Sirbendy

Ah, bless. Jems family and mine are fortunate then..they have me (hardware/software), Jem(Hardware/web), Jems brother(Hardware/software), and my brother (software). I enjoy house calls though..the old "can I have a drink of water, please?" to get the person out of sight before you deal out the thwack to release the jammed button" routine is good.."what was wrong then?"... "Oh, it was a hardware problem..easy to fix when you know how.." "Oh good..I'd feel ever so silly if it was something daft.." So many times I've gone in, seen a schoolboy mistake that takes 20 seconds to fix and then twiddled around with nothing at all to make it look like it wasn't an ID10T fault..

isn't it now 19% on diesel and 17% on petrol? I'm sure I read it's higher on diesel. It's all bloody silly. I do agree with some "it's all profiteering and greed" viewpoints though..once the fuel is delivered, the prices should be fixed until the next delivery...not go up every day..that's profiteering IMO. OPEC are ..well...money grabbing sods, is a good summary. The government also - but from a lot of what I've been hearing, they're in financial poo..which I could believe..useless bunch of pillocks. I've discovered a local bus from by my house (apparently) to outside this building by 8am, leaving at night by 4.53pm to be back by 5.30..it'd mean me leaving early (5.15 finish officially), but if I got here at 8, instead of my official 8.30 start - stuff it. Reckoned to be about £40 for a monthly ticket...but damned if I know where I can get one..might give it a try for a weekly and see how I get on. If it goes OK, I'll use it for work, and the car for the "special" days like trips to Civic offices, weekend shopping and family visits, and so on. Bearing in mind that most of the grind for the car is work journeys, and even then I managed to wring a 3 week tank out of £49, I reckon I'll extend a tank of fuel over..at least a month and a half. Electric cars - yes. Most people do short journeys that are well within the capabilities of them. Or so it seems. Electric scooters also. There are even electric mountain bike conversions now, FFS..and you can get trailers and god knows what to bolt on. A decent public transport system would be good..not just in cities like london and brum.. What we also need is to go backwards a bit...reduce our sprawl..bring back local shops, butchers, and so on...cut out the need to travel to get essentials..again, it seems we're quite well supplied where I live...there are a lot of local trades like that still that are in walking distance, and we're trying them out. As to power...wind/solar/wave..come on, we're an ISLAND...lets play to our strengths there...OK, not so much solar, but it's still useable.. I bought a solar panel at the weekend, and a load of electronics to build battery chargers and LED light units etc..all good so far. Heating...stuff oil and gas. Go back to woodburners and solid fuel...recycle as we do now, burn some as well..cuts landfill down. Surely we have the technology to "scrub" the chimney output? I'm sure power stations do it...? Or geothermal...our new facility will be entirely geothermal heated..and we'll have wind turbines and possibly solar as well. I can't wait to see it. Nuclear - I'm not a fan of. It may be "safe", but...it doesn't fill me with confidence...didn't someone on here discuss this not so long back, and someone replied with the uses and ease of waste reprocessing?

Can't say I regard football with anything but annoyance...and I can't say I have any pity for him either..he got paid plenty to do what he did, and by the sounds of it, it went to his head..alcohol issues are self induced. If there are any real mental issues, then I may feel a twinge..but no more. If they're all brought on himself, serves him right. I've quite happily sectioned one of my friends after he went on the self-pity "suicide" binge 3 times..and there was nothing wrong with him that a big fat kick in the arse, lots of exersize and some bloody perspective wouldn't have fixed. Some people need to learn to deal with everyday reality, they really do. No, I'm not unfeeling...but I think footballers are paid stupid money, are a waste of space, and as with a lot of "celebrities", do nothing except piddle the money up the wall. He's got no space to be self-pitying.

don't run a USB hub in it....I did that with my new rig when I built it, and I had all manner of weird keyboard/mouse/stability/shutdown/lockup/BSOD issues for months...I changed every bit apart from the board, ran diag after diag, tried XP, Vista, Ubuntu. Puppy Linux etc etc..all the same. Then I removed the USB hub..and it's been rock solid since..as soon as I plug it in, and connect anything to it - bang..instant issues.

tell me about it...we have a very battered LDV, and a new, shiny transit.. Slightly embarrassing for SLT is the fact that a few days after delivery, an SLT member drove it into the entrance wall..

We've had a few runins with Ergo support for the Ensis laptops. One flaky inverter, one flaky charging circuit. Quite helpful, nice to deal with. Not like Sony, who we'll never buy another laptop from. Useless sods. Sent a VAIO back for repair, it came back badly assembled, with bits missing. AND they argued the toss.

I'm going to leave mine until I hear when the LEA are going to roll it out in their image. I've got most of the latest SP2 updates in the new image for mass deployment in the summer already. CBA to reroll the image just for SP3 just yet.

Oh no, I agree - don't think I don't.. However, we lost our PABX system a few years back, and for over a month we had mobiles while a VoIP system was established. Inconvenient, but survivable. Steve and I project managed construction/refurb of 2 IT suites and our offices during the course of a term - there was no real disruption to anyone else. We just shut the rooms off, and gutted it, then had the building firms in to refit, network and power it all out during the day - no complaints from anywhere. In fact, come to think of it...all of our IT suites have been constructed during the course of a "normal" term, in the 9am-whatever time range..it's never disrupted T&L.. About the only bits that happened in regard to the suites in holiday time was the delivery of the machines.. Repaving and general site work..6 weeks is useful, but again, it's not something we as a school tend to do..it gets done when it needs it doing..we had all the corridor internal flooring torn out and replaced with that "swimming pool" style plastic mat material..done during the evenings, and in parts where possible, in the day. Painting gets done after 4pm, most things get done in "quieter times"..we had the theatre lighting replaced (BIG job) over the course of a week last term..cherrypicker in there and all. They'll be back next week to replace the expired projector in there - it's not a holiday specialty..it's just that it broke on thursday, in time for a break. We even converted the old 6th form block into the new reception/heads office/admin office etc in term time..although thankfully it was pre-networked. Just a case of installing switches, some fibre, the machinery and the phones. Being in there until 8pm one night trying to figure out how the hell to move a videophone is a particularly vivid memory of that.. As to adding servers/taking them down..no, that's an "as and when" as well..we just send out the mail beforehand notifying of downtime, and do it..all auxilliary servers though - LEA run the big ones for now, but even then if they go wrong, we'll take them off and do what needs doing..staff work around us, not the other way round. This is one of the things I'm looking forward to after virtualising them...if it goes wrong, take it down, bring up a second copy in minutes. If we want to test something, just create a copy, modify it, shut the orginal down and bring up the test one. It'll be much nicer. The 6 week break's biggest hassle for us is ALWAYS the bloody timetable...because it ALWAYS gets lumped on us, even though it's not our issue. Apart from that, we only ever run maintenance and smartboard/projector installs...and that's if we can't just nick a classroom for the day and relocate the class.

No, I do realise that. However, "major works" that take down the network could be scheduled for after hours instead of a 6 week break. God knows, in previous jobs myself an NM have pulled plenty of late nights. We had all of our UPS replaced a few weeks back, by MGE on behalf of the LEA..they were in from 7pm-midnight. Of course, schools would have to be willing to pay for the service..but there are alternatives. We will be reimaging all our machinery - we could just as easily done it after hours, but opted to wait until summer. The virtualisation project - it's being run parallel to the existing infrastructure it seems..there are ways and means. Of course, when we're running our own network in 12 months or so, I may feel different. However, right now I do feel the 6 week break is a bit long. There is also the viewpoint that we both hold - businesses and schools aren't the same thing. You're not losing revenue if it goes down, and it's not going to kill them if you need to take a subsystem down for a while. Schools can exist quite happily without IT, but staff have forgotten that fact.

I reckon Transit LWB..

Oh dearie me...might not be a bad idea to offer some bookelts/guides/courses for them there, I feel. When I worked at the council, I was accountable to the senior systems analyst..female, and very, very good at VAX/VMS and all the other myriad systems we had paralleled there. She taught me a hell of a lot. We did a lot of field tech work at client sites..it was her that set me on this career path, pretty much. I'm all for women in IT..my missus was a school tech not so long ago, but couldn't stand the attitude of the male NM that she worked under and couldn't wait to jump when she was offered a job as a web developer in "mainstream" business. The daft thing is, experience apart, I'd say Jem is not far off my level in a lot of areas. We both concentrate on our areas of specialty now though. In web terms, she is god..in hardware terms, I am god..and that works quite nicely. Some of our girls do the "I'm stupid, I'm female" line...and that's not me being nasty, it's a direct quote. I always ask why they think that.."I'm no good at this IT stuff..". Utter nonsense. They lack encouragement, that's all. We have no end of boys wanting to do work experience with us..if we ever get a girl enquiring, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

There was a time the 6 week hols was bliss...both when I was at school, and working. Over the last few years though, I've been finding myself casting around for inspiration after less than a week. I'm currently term time +2 weeks..in a way, I DO think it's too long...in another, I agree about the "when the hell do we get time to do major works" viewpoint. Although I will point out that in business, you have to do it regardless.. This summer will be maintenance through and through as our servers are being virtualised by the LEA..NEXT summer will be hell, and if we get a break, I'll be surprised..it's the entire site move next summer..

You're right there... If we have a cut, the UPS are lifesavers..but we still have to run around after resetting breakers on various floors to bring different room sections back up. I think me and the NM are the only ones who know where each wall is supplied from. It boggles the mind that to power up the back of IT1 and the aircon controller you need to go down to food and flick breaker 13 on DB12, marked "lighting, F13". We've had a rewire, but there are so many "Unknown destination" markers on the board diagrams, it's scary. Last power cut we had, UPS did their job well, but it took us an hour to bring the infrastructure back online..so many odd breakers in so many odd places.

blinds and bars across the view, but it looks down onto the tennis courts.

what version of ghost is it?

I've been in this job 8 years, and I've put on..maybe 1 stone. If that. Cynicism weighs nothing.

The above is normal for us...always has been. It's not too bad - we're that autonomous anyway we rarely use the helpdesk.

Yep, and me. Bloody wonderful disk..I burned it to CD, with ghost on the CD.

Not all Power units are equal...we have blips that'll reboot 20 out of 35 Optiplex GX60s, yet my Sempron and the remaining kit don't even flinch..heh.. It might just have had a slightly less robust PSU..

Power spikes..? Last place I worked had a UPS that was forever flicking between spike and dip..utter naff power. I'd keep an eye if that's not normal...it sounds like there's something going on with the mains. Is the facility server rigged to the UPS demanding a battery? That might explain that.. One of our bank is doing the same..it's being duly ignored..there are plenty to do it. They're all being replaced with MGE soon.

Start task manager. Go to "View->uncheck Show Kernel times"..red lines gone..

Another Truecrypt user here...damn good.

Ahh..Prestel and acoustic couplers...those were the days..

Good god, is DigitalBrain not dead yet?

We don't...I don't see the point. Doing the jobs page takes a few minutes, updating can be done on the WYSIWYG site editor. Admittedly, we don't use any packages or whatever...it's a basic SHTML setup. Quick, simple, to the point. It'll eventually be joined up to the VLE, but for now it's more than enough..I'm just looking at image galleries and bolting a webcam feed for the new site into it.