jonlawsb

The whole point of the excercise was to cut costs! The added hardware, software and administration required would be phenomenal! You would require an massively beefed up Wireless network to handle the extra bandwidth requirements - £££££'s Many schools do not have existing network hardware capable of VLANing and those that do will frequently have mixtures of manufacturers/802.1q implimentations forcing upgrades/replacements. = £££££'s To allow access to internal non-web resources you would require not only internal network filtering capable of stateful packet inspection but also extensive application layer filtering = £££££££££'s You would require AV inspection and MAC tagging for each machine brought into school and that could be a phone, PDA, Laptop or netbook. Many students may have at least 2-3 of those.More hands-on admin. = £££££'s You would lose the control you have through Directory services (AD or otherwise) in controlling access, software installation & update/patch management. More hands-on admin. = £££££'s You would not be able to accept all those devices onto your Acive Directory (as if you wanted too) because most will not have OS's capable of joining a domain/AD. With the exception of browsing - teaching staff could not hope to plan lessons using particular software because of the massive differences in availablilty/version/fixes/updates etc,. Many students simply don't have a laptop/netbook of their own. Those that do may not even want to bring it into school - opening up their private teenage internet activities to potential scrutiny. Parents/guardians may not even want their children to take an expensive items like laptops to school for fear of damage/theft. Considering the numbers of mobile phone muggings - I hate to consider the student safety once a school is known to have students walking to/from school with laptops. I worked at a large secondary (in a comparatively affluent area) that opened up such a scheme to the Sixth Form. Out of around 200 students - we only had a dozen or so laptops brought in. Yes - the Charging, insurance etc,. could easily be taken care of with disclaimers that have to be signed by the student/parent/guardian etc,. but that is the tip of the very large and very costly iceberg. Jon Lawson Broadhead IT Consultancy

A member of staff getting used to Linux over time is one thing but how about that same member of staff feeling confident enough to run a lesson on such systems when they are still learning themselves? How do they field those student questions that they can't answer or handle that one student who uses Ubuntu daily and takes pleasure in running rings around them? I'm sure that member of staff benefitted heavily from having a Linux specialist such as yourself about but most schools are not so lucky - hence my comments about recruiting issues. Jon Lawson Broadhead IT Consultancy

Active Directory is not an implimentation of LDAP - LDAP is a protocol for querying Directory Services, Active Directory is the Microsoft version of Directory services. LDAP itself is a tool not Directory Service. Jon Lawson Broadhead IT Consultancy

The article typically empties a whole bag o'cats amongst the pigeons but on scrutiny raises some good points, others such as own student laptops -are just mad) Open Source operating systems have been sneaking into many schools for a while now in the guise of low end Netbooks. While OK for browser based software use and those students/staff au fait with OpenOffice it's no much use for anything else in most scenarios leaving the netbooks sat in the trolley. ICT teaching staff on the whole can craft lessons regardess but when the non-ICT teachers visit the equipment with a class, what do they do if they've never seen Linux? Unfortunately many schools have issues finding affordable support staff with the necessary Open source skills (particularly when using open source Server OS's) this is due to the inevitable market bias towards Microsoft products. Old School Unix & Linux guys (like my brother) will claim there's nothing difficult in implimenting and supporting Open source but they have an unrealistic idea about the level of 'technical' know-how of most IT Support professionals. I know many such people who have never used a command line in their lives let alone live and breath Bash. As for Penfold & dhicks "pupils shoul(d) be learning skills not software" I fully agree but they also need to leave school and be able to answer 'Yes' in an interview when they are asked can you use windows XP/Vista/7 or Office 2003,2007 etc,. Unfortunately (again) the majority of industry still uses predominantly Microsoft in the workplace. As an IT Pro - I would love to be able to help out with the networks, servers etc,. at the primary/junior school where my daughters go but the local Council would throw their toys out of their pram. Many Council based ICT support services are dug in like ticks with their management emitting sharp intakes of breath at the mere suggestion from a headteacher that they could find cheaper, more effective alternatives elsewhere. Many HT's don't even realise that they can go elsewhere for their support. Jon Lawson Broadhead IT Consultancy

Frazer, you may be having TCP ACK problems during these SMB copies. If your servers have security signatures enabled on SMB transfers - incoming file copies using SMB (from XP for instance) require the redirector to process the block at the same time, however the redirector will sit there waiting for a TCP/IP acknowledgement before getting on with the next block - result - a slow upload to the server but downloads appear fine. On the servers check this registry entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Current ControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters If the EnableSecuritySignature or RequireSecuritySignature values are set to 1 then this could be the cause. Setting both values to 0 will negate the problem by switching off the security signature requirement. Hope this helps - otherwise it's another one you can cross off the list! Jon Lawson-Broadhead IT Consultancy lawson-broadhead.com