Roberto

Are you saying your new DNS server isn't being advertised to DHCP clients? That's perfectly normal. DNS servers are not advertised to DHCP clients unless you choose to add them to the list of scope or server options on the DHCP server. On a busy network you might want to plan which DNS servers are used by clients for load balancing purposes, for example.

I'm not aiming this at the commentators here but I do wonder how many of the 'outraged of lancaster' types in the comments on that website will start thinking "maybe there's a reason this pizza chain is cheaper than that artisan pizza resteraunt" and start to be more careful about where they place their orders, or will they continue to think "Hey, 2 pizzas the size of bus tyres, 2 litres of coke and a big tub of icecream delivered for £12 on this 'football night special offer', woot!"

Sorry, they appear to be idiots. Their options are wake the hell up or Windows Surface, imo. Or possibly both if they think they're going to get much action with any tablet worth using, for £2k.

I suspect that regardless of how the back end is provided, Phil is talking about a hosted "MIS-As-A-Service" style system where you're not running your own MIS server on a cloud provider but you're paying a MIS provider to host your data on their system. And in that case it's actually a good point. If hypothetical example cloud services, LTD run out of money and go fizzy-pop-bang then there's a possibility the servers will be turned off with little to no warning, let alone further discussion. If the server hosting your data is in the back of a bailiff van on it's way to the auction yard (and don't tell me it doesn't happen, in a previous life I've been the bailiff that closed down a techie datacentre in exactly that way) then this would make the presence or absence of a data export option something of a moot point. As much as I think hosted services make sense for a few scenarios, and as much as I don't think anyone needs to fret too much about the likes of MS, Google, Amazon or Capita specifically, this is actually a point that people need to give serious thought to. Especially as there seems to be a lot of firms jumping on the hosted services bandwaggon right now, and with the best will in the world they're not all going to survive.

As snagrat says, just get APs that can support them both. This should be most reputable brands these days. Or to put it another way: If the brand of AP you're looking at does not support 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz properly on each access point, then you're definitely looking at the wrong type of access point.

We evaluated the stone box. Really like it. I would buy one for home, never mind work, if I wasn't a mac kinda person.

Now I loved shakespeare as a student and still do now, but I absolutely think that more modern and yes, American why not, authors should be there too. In fact I'd like to see there being a point made of picking one classic and one more contemporary piece to study and comparing and contrasting the different writing styles in the two. That would be an interesting and educational case study imho. In any case, strangling the life out of English Lit for students cannot be a good thing in the long term. Gove really does appear to be an awful, dreadful halfwit. I can't remember a single recent education minister I didn't feel that way about, to be fair, but he is almost certainly the worst for some time.

We don't have a separate roll for AV technician in terms of general classroom support here, it's seen very much as a general IT support function. There are separate (not even close to our line management) technicians who supports the creative arts team and handles technical support issues of all kinds for the theatre and rehearsal spaces we have here and we support them if they get stuck on an IT issue. This is quite a large function in its own right and is pretty much unconnected to general everyday teaching unless its in the spaces they support. To be honest, I suspect the AV tech and IT tech roles will converge everywhere as the technology used converges, in much the same way that telephony used to be a totally separate discipline and is converging as places move to more modern systems with voip/softphones, etc.

If you offset the cost of the time for one person making a multi-dvd archive against the cost of just using a memory stick then the overall loss might not be so steep.

The server might have the capacity but there are good reasons besides that to separate roles out: Some roles do not play nicely together (e.g. installing Exchange on a DC is not a good idea). Installing multiple roles on one server means that required downtime to fix an issue or install a patch on one service means interrupting the other services. Makes it easier to manage DR: e.g. it's easier to test backups and practice DR for smaller, more focussed servers, you can prioritise which services are more important and recover those VMs first, etc. If the services are placed in lots of small VMs instead of one big server you can more easily expand available resources as requirements increase, by creating another virtual server host and moving some of your virtual server guests to the new host and increasing resource allocation for those specific items.

wordstar was forged by lucifer himself. But if a successful scriptwriter finds that it helps them be successful then who are we to argue.

Even if we assume the 5-yr warranty is golden that doesn't help if you have 7-yr retention requirements on some items of data (which we do). Backups are surprisingly difficult, when you dig into that level of detail.

So are you saying that you don't leave them powered off for very long, or that you know better than the manufacturers themselves when it comes to data retention? Because if you're exceeding their guidelines then you're betting against the casino on a loaded wheel, and so far you've just been lucky.

I would agree with that, but I do think that lots of people dismiss tape because they don't have a proper understanding of its benefits and limitations vs. that of other solutions. Most of the people who tell me "tape is dead" certainly don't understand why - they're either vapid salesdrones that have no proper understanding of backup that are trying to sell me cloud solutions for backup or they're inexperienced sysadmins who are just regurgitating the latest "tape is dead" rant they've seen on reddit's /r/sysadmin or other similar homes to uninformed halfwittery.

We use tape. We have about 50Tb of data storage and we back that up to a hard drive store on a DPM server, which then migrates longer term backups out to tape. We keep some of that data for 7 years due to financial and other requirements. We may be at the stage where we decide to put long term backups in the cloud once our current tape system (2 LTO5 drives in a 50-tape library) reaches its natural end of life, but we don't think that this is quite mature and cost effective for our needs to justify ditching tape before then.

The sort of people who don't use twitter or RSS would probably rather you sent them an email anyway, I would have thought.

If someone asked for that then I would ask them to think very carefully about what problem they were trying to solve with this app and the benefits of that vs. the ongoing support burden that an app could generate. If the app ends up just being an echo of data that's already available on the website then what is the point? And if people can't get to their email/calendar from the website, alongside dynamically updated news items via a twitter or RSS feed then why is your website from 15 years ago? I would suggest that simply making the website easier to use on mobile phones and tablets is probably less work than writing one app for one platform, yet would give you the benefit of being available to all kinds of users on all kinds of devices and won't require you to test and deploy app updates every time Apple, Google or Microsoft update an OS widget or two.

could be. I have seen these boxes slow down at times when they're processing something (unpacking a firmware update will do this for sure) but not like that on an ongoing basis.

Running a couple of 8212zls here, so close enough for cash I should think. 1) over 100 routes and pretty much instant, certainly nothing like you described. 2) maybe 2, maybe 3 seconds? Something like that. That's with Boot Rom K.15.30 & Firmware K.15.10.0015, identical results on two switches.

In that case, I'd go for the cloud-based backup. Nothing says "off site" like actually being off site!

I guess the first question is what problem are you trying to solve by doing this? If there's a problem with the tape solution lacking in some way then its impossible for people to suggest improvements without knowing what that problem is.

Can't say no to that!

Well, in 1998 when I came to the college I work for now, my then manager made all kinds of comments about fixing BBC model Bs. Instead I now find myself fending off calls from recruiters while sitting here managing a fairly sophisticated network (40-odd switches, 10Gb backbone & links to servers, heavy investment in virtualisation, about 70 to 80 servers).

What a terrible tragedy. What on earth could have happened to cause the kid concerned to do this?

There's something bitterly ironic about the Grauniad calling someone else out on poor use of the English language.