mrbios

Exchange 2010 SP3 here, 2000 mailboxes - 24Gb ram, runs a treat Here's the microsoft document on memory requirements: Understanding Memory Configurations and Exchange Performance: Exchange 2010 Help So essentially if you have every single role on one server and your mailboxes, 32GB is basically a minimum. Granted that's fine in theory but in practice you never quite seem to need that much, it's clearly stated though. 10Gb for example will always cause exchange to struggle, infact i once had my exchange server running only 8Gb ram, and it crawwwwwwwwwwwwled.

Really? You and Marling are closer to the exchange than we are and we can definitely get it here, we were assured of that by a few providors, hell you're practically across the road from the exchange aren't you? haha. Our SWGfL contract ends in August, which is handy, gives us the summer to do the full switchover.

So I've finally decided on a firewall (Palo Alto) and almost finalised a decision on a filter (Lightspeed or Bloxx) now I need to decide on an internet providor, but first i need to decide on the technology to use..... Now the majority of us are on Leased lines, which works well enough but it's so damn expensive. We had a quote for a connection from Exa which happened to be FTTC, but I'm a bit skeptical after reading a comment from @SchoolsBroadband (of which I've just send a note via their website to contact me ) in another thread that the 1:1 contention ratio they're claiming is legit? We're currently on a 30mb on a 100mb bearer leased line from the LA, we're 100% certain about leaving this connection behind and never looking back, but all of my leased line quotes so far put us at just over £10kpa for the same speed which we feel is just too much. The FTTC offering was less than half the cost of a leased line for 75mb, EFM only goes up to 35mb and I'm still unsure of the cost. Can anyone who's gone through the same process shed some light on what they've done or doing in this situation? Are leased lines really needed or can other technologies fill the gap? and here i was breathing a sigh of relief after finally deciding on a firewall, thinking the rest would be easy choice....HA yea right, just trying to get 3 quotes for the same technology (for example exa supplying FTTC, and i can't seem to get any directly comparable quotes!) seems to be hard work so far...

Cheers chaps, can't believe i didn't think of movie maker! and faststone resizer looks perfect

I've got 60 pictures to go on our TV system, they're all 4000x3000 or bigger and i need them all to play in sequence...short of uploading 700mb of images or faffing about trying to put them into one powerpoint (which would no doubt mean messing around resizing them) can anyone recommend a really quick way of sticking 60 jpg images into a sequence like a video file or something without having to worry about resizing them etc?

Either one is good in my opinion, my original thought was to have it automatically archive them every term. So set the term times like you do with the booking sheet, then at the end of every term the closed tickets get archived off. That would also allow us to see statistics for each term if you were able to implement such a thing?

Finally I've had a presentation from all 3 big suppliers, had a play with the software from all 3 and given all companies a damn good grilling. I think from my questioning and investigation of all 3 companies I've decided that I'm going to have a bloxx trial first. Bloxx looked like the better filter, i liked their software and while they don't have all the features in place that we want yet they certainly seemed to be on the case. After that I'm going to test lightspeed, they had all the features we wanted and more but potentially weren't as good in the area of blocking out unwanted pages, really liked my big campus though!

You can't build a skyscraper on a mud puddle. Start from the ground up, explain to management that money needs spending on the infrastructure first, and like a skyscraper the sky comes last (in this case, sky = wireless) you need a 3-5 year plan to be honest as from the sounds of things it's not going to be a 1 years budget type of job.

You should certainly be able to use it for VPN, NAC and firewall, as far as I'm aware though the palo alto kit doens't do email filtering and its web filtering isnt going to be as educationally focused as the lightspeed i wouldn't have thought? Best off keeping the lightspeed imo and using the PA for the rest? Out of curiousity which model of PA firewall are you going for? I'm in the process of deciding on a new firewall but I'm a bit naive when it comes to firewall specs, don't know if i should be going for the PA-500 or the PA-2020 (700 devices and 1600 users on a 100mb connection) if i could just hijack your thread for a second and ask if someone could point me to which model i should be going for that'd be muchos appreciated

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh for christ sake, i just rebuilt an image yesterday!!!!!!!! >_< And I've just deployed 4 of these fabled hotfixes to all the PCs in the school because i was hit with the slow boot issue. *BANGS HEAD AGAINST WALL* EDIT: oh and just to really make it feel like it's rubbing it in.....the KB Article ID is the same as one of my IDs here at work! WHAT THE ****!

"Problem exists between chair and keyboard"

Another helpdesk request..... Basically, when you get over the 500 closed tickets mark, by the time of archiving off and creating a clean xml file i have nearly 700 tickets in one xml file which was painfully slow. A fix for this would be wonderful

Just had lightspeed in, got to have a little play with their demo box and i really like the look of it and my big campus (we're currently with uniservity which is dire) lots more to consider, just bloxx to look at next week now Really looking forward to the day we get whichever option we go for in, the improvments for us a huge.

Hi Paul, It's working a treat, we use it in our science labs and main hall (music teacher doing rehearsals) and not had any issues with it over the wireless Obviously will depend on your wireless capabilities but even in areas where we haven't got decent managed wireless yet when it's going through old nasty D-Link independent APs its still worked wonderfully, and it's very easy to setup once your client AP is configured.

Wanted to start a poll to see how many schools have moved from one solution to another of these 3. if you could please comment why you moved from one to the other that'd also be appreciated. If you've moved to "other" please specify in comments who you moved to, personally I'm only trying to decide between these 3 options currently so apologies for not including others in the poll. EDIT: if you can give in depth reasoning for why you moved from one to the other that'd be really helpful EDIT: -1 to the last option, as i've ticked that for myself just because it annoys me clicking "view results" every time i want to check

It's nice to find someone who shares my thoughts on this. Nothing to add really as you've pretty much covered my whole opinion on this, i get the feeling not enough monitoring and research go into a lot of the implementations/recommendations people give and receive. The idea of "more is better" mentatlity is one that leads to schools throwing away a lot of money at unneeded equipment and configurations.

I've obviously not used one myself but a local school told me they hated the firewall because it was so complicated to get the simplest of setups working, which sounds contradictory to everything on these boards says...I'm starting to wonder if they just didn't know what they were doing....lol

How about complexity? Was it easy to configure in comparison to the competition or a bit of a ballache? Also i was told layer 7 features were a big part of what's being added in updates this year (I was told April but was also told that may not be 100% accurate) though i assume you've heard the same.

Thank you for rounding up those opinions Marshall, while i will make my own opinions of 3 of those it's nice to have in depth opinions with reasoning on more products than I'm looking at Out of interest are you able to expand on the problem areas of the smoothwalls firewall? Having met with a smoothwall representative I've been given their information regarding improving it but i have no experience of how bad and what is bad about it currently (I've heard it's very overly complicated and long winded to change settings currently?) Also have you ever used an ISA firewall to make comparisons between what you've tested?

Already planned that in too Had a play around with the VM that she had running, but that said, literally anything is going to make us impressed as we're still stuck on SWGfL url based filtering at the moment which is dreadful It's certainly set a benchmark for the next two companies who come in at least.

Just had a lovely lady from smoothwall in no more than 10 minutes ago....very impressed with both the product and her knowledge of it, and very much looking forward to seeing how bloxx and lightspeed compare to it when they come in over the next 2 weeks. Is it sad that the thought of getting our filtering replaced is making me feel like a kid at christmas?

So even when deploying apps through the MDM software you still have to go and put the password into each iPad?! This is why I might recommend the school buy something rather than going for the free alternative, really want to be able to assign an app and have it install seamlessly without any user interaction, is this possible with things like mobile iron or sophos etc?

Ah that makes more sense, cheers Well it looks like we're getting the iQ 32 trolley no matter what, and i've told them to get the macbook with it so that we can setup the first lot of ipads using that method. Once we've evaluated how well that works we'll go from there Still going with the macbook method instead of a mac mini as we'll be moving it about between our office and finance i think.

So you say we don't need the Apple configurator? So how would we manage the settings across multiple iPads and app deployment? I know you could use the sync functionality of the trolley but if we had say 10 iPads that weren't in one of those for example, is that what we'd want the configurator + laptop for?

@j224 I'm in a position of having ipads forced upon me at the moment, long story short..head had left over funds so he went out and bought 35 iPads with the possibility of 25 more incoming.... now my manager was shown the quote for am iQ 32 lock n charge trolley, which included a macbook pro (we have no macs in school) he said "nooo you don't need that" so they struck it off the quote. Am i right in thiniking that was a poor mistake and we do actually need that in order to configure them en-mass? (looking at the Apple Configurator page it says requires MAC OS X 10.7 or later) Also when you say you say all the devices need to be connected via USB for app install, is this likely to be a pain in the nethers for >50 iPads? Would you say in your experience of using apple configurator that buying an MDM solution would be worth it for more iPads?