Paid_Peanuts

Well I've pre-ordered one through Jessops so we'll see what the crack is when it arrives hopefully at the end of next month! It's replacing a Nikon D300s. I've been planning the FX upgrade for a while and currently have: Nikon 24-70 F2.8 Nikon 70-200 F2.8 VR2 Nikon 105mm F2.8 Macro and a DX 12-24mm F2.8 with Nikon 2x III teleconverter for that bit more reach. So i have all the bits but not the camera so i decided to buy myself a belated christmas pressie. Hopefully the wife won't notice it's a different camera, as far as she is concerned it will still be too big and it's still black and has Nikon on it...

Nikon | Imaging Products | Nikon D800/D800E Just found my new toy! Specs look very interesting, think they may do themselves out of some D4 sales!

18c with two AC units on and working incase one packs up.

My view having tested both is WAIT until windows 8 is managable on a tablet device using GPOs!

Am i right in thinking you have to buy a device with storage server already installed or can it be installed onto an existing 2008 R2 server?

@CyberNerd - which deduplication would you suggest?

Good idea Domino - poll added.

This morning i have had a member of SLT in asking about file space and who has what allocation. Reason he was asking is because i impose a quota of 15GB on all staff - with the exception of less than 10 staff that were already over the 15GB limit when i applied it over Christmas. The staff file server is 2008 R2 sitting on VMware. The virtual machine (VM) resides on a 2TB LUN which is physically part of our SAN. An IBM DS3400, the 2TB LUN is the maximum it can be with current limitations of LUN sizing and VMware vSphere 4. The fileserver currently has 1.6TB allocated to the machine - leaving 400GB free on the LUN for snapshots and a little room for growth. I am reluctant to eat into the 400GB too much for when we snapshot the machine or when we run VCB backup jobs which require some of the 400GB for these operations. We don’t want a case where the VM hangs because the physical LUN runs out of space - which has happened to me before when we increased the size of a VM without thinking about what space is needed etc. for snapshots and VCB jobs. So the staff file server has 1.6tb drive inside and of that i have 400gb free space. With 200 permanent members of staff and numerous student teachers i don’t have enough space if everyone was to use their 15gb quota as it is. However the member of SLT was asking why heads of faculty and special skills teachers’ couldn’t have 2-3 times that amount whilst we limit new teachers to 5gb for example. Am i being unreasonable when i said i don’t have time to go through manage all the quotas and i also explained that some HoF and SKT have some of the smallest usage when other members of staff seem to have copied the contents of subject drives into their own H: drives! FFS! I think 15GB is more than enough - oh yes, all teachers also have offline files enabled on their laptops (imagine the fun there when they have 35GB!!! in their h: drive), especially when they have access to the additional: • Department drives which is 700GB of which 200GB free. • Year Drives which is 160Gb of which 65GB free • Admin drive which is 700gb shared with department drives with 200GB free. Please tell me if i am being unreasonable as SLT don’t consider the affect it will have on backups and infrastructure. They think because they can buy another hard drive in Currys for £80 that it’s as simple here. My only other option i can see at the moment is to create a second staff file server and split the home directories between the two. That’s a short term fix as that then leaves me the problem of backing it all up. I would have to increase capacity on our DPM and VEEAM server as well as run the Backup Exec job to tape all weekend and into Monday day - as this currently takes anywhere up to 30 hours as it is. How do other people manage their staff file usage and do you impose a quota? ARGH!

We also have a magicard and would not buy another if it were to break (fall of a desk, by accident....).

I use AppV for this and sequence the application in standalone mode. Then enable the software for the necessary AD groups.

My vote goes to SCCM, we will be using this to deploy Windows 7 to 1050 machines over summer. We have all the drivers installed so they get injected at time of build. All our hardware has been tested and works 100% with drivers injected correctly. it is zero-touch deployment. Vote also goes to SCCM for the option of having multiple distribution points - therefore i can have many distribution points and push to 100+ clients without any noticible slowdown in imaging. From start to finish on unicast Win 7 20GB image using SCCM takes 36 mins.

What would you set aside for a simple setup as above with enough AP's to cover an area approx 50x50 meters? No walls, one open space with anywhere up to 200 sixth form students and their devices?

Hi all, I wondered if anyone would be able to help me out by suggesting the best possible solution for introducing wireless access into the 6th Form areas? What I want to achieve is a WPA/WEP connection for 6th formers whereby they see the head of 6th form to get the key then they associate. I would like the wireless controller to then give out a 10. whatever address or an obscure address based on a dhcp scope on the controller. I would then VLAN that traffic off back to my BLOXX device which would then filter all internet traffic. The benefit of keeping everything separate is so the little darlings can't start scanning the network for things or introducing virus ridden laptops etc. Does anyone know which wireless system for about 10 or so AP's would be best suited? Does anyone have any experience with any? Any thoughts or feedback greatly appreciated!

Someone sent me a PM with an important question regarding the post. I thought it would be important to add the question and my response incase anyone else had the same thought: Question: "Sorry to bother you. The job advert you posted up for Aston Academy. It mentions, on the website, about Newsletter creations and posters etc.. How big a part of the job is that? Thanks" Answer: "Good point, it was added against my recommendation. It is more that we require someone that knows how to use publisher etc. I argued the point about it blurring the line between art technician and ICT technician however they left it in. It wouldn’t make up even 5% of the workload and I certainly wouldn’t expect the successful candidate to have to do anything other than possibly tweak an already produced banner/poster etc. and then print it on our A0 printer. Hope this clarifies things"

Why don't you apply for the post of ICT technician at my school? check out the vacancies at Aston Academy

Dragging up an old post. I have the same issue, I have got it working with a re-directed start menu. However this then casues problems when you use AppV as that folder with all the AppV shortcuts doesn't appear under Prrograms. It is as though it gets applied then the re-directed start menu wipes over the machine copy and therfore doens't allow you to see the Application Virtualization Apps. Any ideas? I was hoping to not have to worry about programs structure and just let the students search for the apps they want.

The post would be of interest to anyone wishing to work with the following technologies: • Active Directory 2008 R2 • Exchange 2007/2010 • SharePoint 2007/2010 • Microsoft System Centre Configuration Manager • Microsoft Application Virtualization • IBM fibre SANs • SQL 2008 • Cisco managed wireless • DNS • DHCP • Windows 7 • Office 2010 • SIMS.net • MailMarshal SMTP + Exchange • Citrix XenApp • Terminal Services As you can see we use varied technologies to achieve a good level of service to 1700 students and 200 staff across 1000 machines.

Vacancies Scale: Band E (Points 18-21) 37 hours per week - Term time + 7 weeks £17,161 - £19,126 Closing Date: 9am on Monday 20th June 2011

How many times have you sysprep'd this image? Did you know you can only sysprep win7 3 times?! then it is game over and there is no work around! We got this message and racked our brains for ages until we found out the behaviour of sysprep. We build an image then ghost it. then we sysprep it, then if we have to revisit the image to ammend we ghost back to box then update - ghost back then sysprep again so the sysprep count always looks like its on '1'.

On the tape front we ue an IBM TS3200 LTO4 tape library with SONY LTO4 tapes and that has been very reliable. I think over the past 2.5 years i can only remember 2 tapes failing - and the tape library tells us to replace them! I dont have any issues with tape reliability. I would argue that tape are more reliable than a bunch of HDD in a RAID configuration.

Whack in 1 TB or so and use DPM to backup to disk for immediate file recovery. Then LTO3/4 to tape once a week for offsite backup. That would be my suggestion. HDD backup is fine however you would need several HDD's that you could remove offsite to be completely safe in the knowledge your covered. Knowing primary schools their internet connection wouldnt be capable of keeping an offsite backup up-to-date without scheduling it to happen at night without users knowing. In which case your not that much better off.

Hello all, I currently have a Cisco AIR-WLC4402-50-K9 wireless lan controller which i need to get a smartnet support contract sorted on it as it is my single point of failure. Would anyone here know the best place/contact to contact to get a quote? I understand the service part number from Cisco is: CON-SNT-WC440250 Any help much appreciated as i have been back to the place where i bought the kit from and they quoted me £950 which i thought seemed expensive but not knowing where else to get a quote i have no comparisons. Cheers

We are currently testing our new build ready for September. Currently we have Office 2010 installed on Windows XP SP3 using SmartBoard SW V.10.6 We have noticed that in PowerPoint 2010 when you run the slideshow then annotate with the coloured pens on the powerpoint slide, when you move to the next slide and then return to any previous slide it isn't keeping what was previously written. This isn't an issue with PowerPoint 2007 - when you click back and forth between the slides what you have written remains. Does anyone else have this issue with PowerPoint 2010? I am wondering whether SmartBoard are working on a version of their software which will work with PowerPoint 2010 and it isn't yet compatible.

Sorry to raise an old post, however we are building the new XP image. Using SCCM we are planning on deploying this one image to all machines. On the build is Sib 5, however once it is sysprep'd and it boots back up when you run the stand alone version of Sib 5 it works but when it comes to saving the file it wants to go online to register. Something which can only be done by an admin - so i am thinking it must write something to the registry. Any one know what this could be so we could sort it on our build image so we dont have to actually visit all machines with Sib 5 on them?! Thanks.

It probably would, however i wondered if there was any little gem of a piece of software out there that we hadn't come across?!