rich_tech

Personally I have no preference, though its really up to the person ordering I suppose, I would prefer they all match so all of one brand with an order and I just prefer USB to a PS2 connector wise, the Cherry mice we got with one order were moaned about a fair bit though by staff and pupils alike and are not the best, though they are still installed to this day in one IT suite

Can you enter me please for this, thanks, Richard

Subscribed ! woohoo

I generally go through the "Make a Recovery Disk" option to restore to factory if things go wrong, then wipe it all and stick a stock OS on it these days, one of our SMT bought a PC in PCWorld last year and brought it in for me to de-crapify for them, it was chock full of crap and spammy ad stuff like Norton :/

I cant understand why she gets given the light of day, especially since she is trying to be a British "Anne Coulter" these days and saying stuff just puerly for the controversy and airtime. That being said I thought that "debate" was pretty farcical overall, it started off ok but soon got fairly abusive with the way that Matthew Wright failed to control the debate reasonably I felt, when people started shouting over one another it descended into a bit of a joke I felt. Stuff like this does not help the debate in any way I thought overall.

from our school iMac I think I definitely prefer Office to iWork on the mac, havent really bothered that much with iWork because it feels a bit "clunky" to me, though Keynote does make for some very good looking presentations.

I use Hyper-V on 2x Windows 2012 DataCentre Hosts (Proliant DL380 Gen8) here (v. decent specced) and the servers are hosted on a HP P2000 MSA iSCSI SAN, the OS we used largely because its within our EES Agreement, so was included within the costs minimally with what we were already paying when we looked at the others (I think there was a slight increase for the Datacentre Licenses for the hosts), vmware is great and I have used their free versions several times in the past its very polished, but the costs were too prohibitive for us when we looked at that, same with Xenserver for the HA/Failover stuff it ramped up the costs. Initially it took me a while to setup primarily as it was a large virtualisation project we undertook here and I have not set anything up like this before on this scale - it took me about about 3 weeks in total on and off(because I am the sole technical person at the site here dealing with staff hardware issues, Gareth the NM does the more web-related and purchasing related stuff and as a teacher that is his primary role in the school, so I was doing this whenever I had no calls on our site) and I had to tear it down and restart it once because of issues with MPIO initially, though this was solved through building the two hosts up from the base OS and updating them as much as possible until they were equal before doing any of the Hyper-V building. We have it setup as a 2-Node Cluster with a SAN and it runs with failover and High availability of the VMs on there, we currently back it up with the Veeam Backup and Replication 7.0 Free Suite, we have the servers split over 2 UPS also to prevent any massive problems with outages. It was quite fiddly to setup initially I found because we were "bleeding edge" at the time (2012 had not long been out then) and I am in the middle of creating a rather tomelike blog post to cover the steps and stages I carried out when making the cluster because of the fact that we were using a newly released 2012 and most books were out of date we could find or referred to the BETA and features which got changed for the live, but once it validated itself it was all really simple from that point onwards. As for it being live here now:- We dont at this time run SCCM or any of that suite, ours is a standalone hyper-v cluster with failover and high availibilty configured. The priorities for the machines are all setup and their specs and things like RAM management, with load spread over both of the hosts, we don't have one dedicated offline host setup here We currently host all our non-LEA in-house servers on it, its an ongoing process of virtualising our existing RM servers onto our platform, so far we have our PCounter Print Server/Exam Server/Spiceworks/WSUS/SuccessMaker Enterprise servers on the platform and we are in the process of migrating our MDT server over and our VM servers are setup with failover and high availability, if you reboot a host for any reason, it auto drains them to the other host without any loss of service so all of that technology works fully as intended from what I have seen, Hyper-V has come on massive leaps and bounds since its initial creation I reckon We use VEEAM for backing up to one of our older servers on site and then to our NAS box (we use the free product which works fine for backing up and restoring VMs, but with the automation cut out of it basically), I manually run the backups on the machines when needed because nothing major is kept on the machines at present and changes dont happen massively on the machines when their running. When we have had to use the restore because of issues with our Print Server(to us a major thing we host which attracts complaints if it goes down) a while back and an issue with a UPS failure and a host, that worked absolutely painlessly and the server was restored in about 3 minutes total, it even helps you migrate the server to another non-clustered host if needs be, as a product veeam is brilliant, but I will say that they have announced changes to their licensing which will possibly make the product more expensive for the paid versions in the coming months. I have recently trialled the setting up of an Ubuntu server onto our box (looking at Minecraft Edu) and it works well with minimal fuss on the platform, so the Linux side of it has improved quite drastically as well, no horror screens not displaying properly like before that I have found.

On our site here these days, I carry, Mobile Phone 8gb USB stick (lent a family friend the 16gb one I had and only just got it back) Multitool that my wife bought me for christmas If I have to get anything specific I usually go back to office/server room to get it and install it today, failing that I remove the base units back to our server room to work on if needed

There has been a rise of these in the mails of late, also you get ones mimicking amazon deliveries as well, we had to warn staff about them on a "be mindful about them" level.

I took the wife to see Alan Carr in London a couple of years back as a surprise, before the boy made his entrance a year later, she's a big fan and I didn't think I would enjoy it as I'm not that big a fan, but he was absolutely immense in the O2 and we both laughed until we hurt and then some more, add in the day of the show shopping as well and the Mrs. fancied trying planet hollywood it all made for a lovely weekend away.

With the increase in Chromebook usages thanks to their "cheap laptop" ethos it is something to consider google docs and it is improving all the time and working hard to become a viable candidate to replace a lot of expensively licensed MS technologies. (Being Free comparable to Office even as part of EES) Would I be worried about the stuff hosted on it ? yes, if its physically kept outside of the network it is an issue, sensitive data is a big issue in there. Which is why staff have access to a portal created by the LEA where they can access all their hosted files remotely, we use MS Office on the PCs but offer up in addition Google Docs (though here we dont have staff using that much outside of IT that I have personally noticed, we are waiting on our LEA to sort out Office365 in the coming year) Pupils are using it more regularly though on our site, they can work at home without worrying about an office suite on their computers and its all saved online with no need for USB sticks, I have recently spoken with a couple about printing from Chromebooks, it is becoming more widespread and I do see how good google docs can be, from being in a classroom where the pupils are all collaborating on projects working together making a "Sheet" or a "Slide" all on their seperate machines and working together.

Looks pretty good as games go there, console based or PC ?

did you just add the printer using the driver or use the installation tool ? I ask because when I added ours here to our print server, I just did the whole update driver thing when adding them, not any software installation. Admittedly we only have a single HP laserjet here nowadays, but I would never contemplate doing the manufacturers install for them, I found it easier to just extract the driver and add the device with the minimal driver by pointing it at the driver directory during installation.

Notes were turned off in the backing up of this device, because it was a shared account behind it all and we didn't want any individual doing potentially confidential stuff and getting it shared via icloud I get the feeling their on the devices, but this really isnt helped by the fact that its apple and they deliberately try and obfuscate accessing this device normally imo I have run Dr Fone on the device and its turned up nothing in the backup on the notes. None of these programs seem to search the storage on the device, only the OS as far as I can see because of this, unless these notes have been securely wiped.

Is there a program for getting into the actual disk and recovering software on an iPad that anyone would recommend here ? I ask as we have a member of our SMT who had locally saved notes which have now disappeared on the device as a result of an upgrade and rebuild without saving them. I have tried the Dr. Fone iOS data recovery and notes are not in there for the device. Any help is appreciated here.

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First things I would ask, Do you have windows updates controlled via GPO and going onto machines at a regular interval ? Do you have it set so that all the machines are turned on at the allotted update time to be able to go and look for the updates ? Ours here are set to do a daily sweep for updates on the clients at 4pm each day when the network traffic is lighter as most people have gone home (site powers off at 6pm here and powers on at 8am in the mornings with spiceworks) and we typically allow updates through once a month for our machines on the WSUS side of things.

I was looking in custom PC magazine last night, theres a couple of manufacturers there offering pretty decent "entry-level" high-end PCs at around the £500 mark or just over, I would be tempted to consider one of them over a specific server if your looking for something a bit more beefy than a Microserver, the PSUs though are a thing to be wary of, as they can start to smash the electric bill in if you use it a lot (my main rig has a 550w psu and its quite noticable on the usage when that things on a lot in things like school hols instead of my two hours a couple of times a night)

Think I'll pass on that, seems a spammy/virus/dodgy link to me

6 mile each way takes less than 10 mins in the morning (8am start here and roads are quiet) evening takes about 15 mins

if its simple enough text and doesnt have masses of graphics / tables in it then, MS onenote can do the OCR, failing that Foxit stuff isnt bad, but it costs for the product

I would agree with virtualisation being the key ! its the future and allows you to get the max from your machines ! We have a 2 node Hyper-V cluster here with a HP SAN attached to the back end for storage, we have a MS EES Agreement in place, it was a massive project and undertaking on our department to replace our aging RM server farm (lots of internal servers that were 6+ years old and fairly creaky), but it cannot be recommended enough I think on completion of it, we have a scalable platform now where you can spin up a server easily enough and move everything across without any loss of service with scope to add on servers further if needed

We have Spiceworks installed as an inventory system here and I use its helpdesk to log my work calls whenever I get a chance, would recommend it, but be prepared to have to turn about 90% of its functionality off when using it.

Quick update: One of the machines that refused to rebuild has now rebuilt with office installing onto it with a new hard disk drive in it, on inspection it had a "Certified Repaired" drive that was fitted by the previous tech. I get the feeling that it was indeed trying to write to some dodgy part of the disk which was not properly accessible, I will try a new HD install into the other one that has failed to install, so it can be put down then possibly to hard disk faults for these failed rebuilds, everything else has gone fine for the machines.

All of our internal surveys and questionnaires get done this way now via google forms, though we have yet to use it externally I couldn't imagine it being that difficult to do.