Steveduk

Updated title with salary & added the "msg me" bit!

Hi everyone. My job is available in the Job Vacancies section on the school website. Location is: Rossall School Broadway, Fleetwood, Lancashire FY7 8JW There is also a Classroom AV Technician post advertised. Msg if you need any more info Good luck if you apply! Steve

Hi everyone, Long time user of Smoothwall here but I've given up with them now. What are you non-Smoothwall people using for internet filtering and firewalls? I'll be looking for something which can handle circa. 600 users on a 1/1Gbps connection with peak of about 600Mbps of filtered traffic. Cheers Steve

We only use Eclipse now, JL was binned for the same reasons!

We fixed this.. Delete the file %wherever its installed%\MLS.NET\bin\AD.Log Once this file grows things slow down so schedule a task to bin it every now and then!

Totally agree with this! I've given up with their support re. their scheduler service running at 100% CPU. They just ignore emails or take ages to reply. If we start voting with our money they will have to react to survive. We've been looking at Oliver from Softlink and I'd appreciate it if anyone has feedback on the product or company. Cheers Steve

Hi everyone, Are there any schools in the North West successfully using GoogleApps who would be happy for a couple of our teaching staff pay a visit? We are an all-through school so seeing how they have been put to use at any age and subject would be really useful. Thanks in advance, Steve

Hi everyone, Are there any schools in the North West successfully using Chromebooks who would be happy for a couple of our teaching staff pay a visit? We are an all-through school so seeing how they have been put to use at any age and subject would be really useful. Thanks in advance, Steve

The school I was at didn't get a managed service. The facts are that a working Ruckus system with about 18APs was replaced by a Meru system with 80(Now over 100) APs to achieve a slower client throughput. The system required a Meru engineer to be flown in to work with a UK based engineer for two days to get the thing working! It's only tax payers money!

Hi theriver, I would definitely recommend testing various vendors kit with your devices. NetCtrl used to have loan kit (I assume they still do). Do your own throughput, density and coverage testing. I tried to borrow Meru before BSF forced it upon us and was unable to either obtain evaluation kit or a reference site with high density usage similar to what we required. Steve

Hi, I have experience of both. We had a Ruckus system (20 APs, ZD1000) with about 1000 users in an old building with about 90% coverage and it worked flawlessly. This was replaced under BSF with a Meru system(90 APs!) which took Meru 12 months to fix after diagnosing problems with client adapters, drivers, settings, Windows configuration, Meru firmware and Meru configs (all worked on the Ruckus). The system finally worked best after single cell and half the APs were disabled, i.e. turning it back into working like a Ruckus system does. After being NM at the school for 13 years, the Meru system was a big push for me to change jobs as the increased workload in a BYOD school caused by a flaky WiFi setup was awful..... by chance my new employer uses Ruckus and it just works. If you want more info please pm me. Happy to talk on the phone.

Hi everyone, More info here - I.T. TECHNICIAN Closing date is Tuesday 18th March 2014 Good luck to anyone who applies! Steve

Hi all, I've just changed jobs after 13 years at the same place. We had Meru there provided under BSF and had no end of problems. Meru did send engineers out to get it working however we have had 2 APs fail in the last 12 months and no response when we have requested compatibility information on NICs. Compatibility and configuration of NICs was the cause of the problems we experienced. We had 120 APs installed to provide almost blanket coverage. My new job has a Ruckus system in place. It's a much larger site with a mix of 1800-1900s buildings and has 40 7982 APs providing almost blanket coverage to very heavy bandwidth users.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2384005066.png"]http://www.speedtest.net/result/2384005066.png[/url] Just done but students using the connection too.

My thoughts on the original question... 1. Make sure your idea of high density is the same as whoever is providing the wireless. 2. Ensure your client devices - present & future(as best you can) will interoperate with the new wireless system. 3. Remember with BYOD you have very little control over the client configuration so will be unable to make adjustments if they cause problems with your network. 4. Insist, persist, demand to see reference sites using the same setup as you intend to use. Go speak to the people who manage and use the network. Look at a few vendors and make sure you understand how they work and the pros n cons of each. Don't spend a penny until you have! Cheers Steve

We've often referred to Open Source Victoria's "Catalog of Free and Open Source Software for Education". It can be found here - OSV - Catalog of Free and Open Source Software for Education

2 sons, 14 & 17

Logged a call 27/11/12, got a ref, no further contact. Come on Smoothy, sort yourselves out! We've used SchoolGuardian for years now and I've always recommended SmoothWall to potential customers. Every problem we've had has been due to the database and reporting systems, the latest issue being Postgres bogging down.

Ours seems to be really struggling lately. I've logged a job with Smoothwall but no response yet...... off to moan about the lack of response now!

beaten to it

Hi Cyber, we've got Meru coming in to take a look tomorrow. I'm happy the infrastructure is fine - everything else is ok, throughput is never an issue. No routing issues or unexplained packet loss - a very basic network compared to ones I have worked on in the past. Everything pro-actively monitored and 288Gbps backplane capacity on each switch with 40Gbps interlinks. I'll let you know how we get on. Thanks Steve

Could you let me know what BBs you had problems with? Thanks Steve

Some of the clients will be B/G. We have always allowed BYOD which includes all sorts of clients iPod, BB, Android etc. We have over 1000 clients which averages out at about 400 connected during the day. Overall throughput is relatively low as most of the traffic is Internet based and goes through a 100Mbps connection. I'd be happy going back to working B/G but it would then seem a bit daft paying for top spec N kit! We've got Meru (who have gone out of their way to try and sort this) coming in next week so hopefully we'll get to the bottom of the problem. Cheers Steve

Thanks for the info Slice. How many APs do you have covering each location with 30 devices in?

Was this on a single AP? If so, can you tell me what model AP it was? Thanks Steve