Roberto

Oldest stuff eh? Despite @Norphy's claims earlier when he told me about this thread, I wasn't involved in designing colossus. Or the atom. Could be the IBM 3090 which was the first 'professional' computer I used in my first IT job, in the 80s. We actually had this connected to the internet. Or the VAX 6000 I used to use at an old Uni job. Or the Texas Instruments TIMAP (discussed but not really seen here but if you want to know what it was like, imagine 6 very loud 1-inch reel tape drives which were in floor-standing units that went to head height, a complex panel full of blinkenlights and trip-switches, and a teletype console with a large paper hopper behind it with a PFY sitting at its keyboard weeping) which was also part of the equipment we used at my first IT job (oil exploration for GSI/HGS). On the first day I started there I was told "we're getting rid of that TIMAP thing soon". 6 years later when they closed my datacentre and paid me to be part of the decommissioning team for the centre, the TIMAP was one of the last things we turned off. It was a beast that booted from a set of hand-coded instructions you entered via a series of binary switches on the front panel, which provided enough of a bootstrap to load the OS from punched paper card. This then allowed you to load programs from drum storage and data from 1-inch magnetic tape.

We have our own internal stratum one time server, actually two of them for HA as we have decided that time is a critical service on this site. Galleon will do you an appliance for about a grand to handle this (and its been rock solid for us, 4 years with zero downtime), or there are cheaper solutions out there too.

For the first part, in Exchange 2013, apply a message flow rule to append a disclaimer to outgoing email from the appropriate people. Job Done. For the second request... hmmm... that's a bit trickier. You can enforce text messages only, to remove formatting, but that's about it as far as I know. If someone wants emails from staff to look professional then this isn't really a technical issue.

As @Norphy said, we switched from VMware to HyperV in the 2013 summer break. At the same time we updated the virtual host hardware in one of our two virtual server farms. We had 9 virtual hosts in total between the two farms, moved to 7 in total (with higher processor density) and the fact is that it cost us substantially less to buy SCVMM than it did to renew the support on the licences we already had from VMware (we had windows datacentre licences either way...). As much as Vsphere might be the better product overall I can't ignore that kind of price saving now that hyperv is 'good enough'.

I dunno. "England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all valuable members of the union. While each of them has a proud history that stands by itself, a united kingdom that plays to the strengths of all its members..." etc. etc.

I suspect that if there was a yes vote, Alex Salmond would very quickly learn the lesson that the Lib Dems have been taught since they agreed to the coalition govt: It's easy to make lots of promises that sound good when you've got no power to implement them, but very different when the buck actually stops with you and you realise you can fund one of your promises but not the other, or you realise that one of your wild claims needs someone else to say 'yes' when there's no profit for them in doing so. As someone with a Scottish father and an English mother, both of which are buried near Aberdeen and both of which would never have support devolution, the idea of it actually happening makes me very sad indeed.

In fairness he may have expected a hostile reception. It isn't like this is the first time or even the tenth time we've had a very similar go-around on FOI with similar results. But yeah, you have a point.

I think he's absolutely right. I'm amazed and appalled at the amount of hysterical nonsense talked on here every time a FOI request is mentioned. Yes, some of the applicants are distasteful when they try and dig information out via FOI to use to harass the school and undercut current suppliers, but the answer to that is to supply the information then refuse to deal with them when they ring up looking for a sale, not to play stupid games with supplying the answers to what is a valid FOI request.

Excellent. Another one of our alien pod people is in place. The insanely great plot continues. *adjusts black turtle-neck*

Phil, Fair enough and my apologies. I thought you guys had a cloud MIS offering as I live in Bedford and keep seeing Capita advertising for someone to herd clouds locally. I think my statement about SLAs can still stand if you change where I said "you" to "a general cloud MIS provider", if you see what I mean. A cloud-hosted MIS system is really no different to a locally hosted MIS or other CRM-style app. As for cloud providers being multi-tenanted, that's something I would regard with horror. I know we need direct 'back-end' access to the tables storing our data in our MIS system and therefore any solution that had us sharing a database either wouldn't fit our needs or would be running a massive risk. This comes back to what I've said about cloud and virtualisation in the past - nothing magic happened just because someone said "cloud" or "virtual" during a meeting. A MIS product is still a MIS product no matter where it's hosted in the same way that Microsoft's Office 365 product is essentially 'just' Exchange, SharePoint and Lync hosted by Microsoft instead of the customer. If I connect directly to the database behind any product and run DROP DATABASE then that's not the vendor's fault, especially if I was warned about it (provided, of course, that all the info in the DB was mine)... That doesn't change just because something is hosted in the cloud, though I don't doubt some people who didn't get the "cloud's not magic" memo would disagree :-(

In both cases that's a decision for the customer to take - once fully warned of the risks of course. You presumably generate a SLA now that already only warranties performance and / or data integrity only while the system is being used in an 'approved' manner. Lets be honest here, a "cloud MIS system" is essentially a hosted SQL database and front end. There's not that much secret sauce in that, and neither is it very difficult for the provider to monitor access and highlight anything that's being done in a 'non-approved' manner that is causing problems.

Good excuse to get rid of them - "Sorry $headteacher they won't work with the new network management software." The only place that P4s should still really be in use is where the caretaker has a few stockpiled because one can heat a cold classroom faster than any other brand of electric bar heater.

There's lots on SCCM on this site. It's... well... not difficult to set up, but perhaps the post install configuration might turn out to be quite a job of work depending on what you want to do with it. I'd suggest that *just* doing OS deployment and nothing else via SCCM is a bit of a waste. We use it for app deployment (on Macs as well as PCs), as well as antivirus and manage a surprising amount of settings via SCCM. It's a very powerful package; it might be a lot of work to configure it but the results are, in my opinion, worth it.

I'm not sure that its tied to the hardware per se, but I'd agree that its very bad practice to P2V a DC. Windows domains should have more than one DC present anyway and it doesn't add that much time to demote a DC then promote it again either side of your P2V process.

I don't agree with some of the more paranoid "fingerprints in the system" stuff about this, but she's entitled to refuse. The obvious next step would be to simply bring a packed lunch.

They 'get it' very well. All the parties want to censor the internet and now they have. They will position it as censoring things that are unreasonable and use that as a smokescreen to hide behind when it comes to using it to impinge on other things. Now they've got it and someone else had to pay the political price for it, Labour might wring their hands and make political capital out of some of the grossest errors in the filters imposed by the coalition but if they get into power they will find reasons not to turn it off and none of the other parties will give them too much of a hard time over it.

I can't say I like it, I found the mint a bit too bright for a website colour, but you can change it and the site's running costs have to be paid for somehow. I just don't see it as that important in the grand scheme of things.

Not sure how well that will work. Skydrive Pro is the user's SharePoint MySite Document Library. You might be able to lock down what they can do in sharepoint but you can't stop them from having a sharepoint site while letting them have Skydrive Pro.

We've been working on Windows 8 support to the point where we could deploy it if we had to, but my intentions are that we skip 8.x and wait for Windows 9. I think those that are expecting Windows 9 to be a complete rollback to Windows 7 in terms of desktop/start menu look and feel will be disappointed but I do think it will turn out to be a good compromise between that and "metro".

This. A million times. Though I'd personally add that the whole "adding a bigger hard drive will make it slower" thing would already make me doubt their competence to build/sell me a server.

I can code. I've earned a living from coding in the past. I just don't like doing code. Scripting is a little different, of course... but coding isn't part of my job.

What sort of level are these questions expected to be at (does he want to know the IT manager can still find the 'any' key and plug USB leads in correctly or does he want to test if a prospective manager can think strategically?) How will he evaluate the answers if he's not qualified to set the questions himself?

Apart from the bit where people who suffer from diabetes are generally advised not to wear contact lenses. One diabetic

If someone's purchased software and told the guy to use it for their job when he has no background, training, etc. in that software then my sympathy is actually with them. If he can't do his job (whether due to lack of knowledge or unsuitable apps) then that's a real problem and by the sounds of things, not one of his making. Having said that, I think apple do introductory "classes" on how to use things like imovie in-store. Wouldn't hurt for him to do one of these, maybe? Are there "dummies" style books that he could be given?

We use one of these (Small to Medium-Size Business Tape Library - Scalar i40/80 Overview) with two tape drives for our daily backups. Depends how busy you are as to whether or not you can really justify a tape library or not but we'd be lost without it.