Jay

As well as telnetting out on port 80, you could try 443 to see if the ssl port is also blocked. Sounds very much like something sniffing the outbound traffic, left over AV hooks perhaps after an uninstall, Norton used to do that all the time.

If its seven years old you may as well just buy a new base unit, it will probably cost the same as upgrading and be a lot quicker. (Assuming its using an older CPU socket, DDR1 and AGP.) Still wouldn't think the Sims would require a lot of horse power to run.

Depends if its hardware or software raid. Normally you could have a dedicated on board/plugged in hardware raid controller with its own BIOS to configure and setup discs in various arrays and configurations (like a Dell Perc). You would also have a dedicated driver CD to use when installing windows, via the usual hit F? to load a raid/scsi driver on setup message you get when first installing. As far as the OS is concerned, its then seen as a single disc, the controller does all the managment. I tend to go for Raid 5 on data volumes with a single disc reserved for hot stand by. In the event of a failure the spare disc will automatically take up the load of the failed disc with maybe a hour or two of downtime to rebuild the data. You can then wander in the next day, view the warning message, purchase a new hot spare/take one from stock and replace. For serious uptime, using a mirrored array will remove the rebuild time for Raid 5, but at the cost of more £'s per MB. (1/2 capacity of all discs opposed to 3/4 capacity in a 4 disc raid 5.)

That sounds more like a networking issue. You could try running a packet sniffer or HTTP inspector to check the requests are being made and responded to. Other than that checking event viewer, logs etc is all i can think of. Don't really know the package you're using.

Assume your Natting, perhaps the rebuilt machine has a different LAN IP? (Did you give it the same static address as the old one.) Assuming there is no firewall in the way or on the local machine and RDP is turned on, thats all I can think of. Edit: Just read the bit about OWA, so assuming the name for RDP is the same, NAT must be working unless your router requires you to specify port when Natting.

If you're talking about Forefront, you will need to be able to live with a block level of only 95% or so, unless you want to turn up the thresholds and trawl through a quarantine mailbox each day. We recently implemented it and are now looking at putting a second system in place as its impossible to catch 99%+ whilst still letting through all genuine mail. Message Labs are pretty good (cloud service), although they have just been bought by Symantec.

I don't have time to do anything, but some of the popular topics i get regularly asked are: Using mobile devices for effective communications Blackberry, PDA, Smartphone, Netbook etc The amount of times I get told schools SMT's have bought the latest and greatest and now are wondering what to use them for. e-Saftey What is is, why is it important, etc. The difference between filtering and monitoring systems and when each should be used. Complieing with the DPA and FoI requests, and how to use monitoring without seeming to invade a users privacy. My favourite: Why you shouldn't use gmail/yahoo/hotmail/blah for your schools email service. (unless you like the idea of a 1/2 mil fine and possible jail term.) (Sounds like its partially covered under data security) Making best use of Video Conferencing systems I actually wrote a mini-website about this a while back, see this page for what I mean. Video Conferencing, Some suggestions for use Smartboards Promeathean for example, have some superb software for primary schools, but very few seem to use it to its full ability. In particular its use in teaching special needs pupils. (fun to use, tactile and interactive) Student Response Systems Probably been done already, but handy for a quick quiz or to find out which pupils need help without embarrassing the kids in front of class. And of course you could write an entire paper on how to make best use of a learning platform/vle/mle. (or a small library) Sorry its a little late, but maybe useful to someone. J

It seems I'm not the first to ask this question. I've been told there is no central training fund outside of specific projects like VLEs, its devolved down to schools as part of the budget. The technical manager at ICT is speaking with the training provider that NCC use to try and arrange a discount for schools though. Apparently its the same training provider that a number of Norfolk schools already use. Can't say the name.

The question was asked in the NCC forums a while back (April) and the HR peeps said that only those who retire, leave due to ill health and those made redundent would get back pay. However the unison guy (Jonathan Dunning) said that it was still under discussion and peeps who left NCC could make an equal pay claim, so maybe its changed since. Edit: Nope, its confirmed in the booklet bottom of page 14 (green bit).

Mine came Monday, but I'm Sprowston, Norwich. I spent ages looking through the booklet trying to find the bit that said my new scale, then realised the letter was double sided paper...

NB: If you can get OWA to work on a non standard port, you can use apache virtual directories/hosts to pass HTTP(S) for /OWA/ requests onwards to IIS. (AJP Proxy or similar module I think)

In the PDF document I read online, it specificly states pay increases including appropriate increments are backdated to April 2007 once your final salary is determined unless you leave NCC (schools the same I guess) volentry*. The thing I find most annoying is that peeps who left employment with NCC/Schools by choice after April 2007 are not (it seems) entitled to backpay if the scale rises, I'm not very comfortable with that. J *Sorry, I tried to spell it, honest.

James at Sprowston had some plans to make the school a prometric test centre. I've not spoken to him in some time, so am not sure how far along they are, but worth checking. (This is the kind of thing the LA ought to sponser IMO*) Jarrolds used to offer prometric as well, but its been a while since I've been on a course. (unless it was Pearson VUE, not sure exactly which.) J *Will raise tomorrow if I remember, prod me if I forget. I imagine there has to be some sort of LA assisted training fund for school techs.

You might want to exclude the bottom 7 addresses from DHCP on each 24 bit subnet since they will permit the workstations unfiltered FTP out. (Norfolk config). I'd allocate these via reservations to staff members who might find it useful.

I'm not sure anyone elses costs will help you unless you are looking at the same geographical areas. LES is highly depended on the distance from the exchange for each end point as well as the basic cost. For a school sitting next to the exchange and with fibre already in the area the cost will be far lower than a rural school in the middle of knowhere. Also at present BT can only do 10Mb over copper, so unless you have access to existing fibre, you would also have to pay excess charges for laying new fibre and go through the joy of civil works. The good news is that once you have the fibre going from 10Mb to 100Mb to 1000Mb is just a matter of flicking a switch and swapping out NTEs and routers.

Might be worth having some sort of workshop where both you and the SMT can explain the facts of life to your staff. I'm sure that with good reasons for what you're doing the majority will accept the need for change. Worth checking with your SMTs first though. I would guess your Offsted probably pointed out that IT wasn't a strong area given what you have said. You could indicate to your staff the failure in this area is one good reason for change. It's my experience that offsteds seem to scare the bejesus out of most teachers. There is an AUP here that might be of use: Acceptable Use Policy (two links within) . It's fairly old and in need of updating but the principles should be the same. J

Speaking as someone who has had one of their packages for a few years, don't expect great uptime, I get around 97% with regular drop-outs. I don't doubt its the same with many other shared hosting providers though, too many users on each server, (and too many script kiddies killing the threads with endless loops). Interestingly though they had two incidents of MS SQL clusters downed at the begining of the year which is unusual.

I don't have the full list on this machine to hand but I've got a list of items from our legal team (Norfolk CC) that I needed to cover for our email system. You have to start thinking about data retention policy, for example data protection laws require you to store 6 months worth of message logs* (who sent what and when). You should also have a written policy regarding placing a hold on an email account or freezing messages when requested by the courts. Exchange 2007 has some of this functionality built in I know and a lot of it is just manual stuff but pretty important still. J *Not the message contents, thats not covered (yet).

Norfolk did look at quite a few providers, I think around 20 were invited to tender initally. The requirements of MIS intergration, BSF availability levels of 99.99%, no hidden charges for extra drive space etc put a lot of suppliers off though. The fronter solution came top both technically (bits above) and when tested by teachers and heads. I don't think we had any Moodle suppliers reply to the tender, the other candicates had custom solutions or Sharepoint based offerings with custom web parts. The other posts are correct in saying its optional. As I understand it some of the money being used is from a central government grant to RBC/LA's to provide a learning platform option to schools, its not topsliced as such so I doubt you would get any back. (Best to speak with Mike Pickett from NCC to confirm) PS: The LA offering is the standard product but with a slightly different support package. There is a LA section that the teaching advisory service will no doubt make use of. One of the things to think about with any MLE/VLE is how you collaberate with other schools, thats one area any LA/RBC offering should have an advantage with. I know fronter does because we had a discussion not so long ago about devolving some cross-school enrolement permissions to named individuals at school level (federations, shared teachers etc).

If you use an HTTP(S) proxy then the proxy handles name resolution for you. Also your machine might be using a local DNS server with forwarding configured. In either case if those machines are permitted outbound 53 UDP access then you would still be able to resolve names to IP's when browsing. Don't know if that helps any.

FYI, from my (limited) understanding: London Grid for Learning have over 400K users on Fronter. Might be an idea to have a chat with an area, wouldn't hurt. J