Roberto

Its clearly an april fool's but given the craziness of some of the nonsense ubuntu cough up, its also all too plausible.

Which bunch? The lot that are currently in charge of selling the family silver? The lot that bankrupted us so we've got little choice but sell the family silver? Or the lot who'd never been trusted with the family silver before and are now finding out that their promises about what to do with it that sounded fine in theory don't always work so well in practice now they've been allowed to share control of the family silver? Politicians are are as bad as one another, just in different ways. Sure, I've got my sympathies with some of them (more to do with them being "less worse" than "better") but lets be honest, when you vote in an election, you're not choosing whether or not you're going to get screwed by the govt. at all, you're simply choosing what flavour of lube and whether or not you get to be the big spoon or the little spoon afterwards.

If I had to guess myself, I'd be looking very closely at any perimeter firewall/smarthost that you (or your upstream provider) may have.

There's something in this point. There is a balance to be struck with this kind of thing. On the one hand, the IT tail must not be allowed to wag the educationalist dog, but on the other hand, we need to be working with our respective senior managers to help them understand how the dreams they might have can be translated into reality, what we can do for them that is possible, practical, supportable and affordable. If this doesn't happen, you'll end up with a "vision" written by someone who saw something on a star trek re-run and jotted it down with no idea of whether or not it is possible or you'll end up with teachers getting issued with ipads they don't want and have no idea how to use while some more basic IT equipment that would make a real difference to teaching and learning in an organisation remains unpurchased.

Papercut just transmits transaction information, not the job itself.

Something else, specifically Aruba. And we're very happy with it

We're migrating to Windows 7 this year, and it will be x64 everywhere except for one or two devices connected to peripherals that will only work on a 32 bit OS (our phone system's switchboard operator's console springs to mind). 32-bit office 2010 for us; Microsoft themselves recommend using this version unless you have an edge case situation where you will see some benefit from x64 office.

That of course depends on whether or not you see BYOD supplementing your current deployment, or replacing part of it. We see it as likely to be supplemental, for a while at least.

You're quite right, of course, but even both of these actions have a cost associated with them. You need to spend resources keeping the list of supported system up to date and you need to spend resources dealing with investigations (even if your automatic default answer is 'go away, we don't care', there's still even a resource cost involved in saying that).

Still a problem for us too, basic channel. But if C4 aren't prepared to take it seriously, I'm certainly not going to.

Can't give you the numbers as I don't have them to hand, but we don't have any complaints about a lack of IT resources at my college. Well quite. This is where supporting them as an addition makes sense.

I can't help but thinking that BYOD instead of standard equipment is a bit of nonsense put forwards by people who don't need and don't understand specialist working environments, and wireless/vdi/etc vendors who have a vested interest in anything that will increase spending on their tools. Having said that, I don't see the problem with allowing people to BYOD in addition to standard provision.

I have to ask why people seem to think you need to create a new domain when doing a CC3 -> Vanilla migration. It's quite possible to remove CC3 while keeping your current domain. Simply promote new DCs that don't have the RM components on them and remove AD from the old servers, and then create a new OU infrastructure for your workstations and users. Sure, you have to rebuild / re-create the servers that hold users home areas but then you're doing that either way. That's all you need to do - its certainly all we're doing, and we've tested this quite extensively in both a virtual environment and - to some extent - on our live environment. I'm not trying to tell people what to do here, but we're interested in why people seem to feel the need to do this as it seems like a lot of un-needed work.

Given Apple's recent attitudes to enterprise computing, I would seriously question the wisdom of moving towards OSX at this stage of things, in fact we've got a 70-odd mac deployment as part of our network which we're planning to move away from when it comes time to renew that hardware. Sorry to be so negative, I've driven hard at getting macs adopted and usable in education in the past, and we've done great things here with art/media departments and adobe creative suite plus final cut pro on the mac, but I wouldn't recommend it now, especially if the jobs you're looking to do are reasonably do-able on other platforms.

Three issues here. 1) Microsoft's server-side offerings in general and Active Directory in particular are much more widely used, better supported and are generally much more mature products than their Apple server equivalents - where an Apple equivalent exists. 2) Where an "Apple equivalent" exists for a server product, more often than not its actually an Open Source equivalent that Apple have bundled, so why run a Mac server platform to run, say, MySQL if you can run the exact same product at a lower price on Linux? 3) Apple's recent moves show that they are somewhere between 'clueless and witless' and 'outright hostile' towards serious business/education use of their products, to the extent where we're looking to wind down what is currently a fairly serious investment in Apple gear that runs alongside our Windows-based stuff. This is far from unique to Mac enthusiasts but imho lot of technology X enthusiasts who reckon their favourite tech du jour can do "the job" better and cheaper often turn out not to know what "the job" actually is.

If they're shared, and ipad is remembering credentials then my worry wouldn't be "how can users access their own areas", it would be "how do I stop them accessing someone else's area via previously saved credentials".

As Andy says, I'd be reluctant to "mix and match" between these two types of build. Aside from anything else, if you do that (and the RM-built GPOs are applied to the users that log into these workstations for testing purposes, then you're not getting a fair test of what it would be like to run a vanilla system. Speaking of GPOs, IIRC you need to use one of those to specify the default location for PST files and the like - there should be GPOs available for each version of Office on the Microsoft support website - download those and use them to create the default office settings you want to have - this is where Exchange would have been a benefit as the newer ones can configure outlook automatically when the user first runs outlook as andy says, or I'd consider switching people to webmail; running outlook without exchange or an exchange-like system seems like a bag of pain to me!

Its probably a good idea to have more than one DNS server, but actually your problem here isn't the amount of DNS servers you have, it's that either the server you're testing from or your current DNS server has something configured wrongly. You need to resolve this and understand it before worrying about adding another DNS server. Are the DNS client settings correct on that server, in the network settings / tcpip settings panel?

Yes. A CC4 network is just a standard Microsoft network with a fancy front end. Follow the guides that are stickied on this forum for authenticating a mac to a windows domain and you're done.

@Domino - that's more or less where we are now, but really these things should be scheduled.

That's an idea actually. I'll look into that, thanks. This is a problem we all must face, I know its possible, even sensible, to do it with scripts but I'm also kinda surprised there isn't some nice fancy gui tool to do it all for you...

Thanks for your responses folks @Jamman960 - login times (what I mean when I mentioned 'via ADUC' are not granular enough) are they? AFAIK they can only work on a 'per hour' basis and while I've got no problem telling our exams department that if an exam starts at 10:20 the account will be enabled at 10:00 (or better still, 10:15) I can't really tell them that if the exam starts at 10:50. @TheLibrarian - yes they can. But something friendlier would be preferred.

Does anyone know of any software that lets low level helpdesk technicians set up groups of accounts to be enabled and disabled on a schedule, possibly several times a day, for accounts used for exams? I know we can do it via scheduled tasks (not "simple" enough for helpdesk techs) and I know you can do it via ADUC (time not granular enough). I'm ideally looking for a bit of software that focuses on allowing people to simply select a group of users and give the times to enabled and disable them, rather than a suite of programs that includes this function but all ideas gratefully received.

They get the same laptops at the same price as the ones we buy all the same for staff and students.

PM sent. I thought the quote we were given was very expensive. We are planning to DIY it and ditch cc3/cc4 and we reckon we can do it for 25% to 33% of the cost.