rich_tech

Infrastructure, investment and internet access have been the most major sticking points in schools I think in recent years and preventing taking up of cloud services, our internet access here has improved, but it still has some way to go to be properly fit for purpose based on my calculations against it. You can't really consider cloud when you don't have the infrastructure or internet access in place as its much more reliant on those two items, given that their services are easily accessed through browser technologies.

We are a similar sized school and have a managed system with 6 Konica Minolta MFD devices (it was 10 when I started here, but we have gradually reduced it down over the years because some of them were in areas for convenience not usage and didn't cover their internal costs). We have it set up so all departments get billed for their printing and students get a pre-determined amount of credit each month, its controlled by pCounter here, though I see also that in some schools the IT department cover all the costs from what I read here and don't bill like this. If the supplier has signed up and is on the local government procurement framework as ours are, the price per copy is incredibly cheap and also the toners and servicing are included, any faults are also fixed within four hour windows or next business day. Don't be afraid to make staff walk small distances where needed for them, most if they had their own way would have a printer next to their machines for convenience and this isn't just schools, its also a case from the companies I have worked and I have even been one of them myself It prints securely for staff also because of the pull queue setup we have for printing, where they log on to pick up a job and release it to the printer.

Thats great when they do decide that, it put me and the wife off big time the other day, I would never use sky as a broadband provider. Thinking of cancelling sky now, as we only watch live TV for about 1/2 hours a night if that here, streaming could get around everything with our viewing habits from the trial we are doing at the moment.

Found out on Monday in Cardiff, you can't have Sky Q unless your a sky broadband customer, so its a no go for me, not getting rid of my 200mb VM cable for that, thats a cert here. Personally I find it questionable needing their broadband as a stipulation to having a product for TV.

the related threads feature strikes again ?

Depending on the Epson model you may have to go into settings and turn on communication and fiddle with one of the power settings to get it to stay on separately, we have this issue with the newer projectors from Epson, I'm not in work at the moment to check one of our epsons for this setting, we set the majority of ours up as plugged through if we can. We run with epsons and I have seen this on the ebx27 models that I'm aware of

portable halo is another option, sans gibs and violence and I think that can be controlled a bit easier as you can lock it on and off with GPOs and software restriction policies, you can search on google for it easily enough, it caused problems for another school until I showed then SRPs.

yet another great day for adobe there Horribly expensive software and needlessly fiddly in this day and age.

some decent reading there for kids I think, I am still vividly haunted by having to read Children of the Dust though for my GCSEs, stark reading at the time.

I want to say here, that its likely not to be on one DVD after a point if you can get it, it became a big application to get installed and manage with a sybase database behind it all from what I was exposed to, the majority of us who went through the horror of RM had a few DVDs of software for it here and its various updates. If you do get hold of it, chances are it will struggle to run on anything after windows 7 if its below version 1.7.3 as ours had to be upgraded to that to work with 7 onwards. I wouldnt fancy buying it either, its super expensive as a program from my understanding of it when we looked at the new version a year or so back.

I am trying to convince Mrs Rich_tech to go and see it on valentines day without much success at the moment. Looks awesome and fun.

I would post a picture of the ones that my wife made, but they didn't stay on the plates long enough to be photographed here Lovely in fairness, one of my favourite deserts

I tried shop bought the weekend for the novelty of it, though today I am making them from scratch, much nicer than shop bought. Tried them with Nutella also, would not recommend, it was the most sickly thing I have ever eaten after two of them it was like having a mouthful of glue.

im on the basic package with them, so I won't be upgrading, especially in light of the £249 fee for it which I am reading. Its getting ridiculous price wise now for all TV, no wonder netflix/prime are taking over, £17 a month for movies, just so you jump the queue and see them on TV a little earlier.

I cannot understand how they even thought that this show was possible in its current format, given that athletes train for years in these disciplines, I wouldn't think I could have a go at ski jumping after a couple of weeks training, its a bananas idea, given that snow and ice can be very unforgiving surfaces to land on.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, I did some reading last week and turned off checksum offload on everything as it was set to Tx and Rx and another thread I was reading said to turn them off when I was looking for solutions to this. At the moment though, we have a serious issue with hardware and I cant be sure if there has been any fix of that until its fixed on our SAN. It seems we have a much more major issue on our SAN at the moment, I have HP coming out today with a brand new controller module and compact flash, as yesterday afternoon, we had a failure on controller B in our unit of the compact flash, added to which the storage controller seems broken on the module and refuses to upgrade its firmware, so HP are sending someone out to change that for us today as we are still under support to their credit their support is quite excellent from my point of view. I don't know where I stand with HP SANs though after this myself, from my singular point of reference. Its our first unit and its impressive in terms of technology and how failover happens and multipathing with this HP unit, but as I said to @garethedmondson yesterday, we have had issues with our SAN over the entire time its been in operation on and off(about 30 months now), the 2 HP server nodes attached to them are absolutely rock solid (*touches wood*), though the SAN is something else. HP seems to be terribly designed in terms of upgrading it too, you cannot target a specific controller for upgrading, its either an all or nothing scenario it seems and they tell you to turn off their partner controller firmware updating feature as standard as its known to cause issues on their devices. The compact flash that's being replaced is already a replacement card, as it went before about 15 months ago. We have also had an issue where this same failing controller module played up about 9 months into service and failed to register on the unit, where the phone support had to talk me through removing and reinserting the module to remedy. We have also had a single disc failure where HP sent a replacement out for us. That has quite a dodgy history in my mind especially as it was a brand new device, compared to the servers attached to it, which are solid.

Its on Jeremy Vine on Radio2 today this topic funnily enough.

Had an interesting time of it trying to update this on the weekend, Controller B seemingly blew a gasket, I made sure Partner update was off in line with HP recommendations and it basically never came properly out of its reboot, when it did come back up, it was clearly on the old firmware, multiple attempts at updating the firmware went awry too, A is fine and hold it all up now, B - I had to remove and reinsert the controller module today as it has got itself into a state, where I could not shut down the controller. Everything I tried with it has caused issues, even FTP updating of this hasnt worked, though now its back alive, but now I have a firmware mismatch after trying to update it when it came back alive this morning following the pull and reseat I did. HP dont make it easier by allowing you to target a specific controller for updating either imo. Thats it current state of play at the moment below, waiting on HP to get back to me now about it and how I remedy this problem. [TABLE=class: objectTable, width: 0, align: left] [TR] [TD=class: objectTitle]Component[/TD] [TD=class: objectTitle]Controller A[/TD] [TD=class: objectTitle]Controller B[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectAltValue]Bundle Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]TS252R007[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]TS252R007[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectValue]Storage Controller Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]T252R06-01[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]T251P08-01[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectAltValue]Storage Controller Loader Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]23.008[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]23.008[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectValue]Memory Controller FPGA Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]F400R02[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]F400R02[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectAltValue]Management Controller Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]L252R008-01[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]L252R008-01[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectValue]Management Controller Loader Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]2.5[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]2.5[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectAltValue]Expander Controller Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]2028[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]2028[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectValue]CPLD Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]22[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]22[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Some BIOS include battery tests, I think I recall seeing one on a few laptops over the years.

I didnt consider it could be the SAN funnily enough, HP made us update it when a flash card failed in a controller last year. We are running the following at the moment and it appears there is a newer version which I have just downloaded, just need to schedule a late night installation now as I will have to take the attached VMs down. [TABLE=class: objectTable, width: 0, align: left] [TR] [TD=class: objectTitle]Component[/TD] [TD=class: objectTitle]Controller A[/TD] [TD=class: objectTitle]Controller B[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectAltValue]Bundle Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]TS251P006-02[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]TS251P006-02[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectValue]Storage Controller Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]T251P08-01[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]T251P08-01[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectAltValue]Storage Controller Loader Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]23.008[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]23.008[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectValue]Memory Controller FPGA Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]F400R02[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]F400R02[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectAltValue]Management Controller Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]L251R005-11[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]L251R005-11[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectValue]Management Controller Loader Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]2.5[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]2.5[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectAltValue]Expander Controller Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]2028[/TD] [TD=class: objectAltValue]2028[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: objectValue]CPLD Code Version[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]22[/TD] [TD=class: objectValue]22[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Hostpresto I use, great service and cheap, used to be called dreamhosting

Think ours is a timer linked into the fire alarm here, gives a couple of short blasts at the end of a lesson here, everyone knows if it stays longer on to evacuate

Hello All, I am posting here as I have been seeing issues with our Hyper-V setup here for a while now and I have noticed it seems to be getting progressively slower for us consoling in and using the servers themselves on certain VMs. We are seeing a slowness to connect via the console to a VM or to an RDP session with our Hyper-V setup, It seems horribly laggy and slow. Our setup is a VLAN based network, servers and nodes are on their own VLAN, we are sat on another vlan accessing the servers and interfaces fine, no issues with other servers when we connect to them here. We use 1 Ethernet port on each node server as a virtual switch, the other IP remains for management and their rigged for failover along with a standalone network specifically for that purpose using high quality crossover cables and bypassing the VLAN setup, connections to iSCSI SAN are also direct cabled and do not go through Vlans as they are all in the same rack. This setup has worked fine until the last few months but we have noticed issues with it slowing down or being slow to access and use the VMs. I have had the networking side of it looked at and monitored by our LEA networking team and there doesnt seem to be anything horrible going on with regards usage and utilisation unless we are moving the VMs between boxes which is understandable. I have done a fair bit of research and turned off VMQ's as a trial, but this hasnt made any impovement that is noticeable and possibly made it a little worse so I am going to revert that change today. The setup is Hyper-V based cluster - both nodes run Server 2012 R2 and their configurations mimic one another, having gone through all the same setups, such as NIC settings/Hyper-V server settings and all the associated setup configurations, the cluster passed validation no problems at all before going live also. The server hardware consists of 2 x DL380e Gen8 servers and 1 HP MSA P2000 SAN, the HP has the up to date NIC drivers for both the dual and quad port NICs installed also. Has anyone else experience slowness like this on their clusters ? or know of a fix for this issue ? Thanks, Rich

Coffee is fine I think, provided your not sucking down a litre of strong espresso every day. I have been on a major health kick since August last year and managed to lose over 3st so far among other health benefits by diet alone, largely by cutting out Sugar in the form of Coca Cola/energy or fizzy drinks/Chocolate/Crisps/Chips and anything else blatantly loaded with sugar. It was hell for the first week and I craved sugar constantly all my waking time, then it abated and everything was fine, now I don't miss it at all. I have much more energy for these changes too, so much that I don't need to be in bed by 9pm on an average night and I am no longer knackered constantly. I average about 30 pints a year since my children were born now, whereas before it was about 10 pints a weekend on any average weekend.

I looked at this stuff when I first had my Mac, shame on that though I think I can see why from my experience on a Mac, Parallels were ahead of them and cheaper too I found, still an excellent product though which had its uses. I think apple have gotten around it easily these days though by putting in the Hypervisor and also allowing bootcamp quite painlessly, thats what I settled on with my Mac in the end for the rare occasions I need windows (usually the wifes iTunes setup to keep her music seperate) I think its a shame as VMWare is still better at running linux than Hyper-V