TronXP

Bloxx does this also

we run 1Gb over cat5e. So far no major issues

If you want to backup directly from SAN > Backup device then I think you need the SAN agent for Backupexec. Speak to Symantec about it. They are good when discussing situations like this. At my old school the used Backup exec to backup a SAN, but how exactly they did it I do not know!

They are R61i mfr# NF0FDUK, All our suppliers are getting special pricing from Lenovo, so don't expect to get pricing back for a few days. Off the shelf price we have a price of £530 ex VAT so I would expect to knock at least £30-50 off that price from previous experience. We are asking our suppliers to include 3 year onsite warranty and a lenovo branded bag into the deal.

Lenovo, still do XP drivers, I am about to order 20 and just checked there website and they do XP drivers for them.

Core Switch (D-LINK DES-6500 - Fibre + 1Gb copper Modules) Links to other cabs in schools over either Fibre running at 1Gb or Copper at 1Gb. We try to get a 1 Gb link to each switch but at the moment thats not always possible so there are some daisy chaining. In the cabs we use D-Link DGS-3024/3048 switches and have a few old unmanaged DES-1024R(100mb) which are to be replaced in the next few weeks. Most our computers are now running at 1Gb and the last of the 100mb will be replaced over the summer.

I work at a Independant school and we used to have 8Mb ADSL line but like yourselves we are to far from the exchange and we were getting betwen 2-4Mb. We bit the bullet and went for an 8Mb leased line from BT. The thing to be aware from BT is that they don't tell you about there "excess charges" on installation. In the end we had £7000 excess installation charges. Now the price is a lot lot more than ADSL but to be honest I think its been worth it. We have a much much more stable line... So far. We've had it in for about a month and testing so far has been good. We are going to release it the rest of the school after half term.

I like to replace the power cables when we put new equipment, and the old cables go with the piece of equipment, where ever that may be... But we still end up with boxes and boxes of spare ones some how. What I can never seem to find is the cables with the right angled 3 pin plug on! Get them occasionaly with some of the Xerox printers, but am always short on them!

Quite a few years ago when we were ISDN we had ZYXEL ISDN routers, they were reliable never had any problems with them. Just set them up and they went for years without touching them. Not sure about switches or more recent products, however.

We have just had a BLOXX filtering server put in, to replace our NetPilot filtering server, and am very very impressed with the Bloxx, it works out cheaper than the netpilot was and its "TruView" (sp?) technology is also very impressive. As said before we have this plugged into our core switch with a firewall between router and network. Then we force proxy settings in GPO. With us being in a Novell environment we auth to the BLOXX using LDAP.

I have around 150 Thinkcentres now, they so far have been excellent currently we have A53 and A55 specs in desktop and tower varient and I am about to buy 30 or so M55 hopefully in the next month or so. So far they have been very robust and I think out of the 150 we have had one that had a hard drive problem that was fixed real quick by the support team. The warrenty service is excellent. You register the problem online so you can track what is happening and the guys on the support line I have spoken to have been really good and seem to know what they are talking about. The support is still carried out by IBM so you talk to IBM guys and everyone I have spoken to has been english. I have to say most my dealings with support have been issues with my lenovo laptops and dodgy batteries. As you have said already its a dream getting drivers from the website. Looking back at what we used to have (local company build) I don't know why we put up with the shoddy build quality. The lenovos are just so reliable, I can't even remember when we had to last go and fix a hardware problem with a thinkcentre.

thats what I meant do what ric says

We are using LG screens currently for signage and as Ric says make sure you get consumer ones. We got a good deal on our LG's from misco at the time. so might be worth checking them out.

Its fibre into the comm room, then there is what I assume is some sort of convertor then from that it comes out as ethernet into the router.

Its a LES 10 and a managed router, I just wanted to make sure it wasn't something stupid I was doing wrong. I can remember reading somewhere about an issue with cisco routers and flow control on the D-Link switches we are using. To be honest BT (who i normally hate) have been good on the support lines about problems/issues/queries so far. I just don't want them to send out an engineer and find out I've made a school boy error

I just got it now

We had a leased line installed by BT and they set it up with a Cisco 1800 router. Now I haven't given this out to the rest of the school until we are happy with it. We are having an issue at the moment with it, after about a week of my dept using the line, we lose all connection. We just reboot router and everything works again. At the moment we have The cisco 1800 running into a D-Link Netdefend DFL-1600 firewall. Any suggestions or has anyone had any experience with the 1800 series?

I can not help but look at the solution and it screams out single point of failure. You have to expect some issue with hardware at some point, when it happens you lose 6 - 8 "machines" instead of just one. For that reason alone I would be cautious about it

Lenovo very much want to do deals if you order quantity. I managed to get the Lenovo sales reps phone number, I spoke to him, told him I wanted x Laptop + bag + extended warrenty and that I had X amount to spend. He came up with a pricing that was good and then sent the special pricing to the 3 companies I wanted to deal with. I ended up with a deal I was happy with and so far the lenovo laptops have been excellent.

Has anyone got CMiS/ePortal working on a windows Server 2008 environment?? If yes is it stable and working correctly? Serco are still recommending Server 2003 R2

300 Computers, 10 servers, 38 projectors, about 30 printers, 1100 users 2 Technical staff term time only (NM + Technician) and 1 Teaching Assistant in the main lab

We had same problem, just changed the mapped drives to start from K:\ onwards which leaves pleanty of room for USB pens

We use PowerOut here, you can change power management settings and yes you can program it to shut down your PC's, we have it set to shut down at 7pm, So far it has worked brilliantly. We got it on offer for £90, wouldn't pay full price for it. The interface is a bit rubbish but it depends on what your looking for.