robknowles

Hello, We are a secondary school with almost 1400 students looking to roll out cashless catering over the next 2-4 months. I've been looking through Edugeek and have come across some threads about different suppliers of software/hardware etc but I'm interested in how you rolled it to to Staff/Students/Parents and how the system impacts the school? Namely: 1) Did you support a two way system to begin with, i.e. use both Cash-based registers and Cashless Catering System, or did you migrate from cash to cashless in one go? 2) How did you inform parents? Simple letter home or something else? 3) How did you show students to use it and register them on the system? Did this take time? 4) Do any schools here integrate it with their VLE or provide Parental Logins so they can view what their child(ren) has been eating? Does anybody have Frog which they have integrated with? Did you launch this at the same time as you moved to Cashless Catering? Do parents look at this? 5) How do you accept payments of parents/students? Online payment (i.e. Credit Cards), or Cheques? Do you have machines that accept cash and register it to their account automatically? Anything else? 6) In the use of paying for their food, do students use Cards, Pin Numbers or Biometrics or a mixture? We are looking at Biometrics but just wondered whether any schools use this and have had parents who have refused their child to be fingerprinted? In which case what did you do to resolve this? 7) When students leave, whether at the end of the year or part way through how do you re-imburse students/parents with any access funds? Or do they lose it? If you return them does it add a considerable work load to Finance staff? 8) How did the first few days go when you implemented the system? What pitfalls did you find and what went well? I'm guessing that some students may have struggled but how about catering staff? 9) What contigencies have you got in place if the cashless catering system goes down? 10) Again looking through the forums I've noticed that there has been issues with parents paying, whether issues with online payment systems or something else. Do you allow students to go into a low negative balance by a few pounds just so they can have their lunch? If so how much? 11) And finally any particular systems we should look at or avoid? I know there are a few questions here but any advice/information would be extremely useful and I would like to thank you for your time now. If you have anything else to add that i've missed please do so. Thanks, Rob

Hello, After replacing our core switch over the summer we have a HP ProCurve Switch with some modules available. - Single Power Supply (does support dual power supplies I believe) - 3 Modules with 6 x Mini-GBIC Ports per module - 3 Modules with 20 x Gigabit Copper and 2 x Mini-GBIC Ports per module - Will also provide 4 x 1Gbits/s Fibre Short-range Transceivers that fit into the Mini-GBIC Ports. Works fine. The only thing is that from when we originally had it the fault light and power light were wired the wrong way - but looking on the web console or telnet port reveals that it is fine. Looking at around £450 although I'm open to offers. If you can collect then even better (we are in the West Midlands area - Sutton Coldfield) or I should be able to post for around £10-£15 depending on where you are - although it's likely I will have to wait until September - we all know what courier firms are like for school deliveries/collection over the summer! Thanks, Rob

Hi, Appears to be fine for me now as well on Virgin. Rob

Hi, I've been having issues, and yes I'm on Virgin Media too. Rob

Hi, No, not just you I'm having the same issues as well since yesterday afternoon - whether on Chrome on my Macbook or PC with IE 9. Cheers, Rob

Hello, Has anybody deployed Successmaker Enterprise 1.3 on Windows 7 (64 Bit Enterprise)? We have and the majority of it works fine. The only issue we are having is occasionally on the stations where the audio appears to stop working and normally the user has to close the program and go back in, or pull out the headphones/speakers and reinsert them again to get them working. It's not related to the headphones/speakers and it happens on all of our stations. I've now disabled the HDMI Audio Output, just leaving the normal 3.5m Jack audio output to see if this makes any difference, but just wondering if anybody else has come across this issue and how they resolved it? Thanks, Rob

Hi, We have 4 different cabinets. Two Cabinets used for servers (each less than half-filled). One Cabinet used soley for storage/iscsi switches and one Cabinet used for Comms Equipment. This way everything is pretty much kept seperate and with any cabling that gets done I don't have to worry much about the servers. We have a seperate floor standing UPS (some 3 phase beast) that goes into a seperate power distrubition unit to feed each cabinet. We have the server room on a seperate lock, each cabinet is locked and all the servers/storage units etc where they have lockable bezels also have these locked too. On the server cabinets switches are kept at the top, but mounted on the rear rails - largest/heavyist servers (4U) at the bottom - working the way up to 1U servers. On the comms cabinet - patch panels at the top, then the core switch/router and below that firewall, ruckus zone director etc. Cheers Rob

Hello, I've installed / configured SIMS Solus 3 this evening ready for updating SIMS when we migrate to Windows 7 over the next couple of months. With Solus 3 can I deploy SIMS, or does it just deploy SIMS Updates? Thanks, Rob

@nephilim: Sorry, not sure where you get about the 2nd part is not legally binding. I mention that software developed outside of school time that isn't based on something they developed in school time is owned by the employee (not the employer).

Hello, I'm wondering if anybody has any sample guidance or a policy for ICT Support Staff to sign within a school in terms of software ownership. For example, within my department, some staff are starting to develop software during school time in a view of the school giving the software away for perhaps even selling it. I need to draft something that shows that software development developed in school time is owned by the school, not by the employee. Additionally to state that software developed outside of school, that's not based on software developed in school is owned by the employee. Has anybody else got other suggestions. Thanks, Rob

Hi. We have a Virgin Media 100Mbits/s service - very fast and great support. Rob

Hello, Here, we have both. We use the Smoothwall as a proxy/filtering server and then we we use the SonicWall has a firewall that sits between the SmoothWall and the Internet. Never had any problems with either and for us both offer all the functionality that we needed of each product. Thanks, Rob

Hello, Is anybody else having issues with Impero 3 that means that the program is appearing to be altering the proxy settings for the local system account, which means that applications, such as Symantec EndPoint Protection aren't able to access our Internal Symantec Server to be able to download updates? Symantec works perfectly fine on every other machine with Impero 3 (Impero 2 was fine). What we've done is used the PSExec Tool (from SysInternals) to run Internet Explorer under the local system account and unticked use Proxy. I've noticed though on a few machines that it appears to have reverted the proxy server settings again breaking Symantec updates. Thanks, Rob

Hello, We have a Dell EqualLogic PS4000XV (16 x 450GB Disks, Redundant Modules) - has it been reliable Yes, no problems - had it two years now! - has it met your requirements for performance and storage Yes - was it good value on initial purchase Yes - has support been good if \ when required Never needed technical support on it, but their support site is excellent. - would you buy a similar model again? Yes, if using for Virtualised Environments/VDI, for My Documents/File Shares storage I brought a Dell MD3220i last year. Thanks, Rob

Hi, Yes, still for sale. We can negotiate on the price if neccessary. Thanks, Rob

Hello, I have for sale a Infotrend EonStor SAN, model ES-A16E-G2130-4 (Infortrend EonStor A16E-G2130-4 iSCSI to SATA-II 3U/16-bay RAID) It's has: - Single, user-swappable controller. Has 4 x 1Gbits/s Ports and a 100Mbits/s Management Port. - Controller was upgraded to 2GB Ram Cache (the official InforTrend part, I will ship with the original 512MB Cache) - Dual Power Supplies - Dual Cooling FANs - Rackmount Kit - Supports 16 SATA Hard Drives (comes with 16 x Drive Carriers and screws as well - NO Hard-Drives provided). We had 750GB Hard-Drives in it, but the compability guide says it supports upto 2TB Disks. - No Warranty (either from us, or the original manufacturer) - Supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 6 and hot spare disks - Certified for VMware ESX 3.x and vSphere 4.0 and 4.1 according to Infortrends website, and I believe Windows 2008/2008 R2 certification as well I have the original box and can get it shipped anywhere in the UK. We've recently replaced it as we wanted something with a dual controller model and to host SAS Hard-Drives. The SATA HDD's were fine for streaming media, but for random network file access (i.e. My Documents, Desktops, Shared Areas etc) we needed the higher spindle count and faster SAS Drives speeds. Looking at around £950 (delivery included in within the UK). Also have 2 x QLogic iSCSI Adaptors (QLA-4052C - PCI-X, Dual Port) as well, which can be provided for an additional £250 each. Thanks, Rob

Hello, As a school we hire out various facilities, such as the Gym, All-weather pitch, swimming pool etc. We've recently been asked about hiring a computer suite to run Photo Editing courses. What sort of cost do you think is reasonable for this, or what do you charge if your school also provides this service? Thanks, Rob

Hi, This is to do with Digital Certificates. I'm guessing you use internally generated digital certificates, in which case, you need to generate a certificate for each internal Session Host server and then import that into your Gateway/Web Access server (or Web Access) server. Make sure it uses that certificate and that gets rid of the issues. I'll try and find the guide I found on the net and post a link. Thanks, Rob

Hi, For our server virtualisation SAN project last year, we decided to go with the EqualLogic PS4000XV. This was circa £17K with 16 x 450GB HDD. Been a very good SAN and does all the snapshots, volume copies etc you would require. In terms of most SANs I don't think they have massively fast processors, it's not needed and also to keep the heat down I'm guessing. We have an Dell MD3220i (with an additionals shelf) that's about 4 weeks old that runs our shared folder, my documents etc areas. The controllers in these have an 800MHz PowerPC Processor yet they are incredible fast (even with small non-sequential IO that's the majority of the workload), so I wouldn't be woried if they have an Mobile Celeron. Thanks, Rob

Hi, Had a support session with one of the smoothwall support team - Jason. Very helpful and he got it setup in a matter of minutes. The issue was caused by having the domain name in lower-case letters after the username I entered! Thanks

Hello, I'm currently trialling Smoothwall and I'm attempting to add out Active Directory servers has authentication. However, it keeps failing when I go back to the control tab and clicking on the run button for Verify Configuration It displays that it fails on checking forward DNS. I have put the server fqdn in and it says multiple addresses were found (which is correct, as I have IPs on the server that are setup as DNS, NPS IPs etc). It fails also on Checking connection to the directory server as well. Any help appreciated. Thanks, Rob

Hello, I'm after a device that can plug into a normal projector, lcd screen etc (via HDMI, DVI or VGA), which in turns receives the video streams wirelessly via some sort of USB Dongle. I've come across Cables to Go TruLink (TruLink Wireless VGA Device Adapter - Cables To Go) but they only accept upto 6 devices at once. Can anybody recommend anything similiar that supports additional devices and will allow the user to easily flip between sources? Thanks, Rob

Hello, OK, I'll go with the one IP Address. Will make it easier to support and setup that way. Thanks, Rob

Hello, I'm currently implementing routing within our network, via a subnet range on each VLAN for a specific set of devices - such as a VLAN for Servers, VLAN for Management Ports on Switches Devices, VLAN for VoIP etc. My question is, what's the best way for defining the DNS Settings for devices, in regards to, do I add a IP address to the adaptor for each of our DNS Servers for each VLAN? So if I have: VLAN 1, range 172.16.0.0 to 172.16.7.255 VLAN 2, range 172.16.8.0 to 172.16.15.255 VLAN 3, range 172.16.16.0 to 172.16.23.255 VLAN 4, range 172.16.24.0 to 172.16.31.255 Our DNS Server IP Adaptor will have an IP for each VLAN, such as 172.16.0.2, 172.16.8.2 etc. Devices in VLAN 1, where they require DNS Settings inputted would have 172.16.0.2, Devices in VLAN 2, would have 172.16.8.2 Is this best? Or simply have them pointing to the IP's even if they are on seperate subnets. Thanks, Rob

Hello, Yes, our environment is a full HP ProCurve environment. So, if I understand you correctly, I should not tag the data by using the software on the Network Cards themselves (for example the Intel ProSet Utilities, or VMware's Virtual Switches), but instead should tag the ports on the core switch with the VLAN data I want it to carry. I'm guessing that I should then in turn tag the VLAN ports to the uplink ports on the HP 2626 satellite switches around the school, or can this be left? Thanks, Rob