Roberto

It's certainly their choice to do, and I can see why they do it. They've not had much success in enterprise... though their success in consumer areas vs. their success in enterprise might lead me to suggest that they've got the all the evidence they need that you get out of something what you put into it. It's also my choice to say that I now can no longer recommend their equipment be purchased. Indeed. I certainly agree with the drive to make resources more accessible to people's personal devices. Whether ipads, android tablets or something else entirely. I'm sick of all the vendors trying to enforce lockouts in areas where there's no good reason or justification to do so.

It's nice that they're running these events but given their weak answers to your questions and their previous actions with confusing licence models, stopping support of "real" server hardware, poor business networking support and tools in OSX 10.7 and laughable management tools for iOS device in educational scenarios, I can only regard Apple as being indifferent to the point of being malicious to the cause of education here in the UK. I still love my personal apple devices for my own use, sure, but there's no way I can personally continue to recommend them for use in education. And that makes me sad given how much work I've put into trying to get them accepted in the past.

I love my iphone 4s - it's a very good upgrade from the 3gs, which is where I was. At the end of the day, I think its a personal choice, down to whichever feels better in your hand and fits in best with your philosophy of how such devices ought to work. One question I would ask is how many apps do you have now or are planning to have in the future on any platform? If you spend a lot of money on apps for a particular platform then this tends to lock you into that platform (and I think there are swings and roundabouts as to which is the better platform to be locked into from this point of view - Apple have less choice in their range than you'll ever get from all the various android manufacturers, but with Apple you can be more certain that your app will work with any current device you choose)

I wouldn't deploy a netgear anything into a professional environment, personally. As for what we do use for wireless, we've deployed trapeze in the past and aruba currently and we're extremely happy with the aruba solution.

I've got a "super"hub with a normal switch plugged into it. Works just fine. Not sure about the homeplug stuff though - I've run cat 5 throughout the house and its paying dividends. My (non-techie) brother is a builder and helped me with the wiring while we were doing my house up anyway and he's gone from "What do you wanna do that for? GEEK!" to "Can you wire mine up for me?".

Linford Christie - met him in a motorway service station Morrissey - met him at a record signing session Perry Groves - ex arsenal player, did the tour of the stadium that i went on.. last month actually! Tony Adams - ex arsenal player (though current at the time), nearly run me down in a golf club car park Bill Gates - had a few meetings with him when I a MVP and did contract work for the borg Steve Ballmer - as above. David Tennant - back stage at the royal shakespeare company theatre.

We allow both staff and students to bring in their own equipment and connect it to a "guest" wireless vlan, which doesn't have much access to the main network.

I don't think comparing specs is the way to go when choosing a phone, because lets face it, most tablets have a higher spec than the phones, and I don't fancy holding an ipad or a xoom up to my ear, do you? They're both good phones - I prefer the iphone and have a 4s on order but that's my preference. As to what one you should get, I think how they feel and how they work in your hand and which one you can easily get your head around is going to be a more worthwhile comparison than which one has a camera with more megapixels or whatever. When I talked about the iphone being my preference earlier on, I mean that the choice of phone is quite a personal thing... it's something you'll lug around with you all the time and so whichever one you feel most comfortable with really is the most important thing I can think of. Also think about the apps you will use - though each app is usually fairly cheap in itself, the cost of them adds up quickly enough and whichever phone you decide to buy, it will cost a lot of money to change course later on and rebuy all the same sorts of apps over again!

We support this in the college I work at. Making it work was my problem. We tried all kinds of stuff with wpad and so-on and it just never worked reliably. Sometimes I think its down to the wpad infrastructure being a bit fragile, and in some cases I think some of the smartphone / tablet stack was coded by drunken lemurs whose experience of networks is confined to what they vaguely remember from the weekly technical column in drunken lemur weekly (bitter? me? why do you ask?) Anyway, moving on... we discarded any idea that worked with configuring proxy settings, and we've basically worked on making all traffic naturally routed out to the internet through a particular gateway on our network, and placed a transparent proxy at that address that can handle authentication, filtering and logging.

I always had the impression that Gates and Jobs, despite being rivals, were also friends at some level, and I quite like Gates' tribute.

I'll have a play with that. Thank you

We used to sync to one - you didn't need to ask for the major public time servers (from a technical point of view, you don't usually *need* to ask at all, if you see what I mean). We have since purchased our own time server and run that on-site for our needs. We actually offered access to this as a service to other members of the educational community for a while. When people have asked me about using a time server on site (whether their own or connecting to someone else's) I reccomend that one or maybe two servers sync time with the upstream time service and then workstations / other servers take time from those servers. For things like Kerberos in Active Directory or similar (or more 'mundane' stuff like time for door control, CCTV, etc) its probably more important that all the clocks on site reliably agree with each other than it is that they all get the "correct" time from somewhere else.

You might want to contact HHES. They are currently in the final stages of testing a new product that does very comprehensive resource useage monitoring and reporting of exactly this kind. We're a beta site for it and so far so good I have to say. Just tell 'em Rob @ Luton Sixth Form sent you!

Without wishing to sound like an a$$, shouldn't they check to see if there were useful apps for 20 ipod touches before buying them? I've seen a few bits of useful educational software on the apple store when I've gone looking myself, but don't remember that much of it being free. Have you seen this? There's all the stuff like google earth, dictionaries, etc.

I think its incredibly bad practice but, as has been mentioned already, it need not be "illegal" in itself. It contains the potential for bad stuff to happen though. The question I would ask is why are they sharing? Is there a problem there with one person's access or with a workflow that would currently be too awkward otherwise that needs to be fixed.

Ah, you will have problems getting this to work reliably. Parts of Apple's iOS networking stack once you get beyond the basic tcp/ip stuff appear to have been written by a room full of drunken chimpanzees. Possibly wearing boxing gloves to type.

Ok. It's a standard file that you're publishing on a webserver. You need to place it in a visible "website" so that you could browse to it with a web browser (in fact my next step is to browse to the URL you're publishing it under with your browser to see if you can 'see' the file). So, with that done, can you browse to the URL of the .pac file wit... oh wait repeating myself, sorry. Lastly and most importantly, as others have said, check the MIME file-type of the file is correct.

We use Blackboard. As @Norphy will agree, its fair enough when set up and can do a lot of stuff, but setting it up is about as much fun as cleaning your teeth with a chainsaw while being forced to watch someone surfing 'goatse' style websites.

Well it'll get IT staff more hassle from staff who think it's now legal to copy anything and everything for the school or by cheeky staff who want the IT team to rip their personal media for them.

I have to agree with Sukh - there are at least two things wrong with the ISA deployment, and both of them are problems I would expect to impact on a successful exchange deployment.

If its a network share then you can put it on a dedicated partition of the size you desire.

As you ask, no, I believe it doesn't. And straight away you define the problem. You use the phrase "best possible price" here; "best price" to a supplier won't be the same as "the absolute rock-bottom cheapest they can do it if they sell the warehouse team to be melted down for glue and offset that against the cost of selling to you" which is what you presumably want. Well I have two comments to this - first of all purchasing through a framework with a formal bidding process eliminates this (though I appreciate this is overkill for a few toners) and secondly, with respect, salespeople bugging you all the time is an entirely separate issue from actual purchasing processes Be thankful you don't, from the sound of it, work in a FE College. We have to jump through this procurement hoop for most things we buy. It might well be annoying, it might well be a waste of time, and its certainly debatable whether or not it saves us any money, but we're required to use the process Tony describes for much of our IT procurement.

If your head of ICT is claiming they need it as a requirement for a specific course then I would ask to see the course itself. That's a pretty steep requirement as it implies that pupils also need a computer at home... and while I realise that many people have these days that still seems a bit of a steep thing to take for granted. Having said that, I think its perfectly reasonable to allow USB drive access to the system to allow students to take homework away from the computers, we certainly do here with no problem. And I think that looking into skydrive/dropbox type systems also seems reasonable. If you have a VLE in place then again, it seems reasonable to extend this for home use too, we certainly do that here with no issues.

This is a very good point that shouldn't be neglected - this sort of thing is part of the cost of "administering" a leased computer fleet and needs to be taken into account with other work and upgrades that can be planned/scheduled during a replacement cycle if you have to do all your machines in one hit. We've not gone down the route of leasing. For what its worth, my personal feeling about any and all aspects of "Total Cost of Ownership" is that all the various price models cost you about the same in the long run and the only significance of the choices you make is how much of that cost you pay "up front" and how much as ongoing fees.

1/ about 2500 2/ 8 (we have two domains and we're in the process of getting rid of CC3, which forces us to have a sub-optimal DC configuration). 3/ No 4/ What kinda DNS? 8 internal as thats AD integrated. 3 external to serve our JANET connection 5/ 8 in 2 clusters (1x5 and 1x3). Not sure how many guest servers per host (for a start, we're using VMWare HA and it doesn't really work like that) As for fault tolerance - have a specific, measurable problem in mind (e.g. not "fault tolerance is good") but rather ("our inter-site links are a bit ropey" or whatever) and work towards solving that. If you're looking at fault tolerance then I assume you've already got service level agreements in place which you can use to see where you're not meeting your SLA 'standard' due to availability issues and where this issue is causing the business real pain, and use that information to decide what specific problems you need to improve in order to meet the standard (and if you don't have this in place, then I'd suggest doing so before worrying about anything else to do with improving availability/fault tolerance).