crutchfieldj

A school I used to work in uses a free theme called Academica. Very easy to use and customize, and it's purpose built for schools and other educational institutions. customize

Wordpress is dead easy and there are hundreds of free templates available for it, good ones, too. It's also very powerful if you want to get technical. I would use Wordpress.

Doesn't sound like the company actually know what they're doing. I would scrap the whole lot and put something together with wordpress. That's what we did. The whole thing looks much better and it's much easier to work with.

In truth, I can't say I'd recommend using blogger for a school website. It's just not a very flexible platform, unlike wordpress or joomla. You'd be much better off investing the time & effort into using a proper CMS.

Signed up for 15 accounts. Downloaded steam, installed, and oh wait, LGfL blocks the ports we need. Failed at the first hurdle.

It should work under windows as long as you're using apache. Create a file named .htaccess (no extension, just .htaccess) and put the following in: php_value upload_max_filesize 20M << php_value post_max_size 20M << save it in your sites root directory.

Second the above. Right click> Inspect Element in Chrome, click the network tab, reload page. That will show you how long each element of the page takes to load- could be something rogue in there that's slowing it down, like externally-hosted images or third-party plugins. If that doesn't show anything useful up, try it on another host to see if it responds better, just to see if it's the box. This should really be the responsibility of the developer. If they can't fix an issue with their own site...

Just a thought- have you tried creating a .htaccess file (if one doesn't exist already) and putting the new values in there?

Sounds like a registrar-side issue- not creating the appropriate records, or a DNS misconfiguration somewhere along the line. Contact the registrar directly.

You people put me to shame...one HP Proliant Microserver with 5GB ram & 2.25TB storage, running 2008R2 Standard. It's hooked up to my TV and surround sound system via HDMI, serving as an XBMC-powered media centre machine.

Got one last week. So far the stock Debian build seems quite useful for tinkering, programming at a basic level etc. Tried Raspmc and very impressed with it. Someone has also released a penetration-testing toolkit for it, but I haven't had a chance to try that yet.

Windows explorer will connect to FTP servers quite easily, just stick your ftp server's URL into the address bar, prefixing it with ftp:// That's probably the easiest solution for your students as there are effectively no settings to change.

I've turned my microserver into a HTPC. 5GB RAM, 2008R2 Standard, ATI 5450 w/HDMI out. Serves up media but also acts as a home lab server just to play with things. Useful for RDP as well. Davit2005, how quiet is yours? Mine is in my bedroom and loud enough to notice it at night.

We have this issue too and haven't found a solution yet either.

I have one that I use as a general purpose home server, media centre and remote access station. I've put an ATi 5450 and two 1TB's in it and run Windows Server 2008 R2 and XBMC for the media. Setup is dead easy and it's perfectly speedy.

Sounds like their server's are overloaded- as stated above, over 800 websites on one server is definitely not recommended, even with normal usage patterns (i.e. no snow). Switch to another host that doesn't overload it's servers. You can also use loadimpact.com to simulate users and see how the site copes with the stress.

We have two consulting network managers and two techs, one of which (me) is a university placement student.

We have a similar issue occur sporadically with a few users and it is always group policy failing to apply properly. GP update also fixes it. Any ideas would be appreciated.

No, I currently use another management tool (AB tutor) but have seen this problem before.

Most domain registrars will also have their own DNS servers. If you want to use someone else for DNS, I can recommend Cloudflare, they've been very reliable so far. Not sure about UK domain registrars, however, as I've only ever used US ones.

OpenVZ is an open-source industry standard for VPS hosting. Not sure if it'll be totally suitable for your needs, however, but it's worth a look. Main Page - OpenVZ Linux Containers Wiki

If you want to learn unix/linux its worth trying to do as much with the CLI as possible. I recommend Ubuntu Server.

I don't think anything will ever replace XBMC...

Disable Aero? But seriously, it's worth doing if you can. It's just a resource hog. Lately its been causing problems with some of our machines' graphics drivers crashing out. I remember this being an issue a few years back at my own school. It was obvious when a computer was being monitored (using RM Tutor 2 back in those days) because the screen would go a bit funny for a second.

We use OneNote for all our docs, as well as a dedicated docs area on our network drives.