truebluesteve

Same here - its so frustrating!

Morning all Some of you may have heard of the comedian Romesh Ranganathan (he was on Question Time last night), who was until about 3 or 4 years ago, a maths teacher here. Anyway he left to do stand up (he always was a funny guy) and has become quite well known, and last month he was back at the school to film a program for ITV which was about using technology in the classroom to make teaching easier (yes I can hear you all groaning now!). I was asked to come in over the weekend the filming took place to help out with the IT side of stuff and it was really interesting to see program being put together. We were sworn to secrecy until given the nod by ITV and apparently they have have now nodded, so check out the program next Tuesday at 8! Blurb is below “It’s Not Rocket Science” is a new science show on ITV1 with the actor Ben Miller, Countdown’s Rachel Riley, plus comedian and ex-Hazelwick student & teacher Romesh Ranganathan. The first episode is being screened at 8:00pm on Tuesday 16 February. In this episode, Olympic hopeful Adam Gemili races against a Red Arrow, Rachel Riley travels through a wall of fire at 450 degree centigrade, and Ben Miller uses the power of Joey Essex's brain to drive a car. However, the highlight is former Hazelwick maths teacher Romesh Ranganathan returning to his old classroom armed with new technology to teach a lesson for the first time in three years."

We used Successmaker until a couple of years ago. It can still be used but isn't supported any longer either by RM or Pearson (who have another product now). We used it for at least 10 years and it was a client-server setup that could be a real pain to administer and took some setting up, so I'm not sure about your stand-alone version. Maybe it was just a US thing?

A bit of useful info about what is and isn't included in Deduplication (according to MS) Deduplication is not supported on: System or boot volumes Remote mapped or remote mounted drives Cluster shared volume file system (CSVFS) for non-VDI workloads or any workloads on Windows Server 2012 Files approaching or larger than 1 TB in size. Volumes approaching or larger than 64 TB in size. Deduplication skips over the following files: System-state files Encrypted files Files with extended attributes Files whose size is less than 32 KB Reparse points (that are not data deduplication reparse points)

We use 4Matrix here and whilst I can't comment on the quality of the data it produces, it does seem to be well liked here by those staff that use it. It is also very easy to install and set up.

Just as a matter of interest is Robbie Chalkwright the same chap that opened this thread - which seems to be a thinly disguised plug for Laserlife? http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/162441-pay-you-go-managed-print.html

We've got 13 Ricoh MFD's here and they have given us good service over the last 4 years however many of them have started to break down quite frequently over the last 18 months. This is mainly due to them being thrashed to death rather than any quality issues with the machines themselves. Our support company have been very good and engineers are here on almost a daily basis! Our main repo copier is a 907ex which has a finisher unit that does everything bar making the tea, and has been out of action for 10 days now and is waiting for parts :-( On the plus side we are about to go out to tender for a new fleet of copiers and printers...

When I first started here we were in a portacabin (5 of us) that was absolutely freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer due to the lack of heating and ventilation - the servers were in another part of the school completely. Fortunately a new LRC was built a few years ago and I was able to have a say in the server room and IT office design and even though we have re-organised a couple of times, we do have a very nice working area - and after reading what others have, I feel very fortunate. As for working in the admin office, my biggest fear would be getting roped into all the non-IT stuff - answering the phone, dealing with parents and other visitors and so on.

Agreed - I really don't have the time to be continually messing around with config files and the like - even though I can see they have some benefits.

Well we had a brief loss of Internet the other day - 45 minutes which was annoying enough, but at least everything that was local was largely unaffected. The outages are rare for me but I know others on here have had far more and that could be a nightmare to manage I suppose it will depend on what, if any, discounts they give to Education for locally based software - i.e. Server OS, Office etc. Even if they double the price that we currently pay for our OVS-ES license, I think I'd be happy to pay it at the moment.

Plenty of time for things to change again I suppose and I'm not quite ready to put all my eggs in one cloud based basket just yet!

What drivers does Windows 8 use? For example if they are Realtek 86xx or whatever it may be worth heading over their site and seeing if they have up to date driver. We've had to do this in the past.

The Mac Mini is fine - we use one to run OX Server for imaging and profile management and its fine. Its worth making sure it has at least 8GB RAM as it can't be upgraded afterwards. You'll need to add the costs for a decent monitor, keyboard and mouse (Apple ones possibly) and maybe a VESA mounting bracket to keep it off the desk.

We have 3 Dell 730's each with 128GB attached to an HP and EMC SAN. There are about 16 VM's across the hosts including SIMS, SQL Server and 2 x DC's. We don't have an Exchange server and the only box not virtualised is our legacy backup server which connects via SCSI to a tape library. We've had this setup for 4 years or so now and its been extremely reliable so I'd say go for the whole lot!

Mobile Asset V7 here - they do an educational version now I believe. We've used it for years and its been very reliable albeit it does have some quirks. No annual subscription either

I had the same issue when I set up our new policy - although ours does have a maximum age. In the end I reset the the password last changed attribute in AD for all staff and those that had changed it once, had to do it again. As it turned out no-one complained which must be a first!

The judgement did say that employers must have clear guidelines about what data they can collect etc.

I think this probably confirms what most of us suspected Private messages at work can be read by employers, says court - BBC News

Are there an errors in the event logs of the server that dirsync is installed on?

Well if you're planning to move to Shoreditch or anywhere in that part of London, then they are mandatory - otherwise bin it!

I've always been a Playstation man - and have a PS4 now but there isn't a huge amount to choose between them I think. The online experience is allegedly better on the XBox but the PS4 is supposed to be better technically so if you plan to do a lot of online gaming and your friends have XBox's then that is a consideration. There are also those games that are only available on one console to think about - if you fancy playing Halo then the XBox is your only option, but these games are few and far between these days. I don't think you will go wrong whatever choice you make as they are both very good consoles - but the PS4 is more betterer

Ah...evidence! Got it :-)

That is a long train.... but I took this video during a trip across Montana this summer. I lost count at about 90 wagons!

We seemed to have the same problem with Internet access being thrashed - restarting the Smoothwall proxy sorted it though.

We had the same thing yesterday and it was only for users that had changed their passwords - of which there are a few as its that time again.