gaz350

How far along is your new college? we had similar issues during the design phase. Server room was originally installed next to the Boiler Room and the Kitchens on the other side with external windows and at the furthest end of the building, Sprinkler system, water and drainage pipes running through the roof space and no Air con!!!! Now, its at the heart of the building, no external walls, no building services in the roof and in the same part of the building as 50% of the users oh and Air Con in the server room aswell as our 4 Comms Rooms. Just keep at it and you should get it.

what i do is create your groups on the windows side lets say "WIN_INTAKE2010" and obviously add all your new year 7s to that group. go to the mac side, then create your group that you are going to use to manage that group on the Mac side, so lets say "MCX_INTAKE2010". then instead of dragging users in like above from the side pane, drag the WIN_intake2010 group into MCX_intake2010 instead. the advantage of this is once all your managed prefs are setup you wont have to touch the mac side every time you create a new user on the windows AD. prefixing group names helps you from getting all confused too!

(grr typos 460c blades) We're in the process of configuring our new blades. (well the engineers are) the blades are 6GB(3x2) and having 32GB upgrades(3x8). These are single processor blades with the 2nd slot free. so am i correct in thinking that all the ram should be in the DIMM sockets that are specified for Proccessor 1 and not spread across the 2 banks of DIMM Sockets?

Would explain a few things yesterday. Thanks for heads up

Same size school and if it wasn't for a new school I Dont know how we could even think about purchasing a SAN and that's with our 50k budget + 8k spares and repairs (we charge departments for toners)

Hi Aaron, for anyone to help you with you setup we'd need a little bit more info. How many machines you have What you use them for. We have a lot of big files flying round our network for example. Budget constraints.? Can you see your budget for next year being 10, 25, 50, or £75000+ Time constraints, Its now less than 1 week before the kids return for us.or is it something you are aiming to role out during term time, next year etc? I just can't imagine anyone being able to help without more info without doing some wild speculation Edit:2hrs sleep last night, sorry just realized you have mentioned number of clients

This academic year im aiming (key word here!) to do Termly reports instead of monthly. Mainly due to how term holidays end up screwing with any stats. Should also link in nicely with the departments Termly key tasks from our Dev plan!

Our office is huge! Used to be the staff room. The staffroom is now in what I would call a small classroom on the ground floor, seems to get used alot more since. I generally make the effort to have lunch in the staffroom(no food policy at desks) so it's the only quietish place to eat. Unless it's been impossible to have split lunches amongst the team then like others a polite reminder to staff and a gentle nudge in the direction of itsupport helpdesk. Most staff respect our lunch but it's taken 2 years to get it like it is. Although I always seem to end up having heated discussions with lazy staff who hate changes that have been implemented by slt. They pay your wages, if you don't like it find another job! Your lucky to have one!

Defo interested in this thread, just to add some more to the mix we move Mid academic year! After Xmas oh and guess when my next baby is due...... 8th jan! All fun fun fun. Annoying thing we were suppose to move at the end of ocotober.

So, Its that time of the month again. As everyone knows with windows, Windows updates are the 1st line of defence in maintaining a secure system (especially when laptops are outside the network at home for upto 6 weeks.) Keeping laptops up to date within your own policy and procedures is the easiest thing during term time. (Update tuesday comes, Test on VM, approve for install with a deadline 1 week later, followed by a quick email to staff outlining the proccess and what will happen if they dont update their laptops by X) Obviously this system breaks down when the summer holidays come. anyone have a system in place for getting Window updates out to staff laptops? would it be simple enough to give WSUS external access for 6 weeks of the year? any security issues doing so?

Follow http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/18340-new-od-ad-integration-paper.html

Sorry have you setup open directory on the mac server?

You need to bind the clients to both ad and od. Ad needs to be 1st in search list on the clients. Can't think of the correct term for this right now. In od you can assign active directory groups to od groups so you don't need to manage them in 2 places.

Thnks Ric_, i was also looking at these other things as well but i was looking for that one thing that means something to college managers, nothing better than cold hard cash to get people to listen!

its being designed to 50% peak useage and to allow for 50% extra capacity growth in the future i believe (ie room for more blades if needed!). There is also 1700 network ports in the building!!!! as its far cheaper to put them into the building then to retrofit later. Went round the building today, i feel sorry for the cablers!!!! oh piccys ( Vale of Catmose College | Facebook ) edit: apologies i was mistaken your right, shouldn't always believe what i've been told (we were speccing out power requirements for prestaging!!) unless something has changed in Detailed design! There is also a bunch of non Blade servers.

As part of our new build IT, it looks like we are going down the route of Hyper-V. although i would prefer to go down the route of citrix/vmware. From what i can work out from various documentation we'll be running 20 HP Blades (across 3x C7000 enclosure) over a 5 year period i roughly worked out to run these 20 bad boys would be in the region of £40k+. One feature i would love to get my hands on is DPM, sadly only available in the Enterprise version of vSphere/xenserver at approx £32,000 for the entire cost based on the xenserver Enterprise. i cant seem to find such features in hyperv Anyone running the Enterprise versions and using Power management features to power down servers? anyone looked into possible cost savings in such a setup? in the above i haven't included savings made from reduced cooling either. Do you think i have a business case for investing in vsphere/xenserver or am i being sold by marketing fluff? we want to front load as much as possible into the infrastructure now to save us in running costs in the future, to me this seems a no brainer in our case or am i missing something? sorry if it seems im going on a bit just getting whats in my head out!

We've just hit our 5000th ticket! And love it. From our point of view there can be requests where we often find we have to juggle a ticket between techs as we each have different roles and would be great if it was possible to create sub tasks directly from withIn each ticket. Would help track those more complicated requests a little better. Although I'm sure I've spiced up this request on the community forum Can't think of anything else right now! Great to see spiceworks in edugeek! Edit: just thought about it a decent mobileUI (iphone cough cough) and HTML 5 graphs instead of flash

hold ya horses on the IT Audit save that for the summer. get ya booty around all the departments and talk to them, see what their needs are, find out what they have problems with. then do your Audit during the holidays.

I agree, but we don't need to procure 20 other services we don't want at the same time just to get it

See this is why I hate the rbc and the "lea" way of doing things. Every school is different, why purchase the same thing for every school? Would the school buy these things if they were to be given that pot of money or spend it on some other software/resource they really need?

Yup it's really bad our county is at the top of the leader board of top slicers

In reply to Tony, at the time we hosted most of the services ourselves already. Things might have changed in the land of embc plc but for us it really did change the way the college was able to use the Internet connection.

Sorry I wasn't deliberately being difficult, I keep hearing it too... But really what does it provide? We are a smLl county... Our county top slices nearly £700 per student, we are a rural county with very few issues. For example a similar school in another part of the country with a pretty well off population would probably be closer to £250 per pupil. (we have 750 pupils) Going back to the broadband situation, at the end of the day your head needs to take risk. For us it's either computers to use the connection or no connection at all.

And where was that rule made?

It's not so scary providing your own broadband. We cut our ISP costs down to 4.5k a year for a 24meg/3up bonded connection when embc were still offering 2meg lines for 10k. 10meg costs were being offered at £15k don't know if this is still the case but I know we can now get a 100meg leaseline limited to 20meg for 10k now. We left embc 3 or 4 years ago now saving us a shed load of £££.