports - the option to add a couple of gigabit fibre uplinks in the future - the ability to prioritise a few ports (i.e. some degree of management) I don't currently need VLANs but like the idea of having the ability to use them in the future, if the option isn't too expensive. Thanks, -Will.

We have four NetGear WN802T access points in our primary school, and they've been one of the the most unreliable pieces of kit I have ever used. Two have been replaced (within two years) because they bricked themselves. All four regularly drop connections or crash completely until they are power cycled; one is so bad that I have it on a timeswitch to cycle every morning. They'd probably be great for a home user with one or two devices but with any more than that, they quickly become overwhelmed - staff meeting this evening with 8 laptops was enough to crash one unit 3 times. We've checked they're all running the latest firmware and have suffered the same problems with laptops and desktops made by HP and Dell (both of both). Avoid!

I'm interested in these, too. My biggest concerns are: 1. Brightness. Projectorpoint seem to say (and have confirmed by phone) that the ANSI lumen scale doesn't apply properly to LED light sources, and in side-by-side testing they found it to be brighter than 2000 lumen models. I haven't heard anything similar from anyone else (and don't understand why ANSI lumens wouldn't apply to any particular light source - colour temperature?) and feel cautious about accepting it. 2. LCDs. My understanding is the LED(s) shine(s) through LCDs, just as in a traditional (non-DLP) projector. I am cautious of LCDs because all our projectors are now suffering from dying LCDs so presumably, with the longer LED life, the LCD would become the next weakest link. The person I spoke to on the phone was adamant that these models don't have any LCDs because "it's a completely different technology". Of this I am very skeptical. Is there any projector that needs neither an LCD nor a DLP? @glennda, can you PM me who quoted you £375, please? Thanks.

Put the teacher machine (and IWB, if you have one) by the door, then have all the machines with their screens facing the door. This will mean: 1. The teacher can see everybody's screen from his/her machine (during lessons) or from the door (during wet plays, for example). 2. The children have to turn away from their screens when being addressed by the teacher, so they can't fiddle the the mouse or keyboard. 3. Compared to U-shape layouts, where computer screens face each other, there is less potential for children to turn around and chat (across the middle of the 'U'). 4. The children are not distracted by what is happening outside the door. I agree with the principle of recycling older laptops as tethered desktops, but make sure they're well secured.

Yes: I tried looking up the "LaserJet P3015" on the Kingston website (for some reason you have to search under the "No longer supported" category) and it recommends the following: KTH-LJ4014/128 KTH-LJ4014/256 KTH-LJ4014/512 Interestingly, it lists the bus architecture as "proprietary", so maybe HP really have come up with their own packaging. EDIT: I've yet to find anywhere in the UK that has it in stock!

Hi all, We're looking at getting a new HP LaserJet Enterprise P3015x and increasing the RAM to 512MB but I'm having difficulty finding the right specification for the RAM (and genuine HP RAM costs silly money). The only specs I've managed to find say "144-pin DDR2" but I didn't think DDR2 came in 144-pin packages! Surely HP haven't invented their own RAM packages for the sake of charging people through the nose?!

Hmm, that's a point. The network printer we have already have has its own web interface, 1GB RAM and 20GB HD (it's one of those huge photocopier / fax things), so print queues are managed with the device itself. The one I'm hoping we'll soon buy is an HP LaserJet Enterprise P3015x, which comes with 128MB RAM and JetDirect. Does anybody know, roughly, what 128MB RAM will hold in terms of, say, 1-page Word documents of mixed text/graphics?

Yeah, it seems so obvious now but I'd never considered it before. There have been occasions when pupils have logged in, done their work, then the file server died before they were able to save or print. Plus most teachers have their planning on their laptops.

Now that's not a bad idea. Just as I had originally hoped, the client would ask the server where to find the printer but then talk directly to the printer. The printer I'm testing on has its IP address allocated statically so I've created an A-record instead of a CNAME. I haven't tried modifying any clients yet (I'm at home at the moment) but accessing the printer's web server by name via the VPN works. The only hurdle that remains is seeing whether Windows (XP for most clients) will allow a name rather than an IP address in the printer port. This will probably have to wait for another day.

Thanks. We already do that, and to be honest, we'll probably just stick with such a setup. I was thinking of a time when we had to change one of the IP addresses manually, although admittedly this has only happened once and even then it was because we were re-organising our IP space (it was a mess!).

Thanks for the suggestion. We're a medium-sized primary school and just have "the server" - there is no print server, file server, etc. It's not "often" down (very rarely, in fact - last time was a hardware failure); it's just that I'm a full time teacher and we don't have a techie, so I'd like to minimise the amount of disruption it causes when things do break. I'd also like to avoid sending huge amounts of data into the server and back out again. I'm a bit wary of virtualisation on the server after I tried installing VirtualBox (for using FOG) - within a few hours the server would crash (completely - power cycle to resolve). That said, it was pointed out to me since that hardware virtualisation is disabled in the BIOS and enabling it would probably resolve this. Virtualising the print server still wouldn't address the wasted network bandwidth, though.

Hi, We have a few network printers (with their own Cat5 connections). At the moment, clients connect to them using a mixture of two methods: 1. Some clients have the printers' IP addresses hard-coded into the driver configuration screens. This isn't ideal because if the IP address ever changes, I will have to update every single client. 2. Some clients print via the curriculum server, which makes the printer available as a share. This isn't ideal because it needlessly sends a large volume of data through the server, and the printer is unavailable if the server is down. Is there a solution? The closest thing I could think of would be a setup whereby clients ask the server what the printer's IP address is (and perhaps cache this value for robustness again server down-time)? Perhaps even a login script, pulled from the server, would do. We use EISnet, if that's any help. One added complication is that one of the printers is key-coded and each teacher has a different PIN which must be entered on the printer properties page. That said, the PIN is mainly used to monitor photocopying, and I don't think anybody would notice if all the computers just used a "computer printouts" PIN. Thoughts?

I take it back; I was wrong. See the transcript of my e-mail conversation with them in this thread.