Quillyn

I am looking into changing our off-site backup system County has a offer on the table using Attix5 with a set up cost of £1200 and yearly cost of around £300. While our old system was not as robust as I would like it was considerably cheaper. What are other schools using for off-site backups and could people recommend software or off-site backup hosts? Thankyou

I have become involved with helping out a Nursury. They take a huge ammount of photos which are clogging up their machines. Recently I have added NAS to their network and I have been wondering about doing something better with all those photos. In short I am looking for a multiuser photo database I can host, ideally one with a nice and simple enduser program for simple cropping naming/ tagging and organising the database. Coppermine is not the right fit for the end user and Extensis Portfolio is just to expensive. How is everyone else managing / editing photos?

I have a school I am handing over to other parties, I was brought in to bring their systems into the 21st century. In short I have finished and am trying to work out who they should be looking for to replace me... There's about 150 machines running vista-7 inc laptops There's nearly 40 iOS devices There's 3 servers hosting our VMware cluster that does everything the school needs on 4*2008r2 and FreeBSD A couple of chunky NAS boxes. And associated printers scanners etc. It takes me about 4-7 hours a week to keep things running smoothly while dealing with the teachers questions/ training as well. So should they be looking for a network engineer/ manager or a technician any idea of pay band etc? They want someone separate from other schools as it was grouping up for tech support that got them in the huge mess I came in on a year ago. Any ideas?

I have just been given a underling, wah ha ha ha The problem is hes great with stand alone machines but has never ever used a server. If he was going to stay on I would send him off for training but as it is I only have him for 6 months and want him to be more useful before I hand him on. To this end I have promised him a couple of Virtual servers to learn on and setup on a safe area of our network. What I need is a good guide for him on setting up the servers and using active directory etc so I do not end up teaching him my bad habbits. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Harley any users about 20, 1Tb of storage which is already in the machine striped and mirrored.

I am interested in people's advice, I have a problem no budget and a need for network storage. In short what I have to work with is: One retired server 2.8g Xeon with 4 g RAM component built before my time with 2 network cards. What I need is network storage for our admin and curriculum networks ( on different ip ranges but the same physical network) Do people think I would be best to ... -use something like FreeNAS to handle our storage - install windows server - install a couple of virtualisations to handle the file sharing for each network. Just interested in peoples thoughts and opinions really.

Picked up a mess of a school, its server unlicensed, unreliable and over loaded, looking for some recommendations for a replacement. Currently its ... A Core duo with 6gig of ram (7years old) 2003 Running services for 16 thin clients DHCP Anti-virus management Sims FMS & .net for 4 clients Windows patch management Schools main file share (0.5 gig expected expansion in next 3 years to 2gig) non raid. Presently the school runs no notable active directory I would like the new server to take this role for the 80 machines on the network. Presently I have been given £5,000 from the capital budget to try and sort the server out. I am thinking visualization is the way to go do people have any recommendations of the best way of going about this? Any help greatly appreciated.

I am presently using a mac acting as a airprint server using 'AirprintActivator' to print to all network printers from our IPads.

I have used them for Microsoft Licencing, they have been quick and cheap and service has been good. Only negative thing I can think of for them is that they seem to send more spam than usual that I have to keep opting out of.

One of the schools I support has just recieved 5 IPad 2's for the children to use within class. In short I want these to see some real use rather than just gathering dust or turning into glorified internet browsers. So does anyone know of or can suggest any inspiring, educational, practical or just plain fun apps to enthuse our teachers and students. Paid or free apps are fine, though of course free is better. So any suggestions?

I only really know RM in regards to their workstations. Not a clue what the rest of their systems are like, what are peoples thoughts on their internet services? I am concerned about using something like Dansgard or smoothwall with keeping the filtering up to date. With only a couple of hours on site a week I fear they would eventually become to easy for the children to work around as I have seen in some high schools. Though I will note they are concerns, having only ever briefly used smoothwall for some internet filtering & cache.

After the success of my last post I was wondering if people have any good suggestions in regard to schools internet connections. Presently one of the schools I have just taken over has a well.. dangerous internet connection. No network firewall to speak of and practically no filtering. There are only 15 machines on site so the requirements are low but County wants a £6,200 installation charge and £4,200 a year fee to provide a dedicated 4meg line and all appropriate security etc. So I am looking at costing up some alternatives and wondering what people have done to achieve a more cost effective success either bringing in other services or hosting your own. Thankyou

Thank you, looks like HESK is the way to go for me the user interface seems much better for primary teachers than something email based also entirely web based is a must with 4 separate schools

In short I have been asked to take over support for 4 primary schools, they are all completely separate and independent. I recently went though FITS practitioner training and want to get these schools organised. The first stage of my plan is to get a help desk sorted for each school. Ideally something web based so everyone can access it from any place and ideally not flash based ( one school is really into their IPads). I was wondering if anyone has any good ideas, suggestions of products or at least point me in the right direction. Thank you