forkies

We set a limit like so Year 7: 500MB Year 8: 1GB Year 9: 2GB Year 10+11: 5GB Year 12+13: 10GB Our photography and media students get 10GB to start with (I get a class list), then if they get the warning they tell their teacher and I raise it up. It depends what year and what course they are doing, one student last year did a lot of video work and used 100GB while editing, once he had the final work he deleted the raw data and only used 20GB. We have 16TB for user documents. The backup server has 32TB. We do a full backup then incremental after this. At the end of the day, IF the students really need the space for their course then the school needs to provide it, even if that means spending money on more storage. We had a meeting about it when we started photography and they ended up giving me a few thousand pound to get more storage as that is what was needed. Of course future proofing with the money as we only use 4TB for documents at the moment.

Interesting, we use WOL, 1gb network but only WOL 32 PCs at a time. Never seen any issues. I did have an issue before with our Impero server sending WOL packets to 255.255.255.255 about 5 per second continuously for 5 mins with a 5 min break or something before repeating. Turns out one of our rooms does not support WOL (on my list to investigate) and there was a policy in Impero to wake the room at 7am but as the PCs didn't wake it constantly sent them. I spoke to Impero and they put me in the direction of the policy causing the broadcast. However this did not decrease network performance.

I buy a usb hdd every year, and at the end of August put all the leavers for that academic year (documents) on it. Then it goes in the safe. I keep accounts disabled on the system for 6 months, this is so if there is any reason for accessing the users school email account (looking info up for replacement staff or child protection related) I can do it quickly without having to do a restore from backup. I also put the scans of student files on the hdd too, then label it and it is will be destroyed after 7 years (I think that is our requirement for student files legally).

I would talk to your phone provider (assuming you have a maintenance contract on your system), we have a different system to you, but it has a tannoy system, where we can do a broadcast to all phones which can be grouped. Maybe they can set a "autodialler" or something like that up on a schedule to broadcast.

I as the network manager am expected to respond to issues at a response level I feel necessary. Ie if I get a notification that all the servers are running hot, I would go into school to check as it could lead to dead servers. But if I get a notification that an access point is down its not priority and I will leave it until the morning. I have keys and alarm codes to site, I also get phoned (number 3 on list behind site manager and site controller) if the burglar alarm or fire alarm is activated. It is in my contract to respond to out of hours emergencies. And I get time off in lieu for dealing with these issues (which I rarely take, like my holiday). Overtime is no longer an option with less money coming in, as like most schools. I am happy to do extra hours as I really like my job, my work place and my colleagues. I know some will say I'm lucky about that. I also live about 15 mins walking distance from work so not a big deal for me. A example of a out of hours I had recently was a server down at 3am, I got the alert and went in to find one of our VMware servers which runs exchange had crashed due to not being updated (as we hadn't been allowed to take it down for maintenance) so while it was down I did the update as I felt it was the necessary action. I stayed in work until 4:30 in the end that day and didn't take the time in lieu but I did get a personal message and thank you from the business manager and head teacher which was really nice to be recognised for my work. Obviously if I hadn't gone in then the server would of still be down the next day and I would be getting asked why? My answer would have been because it was lacking an update that prevented the error but I was unable to install it. I would probably have been quizzed why I didn't go in when it went down but would they have known it was down at 3am? Probably not. I guess it is down to your contract, your commitment to work, and if they will reimburse you for your time. If like you say you have to ring the BM to get overtime approval, make that call once if there is no answer leave a message and don't go in! If they try to pin it on you, you have done what they asked. They will need to approve overtime at your discretion if their plan doesn't work. Also the whole SLT and Site team (also my favourite staff) have my personal mobile for all hours emergencies. Sorry it's so long but hope it helps.

We have this, if we reboot the switch that all the tills are connected to it works fine. Therefore we are isolating the tills network and giving the server a dedicated link to them so we can definitely rule out our network. Although same as you everything else is working fine!

What weather station do you use? (assume you have your own "independant"?)

We just got some Dell Optiplex 3020 Micros which have a VESA mount, this mounts to the back of the screen and then can be mounted to an arm mount or use the normal feet stand.

@PhilNeal thanks for keeping us informed.

This... Under administration then antimalware policies. Create one and deploy it out. Also under administration and client policy, make sure you set it under there.

Will this help: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187607%28v=sql.105%29.aspx

I seem to remember that there should be 2 sites as wsus should be using alternative ports?

We don't have the CPU power to manage that load. And as the old cameras are on converters they cannot do it on the camera itself, newer ones could but for "consistency" our LT/governors put in our CCTV policy that it will be continuously recording 24/7/365.

Depending on how many cameras and quality and fps and retention period you will most definitely need a large storage device. We have 29 cameras, 24 are old bnc on a IP converter so standard def at 1/4fps, 4 hd cameras 1080p at 6fps and 1 720p camera PtZ at 6fps. Continuous recording for 30 days is 4TB of data. We are rolling out more HD cameras to replace the old bnc which will see our 16TB storage fully utilised. I would recommend putting in a couple of grand for a nas to use as storage unless you have that sitting around.

Minesweeper... Blown up on first click

Incase anyone else has this issue I used this: VMware KB: Consolidating snapshots in ESX/ESXi 3.x and 4.x and this: VMware KB: Cloning and converting virtual machine disks with vmkfstools to clone the VMDK files plus snapshots into one thin provisioned VMDK on another datastore which I could then reattach to the VM.

I think reading up on VMware I am going to have to add additional storage to the datastore using an iSCSI device, then consolidate the snapshots. It would appear you cannot even move the vm as it says there is not enough storage on the data store. I am doing this after school today, currently sims is still up with about 400mb free on the datastore, so hopefully it will last for the day.

I have come in this morning to find that our Sims server has crashed, it somehow has filled the vmdk that sits on our ssd datastore. The vmdk is the only files that sit on this datastore (with its snapshots). I have managed to get the server too boot up but I cannot delete any snapshots as it requires virtual disk consolidation which then says it cannot perform as there is not enough space (even with vm switched off). Any files deleted from the guest drive does not reflect on the datastore capacity either. Any ideas on how to remove snapshots when you dont have any space on the datastore? I cannot move to another datastore as the vm wont boot as it still reflects to the snapshots on the original datastore even if modified in vmx file. Any help appreciated.

We paid for our SQL but it still had issues due to the indexing changes not due to version limitations. The compatibility fixed it for us so far so good. SQL2014, server 2012 r2 VMware. DB on SSDs. Everything in SIMS is still about 2 seconds slower then SQL 2008 r2 running on same server.

We do, does your card reader beep to acknowledge a card? We had this issue and our supplier changed the reader mode in the firmware of the reader.

Not ideal here but the students have to call their games with GMA-*.exe which is the allowed on our FSRM file screen. I also get a report every day using this to show what exe they have.

Same issue here. We just bought Game Maker (very quickly so didn't have a chance to check it out) and we clearly do not allow EXE files in student documents... Sometimes I wonder if IT Teachers even care? Did you get anywhere with this? Tom

I ran this on the DB using Studio and Query. ALTER DATABASE sims SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL = 110; GO We dont run FMS so not sure on that side? That fixed it for me.

5.3 Million on one of our copiers in the print room in 3-5 years. The others had done about 1.5 million. We had one job for a departement the other day with 10500 pages. But Papercut is only showing about 60k a week across whole site now we are limiting people.

Papercut