anne1

There seems to be an increase in the use of shared itunes across our network. It used to be just dance and music etc who could make an educational case but now it seems to be spreading for background music in general. Do you think this will be slowing down the network? They assure me copyright is not a problem... music is not stored on network drives and the aup makes it their responsibility but I'm concerned about the network.

We are rejigging our servers this summer, at present all the printers are on a general purpose box which we want to retire, with sophos and other odds and ends. Our home folders are on a Windows storage server dell powervault 500. Industry norm is for file and print on the same box, what do people think in a school? Does the end of lesson surge of 300 kida printing and saving through the same server make this unwise? What do you do? Thanks

We have a problem with no attendance data coming through to Kaleidos which we have been told will be fixed by the sims November update. Is this connected with the timetable problem do you think? Will we be able to get the timetable patch without waiting for our LA to release the November update? Thanks for the replies, it's good to know we are not alone!

Since we upgraded to version 2 Kaleidos in the summer we have had this timetables issue and groups not getting through to the VLE. We've tried a couple of tools RM sent through, but still having problems. Has anyone else got a problem with some kids not being able to upload stuff to their myspace? Seems to be random kids. We're quite new to Kaleidos and getting people to use it is not easy with all these issues.

Sorry for the delay, and thanks for the input, yes its onboard RTL8168. I have come to the same conclusion as you and now have a stack of cards ready to put in when trouble occurrs. As these machines are still in warranty I was hoping NEC would pay for the cards, but the intermittent nature makes it too hard to prove. I just wondered if anyone had similar experiences?

We bought 80 odd of these in 2006 and they were fine to start with, but over the last 6 months we have realised that every time a machine falls off the network, or a kid can't save a big file or a big sims update won't work it is one of these machines. We have put extra network cards in about a dozen of them and they have had no further problems. It is very hard to tie down an intermittent problem like this and NEC 'do not recognise that there is an epidemic issue with the networking capability of these machines.' has anyone any experience of these machines with or without this problem? The same issues have occurred all over school , though we did initially test cables and replace switches in a suite where the first problems appeared. Thanks

We have gigabit backbone and 100mb switched network, the issue does seem to be the cpu going to 100%. What do other schools do with pupil's profiles and home folders? Have them on one server or spread across several? Thanks for ideas so far

Sorry, I wasn't clear, we have 4 dc'a but as all the home folders are on this one server I think that must be what is causing the cpu to get stressed?

We have home folders for our 1500 pupils and their roaming profiles on a 4 year old dual xeon 2.4ghz server with 3gb ram, we run Ranger (but not on this server) and the profiles are about 8mb each. At some change of lessons we are getting the cpu usage going up to 100% as up to 200 kids log on. It goes down to 2% in between times but logons are slowing down because of this. Is it time to buy a new server, what spec? Or any other suggestions? Thanks