Jamman960

What do you use to filter spam? we're currently using pure message which includes a content filter... We're not currently using the content part but would if pupils had mail access.

I generally try and keep reboots to every half term. I very rarely end up rebooting them during term times but if I do have to I often do it via VPN at home. on the rare occasion the server fails to come back up again I just head into work 30 mins earlier than normal.

Hmm, maybe its time for another clean up The rest of my desk is a mountain of paper.

Last year at Bett I saw a company offering printer rentals by the page - they apparently had a minature camera inside the printer doing the counting, all of the printers were made by a manufacturer I'd never heard of though. Edit: I've just dug their leaflet out of last years bett bag - their website is no longer working though. The printers were all Nashuatec's

I'd also appreciate it, while I'm not currently in the state sector it'd be good to know what I might be going into a few years down the line.

They'll have a policy in place, when they do get the drive back they may do a few tests to see if its still functional and can be re-deployed by them, otherwise they'll put an RMA request in with the manufacturer who will re-condition the drive where possible and probably send it back out as a warranty replacement. Either way it'll surely be wiped to military standards before being put back into circulation... neither HP or any manufacturer would survive if they allowed customer data to be restored from drives shipped by them. HP will chase the faulty disk and charge you for the replacement if you don't sent it back, either way they won't be out of pocket.

I think it'd mainly apply to independant schools, I've been to a few where the headmaster lives on site with their family.

About 7 cards here, one from 2 teachers with £20 worth of M&S vouchers though One of our teachers got £80 worth of vouchers for the local shopping centre from one of the pupils/parents I can't imagine what the rest of the teachers got (independent school)

Does anyone here keep an eye on how much their staff are using projectors? We had a new batch of IWBs/Projectors installed during the summer and one of them has recently come up with a "clean filter" warning which is set to appear at 500 hours usage, I compared this to other new installs that I consider to be used by more IT literate teachers and found that they had only used the projector for around 160-360 hours each, even projectors installed the previous summer had only just reached 900 hours in heavy usage classrooms. If anyone else monitors their projector usage could you list your average usages? It seems as though the teacher who had managed 500 hours in 1 term with a 2 week half term break has left it on from the moment he got in to the moment he left each day. I'm going to start documenting the usages at the end of each term or whenever I clean the filters... in the end its going to be the IT dept that pay for the replacement bulbs

I'll be working for most of the holiday with a week or so off My list is pretty short at the moment... 1. Upgrade Sims 2. Provide tech support to the finance department while they run off the fee bills 3. General server/network maintenance 4. Lots of research 5. possibly clean a few projector filters

Ah, I'd try "sysman" or "system" then or possibly even "master" (the default passwords are rarely all that imaginative/secure) I think our sysman password was setup as abcd by capita when we first had it installed As above your probably better off restoring a copy of your own database and the doc storage folder to the new server for testing purposes.

According to SupportNet the default is sysman/password

I'd check the bios, some manufacturers include more than just wake on lan - often wake at time or wake on keyboard press etc

I believe there are also some very tight SLA's designed to keep smaller businesses away from the BSF contracts. The company I worked for previously got sub contracted to help a larger company do some roll out work on some of their BSF contracts. I got sent in to setup a schools network which basically consisted of around 200 desktops and 60 laptops plus 2 servers(pretty small) - the project manager for the other company mentioned some of their SLA's including 15 minutes for desktop replacements - if they don't meet the SLA's they get penalised. We were often threatened with £5k per day penalties if the projects over ran.

Congrats!

Having entirely seperate networks is much more secure but its overkill for schools. As long as the permissions/security groups and group policys are in place you won't have any issues with students gaining access to areas they shouldn't. File permissions wise I usually ensure that any staff only areas have deny acl's for students even though they don't really need them - at least then even if a student is a member of one of the groups allowed access they'll be denied because they are part of the student group.

Your going to get some deteriation each time the data comes accross a joint in the cable so ideally you should keep the number of patch panels to a minimum, as long as each of the joints meet the standards for installation the deteriation at each point should be minimal. I doubt you would run into any problems until you started having many more patch panels along the route.

pretty boring here too... prepsrv1, prepsrv2 etc I did an install a while ago at a secondary school migrating from cc3 to vanilla.. they had an interesting user naming policy. They used a colour to represent the year group followed by a number to represent the pupil ie green123 would be a pupil in year 7 to top this off there was no accurate record of which user account related to which pupil... I'm sooooo glad I wasn't involved in that part of the project

I suppose another verification option would be to send letters to schools with the applicants job title included and a verification code inside to be emailed back. Again it'd cost but maybe it could be funded by sponsored ad's - also I assume theres some way to get discounted postage, maybe some of the sponsors can send at reduced rates?

One thing I would recommend is making use of the free trial's and making sure that it works with all of your printers before going ahead and purchasing especially if you have picky printers such as Konica Minolta's or in some cases Brother's In the past I've found that Print Manager Plus works very well with the occasional exception of Brother printers(solved by using a generic brother driver), PCounter has many useful features but didn't like our Konica's at all. We are currently coming to the end of our 40 day Papercut trial and I expect to be placing an order very soon, it lacks some of the more advanced features but if all you want is print quota's then it fits the bill nicely.

We've used tape to date but we've out grown it unfourtunatly, until about a year and a half ago the school only had 1 server to backup and we now have 4. We'd need to buy a new high capacity tape drive along with the tapes and extra veritas licenses etc etc so I've put togeather a plan for a new nas server to be housed in the furthest point on our site. I'm also looking at having 2 spare 1tb drives to be hot swapped for off site storage. My current estimate comes in at around £900, tapes etc would push us to at least £1500 and still wouldn't offer any where near as much storage as the nas will.

We also use AB Tutor and I've seen it implimented in many schools, the licensing structure is very good - you pay for the control licences and can install the client on as many workstations as you like. One thing that bugs me is that all of the control workstations are entirely un-linked. You have to create the policys/groups on each one although there may be a way to import the configs.

Haven't had the email yet, spotted this on supportnet tho:

We use Puremessage on its own and very little spam gets though to our users, its fairly easy to setup - just follow the prompts basically. I would remove one or the other, having more than 1 AV/Spam filter will only slow things down in the end although they probably will work togeather.

We had the same thing on promethean boards(known as spiking on their kb), on promethean boards its usually caused by a faulty power supply or controller board. In our case it was the controller board that was faulty.