RoyG

I'd certainly recommend HP - we have 2 single 1GHz Xeon ML350s & 1 dual 1GHz Xeon ML370 that haven't missed a beat in 5 years or so. As the price of the hot-swap HDDs isn't too grim any more, I'd suggest mirroring at least. Plug for Netware - who needs 3GHz processors!! RoyG

We had a similar problem with Scientifica from Nelson Thornes. Here's the Email they sent me - Hi , ************************************************************* Here is the details on how to change the security settings with Flash player 8. You probably have Flash Player 8 installed and will need to alter your Flash Player settings as follows to get the program working (you'll need to have an Internet connection on your machine to do this): a) Launch the Just Click program, right-click on the opening animation and then select Settings… b) On the first tab in box displayed click on the Advanced button. c) On the web page displayed click the Global Security Settings Panel link on the left. d) Click the Edit locations drop-down menu, click Add locations and then the Browse for folder button - Always allow e) Navigate to the Nelson Thornes folder on your hard disk (default location C:\\Program Files\Nelson Thornes) and click OK. f) Refresh the web page and close all browser windows before running the Just Click program again. Please fell free to contact me if you have any questions. Regards, Ieuan WIlliams Nelson Thornes Customer Services - Technical Support 01242267372 ************************************************************* Hope this helps. RoyG

We pass all our old kit to a charity called Hand-in-Hand, who ship the stuff to schools in Kenya & Ecuador amongst other places. They are based in Essex - don't know how far they'll travel to collect. Our contact is Daniel Jones on 01245-236561. RoyG

$16 buys a really great bit of software called MultiNetwork Manager 6.5 from Globesoft - don't bother with the all-singing, all-dancing MNM8. With his you can set up network profiles for school & home. If any of our teachers want Internet access at home I simply reset all settings to default (DHCP, no proxy etc.), then send the teacher home to set up his/her laptop for home access. When he/she's happy it's working at home I install MNM 6.5, save these settings as the "home" profile, then add a new profile for the school settings. This takes about 3 minutes. Whenever the machine fires up, they just choose "home" or "school". The program runs in trial mode for 20 days, before then they can register & pay their $16 on-line. I use this on my own laptop, with loads of profiles - school LAN, school wireless, WAP setup direst, WAP setup over LAN, Wireless projector setup, home settings etc. etc. Even the "technically challenged" teachers seem to cope - highly recommended! RoyG

We also use Misco for most of our odds & sods and components. Their prices are rock bottom - always haggle a bit and mention DABS! For the last couple of years we've got the best prices from them for TFTs. Account Manager is great - not technically brilliant, but super-helpful. I get the odd call when I haven't bought anything for a while, but not pushy. Don't know about returns - never had to return anything! RoyG

We bought our first Mac in May 2005, specifically for Video editing using Final Cut, mainly the Drama department. The model we bought (G5 PowerMac single-processor) gave us a load of grief, hanging & crashing. It took us over 6 months of hassling Apple, hours on their help line trying tweaks & patches, before they finally agreed to take it away and fix it. Apparently they did a firmware update. Since then it's been brilliant, with some of the kids becoming really expert video producers, making DVDs of school plays, House Music competition etc. We're now looking to buy another two Macs for more general school use, rather than tucked away in Drama. The new dual-Intel iMac looks really good. If anyone gets the chance to put one of these through its paces, let us know how it performs. We'd need to integrate them into our Novell Network. With our present Mac we run VirtualPC and the Novell Windows Client, but one of the Apple guys at BETT said they're working on a Novell Apple client. Any Mac advice would be appreciated. RoyG

I also use Veritas onto an HP Ultrium tape drive. Full backup every Friday night, incremental Monday-Thursday. Switch to incremental for holidays. Swap tape on Friday, then on Monday morning as the full backup > 200 Gb. All scheduled - easy-peasy. Also use Veritas OFO & IDR, haven't needed to test IDR yet, fingers crossed!!! RoyG

We just have a Group Policy with some banned EXE's in it. Disable the GPO when they are allowed games, turn the GPO back on when its class time. How about Internet games - however many games sites you add to the filter, the little darlings find dozens more! Pretty much what we do - running a crash course in "Game Spotting for Teachers" helps here too. Some teachers can't quite understand that there isn't really any difference between playing a game on a computer in a lesson and playing with a PSP or whatever - it really is a class discipline problem, not an IT problem! I have to say, most are OK!

How much direct contact do you guys have with the kids? Having taught all the year 7 IT lessons for over 10 years until my metamorphosis into 100% Network Manager was completed last year, I know pretty much all the kids in the school, which is a huge advantage in keeping some semblance of order in Computer Rooms and keeping the system running pretty smoothly. Also my IT Technician spends a lot of time getting to know the kids, as she does some classroom support for IT lessons. By comparison, the Science Technicians hide away for as much of the time as possible in their Prep Rooms and seem to avoid contact with kids at all costs. Also, does anyone else encourage their student geeks to help out with techie tasks? Over the years I've gained huge benefit from kids helping out. All ages, from Y7 to Y13. Little jobs like stocking up printer paper, right up to serious stuff like setting up web servers etc. If nothing else, it gives you contact with the kids who might give you maximum grief with hacking etc. Over the years I've tested security systems by challenging them to crack security - they just can't resist telling you how they did it! With Reborn Cards and Netware they've not managed anything more than minor success! RoyG

The problem for us wasn't nicked mice - just the balls. Like Quackers, we abandoned mice with balls a while ago - optical mice are now cheap as chips. In all the computer rooms the mouse, keyboard & VGA cables pass through a hole to the base unit which is in a locked cage under the bench. All the cables, mouse, keyboard, network, VGA, power - the lot, are tie-wrapped together in the cage. It would take at least 5 minutes of grovelling on the floor to free a mouse! Problem solved! Quackers also made a good point about getting the kids on your side. Not always easy to do, but restrictions and confrontation generally produce a totally negative attitude. RoyG

Cheers Ric & Nath - glad to have found you. RoyG

We've been using Moodle for a while, with most departments using it extensively. Check it out at http://www.kegsnet.org.uk/ RoyG

Just to say that having found this site just 3 days ago it's already proved useful in a whole variety of ways, not least of which is a bunch of evidence to convince the Head that Video Conferencing really isn't an absolutely "must-have"!! I must also say that as an ex-teacher I resent the many implications that most teachers are complete idiots! I don't deny it, I just resent it!! RoyG

Forgot to mention that on our laptop clusters we use a software version of the Reborn card called EzBack. As far as I know it's only compatible with Intel or Realtek NICs. I'd guess it's not quite as bullet-proof as the card, but as the little dears only get occasional access to the laptops for one lesson at a time they don't really have time for serious hacking. We've been using this for a couple of years & no-one's cracked it yet. RoyG

OK - so where do you buy them? http://www.bits.uk.com/ - talk to Dennis Champion RoyG

The problem with software solutions & policy restrictions is that you're for ever chasing your tail! Put restrictions on kids and they'll do their damndest to get round them, so you have to add more restrictions, which they see as a new challenge.......... We are a grammar school, not full of goody-goodies, just brighter villains, and when we used policy restrictions before we started using the Reborn cards they took up the challenge to mess up the workstations and frequently succeeded. So take away the challenge, let 'em wipe the Windows folder, or run FDisk, see if I care! Restart the machine, problem solved. The point is that they don't bother trying any more. Invest £30 - buy one & try it RoyG P.S. No, I'm not on commission!

The company I buy from definitely wasn't there. RoyG

Didn't notice anything yesterday. RoyG

This could be a bit of a long post, but bear with me. I don't know about you, but most of the unsolicited mail that appears in my pigeon-hole or inbox goes straight in the bin, but a few years ago I read one flyer that literally changed my life as a Network Manager. The blurb read something like - "How would you like to protect your PCs from any unauthorised deletions or installations, viruses or anything else that could harm it?" Yeah!! Out of curiosity I got a guy in to demonstrate his product. He set up a PC and challenged me to b*gger it up. OK - delete Windows folder, that should do it! Wrong!! Format C: Nope! He just switched the machine off and turned it on again. It was exactly as it was before I played with it. I was gob-smacked! What he was selling was then called a Teachers Smart Card, which has been variously named since then a PCCure Card, a Safekey Card and the latest a Reborn Card. We now have this device on all PCs with student access. Believe me, it works. For the last 7 years I've challenged students to crack it and so far only one has managed it (with a Linux bootable USB drive and a couple of Linux command line instructions). It means that we don't have to have any restrictions on the workstations whatsoever. We don't even need to run Anti-Virus software, as when you restart the machines any viruses are wiped. We do run McAfee Enterprise on the servers! It's a Realtek LAN card with a custom boot ROM. When the machine is set up a hidden, very non-standard partition is created on the hard-drive that somehow logs any changes to the machine. When the machine is restarted all the changes are reversed. It doesn't create a complete image, just remembers the changes, so it's really quick - no more long waits while the image is restored from the server. Setting up machines is easy - just create a master and clone the rest from that. Machine names and static IP addresses are created automatically if you want. One slight draw-back is that if you actually want to do any changes or updates you have to start each machine in Supervisor Mode, so that the changes aren't reversed. On the later incarnations you can do this remotely. Amazingly the company that originally imported these cards couldn't sell enough to make a profit and folded. I then managed to import them from Denmark for a while, but now they are available again in UK. I can't understand why more people don't use them. The latest version comes with facilities like remote shut-down or reboot, remote control etc. etc. So no more use for DriveImage or Ghost or any other time-consuming software restore solutions - just turn it off and turn it back on again! I'm happy to supply more details. RoyG

I may very well take this up with them!! Cheers, RoyG

At present we're supplied FOC with an uncontended 2Mb (promised upgrade soon) from a consortium including BT, Unisys, Cable & Wireless, RM & Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Usual hassles getting port settings changed - it took the best part of 2 years to open up a port so we could administer our own website & Emails (hosted externally) without using an emergancy dial-up link. Turned out the port was blocked on the RM Cache that does the SafetyNet web filtering. Several of my student geeks host their websites themselves and are quite keen to do the same for our website (always happy to use enthusiastic volunteers!). It's costing us a fair bit for hosting, mainly due to the ever-increasing size of our Moodle site. So just interested in gathering info. about viability of doing our own hosting. Really must sort out Skype sometime! RoyG

Never got that far, we've stuck with 5.1. It hasn't broken, so we haven't mended it! The cache is fine, it just punts off the oldest items as required. Email proxy not an issue, our Email is hosted elsewhere. We're taking a look at Novell Open Enterprise server (Novell flavoured Suse) at the moment, but not in a rush to upgrade.

Does anyone physically host their school website themselves? Is it possible via local schools broadband system? Ours is E2BL. If so, any hints & tips? Thanks, RoyG

Started at this school (Essex Grammar School, 850 kids) as Physics Teacher. Inherited job of Head of IT/Network Manager/IT Coordinator (i.e. anything to do with IT!) back in 1990, with around 20 computers in the school. Still had nearly full timetable of Physics teaching! Since then I've undergone a long metamorphosis as IT developed, gradually losing Physics teaching, then IT coordinator's job, then Head of IT's job, so I'm now just Network Manager, with sole responsibility for all aspects of IT hardware in the school - planning, purchasing, installation, maintenance - the lot. One support person, who's mainly IT classroom support, but who does a bit of minor hardware support. Present system - 3 servers (all Novell Netware and definately sticking with it!), 4 Computer Rooms, around 80 other PCs around the school, around 100 laptops, wireless, etc. etc. All PCs running XPPro. The only timetabled IT classes are in Y7, plus 1 IT module in Y8 PSE. The rest of the IT is cross-curricular. Despite NOF, LfT & all the other initiatives there's still a big spread of IT literacy amongst the teachers, but most departments use IT pretty effectively. Seriously busy, but love the job. RoyG

I've been running Netware on our 3 servers since 1996 - yes, it is addictive! Since then - number of unplanned occasions server down = 3 longest server downtime = 40 minutes I rest my case! RoyG