Jamman960

If there is no chance of your hours being increased then I'd consider either sticking with the current setup or as abbove going for one of the externally hosted options although I'd presume that if you can increase the schools reliance on IT enough they may NEED to increase your hours Cost wise make sure you include spam filtering one way or another - we use Puremessage with exchange and most of the time 70%+ of our mail is spam. The last thing you want is to impliment an all singing all dancing mail service and then have everyone bombarded with spam day in day out. If I remember correctly we pay around £500/year for it(havent looked at the price in over a year though)

I don't care how our staff lock a workstation... if they did it in the first place I'd be pretty impressed lol especially in the damn IT suite with sims open.... argh

Rather than USB I'd consider an ESATA RAID setup, I've recently brought a Startech 4 Drive ESATA enclosure and a few 1tb drives to backup our servers and attached it to a cheap server stored away in a cupboard on the other side of our site away from the servers. The network drive is probably your best option as it'd enable you to separate the backups from the servers without having to spend too much.

Ended up working till midnight last monday and 23:00 on tuesday with my wife getting everything back the way it should be to avoid having to work the weekend/bank hol... I'm more or less ready for the kids to come back on thurs now really wish I could have had more than 1 week off during the summer though - gonna make up for it by taking every friday until half term off though

I also got bored with the default omnia interface and have now upgraded to a custom windows mobile 6.5 rom with Manilla2D installed(the usual HTC interface), its so much easier to use, the HTC interface pretty much completly replaces the windows mobile one(which is still pretty bad even with wm6.5!) Checkout i900 / General Omnia ROM Discussion - WinMo @ MoDaCo You should have taken advantage of the whole orange changing their terms thing - I got out of my orange contract and moved onto a T-Mobile Sim only deal and kept the omnia(after unlocking it ) My wife refuses to let me get a new phone just yet lol

Have installed activ Prim/Studio alongside Inspire on the pc's attached to our new pro boards - it all works perfectly Only just had them installed and still have 1 to go in but they're great - especially with the sound being done via USB and the whole install is much tidier without having to rely on the nuvo amps(which I've always found to be a bit unreliable. Quick question though - has anyone noticed that the pens sometimes don't write and that bits of letters are missed when changing direction? ie when writing an S the top bit may be missed etc

Cookie: what phone do you have? As you've got 500mb included I'd guess your on Orange? in that case I've used my omnia while tethered to my laptop on orange, I can't remember how much I was charged when I used it but it certainly didn't break the bank - I've only ever used it for short periods of time though. Either way it worked out much cheaper than a the usual hotel wifi

if you just copy and paste the folders into the correct locations it should keep the ACL's as they are, if not I'd setup a script to re-apply the correct perms. Then its a case of using GPO's to redirect to my docs etc - the way I've done it is to setup security groups for each year group then setup redirection based on the group ie any student within group Students2010 would have their my docs redirected to \\server\users$\students2010\%username% If the only access they have to their folder is via my docs they won't be able to see or access any folder below their own, this is also the case for mapped home drives. James

Yep any Sata HDD will be fine.

you could probably just setup a scheduled task at each site to either rsync(via an ssh tunnel) or SFTP a backup of the database to a central server, assuming they all have a reasonable internet connection transfering 100mb-200mb wouldn't take long at all. on the central server all you'd need to do is run a script to rename the directories at set intervals and delete the older ones. I've setup a similar backup routine here, the backup server consists of an HP ML115 with a Startech 4 drive esata enclosure attached, I've then setup 2 1tb drives in a raid 1 config and have 2 spare drives ready to be swapped into place - the enclosure will simply re-build the array once the 2nd drive is re-inserted.

Congrats!

Thanks for this, I've just contacted them. I've had nothing but trouble with another free WEEE collection company, will give the full story once an alternative has been booked

There won't be any filters as its a DLP projector - The easiest way to determine wheather its a DLP or LCD is to move your eyes quickly from side to side while looking at the projected image - if you see a rainbow effect on the edges of objects it's a DLP projector. I'd go for a new projector if the bulbs cost too much although if you haven't already see what price CPLTD can offer you - they've had some great prices whenever I've needed lamps. James

sounds like they need to sort out the salary levels accross the board but naming and shaming is really not appropriate, getting pics from facebook is even worse - you really can't blame him for accepting the job etc. I certainly wouldn't turn it down if I were in a position to be offered it!

Just checked all the patch cables, they're 50/125 and so is the 8core cable(luckily... was installed before I joined) At the moment the switch in the 2nd building has 2 Gbic/GigE ports and is linking to 3 buildings - 1 via Fiber, 2 via Cat5E so one is currently only connected at 100mbps. In theory if I could move the closer building over to Fiber & bypass the switch in that building I could then move the other building over to the GigE port and be closer to a star topology. I've worked out that I'd only have to spend around £50 on additional patch cables & couplers so it may still be worth going ahead with. The couplers I've seen are £2.99 each(ebay), based on losing 0.5db per connection I'd probably lose around 3db - is that too much?

I'm hoping some one can help me, I've aquired a few 10m, 25m and 50m fiber patch cables which are all LC-LC along with a few switches and GBICS/SFP's. I'm looking at running the 50m patch between two buildings which are close togeather and currently linked via Cat5e. The 2nd building has a fiber patch panel with 8 cores linked to our main building on the other side of the site via an overhead fiber link. The following is my current plan: 50M LC-LC Fiber - 1st building to 2nd building via underground pipe LC-LC Coupler - Joining the 50m patch to the LC-ST Patch LC-ST Patch - Connecting between the coupler and the patch panel(2nd building) - 120M 5M ST-LC - Connectiing the coupler and patch panel again(main building) LC-LC Coupler - Joining the 5M Patch to the final 10M patch 10M LC-LC Fiber - Final connection to the Switch/Server room Total Distance ~190M Another option is to just go from the 1st building and connect straight to the switch in there via an LC-LC coupler and an LC-SC cable, a direct connection to the main switch would be prefered though... I'm just not sure how much extra latency will be introduced by the above plan.

Get well soon Simon!

Strongly Agree'd

Happy birthday witch! I'll make sure I mention my bday to Joe @ CP next year

Congratulations, your right about your wallet - I'd hide it now!

I've been to a fair few schools with computers pinned to walls with the parts labelled... I'll never forget the one with the case labelled up as "The Harddrive" bloody teachers! As above the poster is a bit ott for a normal classroom

I've got a long list of jobs to do along with 3 weeks of leave to use up at some point before september... it'd get done so much quicker if I wasn't the only techie here. Its funny looking back at the interview, I've got 2 weeks of discresionary leave just in case I ever find myself with nothing to do during the holidays, apparently if 2 wasn't enough I could go up to 4. I don't see myself being in a position to take any of the extra leave at this rate although the network is in a much better condition than it was when I first started full time there will always be plenty of work to be done out of term time. Knock wall through into server cupboard, convert cupboard into store room(with help of site manager) - 1 day Collect racks and possibly a few switches etc - 1 day Install Racks, Switches etc - 3-5 days? depending on how much equipment I manage to get hold of Move servers into new room & racks(old cupboard not tall enough for a rack) - half day Install data into server room - 1.5 days Install data between other buildings(fibre+cat5) plus a few single sockets into rooms(to replace switches...I'd love to know who decided to re-install the schools old unmanaged switches wherever an extra socket was needed...) 1 week Build updated image, test - 2-3 days Re-image all pc's at preprep - 2 days Re-image all pc's at prep - 4 days Setup backup server - 1 day Update all server's, carry out general maintenance- half day Full network documentation(probably won't get done) - 4 days Test AV setups in every classroom, clean all filters - 3 days We broke up on friday and I've got this week off, My line manager told me he's put togeather a list of things he'd like doing during the holidays - I doubt any of them will feature on the list I've already put togeather See you all next week, heading off to Bath for a short camping holiday, lets hope the rain holds off lol

When I was an onsite engineer working all over the country I had a box full of bits in the boot of my car - usually a few PSU's, heatsinks, hard drives, floppy drives and associated cables. I'd also have a switch & lots of patch cables for imaging... its never fun to turn up at a small primary with no easily reachable switches and 16+ laptops to image In my bag I'd usually have: Laptop Usb drive Fibre patch cable Cat5 patch cable kettle lead mouse Crimper & Punchdown tool lots of blank cd/dvd's Philips screwdriver USB-Serial adapter(absolute life saver - I couldn't believe how often I needed to use this) Serial cable Removable floppy drive(presuming I hadn't left it attached to a server somewhere....) Lots of rack nuts/bolts - no matter how many times I mentioned it these were never shipped to site before I got there argh

Make it 4 times our accounts manager also has problems using Fee's billing - so much so that we've ended up paying capita to come in every time to carry out the fee bill run! I had them in to train myself and our accounts manager in the hopes that we'd then simply do the whole thing ourselves but so far she still insists on getting capita in every time... really not a cheap way of doing it The bulk of problems we've encountered have been down to user errors although there have been times that patches have been needed in order to complete the bill run sucessfully.

If its not going to connect to the internet you can use any network addres you want and any subnet mask you want, the only time it could affect you is if you later connected it to the internet and tried to connect to a host with an IP within the subnet you've chosen. It is however good practice to stick with the designated private ranges.