Dantech

Hi A big thanks to Mark from Computer Products Ltd | Home who rang and discussed my issue. He has come up with some straight forward practical things to try: Reduce the power on the AP's which are close together I have a Wi-Fi Analyzer free App on my Android Phone and can use this to check for general bandwidth crowding Check from the Ruckas web console how many AP's can be seen from a classroom and turn down the power so these are not fighting for the connection I had another really good idea to increase the bandwidth available for the AP's in one science block. Since I now have two Optic fibres from the core going to the science blaock I will trunk these to provide a 2Gb backbone and then the 4 AP's and the 4 wired PC's will have 2Gb to share! I will do this this summer. Mark

All our channels are set by the zone director. It had not occurred to me to set the channels manually. I think interference is the problem and I think too many AP's are close to each other. I am seriously looking at investing in a Wi-Spy device to see what is really happening on the wavebands. The main problem area is science where we have two blocks seperated by a 12 foot gap and I see overlap between them. Once science teachers laptop constantly swaps between one AP and another because they have similar signal strengths. Mark

Hi Thanks for your feedback. Do you not have problems logging in 15 machines at once. I assume your wireless cards are n ready? Mark

Hi Look at Aruba too. Their system broadcasts on one channel and appears to get over the simultaneous login issue. To rip out the Ruckas after investing nearly £20 in the last 3 years is not something I would do lightly. I am thinking of trunking two 1Gb ports to provide a 2Gb feed to a couple of areas where laptops are used heavily. Thanks for the suggestion about the PCMCIA cards - I have not used these for so long that I forgot these may work. I will look at cost and availability. Best of luck with your search. By the way our system was originally installed by Nexgen Solutions and worked well for the first year until we introduced Vista. We dsicovered that IP 6 screwed things up so we have turned this off on all our network. However one day in the not too distant future we may have to use it as the IP addresses have all run out! Mark

Hi Thanks for the feedback. I have thought of all that. Our site has ten buildings spread apart physically with 1Gb Mulimode fibre between them. Each building has at least one edge switch at the receiving end of the cable from the core. We are maxed out on fibre connections with all 12 being used (some buildings have two fibres going to them, hence 12. In the science block I ran a new 1Gb cable last half term and used a cheap HP switch which has the new 1Gb AP's plugged into these using Mid-span injectors (this was cheaper than buying a dedicated PoE switch for just 4 AP's). This way the 4 AP's have a dedicated 1Gb feed from the Core switch. However we still struggle to get 15 laptops in together, but these are all HP nx6325 running XP Pro with a b\g network card. We are replacing our core switch on 18th July to provide us with a 24 port 1Gb Optic Module. This will provide a further 12 optic links which will allow us direct 1Gb feeds for data direct to the AP's. However because I am also replacing 3 edge switches to provide 1Gb on the desktop we are also provide proper PoE switches in these areas. It all conmes down to affordability I'm afraid. Ideally I would buy all new 1Gb dual band Ruckas AP's and buy laptops with n ready wireless built in. I found through experience NOT to use an n ready USB adapter because the computer does not pre-authentic properly and mapped drives under this scenario do not map properly leaving our users with no home drive h\: Mark

Thanks for that tip. I did not even think this would make a difference. I will investigate this.

Thanks for the reply Nephilim (interesting choice of name that!) I have really gone off Acers and do not buy any now. Our problem is most fo the laptops we struggle to connect with are 5 years old - yet I get blamed for it not working! The language ones work better now that we updated the realtek drivers to the latest. They are all HP 550's and about three years old now. It's just that I cannot get more than 15 laptops to login in one teaching room - but the AP is the other side of a wall. every where the signal is excellent but logging in seems to be problematic and we do not use roaming profiles. We delete local profiles once a term to avoid unneccesary login delays.

To say I am cheesed off with my Ruckus wireless system is putting it extremely mildly. Thanks to my last post on Edugeek I made contact with a very nice man with the same name as me from a company called c-p-ltd who were incredibly kind and sent me a Ruckas loan kit of the 1GHz dual band AP's so I could see whether or not they were worth investing in. We had up to then 30 - 10/100 AP's which are zf2942 Ap's. Having tried out the zf7363 1GHz dual band I was blown away by the performance. The max through put we ever measured with the zoneflex was 28mbp/s on the old ones. With a new laptop which was n ready and the only one of two in the entire school(!) I got a throughput speed of 132Mbp/s. we called in some "experts" to review our wired network who said our installer had basically fitted the netgear PoE switches (unmanaged midspan injection of PoE) into a port in a 48 port switch with a 1Gb feed, so in reality the PoE switch would get 1/48th 1Gb max in worst case scenarion and this was divided between four AP's - then you divide it by the clients... you get the picture! So I bought 7 of the new AP's from C-p-ltd and they were here within two days and I spent last half term installing them. It has made a more reliable connection in our languages area, but because they are not n capable not that much of a difference yet. We still have problems getting 15 to login. Do I really have to replace every laptop before I see any real improvement? Mark:confused:

Hi Thanks for that. It seems worth a try. If I lose this member of staffs e-mails I will be in the doghouse so I won't rush. She says she can cope with it but I don't want to leave it like that. Before too long I will upgrade to Exchange 2007 or 2010 if it's ready but which ever I choose has to work well with Sharepoint MOSS 2007 which Exchange 2003 does not. I will try this and post back my findings to benefit others. Mark

On this theme, I am trying to get help because of all the mailboxes that could go wrong the ICT Co-Ordinators has to be the one! She cannot access webmail from home at all. Within the network the webmail shows 99 folders labelled sync issues xx etc. Her inbox is renamed non_ipm_subtree/inbox and has her normal inbox e-mail. This is not there if you use Office Outlook 2007 on the local machine using cached exchange mode. I have followed some MS KB info and re-installed Office 2007 completely but this problem occurs on another local machine too. I suspect the problem is her mailbox itself and I would welcome suggestions as to how to repair it. I login as me and outlook works fine for me. Any suggestions would be most welcome. Mark

If you delete the mailbox and re-create won't you lose all the users e-mail?

Hi That sounds too easy to me. The county do not think like us! They provide support but don't seem to provide a lead on issues like this for some reason. It really would seem sensible for the county to provide certificates. I might raise this one with the appropriate person.

Hi Everyone Further to my recent posts you may be interested to know that SIMS will not help me in resolving port addressing issues without paying an additional sum! Which is rich when you consider that without this knowledge the whole of ALG becomes pointless! Just a warning to others that if, like me, they have never addresses these things before then be prepared for this. If I were to do this again I would insist that the remote access information is sorted before you sign off the contract. In SIMS favour (and the guy there is very helpful) they have posted me a link to the microsoft site which deals with the issue. Take a look at Plan alternate access mappings (Office SharePoint Server) Mark

Thank you for the explanation matt40K and wesleyw. That is most helpful. Sharepoint is huge and as usual nobody will pay for training, so I'm learning this as I go along! I do not want to have to install an ISA box but maybe I will have to.

matt40k - Please can you clarify what you mean by reverse proxy? I thought about removing the http only and this was suggested by Mouchel (who support Lincolnshire). Not sure if this will work or if I will totally kill the SLG. I have logged a support call with SIMS on this and will see what they say.

Hi The decision was made above my head to go for the full blown SLG. I went for the full MOSS 2007 and am thrilled that we now have the full sharepoint for other uses too. I insisted on a hosted solution for the same reason we host our own website and moodle. The thing keeps going internally so your lessons and access to these systems is a lot more reliable. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this but I am struggling with the external connection via our county firewall. The SLG engineers created our sharepoint in the format http://ourserver:38040/SLG/default aspx for example. Since we need an SSL connection I have obtained a certificate from ipsCA (FREE) and installed it. I had to add an https connection to the SLG website and bound it to port 443 to allow it through the county firewall. Apparently once the end user logs in it drops back to an http connection which means data over the internet is vunerable. Has anyone out then been through this or is it just me?

Hi I have just installed my free certificate from ipsCA but when testing it IE 8 still does not trust it. The engineer at Mouchel says I should dump it and buy one from Verisign but this will cost shed loads. He reckons that MS will not trust ipsCA certs - is this true? They virtually cancelled my change request over this and I am trying to get our SLG live by September!

Hi Just thought I would share my experience using ipsCA. I waited a while for an e-mail from them before realising it had gone into my junk e-mail folder in Exchange 2003. I am now at the last stage of waiting for the certificate, but it seems to have gone through OK. No payment needed which is the best thing. I wish I had set up a webmaster e-mail account before doing the above because they replied to admin@ which is handled by the Head's PA. Fortunately I was able to warn her in time and I got the e-mail. Just something to be aware of. I did notice there was no way of saying I was using iis 7 though and had to choose iis 6 - just hope this is not a problem.

Sorry It got late. Yes I did mean IIS 7 which comes with Server 2008.

Sorry - not enough detail! On IIs 6.0 on Server 2008 Enterprise Edition with Hyper V. My Sharepoint Server is running on a virtual machine. I have discovered that the ipsca.com website has instructions which gave me an idea of what to do but bore no relation to IIs 6.00. Most people do not seem to be familiar with this yet. There is actually a handy icon for managing web certificates in IIS which made it easy to find. I have submitted my request now, but thanks for offering to help.

Thanks for the useful info posted here. I need to do this SSL stuff as cheap as poss. this year. Does anyone know a good site where I can get help to install SSL certificates because I have never done it and am not sure how to go about it?

Hi We use 3 PDA's for SIMS registration in PE. Don't underestimate how long you will spend getting these to work! The documentation is very confusing and every time you do a SIMS update you have to make changes on your server and the PDA's. Synching data before going offsite and re-synching when the teacher comes back is a challenge for our staff! I have one myself and they are all the cheapest HP offering - the Classic Handheld 114. Added a 1 Gb SD card to hold photos of the kids too. Syncs as soon as I walk in my office to our wireless network. TIPS: Turn wireless off to conserve battery life. Also very sensitive to heat so don't carry in trouser pocket or it hangs and is difficult to reset.

I urgently need one for our Sharepoint server (we invested in an in-house hosted SIMS learning Gateway running full Sharepoint.) If anyone knows the cheapest place to buy these I would be interested.

Hi I agree - my knowledge of Linux was virtually nil. But who has the time to learn all the nuances of Linux - I don't. To change a students password meant changing three passwords in a DOS type screen. In AD its so simple. My technician had used it for three years and now he does not want to go back. Education is about achievement and Linux just wouldn't link easily with any of the developments that we were planning. I'm not totally against Linux - it is stable. I just think there are too many distros and too many things like drivers which don't work. Also we were totally depending on a third party to do everything in Linux and he would not tell us how to do things unless we asked because he knew that he would do himself out of a contract. In the end he did that anyway. Also our county can provide no support for Linux (or Vista for that) and when they brought in Netsweeper which had to be integrated in our AD I don't know what we would have done with the old linux system. We would have had no internet access at all! If I have time I will re-install one of our Linux boxes and use it as a proxy server, but to be honest I would rather learn Sharepoint and Server 2008 which are of much more use to me.

I would like to stand up for this company. Yes they cold called me, but I am so glad they did. The guy I spoke to was MCSE qualified and really knew his stuff. I got quotes from 15 companies for my new servers and decided to give the order to the TI group. I have never been let down by them (unlike the majority of other small suppliers). When I was promised that the goods would be here the next day they were; when I was told they would get back to me they did very quickly. Since this post is 2 years old I can only assume that your experience was a one off. The TI group have always given me free advice both before and after the sale and they keep in touch. I still buy things from them and bought another server this year from them. I also bought 12 Macs from them and they were here within two days - even thought the room was not completed for another month! The TI group are not just box shifters - they genuinely looked after me. Mark