truebluesteve

IT Technican Salary: £16,830 - £17,802 (plus £555 pa Crawley Allowance). Closing Date: 1pm on Friday 5 October 2012. Details on the school website - Hazelwick School Online : Associate Staff Vacancies Any questions then let me know Thanks Steve

Thanks for the posts -they were very helpful and I shall be contacting a couple of you via PM!

We started out getting our SAN a couple of years ago to increase the storage across our user servers which were rapidly filling up, and which were also quite old and needed replacing. We knew that we would virtualise at some point too, so the SAN made sense. We did the virtualisation last year and we have the following setup - 1 x EMC CX4 SAN 3 x SAN Hosts (32GB Ram Dual 6-Core Processors) VMWare ESXi 12 x Virtual Servers Our FRDC and Exchange servers are still physical at the moment as they are fairly new and still under their hardware warranty. Once that runs out, they will be turned into VMs too. Our experience has been really positive and the system is really easy to use. My big concern was for the performance of the SIMs server, but its never been an issue. I cant speak about the other flavours of Virtualisation software, but VMWare has worked perfectly for us. Steve

Hi All I've got a number (about 30) of ageing admin PC's that really need replacing quite soon, and I'm interested in using thin clients to do this. The machines are mainly used for SIMS, Outlook and the rest of the office suite. There arent any really graphic heavy bits of software on these machine. Has anyone on here had any experience of this and could share their thoughts as I need to make a decision quite soon. I also have a classroom of 30 PC's that are used by the languages dept and the only real software they use is Taskmagic. All the other software is web based, with some video and audio involved. Again so advice or suggestions would be extremely useful. Thanks! Steve

Our LEA charged us an annual fee for the licenses and another for support, which worked out about £3k a year more than we pay now via Capita for support. After about 3-4 years, the licenses will have paid for themselves as it were. What remains to be tested is the support we get direct from Capita (as opposed to the LEA which has ironically has outsourced its SIMS support to.....yes you guessed it...Capita!)

Well its kinda free We had to buy our SIMS licenses outright (as opposed to getting them from the LEA), so the up-front costs were high but in the long term we will save money. Capita have said we can use the web parts as long as we pay the support costs each year. Regarding the server setup, what I meant was that you can install SP and SQL on seperate servers (the so-called farm configuration) or on the same one. I just wondered what others have done. Steve

Well I thought the decision had been made to withdraw the scheme, but I have just been told that that it hasn't. One of the big issues that I do have is that a many staff treat their laptops like they would a company car, and are very blase when they get damaged. There is an expectation, I think, that they are entitled to a laptop!

Thanks for the info. I hadn't intended installing SLG as such - I don't think its a particularly nice product, so the thought was to use the web parts in a dev enviroment initially and see how we could use them ourselves. We are also considering using Talmos, which also uses SIMS web parts but needs no involvement from Capita. I will contact our account manager and see what the situation is. I had intended to virtualise the setup - have you installed SQL and Sharepoint on the same server or on seperate ones? Thanks

We dont have to pay for them as long as we pay the annual maintenance costs which is a few hundred quid. I think it was Capitas way of deflecting some of the critisism levelled at them by Academies over licences for SIMS. Thanks for the link tho, I will take a look.

Thanks for all the replies - there are some very interesting points in them. The SLT view on the issue of staff who dont have computers at home is that it is unreasonable in this day and age to expect the school to provide one. If they didn't have their school laptop then would have to buy their own as everyone else does. Its difficult to argue against that! From a personal point of view I wouldn't mind seeing the back of laptops as they are very high maintenance compared to a desktop pc and wont last as long. Infrastructure wise we will be ok as each classroom has at least 1 network socket. What is more of an issue is the space to place additional PCs as we have more teachers than rooms. Also heads of year offices currently only have PC for the administrator so we may have issues there with network ports. This issue has been rumbling on for a while now and our laptops are breaking down and becoming difficult to repair. So much so in fact that we may be forced to buy a few new ones as spares untill a strategy is formed by the SLT

Hi. I'm looking at installing sharepoint at my school and one of the uses would be integration with SIMS. Now I will have professional help setting up SP would like to use the SIMS web parts as provided by Capital. The school is an Academy and our contract with includes the use of the web parts. The question is how do I get hold of them - i.e. will I need to get them from Capital or are are provided as part of a SIMs server install and if so where? Many thanks Steve

Hi all My school currently gives its 150 or so teachers laptops to use and have done so for the last 6 or 7 years. They are used mainly with projectors and smartboards to present lessons as well as to prepare them and mark work. This has beeen very popular with staff who are also able to take them home. Many of these laptops are now nearly 5 years old and due to be replaced this year. However the SLT have decided that we will no longer give laptops to teachers and place PCs in every room with a smartboard. The logistics of this aside, there will be a lot of unhappy teachers and I was wondering whether anyone else had encountered this scenario. I would also be interested to hear from others who still give laptops to teachers and what their future plans were regarding replacing them. Cheers Steve

Thanks for the replies guys. I have checked the image urls, and they are pointing to the correct locations and all the images exist on the server. I have tried the replace function and unfortunately it hasnt made any difference. I suspect its a PHP/Permissions issue, but I have no idea what at the moment! Steve

Turning slash arguments off doesnt seem to make any difference at all

The Website is at moodle.hazelwick.org The images on the front page are fine, but once you go into the courses you can see where the images are supposed to be but nothing is there except the red x's. The images are all present and correct in their respective folders and the urls point to those locations. The only difference between the two websites as far as we are concerned is the name of the them.

Hi Folks Looking for some help with this.... I Have run a Moodle migration using 1.9.13 to bring externally hosted site inside school. Imported source SQL into Moodle database. The next login insisted that database 1.9.7 was updated to 1.9.13 which I did and then ran admin/replace.php to convert URLs. Image URLs seem fine in the database and are using the http://domain/file.php/1/graphic.jpg address with slasharguments on. However, no graphics are displayed either embeded in a course, by clicking the image icon in the course file store or browsing to image URL in new browser tab. All just produce the red-cross image missing symbol. Oddly uploading a file such as Word works fine. Uploading a new graphic and trying to use that just causes the red-cross missing symbol. I'm fairly sure that DNS is resolving ok as have altered $CFG->wwwroot = to use new domain name. Logging in against new domain name is all working ok. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Lucky we tried doing the migrate from external hosting at the start of the school holidays rather than at the end. Many thanks to anyone with some thoughts to investigate. Steve

Hi All Apologies if this is in the wrong forum, but I couldnt seem to find an appropriate one! We have replaced a large number of our current printers and as such we have quite a few that we would like to get rid of. They are the following makes - HP 1300 HP 1320 HP 4200 HP 4250 HP 4300 All them are working and most have some toner left in them. We dont want any money for them (unless you are a commercial organisation) although any donations will be gratefully received You will need to collect them of course. We also have a number of old servers (Intel mainboards) that the above also applies to. If you are interested, please PM me or email [email protected] Cheers Steve

I'd love an Android version, however the big problem there is that Android cannot use proxy servers at the moment which makes them pretty much useless on our network.

Hi. Our Broadband connectivity provided by the LEA will be going from £4000 pa to nearly £12000 pa in April as a result of the expected loss of the Harnessing Technology Grant, which subsidises the cost. I have had quotes for around £7500pa for a leased line with install costs of around £2500. This is for a 10 Meg line on a 100 Meg bearer. Obviosuly we have to factor in other services that we will need to provide including email and filtering. I would be interested on others experiences on all of these Steve