Fazza

Thanks for the replies. If I enter show arp it doesnt show all the ports that are currently active only ports 1, 5 and 45. I know more are in use as if I browse to the IP address of the switch it shows what ports currently have a link light. show mac-address 12 returns a MAC address that I cant find in DHCP.

All I can remember seeing everywhere was lots of large touchscreens, 3D printers, more touchscreens and then more 3D printers and then a load of irrelevant stuff (teaching resources etc.)!

Using Putty/Telnet I have logged on to a HP 2920 Switch and I'd like to know if it's possible to work out what is connected to port 12 as whatever it is, is using a lot of bandwidth at the moment?

Well, The Doctor once said "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." So anything can happen - Rose Tyler could be back!

Says it all really, your data centers connection to the internet is OK, it's just the links from Schools to your data center and how they are configured/connected that is the thing you need to sort out.

Potentially yes, you could lose up to 87.6 hours of downtime if in your contract it says 99% uptime. This why we have to pay special attention to the small print in the contracts. The other thing to point out is that the 99% or 99.99% can be pretty meaningless in some cases as what happens when when it goes below the figure that is stipulated in your contract? In a lot of cases not a lot you just get an apology - others offer credits off your next bill. It's more of a target than a guarantee as you cant guarantee roadworks wont accidentally dig up and break your connection! All you can do is look for recommendations from actual users when whoever your connection is with is up and take a gamble with another company who may be better or may be worse! There are plenty of us who have had issues with SB over the years but we ourselves know/support other schools in the area that have never had any problems with them whatsoever but they dont go on internet forums each time everything is OK as you only do so when there is a problem so you tend to only hear from people who are having issues which can make the problems sound worse and more widespread than they actually are.

Using Excel this time! 14.4 minutes a day = 5256 minutes in a year (assuming there are 365 days in a year) That's 87.6 hours of downtime before they are in breach of their 99% uptime. So unless you've have way over 87.6 hours in total down time then you can't really complain as thats what you agreed to when you signed the contract. If it was 99.99% then it'd be a completely different kettle of fish. The point you and have been trying to make is that 99% sounds better than some people may think so using my figures above if you have 40 hours of downtime and it all happened to occurring just during working hours and was OK in the evening then potentially you could have 2 weeks of downtime and still be within 99% availability!

Nope, I assumed 14 minutes per day x 365 days - I can't remember the calculation now!! (shouldve used Excel and saved it). My point was that 1% is a lot longer than people think! It's a matter of a few days a year.

Doing a quick calculation - 14 minutes a day equates to approx 2.36 days.

Now, unless Dave spilt his coffee on the piece of hardware then there's not much you can do about a failed piece of hardware except swap it out and that's what has happened - in just a few hours! We're not having to wait until tomorrow for a replacement to be couriered out so on this occasion I'd say good going!

Give them their dues, at least we're being kept informed.

Who's doing Windows Updates?!...

Apparently it's even worse than what they first thought so good luck everyone!

After losing our internet and SIP lines we've just come back up within the last 10 mins or so

£25,000 is very low for a School of that size. Out IT Consumables is nearly that alone and we have a very similar amount of students and staff as you! What do you pay for out of your budget and what comes out of another one? i.e. new computers, toners, paper, data projectors, spare parts to repair computers, fuser units etc.

I seem to recall that at some point in the past Microsoft said that eventually you wont pay anything for Windows as they were moving towards a subscription model in the Microsoft Cloud and they will make money that way. Now we have Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscription services that are becoming more popular - especially as Schools get it for 'free' as part of their licensing and more Schools are using it thus creating a future workforce used to the subscription model.

It's what we do once the initial warranty is up. As long as you have a plan (and the correct technical skills) then you dont need an extended warranty. Having said that, we always get a 3yr warranty on new desktops and servers (mainly because the companies we buy from offer it as standard) and we just stick with the 1yr warranty on laptops as most of the issues (i.e. damage) that we get on laptops is not covered by the warranty. We have a large pile of 'Spares and Repairs' laptops that we use to fix or repair laptops that come in and we can get most parts wholesale through our normal supply chain. A couple of years ago we had some storage that failed on us and it was the unit rather than the hard disks so I contacted our suppliers and said I needed quotes back the same morning and needed the kit the next day. We ended up with a fantastic deal from ServerSource and got the kit the next day as they understood the urgency of the situation. So much cheaper than having an extended warranty on the kit. As we have the technical skills to quickly setup and configure a server from scratch this works very well for us. If you dont have such skills then an extended warranty can be beneficial until you gain such skills/confidence.

A response is exactly that, a response to you raising a fault with them. It should be defined in your SLA and could either mean someone responds to your incident either vie email, phone or by coming onsite to take a look at the problem. If they can fix it they will, if they cant, well they're responded so they have fulfilled their part of the SLA so it will then move on to the next step which could take hours, days or weeks depending on what parts (if any are required). A fix means they will endevour to fix the issue within the allotted time in your SLA depending on availability of parts etc. if they guarantee a fix within an allotted time (say 1 business day) then that's better than a response time of 1 day as it will be up to 1 day before they even look at the problem let alone fix it! A lot of contracts/SLAs will have a mixture of the 2 and the times differ depending on the level of the incident (i.e. Low, Medium or High priorities) so for example a low priority incident may have a response time of 4 hours but a fix time of 2 days. In my last place of work each year we paid for an 8hr fix or replace warranty on the area managers laptops so the company would have to either fix or replace the laptop within 8hrs - we paid a lot of money for this service as the area managers struggled without them and in the business world, time is money! You have to read the proposed contract/SLA very carefully and I would strongly advise you to give them a couple of scenarios of what you would consider a low priority incident and a high priority incident to make sure what you think should happen would actually happen.

We use them for all our servers across the trust and have only had to call them a couple of times - once was for a battering in a RAID card needing replacing and another was one of the many, many hard disks we have had failed - both occasions the parts and (if applicable) engineer turned up the next day!

When 2 of our Hyper-V servers ran out of the 3yr Warranty we didnt bother on extending the warranty. Instead we support them ourselves as we have suppliers that can deliver parts the next day should we need them.

So the stand's now an optional extra?! Watch out as next time they wont include a power button and that will be a spare part only available in countries near the Bermuda Triangle...

Teacher Intervention will stop it. Much easier to see people with a pencil each drawing lines on a page full of dots (that's what I can remember doing) and making squares than minimising an Excel spreadsheet. I've implemented the GPO to prevent the Students playing Flash games in Excel so we'll see how long it lasts before they all find a workaround. Now just as long as we dont teach them to embed Flash in to a website using Serif WebPlus, oh hang on a minute!...

This is what we've been waiting for so testing it out now!!!

Pens, pencils, staples, crisps, money, pencil case, paper clips and this poem written on heart shaped post-it notes:

The T series are the only ones I've not experience issues with - the B50 series is OKish but not as sturdy as the T or X series and dont get me started on the SL series (too many issues with them)!