pbainbridge

Its no cheaper abroad...apart from the wine. 10 days in a caravan at Lake Garda in July/August this year £2300 without flights

Hop on a train and go up to Alnmouth in Northumberland. Takes 3:30 hours but to be fair it'll take you that long to get out of London. Fantastic Northumberland beaches IMHO, great food, hotels and pubs at North East prices.

The education support grant given to LAs to support schools is also being slashed 75%+. This means all the LA school support workers will be made redundant and schools will be forced to pay market rates to private organisations for these services. What cost a child clinical psychologist or Education Welfare officer? Then there's the little problem of who will do admissions, currently supplied by the LA and funded by the ESG. Anyone fancy doing that chore every year?

AC Cobra for the weekends and Renault 5 Turbo2 for weekdays

55 schools backed up via WAN to a SAN using Backup Assist and another 10 using Backup Exec to tape.

I'd rather have a physical 2nd DC rather than another DC on the same HyperV host otherwise its still all the eggs in one basket. The 2nd DC doesn't have to be big, any old PC or server will do, you just want something to have a copy of the schema, GPOs, DNS etc, just in case.

You might want to have a look at what's coming in the next OS upgrade. It seems finally that Apple recognise that iPads really aren't good in a multi user environment. Education - Preview - Apple

Hi We've setup Smoothwall Express 3.1 as transparent web proxy for IPads but SSL traffic is not getting through (I know why). There is an add on which will allow this to be circumvented. Has anyone done this is yet and if you have where did you get the add on? cheers

We ended up with dozens of schools with this problem. Sorted very quickly by adding a new group policy with a script to uninstall the KB in startup and shutdown. Any PCs that had the problem were just warm booted and the GP did the rest.

It may be worth talking to a nearby/feeder secondary to see if they have spare kit. I see a lot of kit cascaded down from secs to prims to help them out.

Ha..60 schools to look after so the busiest 6 weeks of the year..

Wake up Shower, shave, s**t Get dressed travel to work pickup bacon sarnie and apple juice on the way at desk...30 minutes total

Amazon firestick and then you can also put KODI/XBMC on it... http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kodi_on_Fire_TV

the first race was ...well, a bit boring to be honest. If there's no major changes this is going to be a very poor season. On a different tack I 've been watching the Formula E on ITV4 and last weeks race at Miami was spectacular. Nail biting stuff from start to finish.

Never had that problem with any installation. Is the server a standard build?

We use VMware Esxi forPrimarys ...its free and easy set up

I have a couple of dozen Hyper V servers as well, but use no tools. It is worth setting up the the iDRAC though.

Left it BIOS...keep it simple

I use a USB stick with the Windows Server ISO on it, again it just speeds up the install time.

I've set up 20+ of these and it's much quicker to sort the RAID out in system setup and then set up the boot to point at the DVD drive. I initially used the lifecycle controller but it doesn't really bring anything to the party. A useful bit of info is that if you are rolling out ESXi as the OS, and using the built in SD card to host it then once its installed it automatically asks if you want to copy the SD card to a secondary SD card also in the machine. Instant OS redundancy, very useful.

Having used a myriad of s backup solutions over the years I have to say this is the simplest. If you have your data storage area sorted you can go from software installation and config to backup in 10 minutes. You can download it and use it for 30 days free before you need to license it, that's what we did

I have 50+ primary schools to backup to a central SAN over a WAN and used to use BackupExec. Version 2012 was a nightmare and 2014 worse. I eventually got so sick I tried BackupAssist. It's now on all our sites. It's simple, easy to configure and use and very good value for money. The software is free and a license for that and the Rsync module (you need it) is £260 for 2 years. We've also paid for the central management console but with only 3 sites I suspect you wouldn't need it.

If your local LA uses Capita ONE to record child information and process school place applications then there's a couple web based modules that do exactly what you want. They may be willing give you access with appropriate rights to only see you own students. Its something I was working on until I was moved to schools IT. Ask your local EWO what they use.

I've got a three bed Victorian Terrace with a small mortgage because I live in the North East. Not planning to buy, not planning to sell. Help to buy, no thanks it will finance another bubble, and when interest rates rise I won't be bothered. When the bubble pops all the expensive houses in the South will take the brunt of the fall. All the new aspirational house buyers will be devestated. and i'll laugh, oh how i'll laugh...

If somene asks "how long" for a job to be done always add in some fat (f***ing about time)