JamesDonkin

Post: IT Technician Grade: Scale 4, £17,714 – £19,742 Location: Academies within The Ascent Academies’ Trust Responsible to: Director of Corporate Services Closing date: Thursday 30th June 2016 at 12 noon Vacancies « Ascent

Ascent Trust

Hello Everyone We now look after three schools' IT provision that have recently left the LA to be academies and have formed a multi academy trust. We currently use the council's WAN/Internet/Firewall/Filtering facilities but would like to move away, partly because of the quality of the service and partly because we may be expanding to include other schools outside of our city. Can any of you recommend a solution/provider combo? I quite fancy an MPLS setup due to costs and the fact it acts like a LAN so not too much change from what we already have. Leased lines would be too expensive though. Just wondering what other schools with similar requirements do. Cheers

There's a great book by a fella called Jonn Palmer. It's sold on amazon but he makes the first edition freely available on his website www.howtobrew.com. At least it was when I started brewing, I can't check as its blocked in school (naughty beer). I followed the book's advice and ignored what was on the box - much better results. And oh yeah, sanitising is 75% of getting a brew right. If anything touches your beer after its boiled it needs to be sanitised, including any extra sugar that you're using to carbonate it (boil it in a bit water). Good luck!

I was excited about some kind of magic bullet there but they're all up to date by windows update, cheers anyway though. Our main storage is a SAN on iSCSI which I'm going to give its own NIC x-over cable and subnet tonight. See if that has anything to do with it although I doubt it, I'm clutching at straws.

Did you apply any patches other than those on windows update?

Having simillar bother here on three virtualised (hyper-v) 2012 servers. Been having people going online / offline randomly. Noticed something in SMB client logs on the servers though. Event ID: 30621 SMBClientSession to server \servername was lost Status 0xC0000203 Event ID: 30623 SMBClient Connection to share \servername\Data was lost. Status 0xC0000203 And then they instantly reconnect. This happens several times a day. Think its linked?

This is simillar to another post on here at the minute but I think its different fundamentally (hope so any way). We've recently upgraded our servers, one domain, three sites to 2012 (not R2) and implemented DFS namespace and replication. It seems that users randomly lose connection to the server and go offline for seemingly random periods of time. It looked like using the server name in the path worked so it was something to do with DFS. Meanwhile, I changed everyone's paths to use server names instead of the DFS name while I worked it out. This seemed to work for a bit but then did the same thing. sometimes the DFS path will work like this \\domain\root and not like this \\domain.local\root and sometimes vice versa. There doesn't seem to be any reason for this. I've specified to exclude other sites from referals as I thought that might help, without any joy. Additionally the servers are 2012 on Hyper-V. Fully patched. Anyone else had simillar probs (and hopefully sorted out)? This is causing real problems now and any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers

Yeah, sort of resigned myself to that. Cheers for the answer though!

Sorry mate, I'll fill in a bit more detail. We currently have three separate domains. We are three special needs schools who work very closely with each other, staff move about, so do students. We've bought new DCs (one at each site) and all storage is on a 16TB SAN at each location. The folders in these SANs are part of a distributed file system that replicates to all sites. Good for backup (off site) and availability at each location. Deleted files can be retrieved with VSS on a 4TB external drive at each location. The WAN links are 100MB and are part of the council's city wide private network (that we still buy into). So in our case, a single domain is the best fit. Any ideas about the redirection question though? There are thirteen folders per user.

Good afternoon lads and lasses, I'm in the middle of setting up a new domain over three sites as we've recently become a multi academies trust with disjointed networks. I've used folder redirection in the past with 'documents' and 'desktop' - the usually biggies. On the new network I'd like to redirect the lot (that are redirectable) but it seems I have to do them one at a time and the result would be a folder for each redirectable, containing a folder each for all the users. It seems a bit messy. I'd like to have instead a folder for each user with all of their redirected folders in them. Seems to make a bit more sense. Has anyone done this? Am I just being pedantic? Cheers for any help.

It seems a bit odd for one supplier to distribute the above email. Wonder if they're just the first to hear of it, although I can't see that being very likely.

Sauce?

Do you have many disabled kids? If so you could spend some money on accessibility for IT like touch screens, big keyboards, camera mice (free if you already have a webcam) adjustable desks/monitor brackets or special software for input for people with low literacy. We use this stuff all the time as we are a special school but I know that mainstream schools are getting what used to be our more able kids now. This will look great to other schools, ofsted and parents if you are ahead of other nearby schools in this area. This is a very basic overview but if you want more detail I'd be happy to help.

I did the apprentice route. About ten years ago mind so don't know how much has changed. It was great to get into the career in the first place because bosses love staff who'll work for forty quid a week, for this money the mistakes you might make while learning can easily be excused. It gets your face known as well as your capabilities before its time to start asking for a real job - the same one you'd be applying for if you did the pure academic route. The apprentice after a couple of years of experience and a handful of vocational quallies will knock spots off an A-level student straight out of college in an interview.