Roberto

16 bit software from 2009? Pretty shocking really. The usual story of people selling utter crud to education and probably charging the earth for it. Sorry, no help to you I know but I just needed to rant on the subject a bit.

{SNIP!} Thanks, Andy, I'll take a look.

Thanks for the reply teejay... We'll take a look at the ricoh gear, though it might not be what we were thinking of. And as to your final point, I appreciate the concern but I don't think its something we need to worry about (our team would still be responsible for the printers, we're just using a 3rd party to discharge some of the work related to that).

Hi folks, we're considering outsourcing printer management (hardware and consumable supply, support, etc) to one of those printer management companies that deliver it as a service to your site. We're hoping to both manage the costs of printing and also to reduce the amount of time our staff spend fiddling with printer fixes beyond the basic "change toner, fix paper jam" level. Does anyone have any opinions on this? Recommendation for good people to speak to? Good ones to avoid? (In either case, reference sites I can give to the powers that be would be ideal).

That is a good question torledo - a mac mini "toy server" might do for that - god knows it won't handle the deployments and storage requirements we have but it could probably cope with being a OD domain controller and applying preferences. The other thing we could do is simply not bother - we don't do a lot of locking down on our mac workstations so we can maybe just look at other ways to deliver the two or three settings we do want without too much impact. At the end of the day this is all down to Apple - I have a rule when it comes to professional IT that has served me well over the years: Never bet against the bank. If Apple aren't bothered to maintain a decent presence in the server side of things then who am I to bet against them. If we ultimately decide it isn't worth the bother at all and start to retire our mac workstations along with the servers then that's their loss. my boss and I need to do a lot of thinking about what the college is trying to do with the macs and whether macs are still the best way to deliver that given Apple's preoccupation with consumer toys these days.

I'm probably going to move away from OS X server in the long term given that both apple's options for it are pretty mediocre. If they can't be bothered to support their OS in proper server room environments then I certainly can't be bothered either - never bet against the banker. Dell have an interesting package - their KACE tools apparently support netboot deployment of Mac OSX images as well as PXE boot deployment of Windows images, so depending on affordability and other stuff we may look at moving to that... it's the only thing our OSX servers do that couldn't be done to some degree on our Windows servers.

No, on the newest version of office for the mac, Outlook is Outlook and Entourage is in the bin where it bloody well belongs.

IIRC Snow Leopard had the first version of mail.app that supported Exchange. You need to upgrade to Snow Leopard, or use Outlook from the new version of Office for the Mac.

I totally recommend the digicert exchange certificates . They make the process easy, I don't think its expensive and it's money well spent in any case; certificate problems in exchange will erode your sanity. They also have a decent write up on the whole exchange and certificates thing here where they point out the alternative (wildcard certs).

I dislike the bonuses going to these bankers too. Their open contempt for the rest of us is an awful thing, but like it or not it would be incredibly difficult to write a law forbidding payment of those bonuses without it having either far ranging and unintended consequences, or being thrown out of court on appeal the first time it was used due to it being overly discriminatory.

I wonder if any of the talk about electoral reform will make that change. I'm interested in seeing how well this coalition works as we may get more of them if voting reform does go ahead. In theory at least, we can hope it puts a stop to the more "lunatic fringe" ideas of each of the parties in the coalition. I'd love to be able to vote "none of the above". Not spoiling your vote or any of the current methods but being able to go into a voting booth and tick a box that says "Actually, I've got no confidence in ANY of you lot" and have it counted as a "vote of no confidence" This is true. The fact that we can take that for granted while some people die for the sake of voting in other countries does rather put things in perspective.

Well that's certainly rational - are you saying that people never, ever change? Because Labour have had a few bozos over the years, as have the Tories and whatever people thought of the Lib Dems before, I don't think they're doing themselves any favours at the moment. So looking at your logic I can only assume you don't vote at all because there is nobody left to vote for.

Indeed. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, there are no simple answers.

There's a lot to be said for that. I'm sure anyone here who has been promoted from a "technician" role to a "managerial" role will agree that there's a very big difference between being able to make suggestions freely and letting others decide whether or not to do them and actually being the person responsible yourself.

Well this isn't a choice between "load it onto students" and "don't load it on to students". If education was "free" at point of delivery, that means it's being paid for by the taxpayer which ultimately includes the students themselves. I'm not saying I like it, I'm not suggesting it's fair, but it might well be the 'least worst' answer.

Of course, just because your current connection doesn't require a proxy server currently, that doesn't stop you adding one of your own and requiring it's use.

IMO it's worthwhile, especially at the price but we've always stuck with Websense despite the cost. What I would say is that if you chose websense because you use all the advanced features then you'd be disappointed with the kind of service offered by this filter. If you just use it for basic filtering along the lines of "This site is either blocked for everyone or it's not blocked at all" then you'll probably find it more acceptable. There are other choices out there between the two extremes, and some of them are very good. For example, while nile_c says they won't pitch smoothwall in this thread, I trust they won't mind me doing it slightly on their behalf: It's a good product, I've heard nothing but good things about it and it will be on my list to evaluate when we come to renew websense ourselves. I don't want to knock the JANET service, especially considering the price it's being charged at, but in this day and age I think services with that level of control are more about ticking a box ("Yes, we DO provide a filtering service [tick]") than anything else.

Have to agree with this. It's wholly inappropriate to be 'forced' into breaking the law at work and I'd always refuse. (I should say now that my employer has always supported the 'refuse' point of view themselves...) What are they going to do? Sack us The industrial tribunal and local press coverage for that would be a bloodbath...

I wouldn't mind the UK trying that, but in the meantime, in our professional capacity at least, we should certainly be sticking with the rules and laws we have, not the ones we wish we had.

I can tell you one thing. If you're trying to decide what will help you develop into a career in web development then don't consider what will be "alternative and a bit punk" as a reason for choosing something, and instead decide what area of web development you want to work in and learn the languages commonly used in that area. I know it's boring but then... well... as much as I enjoy *my* job, there's still a reason it's called work instead of "super fun happy party time".

I second the Toucan reccomendation. They really are very good people, knowledgeable, helpful and friendly. I also rate Solutions Inc if you're down Brighton way, who are also very good.

There's a guy in my office that knows how to do this, I'll see if he can post here...

I don't like to think of it as "running a network at home", because I get enough networking at work, but I have a fairly extensive set of gear to support the things I like to do. - I've got a netgear something-or-other router connected to a NTL modem - 3 Tb NAS to hold backups of music and video content from my media centre - desktop PC - xbox 360 - MacBook Pro - Mac Mini (the media centre).

We purchased them for editing with final cut pro for our media department's classes. Our Art dept. also make use of some of the rooms as we also have Adobe CS on them (as we do on all the Windows machines). Without wanting to be rude, it sounds like you're doing this backwards - surely you identify a need then identify a solution, but it sounds like you're doing it the other way around.

Depends how you evaluate the cost of network management software. If your employer paid you £50 per day for example, ARD only has to save you 5 days worth of work to pay for itself. When we purchased 2 copies of ARD it allowed myself and another 'senior' member of the IT team here to update 40 workstations and 2 servers from our desks in an afternoon instead of spending a couple of days schlepping around the college. Paid for itself in the first week.