smurfomatic

A few nice shots last night from the Mobbs Memorial Match. For those that don't know, Edgar Mobbs played for Bedford, Northampton and England prior to WWI and formed his own battalion after being told he was too old for a commission. Eventually he made it to Lieutenant Colonel before being killed at Passchendaele. This year is the centenary of his death, and every year since 1918 (WW2 aside) there has been a memorial match with the proceeds going to local junior rugby.

A colleague came into work this morning wielding a rather large steel lever, apparently it was the regulator lever from a steam train of similar era to the Mallard. Still in good condition and very heavy - woe betide any pupil who messed around in his lessons today!

Can't believe such a large institution thought it was acceptable practice to have the backup and the live data on the same machine. Even in our school of only 300 pupils we've got a redundant server and a NAS backup (all in separate buildings) and I'm currently looking into an off-site option. Not sure if this will be a replicated NAS or some other system. However, if we've had enough damage at school to affect all three buildings, then data recovery won't be our highest priority!

A couple from tonight's game - great running rugby but absolutely chucking it down in the second half...

Thanks pcstru, a few alterations made:

It's a start, thanks for the feedback. Hopefully it'll get noticed and recruit a few more players!

Thanks, what about this - very rough - version?

Thanks Achandler, we have got our cub advertised with This Girl Can as well as other local groups. Putting posters around on free notice boards sounds like a plan... I haven't put the venue for training on there as it changes from winter to summer and wanted the poster to be "universal". I'll try to produce a less wordy version!

Here's the latest version of a flyer / poster. Need to get rid of some words but don't want to lose any of the information...

thanks TechMonkey, some great ideas there. Will certainly get in touch with the WI and the Guides, and keep an eye out for local events where we can do a demo.

We have a twitter account but not many followers - it's getting the word out to people that haven't heard of us that's the issue. May be worth trying to get an article in the local press, or even the radio. There's a weekly rugby show on the local BBC station and we might be able to get a plug on there...

I started a local touch rugby team in Northampton in 2008, and over the last few years it has become increasingly competitive, having several players represent regional teams and a couple at age-group international level. As a team we've been promoted to the second tier of national competition for 2017, which will be a big step up for us but I think we can make a good go of it. This is mainly down to the hard work of the committee - who organise fixtures, social events, book training venues, keep all the paperwork up to date - all as a group of volunteers who also want to play! For those who don't know - touch rugby is minimal contact (a "touch" cannot be too forceful) and is six a side played on half a rugby pitch. Games last up to 20 minutes and players are encouraged to substitute quickly, rolling subs from your squad of 14 players. Normally you'd only expect to be on the pitch for a maximum of two minutes at a time and get a breather. It's a fast paced game at the higher levels, but when playing more socially it's not as intense. What is holding us back at the moment is a lack of female players. We've got about 40 registered players of varying ability - with myself near the bottom! - and around 10 of those are female. However, for this level of competition (and the third tier we were in last year) we need a fully mixed squad. This means we need three women on the pitch at all times, and that means five or six women in the squad. Some games we played last year we struggled to get enough and ended up borrowing players, which gets rather embarrassing... We need to get the word out to local women about us! But how do we do it? Whether the sport has a stigma of being close to contact rugby (and therefore a bit dangerous) or perhaps its just that we're not looking in the right places. Most of our players joined through word of mouth or by spotting us on social media, but we need to attract a wider audience. I've tried advertising on local teams Facebook pages - women's rugby, netball, hockey, rowing, roller derby - but we've not had any new recruits. I think we need a good quality advert, something that has all the details on it but not too wordy. Every one I've tried to produce starts out OK and ends up looking like this post...lots of words! Any help gratefully received - and, of course, any local Edugeekers are welcome to join us.

Thanks, that's pretty much as I planned. Saves the hassle of upgrading the "old" Server1 VM and still gives us redundancy.

This is our current setup. Servers 1 & 3 running 2003 and Server 2 just been upgraded to 2012. All used to be physical machines, now VMs running on a 2012 host with a replica server in another building and backed up to a NAS box in yet another building: Server1 - Exchange & OWA, some user profiles, staff network drive, DHCP, DNS, print server, router for one of our two ADSL lines (other runs through Smoothwall) Server2 - Most user profiles, student network drive, DHCP, DNS, WSUS, Group Policy Server3 - Used to be a citrix server, now solely running Blackberry Enterprise Server to keep one teacher's Blackberry connected Note the lack of redundancy in the system as it currently is, no server's job replicated elsewhere except for its own replica on another machine...this was something I had complained about for a long time while they were separate physical machines, it's only since I built the replica server out of spare parts that we've had any on-the-fly backup. Over the summer, we are planning to switch to using Google for emails. We are also going to have a mass clearout of the staff network drive as it hasn't been done while I've been in the job (10 years) and is full of outdated rubbish which will be archived just in case. This will mean Server3 is no longer needed and Server1 will lose most of its roles. We also need to get a Smoothwall engineer out at some point so we can change the setup, running both ADSL lines through it and get load balancing running. I've got to thinking, why upgrade/replace Server1 at all? Transfer the user profiles over, update their entries in AD, reinstall the printers on Server2 and then decommission it. Can anyone think of a good reason to keep Server1? Storage space won't be an option, once we remove 200GB of emails and 600GB of staff network drive then there's going to be loads of room!

Sorry, hadn't seen that it was earlier this year.

Not sure how many here read The Register but I've always found it a valuable source of IT-related information. Sad to see today that Lester Haines has passed away. The Life and Times of Lester Haines ? The Register A very honest obituary, not only telling of his achievements but also his problems:

I was gutted to find out I hadn't made the shortlist. This season I've scored four times as many tries as in any other season I've played in, if that doesn't qualify me then what will?!

We've asked one of our Year 8s (who is applying for an ICT scholarship to his senior school) to see if he can design a Raspberry Pi based system to replace our current bell ringer, which is the same as the one on the Farnell link above. Should be easy enough to set up, and won't lose times every power cut, and need altering for the clocks changing twice a year!

Yay! It's Friday and I got sweets in the post!

Well, I didn't win However, I lost out to a really top quality photo of horse racing, the guy that took it was also shortlisted for the cycling shot as well: https://twitter.com/Nsport/status/796831578521534464

Entered a couple of photos into the Northamptonshire Sports Awards competition - this one got shortlisted! The awards night is a week today, not expecting to win but I know there are only going to be three or four on the shortlist so may have a chance...

Thanks Steve, one of those simple solutions you should think of but miss it because you're too busy trying other things!

I've been playing around with Task Scheduler to notify me by email when certain errors occur on our HyperV host (specifically at the moment, replication errors). This is all set up and works fine. However, I get a notification based on every time a particular error is recorded to the event log, meaning once there's a problem I get emails for every VM, about every thirty seconds. Great - I know there's a problem but I'm getting drowned under the email traffic... Is there any way to get a scheduled task to "pause" for a period of time after it's been triggered? I've looked through the settings but can't find anything. Ideally, the task would do something like this: Trigger - send email Trigger Trigger Trigger Trigger (etc) One hour later... Trigger - send email Once an hour is fine, once every ten seconds is crazy. Any suggestions?

Wow, this looked so familiar. Then I realised...

That's a good compromise David, we're constantly battling the "we want iPads" teachers who can't really explain why they want them...