forkies

So had the air con engineer out at 6am this morning. The external unit has packed up, the compressor. So had to hire a unit from a company in London who were really quite cheap and delivered within 3 hours compared to hss who I have used before. Repair bill is £1.5k ex fat as it is 1 month out of warranty! So a new unit it is at only £2.3k which is very reasonable I think. The important thing is we got everything back up and running quickly and surprisingly instead of everyone complaining as they need things now... Everyone was asking for it to stay down as it was so calm and relaxed without email?! If it doesn't work (user error) they want it working asap and they are complaining, but if it is really broken then they don't mind?

So I went into the server room this afternoon, and it felt a little warm. The servers sounded a bit louder as well. I grabbed a thermometer and it was showing 25c when the air con is set to 18c. A quick chat with the site manager to get the air con engineer out and caught the business manager up, I went back and checked and the thermometer had gone up to 30c servers showing 32c. In the end I have had to shutdown all the servers as they were starting to show overheating. Looks like I will be in at 5:30 tomorrow as the engineer should be in at 6am. Hopefully this is the last bit of "bad luck" as its the third thing, and they say it comes in 3s.

Hi all, I am having some deja vu here, we have a user who is getting a message saying her mailbox is unavailable in OWA and trouble connecting with Outlook. The event log on the exchange 2010 server reads: Mapi session "1a111111-2222-33b3-c444-d55555d55ddd: /o=domain/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (QWERTYUI12POIUY)/cn=Recipients/cn=Forename Surnameaae" exceeded the maximum of 16 objects of type "session". We had this issue before and did the IOS fix and also the regedit fix on "Maximum Allowed Service Sessions Per User" to 32. To get it working again I had to restart the IS service, however it then pulled her emails into outlook then came up with the same error. OWA still works though. She does not have any mobile devices syncing, but has Outlook on her MacBook and Windows PC. Also apparently on her iPad, all running latest updates. She is the only user affected. The issue I have is she is a governor and is not in school so I am trying to diagnose over the phone, I think her Mac is brand new so probably the culprit as it has not happened before for her. Any ideas? TIA.

We are probably doing about the same as you however not as many, just replacing admin PCs and maybe ssd and ram in some student machines as they still run fine. We get different screens though, so we can mount the micro units to the back of the screen, then the kids can't move them.

I am getting this too, we had new smoothwall installed over half term. It is not showing blocking on the realtime but is showing a lot its IP rather then the username going to sisra. Then we get an error message saying it cannot connect / offline. @Techdw did you get anywhere with this?

Yes it uses the last policies it received and uploads log when it comes back online.

Me too! Attempting to do some house tidying but ended up on my iPad...

We have a number of vlans, we used to be a flat network via lea but we had quite a lot of broadcast packets, since changing to vlans everything is much quieter and slightly faster. Good for security too generally. We had an audit from an external IT company and would have not met their "good" grade if we didn't have vlans.

I use google when working on systems I rarely use or doing a task I haven't done before because I am not an expert trained person on everything. In a time where you manage so many systems whereas in some corporate companies there is a team of people looking after just one system or less. I sometimes get emails from support people in external companies and they have job titles like "Technical support advisor, ms excel 2013" or "Technical support advisor, iscsi storage networks" in which case they are trained fully and specifically in one area and I expect them to never use google. It appears pretty much every IT guy in education is on here, we all need help and advice sometimes and it's pretty much the same as Google!

So recently my technician and myself have gone down with some nasty cold. I seem to be getting more colds or bugs over the past few months and I am putting it down to the grubbing keyboards and mice we have to touch every day. We have around 300 desktops across the site for student use and we barely get the time to clean our own keyboards let alone think about cleaning those too. We do try and clean staff laptops as the come in, you can clearly see where people have sneezed all over the screen and keyboard and it is disgusting! My question is, what do you guys/girls do about cleaning the keyboards/screens/mice around site? Do you get an external company in and if so how often? Also how much does it cost you (per pc)? If you do it yourself, again how often and how many do you clean? Do your cleaners clean them? (Ours barely clean the classrooms and I wouldn't trust them to actually not break the computers) Or do you not clean them? I am getting a quote from a local cleaning company but still waiting a reply, my concern is this is a health and safety issue (especially in a school) were computers are touched by nearly every student and germs can travel quickly. I am just dreading the quote from the external company being ridiculous and our business manager just telling me to clean them within my department, which has already been cut 33% and with never ending and piling list of jobs to do, this would never get done. I would rather take my 26 days remaining holiday before April then clean keyboards. Anyway a bit off point now, thanks in advance for all your wisdom!

Those VHS tapes though...

I would be looking at the storage with those errors and that setup. The part "dbtime on page smaller than dbtimebefore in record" suggests to me a problem with either writing to the db (could be a network or San problem) or the log buffer. Either way most likely a storage problem if your server appears to be functioning normally.

Are you looking for just filtering, replacing a whole firewall solution, virtual or physical appliance? I just got a smooth wall s8 appliance 3.5 years 1000 users. Came in around £11k. Before that we had a watch guard xtm850 3 years subscription services at £13k ish. Got a quote for some dns based filtering, came in at £18k for 3 years.

From what I understand our safeguarding team use a spreadsheet and individual word documents for each student. They haven't asked for anything different or just don't want to move from the old ways. I am sure there is other software out there that someone else will mention, I would be interested to try and move our teams to the future rather then the past.

I had an issue with groups, apparently the link with AD has been disabled in 5.1.05 so that may account for your issues with setting permissions on groups. This didn't affect everyone so I had to import usernames in the end from AD.

As seems to be the norm, we have no target. However I have had a 3 day whole network downtime scheduled into summer holidays each year so I can do essential server maintenance. No downtime other then that for a year (that ultimately is down to me to fix, I.E. Not power cuts). I always say if it's not in the help desk it won't get done as I will forget about it (or don't even know about it). I was quite pleased this morning in staff briefing that the senior leadership, without any request from myself, told staff to put IT issues in the help desk, not to stop me in the hallway or email me or my technician directly. That seems to work well, help desk is getting more use today and I am able to get jobs done uninterrupted! Bonus.

Just incase anyone is thinking of buying one... I bought one, it's great fun but I can only really use it during school holidays as I have been told not to use it while students are in. Also it is illegal to use these on public roads and footpaths etc. So you can only use it on private premises. Very expensive, even if you buy the really cheap ones from dodgy China sites, for what you get from it.

Turns out once I actually got some time with the laptop, the driver was corrupt. It seemed fine under the teachers profile however when I switched to admin it didn't map and error 57. A quick reinstall of the driver locally and all is working fine again.

Hi all, Could do with some help here. I don't get a lot of time with the problematic laptop so I haven't tried everything yet. The problem is, we have Papercut running and haven't had an issue really since its installation, we deployed the client to all laptops and this specific laptop has been working until yesterday. The laptop runs the client but if you try to print anything at all it just disappears, it doesn't go to a queue, nothing shows on the Papercut live feed, no accounting box nothing. I have tried so far: Close and reopen the client Run the client from the server share Restart local print spool Printing to different printers Reinstalling the client Restarting the print server There is no other users affected. It just seems really odd that it doesn't show up on the Papercut webpage like it isn't even sending the job to the server. The laptop is a couple weeks old and as mentioned before has been working fine until midday ish yesterday. My next step will be to print to a printer on the server that does not have a Papercut port assigned and see if the job goes through to confirm it is definitely Papercut causing the issue. But printers are all showing online and no errors opening properties etc. Any ideas welcome.

I think you have to contact capita for a exe that allows you to change these settings. Not 100% as I haven't done it before but seem to remember being told this.

We just purchased a S8 UTM appliance for 1000 users. Came in at about £10,500 for 3.5 years (they offered us to run side by side with current solution and get that time added for free to end of contract). This is a similar price to our current solution watch guard xtm850.

We use Kenwood pro talk TK3501 here. Works well around our site which was built in 1960's with big 40cm thick walls and about 400m from each side. Also picks up at the rear of our field which is another 300m or so. However, I would strongly recommend going down the digital radio route based on interference we come across sometime, it varies around the year. Or at least licensed band which is only something like £70 a year for a single site.

We have a watchguard xtm850 and are moving to smoothwall in the half term due to bad web filtering. Great firewall just web filtering isn't designed for schools.

Magiboard semi matte board is good. We use it with our interactive projectors.

This... When will you need to print a 10 meter image? They might... Never have I seen anything printed bigger than A3. Half of the images they never open again, and 50% are the same image. But if they pay for the server, I'm not bothered.