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Here's our newly adopted guinea pigs, George (all ginger), Richard (white & ginger) & Henry (white & black), all named after Kings of England.

We use OTRS (OTRS Help Desk software - OTRS IT Service Management software - Free Open Source Help Desk - Problem Management System - Customer Interaction Software | OTRS). Very powerful and configurable, can accept email or web tickets. If you go for OTRS ITSM then you get an ITIL compliant system.

We also use OTRS, we haven't even scratched the surface of what we can do with it. I must look at all the add on, like RFC's, configuration management and integrating it with Nagios.

I use Multimedia Installations for everything from a single data point to a full building, email [email protected] for quotes.

My colleague helped out on a trip yesterday to Manchester Airport, he even got to go up into the control tower! The school has bought insurance allowing staff to take kids in their own cars for trips when there are sufficiently small numbers. In my previous job I helped out on a sixth form trip, the teacher in charge managed to rig the risk assessment to allow them to drive themselves to the venue. So I was in my own car on my own, and I got to go round a Fujitsu data centre.

In our case it is the bursar, but she has delegated some of the time consuming searching to the a couple of the admin staff. We do get called in occasionally if they cannot view the DVR boxes across the network or when they need to write the video to a CD (no not a DVD) for the police. Thankfully we have very little contact with this kit.

Thankfully we have yet to set fire to any of our kit. We just get staff phoning up saying their printers are on fire, usually first thing Monday morning after a cold weekend when the paper has absorbed a load of moisture. It takes a minute or two to convince them it's only steam. Never have understood why the phone us rather than hitting the fire alarm and legging it away from the fire! In a previous job working as a technician in a University Physics dept a colleague managed to set a litter bin on fire. He had cleaned out an experiment containing what he though was oxidized sodium metal, he tossed the remains in a bin containing a banana skin. The sodium wasn't as oxidised as he thought and the next thing we knew was a lot of smoke coming out of the bin as the moisture in the banana skin reacted with the sodium. From that point on we tossed the remains in a beaker of water, it was much more fun as well as being safer.

We had rain for most of the early evening and then it froze in to one large skating rink. I was surprised not to see any cars in ditches or hugging trees! I and several others nearly did ourselves a mischief getting out our cars, one foot in the car and the other sliding away from us across the car park.

Unfortunately I've got a couple of calls open with them at the moment and it is taking a quite some time for them to get to me. As others have said, when you do get to the support engineer they do a great job. Last time I had a problem it took a week to get a call from them and about 10 minutes to fix it as they knew exactly what to do. I do just wish the waiting a week could be shaved down considerably.

At least they got it lining up with the U markings. Most of our racks, installed by a predecessor (my favorite saying at the moment), installed most of ours with a 1/3 U gap between each item to allow cables to run in between the switches.

To eliminate disk issues try using iperf (Iperf | Free software downloads at SourceForge.net) or psping (sysinternals) to do a bandwidth test between the two servers. Our Backup Exec server started running very slow recently and I spent ages looking at BE and the network only to discover the batteries in our MSA20 controller had failed so write caching to the array was disabled.

I think I used this site Configure a time server for Active Directory domain controllers | TechRepublic which are similar those given by @VeryPC_Tom_M. For the time server I use uk.pool.ntp.org rather than one server and so far I have not had any time related issues.

Ours are much larger! sims.bat = 5G Zipped = 1.1G We use PARS so I would guess that will make some difference. As to making smaller, I can't help there one of the SIMS experts around here might be able to help. Our SIMS backup including zipping only takes about 10 minutes on our virtual server.

We have just bought in to the IRIS system, and I am of a similar mind to others, in that it is expensive and could be done much more cheaply. However is it much simpler to use than setting up all the required components separately and getting them to work every time. Whilst we as technical folk will find it simple enough, this system is simple enough for most teachers to use. I and my team are busy enough and we really don't have the time to be recording numerous lesson observations so I appreciate the money has been fairly well spent. Next week I will take a look at our system to see if there is anything on the microphones to identify the manufacturer. Good quality sound is as important as the pictures, no point recording the lesson if can't hear it.

Since we became an academy we no longer buy back in to the LEA's school health, safety and risk assessment systems so we need to look for an alternative system. The question is what do you do for recording and reporting accidents? Do you buy into something like Prime Systems (Prime Systems Accident and Incident Reporting Software | Prime Systems), did you build your own system? Thanks.

The SysInternals suite has been upgraded again. Windows Sysinternals: Documentation, downloads and additional resources It also includes a live version (I've not tried them yet).

Another alternative to allow the IWB to be higher up and still be usable is to have a dias built for the users to stand on or get a fold away one (Whiteboard Step Up | Whiteboard Step | Loxit).

I would ask the site staff to justify the reason why they are bringing working at height in to it as am sure you could argue a similar health and safety point about a board being mounted too low as it would involve bending and potential damage to the teachers back. Perhaps the site staff are not allowed to use ladders! There are a couple of aspects to an interactive whiteboard and getting the two to marry up well can be difficult, that is using and viewing. If the board is low enough for children to use then it may well be too low for teachers and to be seen at the back of a classroom. If it is high enough for a teacher or to be seen at the back of a classroom then it is possibly too high for children to use. This of course depends on age of the children, year 10+ it is likely to be the other way round, low enough for the teacher and high enough for the children ;-). An expensive alternative is to get a whiteboard lift, but this assumes you have a short throw projector and a hefty chunk of spare cash.

You could take a look at the Epson WP-4000 series, they have several in the range from a basic printer to a postscript version and multifunction versions. These are inkjet printers but the cartridges are somewhat larger than most with the largest cartridges having a capacity of 3400 pages for £31 each. They look like a laser printer so many folks don't even notice they are inkjets. We have a couple where I am now and have been happy with them.

@Jamo how does RSLogonLimit cope if a machine is reset and the user does not logon to the same machine again but moves on to another machine or even another class? From what I saw on the website it looks like you would not be allowed to logon until an admin deleted your previous logon. Would I be right in assuming there is no test performed to see if the user is still logged on to the other machine.

Just to add to @hallb15's post. Some universal mounts are based on arms that can be adjusted to match the projector, but there are others which are a plate that has many slots in it. Where I am it seems that the only projectors that ever fail are the ones with unicol projector specific mounts. If the mount you have only has three or four holes for screwing into the base of the projector then it is a projector specific mount. If this is the case then there are two options, bite the bullet and find a replacement plate (go for universal) or wait for the new projector to arrive (or use the manual above) and see if the mount can be adapted by drilling new holes. Unfortunately in our case the mounts were never suitable for modification.

As others say, take advice, if your school is big enough then the bursar / finance office should be able to help. I would also argue that they are the ones who should be seeking advice from the LEA or accountants, depending on if you are an academy or not. It is their area of expertise not yours. Before we were an academy we sold them without VAT and now we must include VAT. I seems that it comes down to your VAT registration status, but I don't pretend to know much about that.

It's a trial one of the new smaller schools the government is looking at building, everyone has to go in single file!

Our office manager has been on to our LEA support team and has just had these three patches released to us. We managed to get all three installed in the 30 minute lunch break including getting everyone out of SIMS. I really do wish Capita would have 'kick out' feature to shutdown all SIMS applications. Patch 17393. Course manager-data ranges of course-class links do not match class availability periods Patch 17386. [OD]: Resolves error message: Dates entered must fall within dd/mm/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy Patch 17512. Leavers not appearing in Learning aims panel. Whether this speeds up course manager I don't know yet.

An update on my comment from yesterday. Our office manager was also using course manager whilst it was being very slow. @Gibson335 Do you know which patches were applied, we have not be informed by our LEA that there are any to apply (at least not recently).