kooperthedog

Thanks for the link Dave, I will have a read over the system documentation with interest. I have to admit I am growing to like the principle and ease of being able to purchase and deploy a "cloud server" that I can be working and configuring within minutes (rather than wait for 2 weeks on Dell). I guess I am less comfortable (and suspect our clients will also be less comfortable) with having our data floating around in the external ether.... From my own perspective, I have concluded that "Cloud Computing" is no more than vendor's marketing hype to cover a range of technologies including virtualisation, webapps, live mesh, google apps etc. We are due to start a VMWare, Server 2008 Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer/Desktop/Apps trial here which I suppose represents a move towards a cloud computing style of service. The ratio of techies to end device stuff doen't concern me that much at present as we are so understaffed here it would be a welcome relief! Many thanks for the comments, feel better for getting this off my chest!

Thanks for the comments guys. What impact do you think this will have on techies and how will it change the way that we work. I have read a myriad of different views ranging from those who think the entire IT world is doomed through to those that see this as an opportunity for the IT dept to deliver more robust and flexible services. Most of what I have read (and agree with thus far) is that some kind of hybrid (internal/external cloud) approach might be the way forward and this seems to fit the Midori model. It's difficult to tell exactly where MS are heading with Midori, but I assume they are suggesting we procure the end user hardware and then either provide (or subscribe to) a virtualised OS platform? However, I have read stuff about Midori that mentions local and remote synchronisation (as per Live Mesh) which doesn't seem to fit the Hypervisor platform! I guess I am reading to much into this at present, and the baseline is that this stuff is several years away during which time many a change of direction could be made!

Any comments on this: Developing Stories - - Midori Unleashed: The Goods on the Future of Windows

Hi Gibbo, We run DHCP failover at each of our secondary schools. We have three servers per school undertaking various tasks, and two of these are configured as DHCP servers. We allocated each school twice as many IP addresses as they required, and then split the scope evenly between the two DHCP servers. The main DHCP server scope at each school hosts the first two ranges (XXX.XXX.4.1 thru XXX.XXX.5.254) and the secondary DHCP server the "spare" ranges (XXX.XXX.6.1 thru XXX.XXX.7.254). This effectively means we could lose one of the DHCP servers as the other has enough IP addresses in it's scope to cover the whole school if required. It might not fit into your environment, but it's a handy approach if you have enough IP ranges available. Cheers, K.

If you are looking at SSL VPN's, then SSL Explorer may be the low cost answer: SourceForge.net: SSL-Explorer Cheers, Kenny

Hi Ryan, Yes, for my sins I work for the Education ICT team at Falkirk, mostly dealing with the secondary schools. Not to sure who I'll be supporting, won't be Italy or France though!

Hi All, Kenny from Falkirk calling.

Hi Guys, I have noticed a strange issue at two of our high schools relating to the delivery of proxy settings via group policy and LANView3. One of our schools reported that the proxy settings were not being delivered to staff and pupil PC's on an intermittent basis. This is our first school to have LANView deployed across the board on both staff and pupil PC's. I spent two days investigating this and could not find any problems with group policy, nor could I pin the blame on a virus or malware of some kind. I have started to see the same pattern with a second school, and have noticed that uninstalling the LANView3 client appears to fix the problem. Even stranger is that you can then re-install the LANView3 client, log back on as a pupil and the proxy settings hold. Has anyone else experienced this? Thanks in advance, Kenny

Resolved the error with LANView's registry key for controlling server access, but had to give up with iTALC. It's a pity re iTALC as it looks like a really great product. Perhaps later version will be more stable.

Hi Folks, I've been experimenting with both iTALC and LANView recently and have a couple of queries that I hope someone else can shed some light onto. Ideally I would like to install the LANView client on each PC in the school for use by myself and the other guys in the ICT team (using the LANView server on our own PC's). I would also like to setup the LANView server on the teacher's PC's in each of our main suites (20 PC's in each suite), but restrict the teacher to seeing just the PC's in his/her suite, rather than the whole network. I've tried applying the "allowed computers" registry fix for the LANView clients as mentioned on the MST Software forums, but this doesn't work. Has anyone else seen this issue? As an alternative I had a look at iTALC, which looks really good and is more suited to classroom management. I have it up and running in one suite and everything works fine, but I am getting exception errors relating to ica.exe every time I log a PC on or off. Is this a known bug, and is there a resolution? I have looked on the iTALC wiki, but it doesn't provide much information. Unfortunately we can't afford NetOp or even some of the cheaper alternatives! Hope someone can help. Thanks in advance, Kenny