ruggie_uk

I'm network manager for 2 primary schools. One 22 hours per week term time with 2 servers and 70 workstations. Out of this time I support the other as and when required. I look after obvious technical issues, development, staff training and hold everyones hand when needed. Also spill over into other areas such as admin, finance and premises when needed and assist with data management such as tracking and special needs analysis.

I keep putting limits on and management telling me to take them off(for staff) as apparantly archiving their home photos and movie collection is essential to the operation of our school. Every now and again I set the limits to enforce a clear out due to running out of space, but then we end up in the same boat again. Childrens directories are no problem at all but we are primary.

There is now a central server as of the end of March, but before that it was a direct connection to sophos. Of course in-house we had an enterprise server but every school is not set up like that.

I expected sophos. As an LEA we all use it so every pc and laptop auto updates from there.

Just thought this would interest you all. This is the top ten sites visited according to YHGFL(Ours and many others ISP) 1 Google 2 Google 3 http://www.microsoft.com 4 TES - Teaching jobs, resources & ideas from the Times Educational Supplement 5 Website of the UK government : Directgov 6 Jobscentres.co.uk - Recruit Resources and Information. This website is for sale! 7 Sophos - anti-virus and anti-spam software for businesses 8 EduGeek.net 9 Yahoo! UK & Ireland 10 BBC - Homepage

Hi, I too have been playing with this today. I edited the msi directly in orca, the program seems to install correctly and shows in add/remove programs as installed. But even with these options added, does not work in IE. No Java option under IE advanced properties. Any ideas?

http://drivermagic.com/p/nph-welcome.php Not used it myself but hear great things about it's abilities. Or http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php - Helps to identify drivers and hardware - Use this a lot on old stuff especially.

Oh yes, the choccies, the Lions fruit salad and the red wine. It almost makes up for the pay.(almost) They ought to be working on this at school now. Never mind being able to show a powerpoint presentation about your local environment, teach the cherubs how to avoid phishing sites, resist the temptations of free smileys and ringtones and recognise a spam email insisting that you dad who has no pc has sent you an mp3 that he has promised you. Oh, and in the style of the IT crowd - how to turn their computer off and on again.

I was in the same boat as you a few months back. Wanted to learn linux, kept playing with VM's but wanted to jump in. Now my main PC at home is Fedora 8, my laptop is Ubuntu 7.10 and my other pc's still run XP. What I did is set up a virtual machine within fedora to host an XP installation(using same licence as was on the machine previously) so that I still have XP functionality available immediately. I keep this open on desktop 2 'just in case'. I really rarely use it as most tasks I can perform in linux now without even thinking about windows. Added benefit is that I can easily ssh to the linux box and perform many tasks remotely with ease. Even from behind a firewall. I have Vista on another hard drive that I can boot to if needed also but I never bother, just takes forever, even on my system which is pretty beefy.

When I first started here nearly 5 years ago as Network Manager, they pushed me into classrooms. So I know exactly what you feel like. Takes a 'special' kind of somebody to be a teacher(or whatever). Took me a year to get back out of it. But made my life a lot happier. I still do the odd bit of tuition every now and again but refuse to be timetabled.

Hi, trying to figure out who made a change within sims a couple of years ago. Does anyone know how to track this down? Thanks Richard

Hey all, I have a W3Insights website that every computer needs to have stored in favourites with log on details so that every child can just click to get on. Is there a way I can transfer the saved log on details to remotely pass to every pc? Thanks in advance for any help. Really don't want to do 50 computers x 6 users. Thanks.

I only have the one login for them but I give each teacher's network login local admin rights on their own laptop. It has worked pretty well so far as I insist on a half termly inspection and upgrade session. We had a training session to instruct them on what is risky behaviour and to be honest it has worked pretty well. They are using judgement as to what is ok to install and anything they are unsure about they are bringing to me. I'm happy at this and it is a nice middle ground between being helpful to them and still maintaining as much control as is realistically practical.

I'm not an expert in this disctinct area, but like you I am currently looking at ways of reducing hardware. We have just purchased a new Dual Quad Core HP Proliant server with Intel virtualisation technology built in. I have downloaded XenSource free version that will allow up to 4 operating systems to be installed. Now this is going to be an experiment for me over this holiday, but if Xen does what it says, it will host the operating systems without needing windows as a base therefore having a very low footprint and working efficiently. I'm looking forward to it as it means I can just ad servers as needed. Bit concerned about getting raid to work etc but these things are sent to try us

I've got loads to do - including PAT testing which I detest, new server to install and a few new workstations. Gone are the days of watching a series of 24 over 3 days *cough* October Half Term *cough*