calikit

Mount Albert Grammar School needs a new Network Manager. MAGS is a very large public high school in Auckland, with 2700 students, 300 staff, 700 client devices. We mostly run Macs with Windows 2008 R2 servers, but with a number of Windows 7 Netbooks and similar. You will need: Some Mac or *nix experience High level Windows server experience Management experience (this is super important. I would not recommend this role to someone new to management) Automation abilities Solid network troubleshooting and CLI experience in Allied Telesis or other Cisco-like environments The patience of a saint MAGS has lots of cool toys, making this a really diverse role. The network gear and the servers are all brand new, UFB is being installed this year, everything is very thoroughly documented and we have a contract with a great services company to help out with big projects and crises. This will be a fantastic role for the right person. The right person will be someone with a solid base of experience, lots of confidence, patience with the technically challenged and preferably a bit of project management. You will definitely need to be comfortable dealing with senior managers and able to negotiate with/manage them. I would strongly recommend actual management experience in this environment. You will have two direct reports and the benefit of some students for grunt work. Sound interesting? If you want to have a chat about it or send your CV, I'm delighted to hear from you: [email protected]

If you lost interest in a CCNA after two semesters, you may want to consider whether you're likely to have the same problem with a degree. The graft is a lot harder and longer and frequently a lot more boring than a CCNA for a lot more money. You may want to try for the independent quals (which are way cheaper) just to see if you can handle the study. Try looking at ads for the sort of job you want to see what you need. I'm also a Network Manager with no degree. I don't know how it works in the UK, but here it's about being promoted internally and being friends with the line manager more than anything else. A degree would get you an extra 57c an hour (limited to $1000 a year). I would very strongly recommend some proper management courses if you're going to end up with direct reports though.

And showers! There is nothing like a shower between long-haul flights.

I'm stealing this line.

That old machine goes from "piece of junk" to "magical freebie" as soon as you take it away. I've got people clamouring over a stack of eMacs with 128MB RAM and 1.6GHz PowerPC processors (at best). I try not to give stuff away because everyone then wants support, but my boss keeps offering them to people...

That was a resoundingly unanimous verdict. Smoothwall was already one we were considering simply because I knew how popular it was here and now I know why. I've already got the demo, just need to give it a test. Who can I contact in NZ about Smoothwall?

How customisable is the reporting?

I'm attempting to plan for a new filtering gateway for my very large school, but I'm having trouble seeing why I should pick one option over the other. Feature sets seem to be pretty much the same across the board. Every time I speak to our consultants, they give me yet more options and widely varying opinions about whether appliances are good or bad and HA and yet more stuff. My brain is honestly fit to burst. Could you tell me what it is about your own filtering that makes you like it more than the others? I think I need opinions from people who actually operate the things. We need us some crazy good reporting, AD support, plays nice with Aerohive, that kind of stuff. Thanks in advance.

That's good to know. Should've realised they'd account for non-credit card users somehow.

Apple didn't have class-size sets in mind when they designed iPads. You can only have five to an iTunes account, you have to wipe them to change it to a new account and a credit card number is required for activation of each unit. Just that alone makes the whole thing impractical unless each student had their own one. I feel I should warn you that a local school tried that here and the parents hung, drew and quartered them.

The version we use definitely uses the license checking method you've described (as demonstrated by a different error, seen when cables fall out etc), but I'm not sure how that could explain the software insisting that the students aren't enrolled. Also, this occurs when (allegedly) just one student fails to log out correctly and affects all machines running the client. We've got 30 licenses. On the other hand, could the unreleased licenses be causing the clients to be blocked from accessing the database? Since I'm not called until after everything is broken, perhaps it's happening more than once or twice per session and the teacher doesn't realise or it's building up over time with nobody noticing when not all computers are in use. In your case, were students getting the same error "student not enrolled" when the system ran out of licenses?

So I've inquired with all the various points of contact and all they can tell me is that a SuccessMaker guy came out, spent many many hours looking at it, then charged us $150 for each of those hours and declared it was the network. There isn't a report anywhere and the person who worked with the technician was a teacher. As for the version, it seems to be version 5. We've had it nearly ten years apparently. This thoroughly predates me, so I've no idea how long this has been happening or whether it did it on the original computers or anything like that. Nobody seems to know.

Hi everyone. I've been lurking for a bit, but now have a problem I could use some advice for. My school runs SuccessMaker (not sure of the version sorry) in a pod of about 30 PCs. As the PC tech, this unfortunately falls into my jurisdiction. Our problem is that SuccessMaker will sometimes just eat all of it's enrollment records. I'm informed this happens when someone doesn't log out properly. The next class to come in will then get "Student not enrolled" errors when they try to start the program. I then have to restore everything from the backup, which is thankfully done daily. At the moment, I'm doing this two or three times per week. WTF? How this happens at all just boggles my mind. Apparently, we had SuccessMaker come and look at it (at ridiculous cost to our Learning Support Dept) and they blamed our network. This seems unlikely because it has it's own closed network with no internet and a dedicated server. Sounds to me more like some rubbish database design that lets it's clients have way too much access. Has anyone else had this issue? Did you find a solution for it? Any tips for getting more cooperation out of the SuccessMaker people? Thanks in advance for your help and/or commiseration.