PiqueABoo

Sure, I had user's requirements in order to do their job effectively in mind - these aren't always quite the same thing as what manglement think they need and it's always worth asking users even if you do get a few comedy answers. Absolutely. There's a Y5 teacher sat on the other side of the room right now **typing away** on a school laptop lesson planning, and doubtless will be for a couple of hours yet. Although she does this most weekday nights I'm quite sure she'd rather not. Can't comment on Secondary teachers coz I don't live with one but Primary schools all seem to *strongly depend* on this happening, ergo there is an unquestionable moral obligation to support it by providing a usable laptop stuffed with relevant s/w - the cost of that is a teensy fraction of the hours they get for free. Salaries are already down-sized to accomodate that aren't they?

As in "what are the user's requirements?" Have you asked any of those then?

Allegedly not. Although I think school techs are a bit more inclined to be net-cops, this is really a fundamental either-or thing and some people just don't have that basic set of acceptable ethical standards. This kind of development was reasonably predictable because anyone with those standards wouldn't have got an instrusive system like that in the first place surely? If you really, really have to track potentially stolen laptops then what's wrong getting suitable authorisation and so on, then just flipping some virtual switch so the laptop tells you it's IP address next time it hits the net? Aside: What do you say if some manglement bod walks up and asks you to closely track someone's network activity? Does it make a difference if the target is Student or Staff (where they might just be fishing for reasons to dismiss)? Do you have a policy pertaining to this area?

I got to think about this quite hard for a reference implementation last year (was a lot easier to do this kind of thinking in ye olde days of physical subnets, routers-with-ACLs or if you wanted better auditing a firewall). The basic principle is pretty straight-forward: You have separate "Private", "Public" and WAN subnetworks all plugged into a firewall with suitable policy controlling what flows between them. Unless you're rolling in cash you're almost certainly going to make subnets with VLANs on any non-trivial physical network. The next questions are: 1) What L3 feature set do you actually have in your core switches? I wouldn't, but if the switches do serious IP ACLs you could use them instead of a dedicated firewall. 2) Do you have or are you getting managed wireless? I'm familiar with two basic approaches that you may or may not be able to do with a given vendor's kit: a) Public wireless traffic is tagged onto the Public VLAN by the controller, Private wireless traffic (always authenticated for access) is tagged onto the Private VLAN, then those VLANs and the WAN just plug into that firewall with the policies. b) Public traffic is dropped onto the same subnet as Private but ACLs set on the controller restrict where it can go i.e. the controller assumes the firewall role, and you don't have to use VLANs. YMMV but in all cases subject to organisational management capability I'd certainly want some kind of access control for Public wireless too e.g. the students have to supply their MACs as a minimum. Then there's the detail: - Wireless client isolation is a good idea full stop i.e. for all Private/Public wireless laptops/netbooks. - DHCP: With switches it's anyone's guess, but firewalls will inevitably serve DHCP on a given interface. - DNS: What Private resources can they access? Do you need DNS to resolve any local names and if so how/where do they get it? - Proxy: Do they need an explicit suitably filtered one to get to the Internet and if so how/where do they get it? Perhaps you can do transparent proxying? - VLANs/Subnets: The usual disclaimers for L2 broadcast traffic apply here i.e. if something depends on NetBIOS broadcasts or you do WOL etc. then you need sort out ip directed broadcast, multihome a management box, or something. - IP Addressing: This can get fiddly. Can your current address allocation from wherever accommodate being carved up into a bunch of subnets? I can't think of many reasons not to put Public behind NAT with that firewall, but the outside of that obviously needs some routable addresses. If Private is already routable I'd certainly try and keep it that way, but you might put that behind NAT as well and if so, do you know what might need R-NAT for a variety of external support providers etc? Finally the network security: - There's the inevitable risk of someone wreaking havoc after plugging their "device" directly into a Private netpoint and if you don't control that with 802.11X or whatever, then any arguments about things like the pro and cons of VLANs vs independent wiring seem a touch academic. - Firewall policies and ACLs just have to be correct and should be routinely reviewed. Some people have a nasty habit of not taking these seriously enough e.g. throw in new ones at a drop of a hat, occasionally with very big inadvertent holes. - More esoteric, less likely, but convince yourself that your kit and it's configuration is safe from VLAN hopping.

Bear in mind that (apparently): It also attacks Britain for "broadcasting shitty TV programs like Top Gear". Romanians are growing on me.

I happily do pretty much everything I want to do with the relatively lightweight VSE 2008 C# and on occasions VSE 2008 C++. Temporily ignoring dotNet 4 support[1] has anyone played with VSE 2010 yet? Is there anything I'm really going to miss? Is there anything really compelling in 2010? [1] I normally target 2.0 because that's installed everywhere where my code goes, well except for a couple of WPF apps for a system where I know 3.5SP1 is everywhere.

The first time Julian Assange (the key wikileaks bloke) came to my attention it was on crypto lists way back and he was touting a relatively novel idea for back then called Plausibly Deniable Encryption... it could all be one big anonymity protecting smokescreen, but if not then I'd assume the encryption was conventional i.e. not some top-secret special "military" stuff.

What actually makes this CringeMaking[tm] is that it's from, or at least on behalf of, the Minister for Digital Britain. In the other thread on this I posted a link to a Ross Anderson RIPA article which ends: The whole business brings to mind a comment attributed to Bismarck: "Laws are like sausages – it's best not to watch them being made."

Quite. I got to sit through a dipstick new company CEO saying that 10 years ago, except the plan was already "wait for Google". Have only glanced at the latest state of DEB and it looks like yet another one with a hole where they get to plug in [whatever] in future re. Ofcom get to try and figure out and subsequently police the whole crime & punishment aspect .. and if it's anything like RIPA it could go on for years yet.

Mine was more or less neck-and-neck Lib Dem & Green which was umm.. interesting. OTOH none of the questions asked about my preferences for using carefully blunted knives to slowly cut bits off people earn^H^H^H^H being paid seriously silly salaries in the public sector.. whether I'm seriously hacked off about the limp gov letting banks go back to what they do worst ..or whether there should be a punitive tax on the use of the words "Cheryl Cole" in the media. I'm a pragmatist, now thoroughly depressed by 10+ years of expensive dogma , so I'm voting anti-labour.

... not exactly the best MP to have attached to a quote like that. -- Last time I looked 2K8 and 2K8R2 are on the same MS support lifecycle and I couldn't care less which one it is for an app server, provided it's 64bit (in-place upgradable in future if absolutely necessary).

When people used to talk about MS and braindumps they meant sets of all current known questions for a given exam together with mostly right answers i.e. what anyone with a half-decent memory could memorise in order to go pass the exams (and despite being "prohibited" lots of anyones very clearly did that). MS were supposed to be doing things-to-fix-it e.g. random picks from a much larger set of questions which are regularly changed - dunno, haven't paid any attention to their exams for a long while.

Not proven i.e. might have been careless fingers, but with FF 3.5.9 and writing a got-distracted-not-nearly as-quick-as-I'd-hoped reply it did some kind of refresh which cleared out everything I'd typed so far. Not TEOTWAWKI because a Control-Z got it back again.

"rubbish" is subjective. I'm old school web generation 1.0 raised on old (very low and expensive in some global corners) bandwidth friendly mail list netiquette where violations had consequences i.e. your mailbox exploded with protests. For me, all sigs are noise.

Whatever happened to the pony-tail as proof of geekiness then (optionally co-ordinated with a PGP in perl t-shirt)?

Perfect.

Mmm ... the FireFox addon AdBlock Plus has just been very helpful disappearing some of those.

The latter **are** Microsoft based systems. That they have bits of unique code where you have a bit of unique VBS, or they decided to use product X to to extend the management capabilities whereas you used product Y instead, really isn't very significant. That said I'm thinking of CC3, not the MSPified successor CC4 with it's disproportionately large, proprietory and opaque manglement layer. Amongst other things, one very clear message from this forum is that technical wheels are being reinvented over and over in the 1001 ways Windows (sorry *nix folk, but..) permits. In this sub-forum in particular we hear how such technical diversity is everso extremely very important which is a perfectly natural stance for anyone attempting to defend themselves from BSF, but I think that argument was lost years ago i.e. RM put their "one-size-fits-all" system into lots of schools and for the most part it was a reasonably good fit. Frustratingly, because I think it's all far too late now, instead of just bitching about that you lot could have blown it away i.e. figured out that you have a great deal in common, realised that the choice of X or Y is much of a muchness so let's just have X, and made an open "baseline" standard for a school Windows system with it's own unique code to compensate for some of those native deficiencies, plus documentation, best practice for integrating special/unique features that really are necessary in some places, made GD's "policies and procedures" nicely tuned to that system and so on. But no one wants to do that do they? You're not content unless it's your creation that does things your way.

Does everyone know about the RFCs? Only today's was Google too: TCP Option to Denote Packet Mood Trouble with these is that some of the jokes can be very "in" i.e. are a lot funnier if you've spent considerable time working with real RFCs. This one from last year might be a bit more accessible, dunno: IANA Considerations for Three Letter Acronyms

Isn't it them that get a day a week to do anything (vaguely constructive) that they want?

That's quite a compelling take, but can I just call it 'culture shock' please? Interesting too. My whining was based on the (unstated) premise: "it'll be [bleepin] obsolescent by the time they've got it working!". If it is generally about people getting around to using as opposed to the tech being really buggy, then that is less troubling, but on reflection not much. My very first system commissioning job 15 years back had truckloads in common with a BSF (and then some) and the very shiny tech involved was a lot more for people to take on board in those days. The tech "snagging" was pretty much over in three months and at an organisational level, I'd say it was settled in six. Years ::eek!:: If that is what happens for those reasons, then yes a more incremental approach sounds like a very good, probably the only plausible, plan.

It's probably the same view for any private sector company dealing with public sector and it's not just our public sector e.g. Holland, Germany, France,... I don't do BSF news any more than news news so just went looking for that and found it via ICT fares well in BSF review - but not transformation. Nearby was Transcript challenges Bristol Brunel ICT furore which refers to the Times article Head of Bristol Brunel Academy says much school IT spending is wasted someone linked in another thread here a few weeks ago. I liked this from Mr BB: "get the balance between the ‘wow’ factor, the cost of functionality, because you can be really led up the wrong way by IT gurus, there’s lots of them out there". I know it's futile, but this and similar bits from the first link makes me want to scream: But let's be honest. We are still in the first stages of BSF and the Wave 1 projects are only just settling down.. How/why, when you're spending relatively massive amounts of money, is it acceptable for these systems to take years to settle down? What essential bleeding-edge T-word ‘wow’ tech is causing the problems? If you're genuinely competent you look before you leap, and consequently put some of those systems out of their misery. Never really figured this out, but some idiots can be extremely inventive and subtle.

MSP then wheels out a couple of the brightest/best/experienced they plucked from school-side who will understand it much, much better: Any company seriously targeting any significant market has experts from that market on tap. Your only hope with this approach might be with lack of educational experience/sensitivity amongst the people doing the in your face local stuff, but aren't many of those likely to have that because they were TUPEd? One man's cynicism, is another's realism and (subject to what happens in May) I don't think anyone has a cat in hell's chance, unless perhaps you have some genuinely world-class ICT and a bunch of smart/stubborn people at the top who, and this is probably the key bit, have pinned their reputations to that i.e. have often stood up in front of their peers et al and bragged about it. Same old, same old. You've been out there haven't you? It can be hard enough to find the qualities you're seeking from decision makers in the more Darwinian parts of the private sector, never mind in a Kafka-esque public sector bureacracy so strongly built on personal risk (responsibility, decision making) avoidance. A lot of it is ultimately that Peter Principle cited above. Get an expert in: a) Your cluelessness won't be exposed, b) You can say you were oh so dilligent by getting an expert in, c) If anything bad happens as a consequence it is their fault not yours, d) You get a pretty report to pass up the food-chain that you couldn't put together yourself in a month of Sundays. There will be some heroic exceptions to that blah-blah-blah, but that's pretty much the shape of it, isn't it?

Had a good and smart friend at Secondary school who people thought was a bit thick, at a glance today he would very likely have been called dyslexic. His entire education experience was actually crippled, and that is the right scope and word, because his Primary stuck with that notorious ITA experiment well past the sell-by-date. "Risk" implies the possibility of negative outcomes. Perhaps it's terminology - you could have fail-safe experiments in mind and I probably wouldn't call those risks, but if it's a genuine risk i.e. something that could set kids back if it fails then there is an immediate ethical problem. Nope just the only DCSF paper I've looked at this year that happened to talk about quantum leaps prior to the arrival of something like the Neuromancer head sockets. Good research is ultra-cautious for good reasons and IME just doesn't do that kind of language. People standing up at conferences talking about the joy of X are self-selecting for more enthusiatic, engaging types and that should be considered in why something apparently works. What happens if you give it to a routine teachers and they don't find it thrilling? Yes it will probably work, but it certainly feels like that kind of very basic question that should always be asked is being overlooked by the technology-is-fab roller-coaster. This could be wrong too, but I've got a sense of change for change's sake here. You don't have to wander too far to find places where "stability" has a leading role relevant to educational outcomes. Deeper down: Plus ca change. I think there's a bit of perspective problem i.e. people working in a variety of educational tech fields are overstating it's importance. We obviously need a solid "background level". The more specialist stuff is surely quite useful in places. For kids it can clearly be a more entertaining/inspiring way of learning something. But education got by OK without tech and the core, non-vocational educational stuff doesn't need it. What is the ROI here? Change in terms of ripping Peter Principle people out of their cosy nests is another story. We have and largely accept, the virtues of a national curriculum. Do we really need an infinite variety of tech carefully tailored to each individual school's needs to deliver that curriculum? A post code lottery is fine there, but not here? There's obviously a compromise somewhere, especially given that "carefully tailored" includes some rubbish systems, and presumably enough for ICT to get spot-welded to BSF in the first place. They[tm] got clean away with that "should be like turning on a light switch" slogan. Why? In principle managed services can deliver stability/reliability (derived via a pool of expertise none of us can hope to attain individually etc.) at the expense of that local responsiveness and flexibility. Unconvinced by the pressing need for so much local flexibility the concept doesn't really trouble me. The bit that does trouble me very much is the deafening silence which so far I've only seen punctuated by an occasional scream from an MSP school i.e. I'm not sure we're getting what we're paying, or at least should be paying, for. There are some people here that I reckon given the budget, could walk into some school with dire IT and within a few months have that school dancing for joy because of the improvement. Why aren't the MSP schools doing that?

There will clearly be some unpopular cuts regardless, and neither side wants to trigger that unpopularity by getting too specific about targets until *after* they've been elected. Because of that I'm expecting a few weeks of bickering claims and counter-claims about what the other side really intends to cut, or has that already started (I don't do the news much)?