teejay

Just be careful, some of the copier rental/leasing contracts have some real nasties in them and unless it's a government framework contract I really would get the contract looked at by a solicitor before signing up to it. There have been quite a few schools ripped off with things like the 'evergreen' contract which is virtually impossible to get out of and costs a fortune.

We used to have Sun storage and was brilliant until Oracle bought them out. We are now using Dell Equallogic kit, which is very good especially as our whole virtualised stack is Dell, so we only have one port of call in case of issues. Before our virtualisation stack was 3 different manufacturers and we did get in a nasty situation where each vendor was blaming each other for the failure. EMC kit is very good, HP some people really like, NetApp some people love whereas others aren't too impressed by it. All I would say is, do get pricing for more than one manufacturer and haggle hard, playing them off against each other as you'll be amazed how quickly certain manufacturers will suddenly come back with some very special bid pricing once they know other storage vendors are bidding.

First off, what part of the country are you in? I'm sure there are a lot of people on here who would be willing for you to come into their school to see what the job is like, I'd be more than happy if you are in or around the West Yorkshire area. I would say your best option would be to go down the web development route, there are a lot of schools, especially secondary or colleges, who have someone working full/part time on web development including the website and VLE etc. It's often combined with other software roles to make the job full time, for instance our web dev also does software deployment and some other bits and pieces. You would need to up your skillset slightly and gain some experience of working with content management systems like Joomla and blogging software like Wordpress, also VLE software such as Moodle. All of those are open source and free, so you could set them up on a machine at home and learn how they work. Personally I think you may struggle with an IT Technician role, although if part of a team in a larger school the job could be tailored around you to some extent. IT Technician roles do tend to have quite a lot of manual work fixing PC's, projectors, printers and anything else with a plug on. Once you get to higher levels such as Network Manager roles, the manual work level does decrease, but is still there.

There were on ours when we did ours last month. There was also quite a big variance in pricing, so do shop around but also be carefull if one are substantially cheaper as they may be quoting the wrong product.

Depends what roles are on the server, if it has Microsoft SQL or Exchange then snapshotting is not supported by Microsoft, even if snapshotted from a powered off state. In these instances you would need to use your backup software. For Domain Controllers, anything before Server 2012 cannot be snapshotted, 2012 can be snapshotted if you are using VSphere 5.0 update 2 or VSphere 5.1 although this is new technology for Microsoft so I wouldn't do it yet on a live DC. I always create a test VM to play around with new software, I don't touch production servers for testing new software and for something like Owncloud that would want to be on its own VM anyway. I tend to work on a replica when testing rather than snapshotting.

I can see the idea behind it, but it really hasn't been costed or thought through properly so when they start crunching the numbers and looking at the knock on effects then I can see this being kicked into the long grass pretty quickly. For a start, staff costs are going to increase massively, teachers will need to be compensated for the extra hours or extra teachers employed to cope with the extra hours. Same with support staff, most of our support staff are only contracted from the current start to end of school hours, so their hours will need increasing, again costing more. PFI and BSF schools will probably get screwed for more money as the opening hours are longer. You then have to look at the environmental issue and the hassle of the school runs being combined with rush hour, causing even more congestion at peak times. IT wise, not really a problem as it works fine in business, apart from again extra costs for increasing technicians hours to full time and also paying overtime for out of hours work when upgrades need to be done. Yes certain upgrades can be done during school time, others can't. I'm not against the idea, but there will be a lot of extra costs involved and schools aren't exactly rolling in money.

Hate saying this, but after testing a few different options I'd go with an iPad.

We looked at this and it was actually cheaper to backup to encrypted tape and store offsite. Another option is if you're friendly with another school then you could have a reciprocal agreement where you backup onto storage at each others site. We did look at this, but as soon as it was mentioned to our lawyers there was some sharp intake of breath and talk of contracts and liability so we backed off from it. You also have to be careful of data protection as you will be storing sensitive data off premises. You could try the government purchasing portal who have pre-agreed contracts for this - CloudStore | G-CloudG-Cloud

We have some of the Dells here, lovely laptops, also really easy to deploy if you're using WDS or similar as they do a specific driver pack download so no flagging about finding individual drivers. Try haggling a bit on the hard drives, 'like your laptop but other makes have a bigger he'd tends to work ;-)'

Why not just replace the hard drive, I know it's 6 years old but still perfectly serviceable, maybe stick an SSD in?

Get quotes from other companies yourself and argue over it. They will say it's for maintenance over the lifetime of the PFI, but you'll find most decent installers will provide a 25 year warranty on the cabling anyway. We ended up getting the structured cabling removed from the PFI contract as they were doing such a poor job with it.

Still got em, will finish decommissioning them at Easter.

You'll need to check with Netgear, but the Oracle S7000 we used supported all of that. We have moved on from that due to Oracle being Oracle:rolleyes:, but we would get cracking performance out of it and the snapshotting/replication was far superior to Microsoft. If you go down the iSCSI route, you would want to put a 10Gb in the NAS and one dedicated to the iSCSI network in the server. You could add a second 10gb in the server for your link into the network. You also really need to look at your disaster recovery/availability when you are specifying your solution as well, putting a lumping great NAS on the network, even if it has redundancy built in can take a long time to fix if things go pear shaped.

Is it storage for your file shares that you are after, if so then the ReadyData supports CIFS/SMB so you can host your shares directly on it rather than mounting as iSCSI. You'll get much better performance then and you can also utilise the features of ZFS to get some brilliant snapshoting which integrates with Windows previous versions. If you have the budget, I'd consider buying a second one with cheaper disks and without the 10Gb nic, stick it in a different building if possible and replicate the shares across onto it for disaster recovery/high availability.

The Sharepoint component of Office 365 for edu only gives you 500Mb free space per user, which might not be enough for this.

Is that driver from the Intel website, if so I would try the version from the HP website.

Again, another vote for E45 here. I used to work as a pharmacy assistant in my younger years and it was always what we recommended. Try a tube of it first off the shelf, but if you find it works then you can get big tubs of it from the pharmacy counter which works out much cheaper.

You could export some snow to the Eskimos

I think the plan is to give these to kids in a computer club, so they can take them home to experiment with. Using these in lessons and not letting them take them home is a bit pointless, as you say you might as well stick a Linux vm on the school desktops. Also, with the gpio on the pi, you can use it cross curricular so they can experiment with using it to control other devices or monitor things, what about a weather monitoring station for geography, or controlling a robot in technology etc.

Vote for Bosch as well. One word of warning with new kitchen appliances, check the dimensions of it before you buy as some of them are now made for deeper worktops so are too deep to fit under a standard worktop, especially integrated appliances. Found that to my cost when our washing machine needed replacing recently

If you are buying in any quantity then you'll be surprised how much the Dell prices drop when you accidentally mention that you're getting quotes from HP and Lenovo as well. All manufacturers make the odd duff model, the difference is how they deal with them and that is generally where I've found Dell to be brilliant on their support as they will deal with it properly and with much less hassle.

Our school closed today, annoying thing is my work laptop has packed in over the weekend, so can't remote in to do some work.

I love this bit on their page - IMPORTANT NOTICE: All of our horse burgers contain horse meat, we do not add beef to our horse burgers.

Capita hosting was pretty poor for us, but we ended up ditching SLG altogether rather than self hosting. If you are looking at the self hosting route, you do need someone on your team with strong Sharepoint skills. In fact I would say the only time I've seen SLG work is when a school has a strong existing Sharepoint based infrastructure and integrate SLG into that. Have you really looked at what you are going to use it for, there are other products that integrate with SIMS to provide parental access etc that are much easier to manage and do a better job in my opinion. For staff access to SIMS, a proper remote access solution providing access to the full version of SIMS works much better than SLG and is certainly more reliable. Have a look at the products available from TASC, Bromcom and Groupcall etc, they all intergrate with SIMS extremely well, are cheaper, much easier to set up and maintain, provide a much better end user experience.

Here's our lunatic, Mac. 9 months old now, so a bit of a 'Kevin' at the moment:rolleyes: http://i399.photobucket.com/albums/pp75/midarga/mac/Devon%2029-10-12/IMG_2934.jpg http://i399.photobucket.com/albums/pp75/midarga/mac/Devon%2030-10-12/IMG_2970.jpg http://i399.photobucket.com/albums/pp75/midarga/mac/Devon%2029-10-12/IMG_2943.jpg