Jamman960

I virtualised ours fairly recently, its currently running on 2 2.4ghz vcores's with 10gb ram allocated and 200gb storage(sas, raid 5), we're a mid sized prep school so its not being pushed all that hard.

Glad Its sorted, do you have shadow copies enabled on the server/drive? If not id get it enabled, would be very Easy to get the files back James

You may need to take ownership of the folder plus subfolders/files and then re-do the permissions(security>advanced>ownership). Did you enter any deny permissions entries? these override any grant's that are in place. Also in general I'd always leave the domain admins group with read permissions at the very least to allow backups to be performed

Very interesting, if it really does pay for itself in the majority of cases it could well work out. I wonder how well it'd work out in city centers where taller buildings reduce light or where the roads are so busy that there's high portions of the day where enough light wouldn't reach the panels. Then again imagine the fun you could have moving spaces as people park or after they park

I was going to migrate to SQL 2012 at the same time as moving from 2003 server to 2008R2 during Easter but having looked at the tech roadmap I figured it'd be better to switch to SQL2008R2 now(we migrated before R2 was supported last time so have an R2 lic anyway) then switch straight to SQL 2014 as its support starts just as 2008R2's finishes. either way it was fairly painless as per the instructions above. I just need to move FMS and Solus 3 over now James

I've been looking at this sort of thing on and off for ages ready for the day pigs start flying and someone here decides to spend some money on IT My biggest concern is that iPad's/non windows tablets in general aren't geared up to be shared so we'd end up being unable to track pupil web activity and have students logging into each others online accounts once someone ticks the "remember me"/"stay logged in" box, all of the things we've spent ages setting up windows networks with AD logins for. I'm visiting a school tomorrow to see their iPad deployment in action, at the moment I'm thinking we should get Dell Venue 11 Pro's for shared use but thats probably just me sticking with what I know best

I agree a server capable of running 30 VM's would easily run them all as one server(assuming there are no conflicts) but as per my previous post it gets very messy - unless you document EVERYTHING you're going to have trouble keeping track of things and the smallest configuration change has the potential to upset functions other than the one it was intended for - especially with the amount of dodgy educational software we end up running server side for one reason or another. There are indeed but I'm not sure there were at the time, either way I'd much rather be able to recover a single VM and minimise the data loss/downtime instead of having to deal with data loss/downtime across all functions unnecessarily.

We're currently using Alice(seriously dated) but are seriously considering Juniorlib.net/Eclipse.net Others of note are Oliver and Accessit

I used to spend hours each week downloading TV series as they aired in the states, I'm glad they've sorted this out now and most series are aired within days rather than months. I just don't have the time to muck about with it all these days I rarely bothered with torrents, Usenet has until recently been untouched, now you just have to be quick and find a host that's fairly slow with DMCA take down requests

The whole point of VM's is to split the roles otherwise you might as well install everything on a single physical server directly which really isn't pretty - I still shudder thinking about how the server here was originally setup, AD, printers, file storage, sophos ent console, isa+smartfilter, exchange 2k3+puremessage, backup exec, whatever dodgy educational software we had at the time. It actually ran very well but I'd hate to have to recover that thing from backups or rebuild it from scratch. We now have nearly everything down to 1 VM or physical host per role, I no longer have to worry about Exchange hogging all the ram or having to be VERY careful when chaning ISA rules or any other configuration for that matter Server OS maintenance wise I think its much reduced due to everything being virtualised and separated out, I probably spend half an hour per week I guess. out of term time I might spend a little more on updates and general checkups but unless something causes an issue during term time I don't really have to touch the servers

We've got a 3050ci and 5550ci here, I'm not sure how they've changed between the newer and older models but I'm happy enough with them, we've got some ongoing issues with them but I think thats more to do with our supplier not being proactive enough rather than the quality of the machines. Toner wise they seem fine, they do go through waste toners reasonably quickly though... don't even start me off on how much paper they go through! Our users get on with them fairly well, I rarely end up having to train anyone. One thing I do like is the print driver dialogs which are again easy for users to use, having to tell users how to private print or set account codes on Konica/Sharp drivers is far too long winded.

We needed to link our two sites(220m with houses in between) a few years back and looked at all of the options including fiber via the sewer, ptp leased lines and fiber via the railway line running behind both sites, in the end we went with a 1gbit FSO link with RF backup, it cost us just over 10k plus 1.8k per year maintenance which still works out cheaper than the other options that meant paying line rental etc. Fiber via the railway looked to be the best option until we started looking into the costs, 1.5kish for a survey followed by paying for them to close the line plus paying their chosen contractors to do the actual work. The worst bit was having to pay for closure again if the fiber were ever to be vandalised which could happen at any time - it was a potential endless money pit so we left the idea well alone. From what I understand the wayleave fee's would have been tiny though.

The Dell Venue 11 is pretty good and not too badly priced, I went for the atom version as the newer atoms aren't as gutless as they used to be.

I brought the Atom version a few weeks back and received it the next day

The collation order is based on the order they appear in the session manager screen, its irritating as I end up re-ordering them each and every time. Then again at least you can change the order there as you can't within the comment banks if I remember correctly so new subjects end up tacked on to the end.

We've currently got wall mounted 64" promethan setups in our nursery classes, they're mounted as low as they could be without being hazard (2 have ultra-short throw projectors) but they'd now like them to be variable so that the pupils could use them more. Its also been mentioned that due to lack of pen control the prometheans aren't ideal so converting them to variable setups probably isn't going to help a huge amount and would probably still cost the earth. I'm gathering quotes for a full smart setup and also looking into LCD touch screens. What setups has everyone else got in their Nursery's?

If its anything like the colour produced by the RISO I had demonstrated a few years back(1p/page) the colours were generally washed out and far from sharp. Hopefully its improved since then though. I'd get them to send you a few example prints or see one in action James

I've also had this recently, in my case once logged in locally I found that the eventlog, netlogon and many other services wouldn't start due to dependencys etc My solution so far after a ton of googling has been to reset winsock - netsh winsock reset (elevated cmd needed) I figured it was a fluke but I've been told this morning a couple of other machines have come up with the same issue so I'll give the above fix a go also James

Not going back in till Monday, will have to test one of our fibre links out as a tree fell on it over Xmas. Luckily there was enough excess in the loft space. Its working fine according to the switch. Fortunately as of last summer its no longer our only link to that side of the site.

once its removed from the old head and added to the new all mail to the address will go to the right place, I've never experienced any issues while doing this - the server handles it all. as a suggestion I'd setup @head/@headmaster as a distribution list, this would make changing heads easier and allow an overlap if the need ever arose. James

Might be worth a look but I suspect it'll have a poor processor to go with the other poor specs

We looked at a few options and eventually went for SchoolPost from Emptus, rather than sending parents emails for them to lose or claim never arrived it basically provides a webmail-esque interface for parents to view their messages and they get email notifications based on their preferences. It also handles responses via custom forms and pulls classes/groups from sims. It does text messages also although we never use them. Its a very well thought out system, everything just seems logical and they're always improving it. SchoolPost - School Communication System - Online Parent Communication Made Easy

My friends kids go to an academy that gets parents to lease iPad's, they leased the first one which has been broken and repaired several times(as to be expected) but have recently been told they can only have one more repair, they also found any repairs took too long and there were often not enough temporary ones to go around. When their other son went to the same school they purchased an iPad mini outright along with applecare so they just need to take it to the apple shop who carry out repairs quicker

for general use the controller can be turned off but it would be needed for guest access to continue funtioning

I've got 3 SF300's on site and they've done ok for the last couple of years, the ESW540 I brought to connect our server's to isn't as reliable unfortunatly, once it stopped passing traffic all togeather until rebooted and other times after reboots it loses its config... not fun when it defaults to locking down ports with more than 1 mac(defaults to desktop profile). I'd buy small business for access switches but possibly not for the core again