dhicks

If you're thinking of applying for this job, do please fill in an application form rather than just sending us your CV - we've had lots of applicants so far, but only one who's filled in an application form. Also, I'd just add that we're a nice, friendly school and that you'll hopefully have the chance to get involved in some interesting work. We're probably going to be rolling out iPads / Chromebooks school-wide at some point soon, as well as moving more to cloud-based provision for some functions that are currently run by in-house servers, so hopefully the chance to get some good experience there.

Just to add: you'll probably be specifiying quite large, PoE-capable switches - check the network cabinets you have around the school are deep enough for the size of switch, and it's probably going ot be worth getting accousticly muffled ones, too, just because most PoE-capable switches these days seem to be quite loud.

With a modern managed wireless solution that should, hopefully, be perfectly do-abale. However if you're at still before the building stage you might as well specify as many physical network points in each classroom as you can - they don't all have to be plugged in to a switch, just there and ready to use should the need arise. If you're running cables to each classroom anyway then adding extra points per classroom should be a relativly small cost.

Good point, although the one I have sat next to me here looks okay, and has chugged along okay for the past 5 years or so with daily use as part of my home PC setup, so they can't be too bad. Maplin also had something on offer today as I walked past, that might be the kind of thing the original poster is looking for - as pointed out above, a few more details from them would be handy.

Depending on how many channels you need, the SoundLab Micro Mixer might be what you want: SOUNDLAB 4 CHANNEL STEREO MICROPHONE MIXER 03-G105DA | eBay

Hello All, We are looking for a new ICT Helpdesk Technician at Knightsbridge School, central London (Knightsbridge, just round the corner from Harrods). You will be working with me, taking care of the day-to-day IT needs of our 400 primary school pupils and 150-ish staff. We are looking for someone bright and enthusiastic who can be the first point of call for end-user IT issues - this should hopefully be a good entry-level psosition for someone interested in IT support as a career. The official advert and job description are attached below. For an application pack and further details please see the school website site or contact Rosie Binns at [email protected], phone 020 7590 9000 or, of course, reply to this post or DM me with any queries you might have. You could also contact @rickjames - he's the one currently in this post who'll be moving on to a new job in a few weeks. Official advert: Advert.pdf Job Description: Job Description.pdf -- David Hicks

We use Serva, a free BINL server capable of serving PXE-bootable Windows installer images - you can run a Windows unattended install via the network, no user interaction required. After the unattended install has run (which includes steps to rename the machine according to MAC address and join the domain) we have Windows hand over to a script that then installs various packages, but that is quite clunky - better to deploy packaged MSIs via GPO if you can.

Rather than use a tumble dryer, we dry our clothes on a rack inside and have a separate dehumidifer. It seems to work well - we have a proper, well-insulated flat as above, but with the dehumidifer running we don't have a problem with damp. This is a small, one-bedroom flat, so really just two rooms, and we do maybe two or three washing loads a week - things may differ in a larger house or flat.

Our QNAP device came with the front slots fully populated with caddies - Dell / HP servers, by contrast, typically seem to come with most of the front slots filled with basic covers that /look/ just like caddies until you take them out. If you have physical access to the machine it's probably easiest to simply check the front and see if it has a full set of caddies ready for you to fit harddrives in to.

If the activity is by that particular VM then I imagine it's probably more likly to be something to do with the OS on that VM rather than XenServer. What is the Windows VM doing at the time those activity spikes happen? Can you upgrade the VM to Server 2012 R2? Or install a fresh file server?

Here's another thread where we had a similar discussion: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/150488-azure-ad-other-services.html That was from March this year, and since then prices might have gone down a bit - BackBlaze suddenly dropped the price of their storage last month, so hopefully Google / Amazon / Microsoft will be following shortly. The rough pricings I worked out in March were around £300 - £500 per month for offsite mirrored VM images using either Microsoft's or Amazon's systems. That's still at least around £4,000-ish per year, which the bursar still thought was a bit expensive, so I priced a solution up where we run 2 or 3 VMs on Google's infrastructure and copy our data over - not mirroring VMs, just backup to a cloud-based target VM of some sort. That worked out a bit cheaper, although I don't have the figures to hand.

Seconded, although I'd recommend specifying the plus-sized back panel - the standard sized ones don't really have quite enough space in them to fit all the cables a typical PC still seems to need, especially if it's a classroom one hooked up to a projector or similar with a second chunky VGA / DVI cable to cram in there.

Indeed - or if the original poster is looking for stuff to develope, making Oauth-capable versions of the various ecucational software / websites already around might be a good place to start.

As pointed out above, there's no need to spend time developing yet another basic VLE infrastructure which you then start adding features to, Google / Microsoft / Aamazon now do that for you. Concentrate on creating applications that integrate data in all parts of their operation. Schools spend far to much time shifting data and results from one application to another, that should all happen automatically.

We've just bought a site license for the Joinit Handwriting Toolbar, if that's any help: What we offer Their website is a bit unclear, but they basically sell a tool that appears as a toolbar in Word and allows teachers to produce joined-up handwriting worksheets. I've not used it myself yet, but from how the toolbar comes nicly packaged as a proper MSI file it looks like a well-written enough bit of software.

My experience of Firefly support has been good so far - as a company they seem to have a pretty good idea of how schools operate, and I generally get coherant answers back to my questions.

We have something very similar-looking to those powered Unicol stands that came with our new Promethian touch screens. They are very solid, and they do extend to a surprisingly decent height. The whole unit is quite heavy, though - you'll definatly need a smooth, flat surface to wheel them about on. The Promethian boards come with OPS slots for a proper integrated PC, although we were supplied with Nucs instead. I don't know if you can get standard non-touch panels with OPS slots, but if so you could have a literally all-in-one unit with no separate PC to wander off or need sticking to a shelf.

One copy of the software will handle, I think, something like around a dozen separate Eye-Fi cards. We currently have 11 on the network, so we might be almost up to the limit. If you go for Windows or Android rather than iOS then your browser (i.e. Chrome) can support the getUserMedia interface, so you can write a web page that can grab pictures straight from the camera, by passing the camera roll.

We have our backups hosted at another school. If it's any help, Backblaze are now doing storage for $0.005 per GB per month, so $61.44 (around £40) per TB per year: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

We just have the application installed locally for a couple of users at the moment, we haven't got around to setting up a network install yet. Sounds like it might take more effort than I was hoping, too.

If you mean the Eye-Fi SD card with built-in wireless, we have 8 or so around the building. They were impressive when we first bought them 4 years ago or so, but it's probably cheaper to buy a camera (or, as suggested above, a smartphone) with WiFi built-in. Eye-Fi's software doesn't run as a service, it runs as a desktop application, so you need an always-on PC to run the software to sync photos with the network. It also doesn't support network file areas. We've set up a virtual machine to run the software and have a script watch for new Eye-Fi photos arriving and copy them over to a network drive, but it's a bit cludgy. Saying that, I haven't actually checked for software updates recently, so a newer version might be available.

We mostly have 120GB Crucial drives, with around 80GB taken up by the average workstation install. We have a few larger drives (512GB) in a couple of machines used for video editing.

You don't need to know what happens server-side - you could use Wireshark to examine a GET or POST request to the external server when you scan a barcode, then write a simple input-form page that replicates that. That's not going to work if the site uses HTTPS, of course, as you'd rather hope it would.

You could write a new input page, one that submitted to the same URL as the original but knew to append the "~" character beforehand.

Currently XenServer for our "enterprise" IT (Windows Domain Controllers, Exchange server, etc), although the new storage features included in Windows Server 2016 sound as though they might be a compelling enough reason for a change next year. Our distributed cloud system uses Xen as it was the easiest option for programatic control and assignment of dedicated harddrives (rather than virtual volumes) to virtual machines.