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*

This would normally be ok. This is an added benefit that the supplier is giving it's customer(the school). The internal distribution of the phones is the Bursar's decision. Now if it was to be owned by him, then it would not be right as it would be for personal gain.

Just to add to this, we have YHGFL in Sheffield and the service is at best mediocre. Speed can be awful thorughout the day with many sites not displaying correctly or being blocked for no apparent reason. hotmail comes and goes, much to the dismay of the teachers who then shout at me about it. I resisted moving to this service in the first place and it has been nothing but trouble. Was using a filtered 2mb DSL service before and it was much more efficient.

Ever considered using online storage? I used to msn important docs to myself to use their servers(I'm sure their backup system is better than mine). Now I use http://www.box.net to keep files until msn includes file storage.

You could simply remove the roaming profile configuration and replace it with a mandatory profile or no profile at all. You should certainly discuss this with the users first as if they are downloading 1gb then they probably have downloaded all their take that mp3's to the desktop too so they will need to move them first. XP can only be attached to more than one domain if the domains are trusted to each other. This may have changed so if anyone knows differently, please correct me but I'm almost certain this is the case still.

\User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Start Menu & Taskbar Disable context menus for the taskbar This should do the trick, might take away too much though but will do the trick.

I find they like to blame us for everything IT related no matter what. How many teachers computers just 'lost' files or somehow deleted certain parts of it but not others. And somehow the document they save religiously all the time is a copy from 3 weeks ago. Those crazy computers are always doing things like that. What can I do about it? Why aren't they more reliable? When we develop the ability to fix their issues before they happen and ensure that nothing ever breaks or needs developing therefore negating our positions, then maybe they will have nothing to complain about(Behind our backs).

My home built intranet system, developed with asp and access databases. Provides calendar, message board, marking system, SEN database, file store, planning repository. Built this 4 years ago and it has grown and grown and we are really proud of it, especially as I had no previous web dev experience.

I've sent a PM, I'm really interested in this. Expenses not necessary.

I give them roaming profiles but folder redirection for desktop icons, that way they can change background picture etc etc, but their desktop icons are static. Works well, then I use loopback processing so that if they are in the suite, they get a seperate customised desktop specific to the programs used in the suite.

One of my schools is extremely small and we have a similar server setup. Servers are important and I would really try hard to get it through to SMT and upwards that future education possibilities are limited otherwise. There's future VLE's to think about, tracking of pupils work, staff planning and performance documents. Also try and get across that using a 'proper' server environment is useful for childrens progression to secondary. Ask them not to give that extra management point to Teacher A this term and do something that benefits everyone.