PiqueABoo

This takeover rumour has been fairly well squished.

Oh I wish they hadn't done that, as in if you're going to make a point please do it with a typical school, not a flash one that partnered with MS and allegedly has almost a 1:1 pupil to computer ratio, OCS etc. Not exactly the kind of school that will elicit sympathy from normal folk is it? Have no issues with the rest.

Interesting. With a just-another-citizen-hat on I was sick to the back teeth of those well before the doom & gloom - I resented having to wade through all the pretty politically-correct smiley-happy pictures in order to extract a typically tiny bit of useful information. Think the moral of the tale is that whenever you change something, a particular type of person will use that as an excuse to do what they do best: complain.

::topic drift:: That's interesting because Symantec very clearly state it is a requirement on BE media servers that are remotely backing up Exchange servers e.g. see their TECH51740.

As in real ones from legal folk? [Not that they're necessarily any more legally credible than the amateur variety] So how many have you taken down?

Nothing in there that would worry me.. it's in use DB files and other in use stuff one would expect to get skipped. But do you have the Backup Exec Exchange Agent i.e. some ticks specifically relating to Exchange Information stores etc. in the job backup selection?

Have never checked, but I would definitely expect loopback GPOs to be processed in the User context, so security-filtering loopback GPOs for one or more computers will not have any effect.

What happens, assuming local system credentials will suffice, if you schedule a task via the command line using "at"?

The numbers in the Exec Summary unconditionally say a typical UK Primary, for instance, can achieve a £6,300 per annum saving... ..but assuming the reader actually gets as far as page 8 we then get "there are costs to implementing licence free applications that will quickly eat into these savings." But since no one ever seriously attempts to enumerate these costs, that pretty much renders all the previous figures entirely worthless. Burried on page 8! Is this really what counts as a thoughtful, credibly presented case these days? If I hid a cost relevant factor like that from a school they would be screaming blue murder. But all I ever see are broad vague assertions and most based on a handful of schools somewhere in other countries. I have yet, but would love to see, a case study for schools here that properly: a) enumerates what they had before with the commissioning + full annual running costs amortised over say 5 years, b) enumerates what they had afterwards with the same costs. Both to include actual training and take at least a honest guess at the cost in terms of informal self-training user time. That is of course relative to what you had before. There are Windows systems and then there are Windows systems. Ditto for Linux - some people, in fact lots of people who swear by it, are perfectly capable of making a complete pigs ear of that. Where are all these very cheap, quick hit-the-ground-running experts going to come from again, especially when I keep reading that Linux admins typically cost 20% more than their Windows equivalents? Not notoriously relevant to 80% of schools, unlike say the apps you can run on an OS that is largely an irrelevant background. A VM will work for the keener students in the rest surely? So Windows doesn't do thin-client then? Oh hang on it does coz I spend 90% of my time working via one. -- Overall this entire debate, wherever it happens, reminds me so much of Jehovahs/Mormons/WhichEverItIs on the door-step: Ask them any serious question and they will inevitably ignore it and respond with irrelevant pre-programmed waffle. "What's 2+2?" "Ah well you see in the book of revelations the number of the beast..." You folk are trying to persuade me, but this is public money not mine so I want a proper business case. Answer the questions that are put to you, not least because I put serious thought/effort into asking them and get annoyed when they are ignored. In particular find out what the requirements are, and for most of those that means talking to my users, before giving me the technical solutions. I'm persuadable, but certainly not by lightweight misdirection and assertions.

For XP I add a command to the TS to lock the console while it runs the last bit. rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation I assume you can do that or similar with Win7, but don't know. There will still be a brief spell when it first logs in which someone clueful might just be able to do something wicked though. And you can tell the TS to reboot right at the very end so it comes back up and sits at the normal logon screen.

Oh.. you were referring to previous posts in this thread being nonsense etc. I made a couple of frustrated hissy ones a week or two ago where training/costs did feature and I was explaining why I was "overstating". 80% is roughly the percentage of schools that are Primary or similar (very few of the points made by anyone in these debates are ever tailored for them). Numbers refers to: a) The ones in the doc you linked at the very start of this thread, b) Any vague claim that OSS stuff will automagically be much, much cheaper.

That would be me. It's what tends to happen in response to people ignoring it completely when making up numbers. I was working on the principle that if you shout about it loudly enough maybe, just maybe it will get through. Similarly for maintenance/manglement costs. Similarly for how you get all these (presumably) linux experts into the shoes of windows folk. Oh and completely ignoring (or worse making ignorant surreal guesses) about over 80% of the school systems in this country doesn't do anyone any favours whatsoever. I've refined Satre: Hell[tm] is other people for a pragmatist in this debate anywhere.

No. You'd very likely need a few lines of PS to enumerate mailboxes that belong to students and point that command at each one... .. that I'm not interested in making because I don't want access to everyone's mailboxes, just individual mailboxes when a very good reason for doing that arises.

I suspect some of the prices you can get inside the M25 would make a few edugeeks cry. It's what you can get locally that counts... perhaps that will be cheaper (than the line element of the LA/RBC) perhaps it won't, only real quotes will tell.

It's always about more than the price of a line. Key points: 1) What services are included in the RBC/LA price? [You really need to uncover them all] 2) What do the services you need cost independently? Tread very carefully on the second one, few RBC/LA services are likely to be there "just-because" and don't forget to include the time/skillset/whatever required to maintain any new bits you might need locally.

Yes. The admin can run a powershell command[1] to give themselves permissions to open one or more mailboxes, and then they can open them via the normal GUI (open other mailbox). [1] add-MailboxPermission -Identity NaughtyStudent -User admin -AccessRights fullaccess

It's got a "someone learning/playing with exciting MS tech" designed for teenage mega-downloaders and P2P seeders feel. Just installed it on my (trusty) laptop and after failing to connect to the update server it crashed Next.

What happened next? I just tripped over the (formal) SIFA UK response

I don't see that. In the current context of this thread we've very optimistically disappeared "MIS suppliers" for being too [expensive|parasitic|annoying]. The premise is that given a prevalent open source school MIS system, the Gov can bleeping well go and hack the code to implement any new must-have functionality they, as opposed to you, require. Indeed, but I think that's much better fought incrementally not with nukes. Think ahead, but go for genuine "quick wins" (urgh.. I hate that but it will have to do). Don't hold out for Utopia.

Of course none of that bears any relation whatsoever to a "cunning plan" like this: 1) Let's make a calculatedly controversial video.. 2) ..with a pre-arranged plan to withdraw it on Day One[tm].. 3) ..and it might just go "viral", cause a fuss in the media, and we'll get 100x the attention... Bingo! The slight irony for me is that I think the root cause of this and many other troublesome issues, is global population count.

[from Bink.nu] LG has signed a cloud computing and virtualization deal with Microsoft designed to help businesses reduce overheads. Under the pact, LG will introduce monitors integrated with Microsoft software. The monitors will function as virtual computers, allowing multiple users to run programs off a single standard PC, LG said. The alliance will primarily target the market for virtualization solutions for educational institutions, aiming to become a leader in the segment with a 25 per cent share in 2012. The segment is expected to grow by more than 50 per cent every year, reaching 6 million units in 2012 and 20 million units in 2015, LG said. LG and Microsoft will also team up to introduce monitors for cloud computing, a technology that allows users to access data and software over the internet. The cloud computing market is expected to expand to 12 million units in 2012, LG said.

..as in one or more SIMS migrations. MS release SQL 2K8 SP2!

It's better nowadays, but I haven't noticed the Internet actually being all that good at "routing around trouble" and as you get out towards the Internet users there are often no alternative routes to take. But it's the application layer that concerns me most. Imagine some web-fronted service in the cloud & this is what you might depend on right now: target DNS server, local DNS server, RBC[1] DNS server, proxy/filter, RBC proxy/filter, RBC firewall, target firewalls, load balancing gizmos, complex multi-tier service (with truckloads of disks at the bottom). YMMV but one or more of the first few have had sustained outages around here in recent years. If you envisage (it's not clear) most everything in in school being some fancy 21st century terminal you still have most of those, but it's not obvious to me that anyone could put together a service that meets all the current requirements in a school, just some of them. Perhaps those apparent requirements can be massaged into a more achievable set, I don't know. The many BSF debates seem relevant - compare and contrast a) local resources with people who can (admittedly not always) go do something about an issue, with b) the very well-established fun and games you have trying to battle your way through support desks and actually get something done this week if you're lucky. Add enough extra money and the latter can get quicker but then we're chipping away at those very large cost savings. I'm a life-trained cynic - and costs that initially look smaller have a nasty habit of turning much bigger. What might look reasonable from a stratospheric viewpoint, can turn out to be rather complicated and much more expensive than expected when you do start drilling down into that devilish detail.

This is very frustrating and this is the most diplomatic way I can say it: You're not unique by any means, but you sound out of your depth. Some VPNs have been inherently insecure e.g. PPTP back when I was energetic enough to actually start XORing ciphertext excrypted with reused keystreams etc. AFAIK there are no such concerns with OpenVPN, but that is perfectly capable of being worthless unless it is configured appropriately. If you want an analogy Windows passwords can be OK, if you turn off LANMAN hashes and if they are are reasonably "complex" (I prefer to talk about entropy because a good password doesn't have to follow the MS rules). To put my reasonable questions in simple terms: What has been configured to stop someone hostile sitting on a beach on the other side of the world from getting into a system via that VPN? What stops some theoretical bad apple at Capita getting into more than your SIMS? It's really interesting that you feel some kind of contractual blame-shifting i.e. anything bad happens to part of a school network then it's OK because Capita get the blame, is the end of the story. Perhaps I'm weird, but I would feel 100% responsible if anything bad happened to my network that could have been avoided had I pulled my finger out and asked a few questions. The answers to the questions may well be perfectly good, reassuring ones, but lacking any I automatically assume the worst - I've seen more than enough reasons not to fold because [insert Big-Company-Name or Security-Celebrity Here] says "hey, it's secure, don't worry!".

::sigh:: I'm not going to spell it out, but there is a clear difference between these two: a) "the troll", b) "your troll"