James_C

Yeah that is what I am thinking. The serial number removal has not been an issue - I was just saying that is what I would do if I had to resort to stealing one of another student so I wouldn't have to pay the $50 replacement cost. It is mainly the tracking overhead for ICT staff which I am concerned about. Is it really worth it? Even if we lost 5 power supplies per year @ a total cost of $250 it is cheaper than me spending 2 days tracking them @ more than $250.

Just interested in how everyone manages power supplies for laptops. We have about 250+ laptops for year 10, 11, 12 students. And we have about 100 laptops for staff. Currently we manage the power supplies by serial number and user must return the the exact power supply (and not just A power supply). This creates significant management over heads trying to track power supplies to paticular user. Especially when students share them around and at the end of the year half of them hand in their friends power supply who then hands in theirs. One argument has been so that students cannot steal another students when they loose their own (but it is too easy to remove the serial number label and then we cant prove that anyhow). I am of the thinking that you sign out, or are allocated a laptop and it comes with A power supply and A bag (no tracking of power supply serial number), and when you return it you return A power supply with A bag. If either item is missing you are charged the replacement cost. No other place which I have worked tracks every individual power supply for a laptop but none of those were in the education arena. I think that responsibility needs to be put back onto the user of the laptop to ensure they have A power supply as we dont have the time to babysit them and track every power supply. We are talking senior students here who are about to head out into the big bad world, surely they can be made responsible for a power supply. Would be interested in your thoughts and how you all manage these. Regards James

Because he is a teacher I get the feeling he thinks he is the voice for them all, but yet when I talk to other teachers they have a very different view on things. He decideds what is best for them and doesnt really treat them like a customer and listen to what they are asking for. So that I dont take over this thread I may post this on a new thread as I would be interested on how I should deal with my thoughts on this. Cheers

We had a power spike the other day and it caused all kinds of problems. After a quick 15 minutes trying to resolve I made the call the restart everything including the EqualLogic data storage arrays and after that everything was back to perfect. It appeared that it caused issues with the virtual servers connections to the data array and the restart resolved the connection issues. Even though everything is on filtered UPS power a power spike still caused significant issues, weird world of IT we work in.

Try having an IT director who is also a teacher. I think he forgets which hat he has on sometimes.

I think that mjs_mjs is on the right track. To at least start your fault finding process. You said they can ping - did you ping to IP or did you ping to server name? At command prompt you could do an NSLOOKUP for the server name and domain name and see if they resolve. Let us know how you get on.

I think that so far about 5-6 years is the concensus on server life. The IT director at work seems to think if he doesnt spend the budgeted money he is going to loose it next year so he buys replacment servers etc even if they are not required. Yet the school is screaming poor and the replacement machine is not going to provide any end user experience improvement. He has the other management staff scared that if they are out of warranty the world is going to cave in around us. Heads up - He is a ICT teacher with an IT degree (or whatever univerisities give out - without any real world experience outside of the education system) who is also the IT director. Guess which department gets all the good gear???? For example he just spent $6k on a new video server because the warranty expired. Even though the current system has had absolutly zero issues and is running like a dream. We could have used that money to upgrade some backbone fibre with bottle neck issues to 10Gb and provide a end user noticable improvement. But nooooo the perfectly working server is out of warrantly and HAS to be replaced. We have about 4 very functional servers sitting around doing nothing because they ran out of warrantly and were replaced. Anyhow. Having a good engine but a crap broken chassis makes for a crap car. Just like having great servers but a crap network infrastructure.

What about the GoPro range? They seem to be what every kid wants these days for their crazy adventures, they are reasonably cheap, and can stand up to some rough treatment.

So you didn't get the crystal ball when you started? We have a web based incident system, or they report it at the helpdesk, or if it is an urgent class in session issue they can ring us. But often they do nothing and winge until we hear their cries, someone else logs the job, or we discover it. They apparently teach the kids to help themselves but they are often found wanting when they need to help their selves. We do have support by higher management in getting everyone to log a job as we need the incident data to justify funding for ICT support and services. But you have to be a little flexible and we sometimes jump to a teachers frantic calls for help, and we then log the incident on their behalf.

Just curious as to how everyone manages the life cycle of ICT assets, particularly servers. Do you replace as soon as warranty expires or do you wait until they become unreliable and/or the manufacturer cannot supply fast turn around replacement parts? Noting that most business level servers these days have redundant everything. I don't suggest keeping them for ever but a year or two past warranty expiration or until they become unreliable would surely make good financial sence in a tight budget school environment. Another consideration is we are running a virtual server environment so moving them around is easy, and a new physical server can be purchased and in location within 12-24hours and virtual machines moved back over. And all our data is on 2x Dell Equallogic data arrays, so really they are the key to data availability, the physical servers are only the interface for that data onto the end user. And with virtuals that interface is very flexible. Thanks for your thoughts

Someone has way too much time on their hands. Imagine living across the road from that. You would have to board up your windows to save your sanity.

We are on the verge of deploying Ipads over the next few months in a trail. Part of our proposal for the trail was for it to include JAMF Casper suite software, onsite installation and admin training. We are hoping this software solution is going to be the answer to our IOS deployment and on-going device / software managment. JAMF Software: Products - Casper Suite

I have just deployed CS6 with it installed on the master image (not my prefered way but dont have time to test alternate) and like you said you have to just run it once with the local admin account and it will then work for all users. Fun thing though you have to use the Local Administrator account, it will not work for another account which is a member of the local admin group, which is slowing down my deployment on 250 student laptops as I have to muck around with another logon step just to complete the whole deployment process. I am going to testbed other deploy options early next year, such as AAMME MSI package deployed with SCCM. Cheers

Thanks for that - I have read your blogs on OSD on SCCM and like what I have read so far. But your last post on this topic was part5 back in April and you said 6 & 7 are coming. Did you manage to complete them as I would love to see the completed product?

Yeah.. I hear what you are saying but my issues remain. I am running Hyper-V virtual domain controllers. And so far this is the best source of information I have found and I am going to give it another go sometime this week, as mine are only very slowly drifiting out of time. Time Synchronization in Hyper-V - Ben Armstrong - Site Home - MSDN Blogs But i do have a feeling that it may have something to do with a firewall or my HW firewall (netbox blue) which may be stopping my DC from getting time from an external source. As i did find something that was saying that it was attempting to contact the source but was unable to find it. Hope this helps someone. Will advise if I find anything new. Regards James

Same here. It is not a simple as it should be, especially with virtual domain controllers etc. Sorry i cant help but I feel your pain.

Hey guys, I have 250 student laptops to re-image. Now with SCCM2007sp2 I need to have the machine name and either the UUID or the MAC. MAC is no good (as we have found out) as we often change between the Wired NIC or the Wireless NIC and you can only have one MAC so therefore I am thinking the UUID is the best option for us. As this is 36 characters long it is going to be a long day if I need to type "Wmic csproduct get uuid" in a command prompt for each and every computer and then manually copy that over to a CSV file for import into the SCCM DB. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can do this fast and efficiently. They do have an OS on them but how good would it be if I could boot on a thumb drive with winpe and an auto run script which just copies the guid to a file on the thumb drive along with the current machine name. Then I can just edit the file and import. The other option is to enable "Unknown Computer" option but I dont think this will not allow me to dictate the machine name which is assigned to each uuid / computer. I dont think - never done it - anyone tried it???? Thanks James

Thanks for those comments. Spoke with Dell and they did a demo for us on their AppAssure software and now I am more uncertain than ever as it is lacking a few components which I was after. It appears to make the assumption that users of their system is going to be running shadow copy and using that for short timeframe file recovery, and only use their back up solution for full volume / VM recovery and not for individual files and folders without mounting the whole volume first.

This may have been asked before but a quick search didnt reveal much. Anyhow - what does everyone use/like/dislike etc for backups. We are currently running mostly Win2008r2 servers, all are virtual on Hyper-V. Dell equallogic storage array which is replicated to a second equallogic storage array. Our backup solution although it does exsist, it is a little wishy washy using Windows Server Backup with disk and tape solutions and numerous work arounds and robocopy etc, so I really want to clean it up. We do have SQL servers, but no exchange servers (using live@edu) for staff and student email. Believe it or not the school has had a CommVault licence for the past 2year but they never implemented it and it is about to expire. And considering it costs bucket loads and I see it for a larger enterprise type environment I am steering away from it. And I have spent my first 6 months there trying to filter through out dated or non existant documentation and other half implemented systems otherwise I would have had a crack at it myself. I am currently looking at a Dell AppAssure solution for them and speaking with Dell it is going to be heaps cheaper than CommVault, it will back up to the second equallogic array and then from there to long term archive backups. And they will implement it for us whilst conducting admin training. Although it is not as feature packed and has some limitations, it meets the needs of a school environment. But now I am looking at the Windows System Center 2012 (any comments apprecaited - dont know much about it) Anyhow that should get the ball rolling and I would love to hear your thoughts. Cheers James

Thanks for that solution. Now if the IT Director thinks this is too hard for the teachers, then maybe they shouldnt be teachers. I think that is a very acceptable and easy solution which works without implementing other complexities. I just now need to educate them with this great little solution. Thanks again

Sorry to continue to beat the horse on this one but I have a couple of questions. Why do we need to see the users name instead of having a generic "My Documents" for the users folders anyhow? If i need to get to a students or staff folder I just open windows explorer and type \\servername\share\y##\username and it opens the users folder. The only problem I see is that we have teachers who often need access to a students folder and trying to teach a teacher how to type that simple line is too hard (words from my IT director / who is also a teacher - not me). I was thinking a simple little script or exe on the teachers desktops which they can open, it asks for the students username and then opens the user folder in explorer for them. I just need someone to write that for me ?????? (or maybe spend some time myself learning - how hard could it be??) Next one - is sort of relevant so I will start a new thread also... Regarding how everyone is managing student folders, do you break them into year groups or should I put them all in one spot under students (just like we already do for staff)? It would save migrating students at the end of the year to the new year group - and I dont see any benefits of seperating them into year groups, taking into account the above paragraph and getting to the user folders, there is no need to browse to them - I just map directly to them to manage. Thoughts - thanks in advance

How good is RoboCopy !!! Although never thought to use it for finding old unused files. Good tip I will also look at that option.

Hello all, I have only recently started in the education ICT world. For the last 8 months working in a P-12 Private College in Hervey Bay, QLD. Prior to that I spent 12 years in ICT within the defence force (Army) up to the level of SGT managing Aus comms in Afghan. Anyhow the eduaction system is a whole new ball game with different rules and in some areas more complex than any other systems I have worked on. My biggest task is the lack of documentation on the current system and having to re-learn what has been done previously, and learning to work the politics which I have little time for. Anyhow I found this whilst site whilst looking for a forum to discuss specific education ICT issues, and was considering starting one up if nothing exsisted. See how this goes before re-inventing the wheel. Look forward to chatting with you all, as I have heaps of things that I would like opinions on, and bounce ideas off. I need to know if I am trying to travel down the wrong path, or the ICT director and other staff members where I work are suffering from static stagmentation (been there too long) and dont realise how bad their system is - or am I expecting too much and it is actually in good shape compared to other education establishments. Cheers James