Kitkatninja

A good site for public sector jobs (including educational jobs) would be the County Council Website (see here for example), the local paper (you'd be surprised, I was), individual school websites and forums like here. -Ken

Good luck for the exams, which exams are you taking? -ken

PM sent -ken

Have you ensured that all the updates (Eclipse, Windows, but especially MS SQL) are done? As I do know that the service packs for SQL actually fixes a few things and speeds up MS SQL. At home, via wireless, I can VPN in and these are the response times: To load Eclipse .Net - 6 seconds. To load Search - 15 seconds. I can't tell you how fast it currently is within the school, as I'm on A/L, but I believe it is faster. This is what we're running the Eclipse .Net server on: A Virtual 2003 R2 server (with SP2) running within Windows 2008. I have allocated 4gb of ram to it & 1 core. Hope this helps. -Ken

I was looking into this a while back, not sure if any of these will be of any use to you: 1. LeTTOL (Learning to teach online) 2. Diploma in Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector (DTLLS) or the Certificate in Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector (CTLLS) or the Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector (PTLLS) - in order of highest to lowest. 3. Your certED or PGCE, but you'd have to be a teacher for this. 4. e-Learning Facilitation course offered by TAP Hope this gives you a starting place -Ken

Hey mate, Did I ask for your address? If I did then I've given it to Personnel, they'll be sending out the application pack. If I didn't you mind sending it over please? Sorry mate -Ken

Bit slow this morning (must be the frost), what form? -Ken

I know that at one point Dean, Andrew & I talked about offering the Network+ & Security+ but there wasn't enough interest in order to run those courses (before I worked there as a part-time lecturer, I use to work there in IT Services). The "All in one" Network + guide, third edition was published in 2004 so before the major 2005 revision then added to that there was a minor 2007 revision (only small updates to the exam). The next major revision will be in 2009, and even though there will be a cross-over period (well normally there is), if you study for the 2005 objectives you'll have to make sure that you take the exam by a fixed date. But apart from that, have you thought about the MCSA? You've got the MCDST, so that's the elective sorted. And even though I'd recommend doing the network+ before the 70-291, there are 2 other exams (the client & server exams) that you could do before that. -Ken

I don't know who does the Network+ course in Northants, however I do know that Tresham does the CCNA. Have you not thought about self-studying the Network+? It is possible. I self-studied the Network plus with this book, plus experience. There's an update version around but I can't comment on it as I haven't used it. As for the career path you should go down, you don't state what in IT you currently do, but judging by the courses/exams you've taken, why don't you stick with suport? Which college did/do you work for? In the past I use to work for Tresham -Ken

We send them back to the supplier who we purchased them from. -Ken

Congrats on the new job -Ken

Congrats Does that mean they don't use RM, CSE, etc? If it does cool, you'll get to play around with AD directly then -Ken

We've plastic cable tied them & metal tied them. With the plastic cable tied the students just cut the tied, with the metal tied they just wreck the kb & mouse. However the damage with the metal cable ties is less than the amount of equipment that was "taken" with or without the plastic cable ties. Due to the cost of the metal cable ties we've done what Heebeejeebee does: -Ken

Wow, I fail the UK one by 15 points - the biggest factor was my age at 30. Glad I was born in the EU Did get the required points for Canada, well got a whole 3 extra point above the minimum and that with my wife also (not sure if having a wife/partner affects the score). -Ken

I love surprise prezzies at Christmas/birthdays, however have asked my wife for Sacred 2 (PC game) this year -Ken

Too bad I don't live that way -ken

Hey the school designers did a good job, I was wondering how they were going to get students from throwing things off the top floors -ken

I'll see if they are still doing this in the new financial year. Out of money this year for major projects -Ken

Great can't wait -Ken

Hi All, Hopefully this meets the conditions of posting a vancancy here It looks like we have an opening at our place for an IT Apprentice post, based in Wellingborough, Northants. Here's a quick run down... Good points: You get to learn alot at our place, eg building PC's, repairing laptops, using a helpdesk, phone system, virtualisation, servers, etc... Training on job via this scheme is excellent: NVQ/iTQ 2 & 3, MCDST, MCSA, A+, CCNA, MOS/MCAS and after 5 years you can then apply for the LCGI (an NVQ 4 level award in IT) Bad points: The pay... The training scheme offers £80 pw (it is a full time post), under current apprenticeship rules apprentices are exempt from the national minimum wage. It is an entry level position, so don't expect to have domain admin rights and the ability to work on the server's/switches as soon as you start. For the amount of users/equipment that we have you're realistically looking at a dept that has either 4 full time techs, or at least 3 full time techs with either 1 part-time tech or 1 full time IT Apprentice. Currently there is only 2 of us. Can be good or bad points: You get to work with Dom (Modey from Certforums), who is the Senior IT Tech, and myself, who is the IT Manager. Not only do we support our own organisation, but we also support 2 other organisations, so there's some off-site work. The IT Apprentice scheme is not a quick way into the IT world. The scheme can be approx 2-3 years long (can be longer depending on how fast you work/learn). There is some training during the day and evenings, if the training is done during the day then it will count towards your working hours. I'm still finding out if the evening training is the same thing - for us full timers evening training doesn't count towards our working hours. Ok, now that's out of the way... We are working with several other people on this Apprenticeship post, so we're not only mentioning this here. If you're interested, let us know via e-mail or a PM -Ken

Got Farcry2 on the day it was released and was about as disappointed as I was with Farcry 1, it was installed and uninstalled on the same day... -Ken

Is the setup a centrally managed solution or are each one configured separately? We had a few Netgear WAP's and I don't recall them having a load balance feature (I could be wrong). On the centrally managed solution, there is an option to load balance between switches (on the 3Com ones anyway, I'm assuming that the centrally managed solution from Netgear does the same). I say this as we trialed several laptops with the netgear access points and found that they connected to the first wap they found and alot of them connected to the weakess signal and didn't hop to any stronger ones that were available. That may not be your problem, but it was one of ours. Apart from that, it's like powdarrmonkey already said about the overlapping signals... See here. If there are more than 3 channels overlapping, then you may have to turn down the transmission power of the WAP's to 75% or 50% - depending on the local environment (eg. metal framework, other electrical devices that can interfer, etc) -Ken

I can only say 3 words: Love the Game!!! Played Oblivion and when I heard that they were doing FallOut3 based on the same engine, had to play it. Had it since the release date and can't put it down. -Ken

We use Hyper-V here and that works brillantly, next year we'll be upgrading to a 2008 domain (missed this year over summer due to too many jobs). One of the things I'm looking forward to, from a 2k8 domain, is the ability to implement different password policies on OU's instead of having just 1 password policy at domain level (in 2k & 2k3 environments). -Ken

Hope this helps: 1. Create your Virtual Network in Virtual Network Manager - this lets you add your real physical NIC to the virtual world. 2. Go to you setting for your Virtual Machine & add the NIC you created in step 1. 3. In your virtual machine window (once logged on), click Action -> Insert Integration Services Setup Disk, and install it. This allows you to use your Virtual machine to connect to the real world. -Ken p.s. I believe that one of the requirements, if you're running Windows 2k3, is to have SP2 installed.