CyberNerd

Works for me. Not spent a penny on an operating system in over 10yrs. Its a complete rip off to pay for a platform just to allow me to run other apps!

LibreOffice 4.1 also works pretty well for Publisher files. We're using it as a replacement now.

That's much better then. 5yrs after Google did it but better.

So to get your students all working on a collaborative document they all need office installed and have to have an office license. 9/10 of our students don't have a copy (and 99% don't have a legitimate copy) so to get them to be able to collaborate we need to buy them one or they are stuck on the cut down web apps. This limitation isn't present in google.

Yes that was a typo - I meant the A3 plan. They missed out a load of stuff from the free plan with collaboration - to get the most out of it you need to use a local install of office and link with sharepoint to have multiple author editing and you can't do that on A2. That was *the* thing that teachers wanted when polled. hence we gave up on MSOffice.

I was promoting Cloud services over locally hosted. Including Office 365. The reference to GAPPS was simply because you can't get the collaborative features on Office 365 without getting the expensive A2 version - so we don't use that. Over the last 10-15 yrs I've been responsible for multiple hosted mail and document services including Sendmail,Zimbra, Exchange 5.5,2000, 2003,2007 and I can confidently say that a cloud solution (including Office 365) is much easier to manage, is cheaper, has less downtime and is likely more secure than any of the above. I appreciate that most here won't pay for the extra features of Office 365 which brings it near to the level of Google Apps so I apologise for even mentioning it.

We send *masses* of attachments, the difference is they are generally created in the cloud and read in the cloud thus require less bandwidth to transfer offsite than a traditional site-hostedmail server.We have over 1100 devices on site and rarely top 30Mb/s because our cloud solution (google apps) is essentially working online, and even offline doesn't seem to consume much bandwidth. Since we moved to GAPPS (three years ago) our regular bandwidth use has only gone up by 30% yet our device base has gone up over 60%. It's more efficient than sending multiple revisions of word documents and publisher files.

The firmware upgrade didn't help at all. I couldn't see anything obvious (to me!) in the wireshark port mirror so I swapped it out with an A5120 (JE73A). While I was unplugging it I noticed one of the PoE injector bricks that was plugged directly into the switch had a red 'fault' light on it - could this be responsible? I'll probably never know as I replaced that too!

Just realised it's actually a 4200G, not that it makes much odds. https://h10145.www1.hp.com/downloads/SoftwareReleases.aspx?ProductNumber=JE015A&lang=&cc=&prodSeriesId= I've just done a firmware update (from home!) and I'll see how that pans out on monday and look at the port mirroring if the firmware didn't help.

No. I meant to do that. Might give it a go but can't see it's going to help much - no network changes

That's the bizarre thing - it doesn't seem to be dropping any ICMP data, just the tftp booting gets interrupted!? The tftpbooting is working elsewhere in the school just not attached to that switch. No recent config changes. I'll have another look at logs

Makes more sense. Just get a script to query the sims and change the group to the internet whitelist group then.

that's rubbish. If people use other people account they get an internal exclusion. We used to ban accounts and we did it like this: Added an extra field in SIMS, had a vb script run 2hourly to check for that field against email address field. If present it would change the ldap attribute to disable the account. It was managed by Heads of year and was an ABSOLUTE PITA because when banned the kids couldn't do any work. Totally pointess. If you don't want them to do work just send them home.

I'm telling you because if you point out to your SLT how stupid it sounds then you might not have to ban anyone, thus lowering your workload. Ask them how often they take away other non ICT learning resources like textbooks.

well it is a silly sanction to ban students from accessing learning resources. Give them a detention instead.

A standard sanction for an ICT infringement sounds the most reasonable way of doing things. We don't take pens and textbooks away from kids if they mess about in English lessons and we don't take ICT learning resources from students either. Infact we give them laptops when in isolation!

I have a 12port HP 4500G that is connected via 2xLACP links to the core. From the 12 port HP 4500G are 2x HP 48 port 4500 switches (also via 2GB links) and 3x Wireless AP's. There are 4 or 5 vlans across the switches. Our clients in one of the rooms with the 48 port 4500 PXE boot their operating system (thinstation) over the network tftpboot. Regularly, a couple of times per day, the clients loose connection halfway through their boot. Once a citrix connection is established they are ok and don't loose connection. My first guess is that Citrix is just ok at dealing with flakey connections and tftpboot isn't (UDP??). Rebooting the 4500G temporarily fixes the issue for a couple of hours. hp network node manager tool detects nothing wrong with the 4500G (or the other switches). There is nothing obvious in the logbuffer. Can't see any signs of loops. I didn't notice any flooding of that VLAN. Where else should I look? Should I just get another switch?

I guess that's not so much a problem in the developed world, but I kind of get it that you like being stuck in 1990's ecosystems.

The post showed (tongue in cheek, I hope) that s/he wanted to use a particular system - not because of any benefit to the school, but so s/he could learn to use it in order to move on to a job in industry. IMO this is self centered and detrimental to the school. Anyone who is going to choose X over Y because it will help them get a job somewhere else doesn't deserve to be an educationalist. Any head teacher or governing body who was being dictated to by a technician should have them sacked. Outsourcing is a pretty efficient way of sacking someone in a restructure, so it's the most common method.

Why is it self centred and why would it cause Entire ICT systems to be outsourced? The post showed (tongue in cheek, I hope) that s/he wanted to use a particular system - not because of any benefit to the school, but so s/he could learn to use it in order to move on to a job in industry. IMO this is self centered and detrimental to the school. Anyone who is going to choose X over Y because it will help them get a job somewhere else doesn't deserve to be an educationalist. Any head teacher or governing body who was being dictated to by a technician should have them sacked. Outsourcing is a pretty efficient way of sacking someone in a restructure, so it's the most common method.

I reckon a Nokia Xbox phone would take the entire handheld market overnight.

Bretford SafeCharge 10 Blue (Coin) (BSL-10-C-BLU) - www.misco.co.uk In theory nothing prevents the kids plugging directly into the school network. I've not put in any NAC (I did look quite seriously at packetfence though). It's not been much of an issue because there aren't very many places where they can connect other than in ICT suites. There are a few places such as in the library where I've put all of the network connections into the same VLAN as the firewalled wireless. Other than that I've not been too worried. I guess there is a thoretical risk and maybe I'll tackle it with packetfence in the future.

• Did anyone install a full NAP solution including having the client devices check for up to date AV / updates etc No • Do you have a transparent proxy in your solution? Yes, but only for certain devices (different SSID) everything else is a logged in connection to smoothwall. • Do you allow your guests / to print Yes via Papercut web print • Do you allow your guests / students to plug their laptops into the school power to charge their laptops up? Yes, 6th form have some 'charging lockers' • Do you track what the students are browsing? Only if they are not using transparent! • How have you authenticated them onto the wireless? Give them all the password. • How have you protected your wired network? The wireless student network is completely firewalled from the internal network, they can only access our proxy, web and Citrix servers. • Do you have an AUP that all your users have to accept before they come on line. Yes. We currently have about 500 machines connecting in and usually just under 400 at any one time. I had quick count up today by mac address identification and found that 247/377 (65%) were apple devices!

We have staff share everything (relevant to students) with the whole school, but not email it. They can then link to the files in Moodle as Moodle has good integration with GAPPS.

This is the sort of self-centred approach that causes entire school ICT systems to be outsourced.