CyberNerd

See my earlier comment about how many times our school has been shafted by ms. Trust isnt their business model.

MS know that the future of windows isnt the desktop. It's dead in the water with the likes of android/ios/Chromebooks taking far more sales than windows. The monopoly is broken and they had to give it away (win10) to achieve any sort of 'success'. Their problem is that so is their mobile platform (2% sales??) has been massive flop. The ONLY way MS can compete in the long term is by moving to the cloud in competition with Amazon and Google. Potentially they can make massive gains here because they can just move their windows server infrastructure to the cloud for company's to use. I can see this is a very good strategy for them. There is still a lot of things GAFE won't do and I think it is here that ms will hope to win. The problem at the moment is that GAFE is currently much stronger than o365 and ms are going to need to up their game. Perhaps that is the sign that they finally will?

I misunderstood too, not sure how the Google file recovery would work with that. I might give it a try next week.

I was describing GAFE. The document revision doesn't recover deleted files or files that are not Google Apps ones. To recover these you need to do it via the Admin console.

I go to Users > Recover files > Select the date and click "recover"

not sure. sorry @ZeroHour will know for sure. WRT CIFS; its not a windows tools at all. SMB was made in the 1990's by IBM. Microsoft "extended" it to the Common Internet File System (CIFS) which is is a completely meaningless name: it's not an internet filesystem as they had hoped. A few years later MS got the Samba team in to tell them how it worked because they needed help with a newer windows (I don't have a reference for this, mail andrew tridell) There are other technologies: windows isn't the be all and end all - There is hope (and most of it is open and documented) Not sure. Last time we were quoted it was mega expensive and we moved towards realtimeboard. When I spoke to SMART at BETT they said they'd revised their pricing structureand it's now in-line with number of teachers. Of course stieljes couldn't get thir s*t together enough to give me a price.

I think the Government have finally worked out the folly is Microsoft. Remember George Osborne campaigning for Open Source Government. They even released a spec then they were in government. Then they worked out it was about open standards, not open source and the cabinet office duly moved to Google apps (open API's) If you paid attention at BETT, Nicky Morgan referred to these open standards in relation to data transfer. (just a message to Capita?) I'm really hoping this is just the start of it. We've lived through a quite ridiculous age of student 'learning' Microsoft systems to get jobs when the rest of the world will innovate quite happily without it.

SMART have a solution for that: https://www.smartamp.com/about

Failover yes, but cloud based doesn't use much bandwidth. We run 1200 user owned devices and barely get passed 120Mb/s at high peak load. There is a misconception that cloud based means moving large files from your could provider - it doesn't ; Google apps bandwidth is very, very small - we are talking about uploading tiny differences in documents that reside in a database.

There used to be stacks on there about linux, how to create samba shares, integration, domain controllers. It all got lost a few years ago and the admins couldn't/wouldn't restore it following a crash I'm sure all that happened here is that MSFT's chat with HMRC didn't go as well as it did for Google. MS decided to withdraw from the old agreements and couldn't reach a deal with Govt. The Govt can play it as they got a 'win' because technically they extended the MoU "saving £30M" and MS got a win because they can move everyone to cloud - they know they have to do this anyway, it's just a matter of time. Anyone who doesn't has to pay more. Also consider that because one MoU runs out it doesn't mean they won't come to another agreement.

What we would pay for EES happily covers the cost of a backup line. If the price goes up you might be able to afford two!

I think it's because much of it is fragmented. The linux vendors will make sure the packages are compatible with each other, but to have an overarching GUI that controls them all would need a huge amount of buy-in from disperse developers. The reality is that *nix admins can do their job without gui's - it really isn't that hard. Many people find it difficult to remember where to find things inside multiple windows (where would I find proxy settings if I couldn't remember inetcpl.cpl ??) So what is easy in *nix is difficult in windows and vice versa for their various admins. It's all to do with what you are used to; which brings us nicely back on topic. I'm lucky enough to be too old to have windws when I was at school, so I can diversify. Hopefully the next generation will be able to as well.

Indeed, and I've never really had a problem editing config files. It's the simplest way to deploy the same settings to all machines - it's still recommended by Cisco, HP, IBM for managing hardware. I think this was my initial point that the tools are all there, but lack gui.

I've been hoping for the same for quite some time, things have got better and its competitive but still just cheaper to run locally hosted. This will change in time. It's only the UK where this hasn't really taken off. Lots of other contries do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters And Google reckon their chromebook (linux) outsells all other devices combined in US Schools.

Yes I agree with that. You can rely on a company to maintain a distro these days and they will help in this respect. That's pretty much all Google do with Chromebooks, there is also RedHat, Canonical. You don't need to build and manage it all yourself. - - - Updated - - - Spacewalk is pretty good, and Free (ish).

Plenty of management tools, thats why mega companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook use them - Linux just lacks a management tool GUI's.

It wouldn't be the first time MS have massively screwed schools over. I can think of a couple of occasions - once our Office license cost went up from £9k to over £50k just because they changed how it would be licensed (in terminal services) Another they started to charge for RDP licenses when previously they were free, costing us another £4k. We since stopped using office. Soon we'll stop using windows. edit: sorry I got distracted by a support call. When we first evaluated Google Docs vs O365 the price for all students having access was something like £70k per year. They changed that very early on, but the thought of their price fluctuations really put us off (and the fact that O365 was crap).

This just isn't true. There are two ways to do this: You can use the vault, as a superadmin this is straightforward - but you can also delegate the vault to teachers so they can review their classes. Or you can use the API - with the API you have total control over the permissions of any file or folder in GAFE. You can also get third party apps which will use the API to do this in a gui. I hear Google are also working towards extending classroom and drive to give parental access so it can be used more like an exercise book.

Do AD -> both. You'll need to mess with email routing to send it all to 365 if you want to keep running 365 as an option.

An HP A5800 has 4 10GBe SFP+ ports and can take a module of another 4. We have 4 of these switches in a cluster with three modules giving us 28 10GBe ports - some of these are used in the cluster though. Remember you can also use these for FCoE which means you can offset the cost of the FC switching.

I do recall an issue (a few years back now) whereby it wouldn't sync shared folders from windows servers, but we were never affected as ours use linux. I guess that problem is fixed now.

I use a local install of JWS to launch Cisco ASDM, IBM management tools etc. It doesn't need to run in a browser plugin if you have the jnlp file.

ok. I wonder if Google have this in their plans when they launch the parental access.

@ass17 Top Tip: Teachers (read SLT) are notoriously bad at trusting their staff. They would sooner get a consultant in to tell them X or Y than rely on a member of their own staff to do it. I'm not entirely sure why; it happens at all levels, not just support staff. probably to do with perceived perceptions of pay vs ability. They are also terrible at getting IT staff properly trained. If you're clever you can play this to your advantage - sure you could ask around here and get a reasonable answer. The smart thing to do is to play on this. If SLT really want something done (ie access to data from home, securely) and they are not prepared to outsource it entirely then get them to pay for it, in a way that you get trained! The choices seem to be: 1) DIY. It's not too hard, maybe it works out fine, maybe you make a hash of it. If it's the latter it's on your head. 2) Get in somebody who does this as a full time job; get them to sell you some hardware and talk you though it. You will learn a LOT from spending a day or so with a decent engineer and it's all on them if it goes tits. Plus it will save you hours of work. Personally I went for #2 first, then #1 after Id learned it from engineer in #1.

You don't need two physical firewalls, a (reasonably) cheap Cisco ASA will do a really good job of this. We essentially have 7 DMZ's as we treat each wireless VLAN as a discrete "DMZ" as it is a semi-trusted network.