teejay

In the UK, not USA, metre is a unit of measurement, meter is a measuring device.

If the computers are owned by the school and the staff are employed by the school (if for instance you have subcontracted catering then you don't include those staff), then yes they have to be counted.

Can't you just use Schools Agreement instead, which is done on a desktop count rather than FTE equivalent staff count and is cheaper per unit? Schools Agreement will be continuing and running alongside EES for schools like yours where EES isn't economical.

I think at this point as previously mention by someone else, I'd be firing up Wireshark to see what sort of traffic is bouncing around the network.

A picture may help:

Have you checked that you haven't got multiple IP addresses for the servers in dns? If you've been playing with teaming etc, you may have some duff dns entries.

You're best checking this with Microsoft, quite a few suppliers are muddling up part codes for EES/Schools Agreement products, had that happen on about 50% of the quotes I got.

You can still use their proxy server for filtering etc, the router/firewall you put in yourself will have an option to use an upstream proxy. For external access to servers, then yes you will need to get them to change it so that they point to your firewall and that then points to your servers.

As localzuk has said. I've always stuck our own firewall between us and the LEA and used NAT, the LEA can take a jump if they expect me to make our network visible to them, bad security if you do in my opinion. Just make sure you're using ranges within your personal NAT range that aren't used by the LEA, so if they use 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255 range then use either 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255 or 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255. I tend to avoid the 192.168 range as a lot of devices use that as their default network, which can play havock when someone plugs some new random device in and you get an ip conflict.

Depends what you're using it for, if it's for teaching, then you can get it free under MSDN Academic Alliance for use in school, or through Dreamspark for students/staff to use at home free of charge. If you are using it to develop non-educational stuff such as in house development then you need to buy it, but you only need to buy it for the limited number of users who do this.

Best price I found was by raising an ITQ on buyingsolutions.gov.uk and then haggling with the top few best quoting companies Edit: Sorry, I can't give prices, I feel that's unfair to the suppliers who quote, although I'm sure the ones who lost would love to know....

Create two virtual switches, one called something like external and one called internal. On the external one you assign one of the physical nics, then build a vm using the firewall product of your choice, connecting the red side to external, green to internal and to use an upstream proxy/gateway pointing to your internet connection firewall. You then build you test machines connecting to the internal network and pointing to the firewall for their gateway/proxy. Edit: just to clarify, don't assign any physical nics to the internal switch.

There is a way to have multiple remote desktops on Windows 7, but in doing so you breach the license for Windows 7 as it's licensed for a single user only.

There isn't an SCCM 2010, the latest version is SCCM 2007 R3. There is System Center Essentials 2010 whihc is a cut down version of sccm with some parts of scom and scvmm built into it, whihc is designed for smaller networks but does have some limitations. Edit: Got interrupted half way through typing and so didn't see previous responses.....

Don't worry, Bernie will have the BBC Executives on a fact finding mission to Monaco and suddenly the F1 coverage will be 'an important part of BBC's sports coverage'.

Yes, there is, System Center Server Management Suite covers the server side: Comprehensive solution for end-to-end management of physical and low-density virtual server environments that includes the Enterprise Server management licenses for Operations Manager 2007 R2, Configuration Manager 2007 R2, Data Protection Manager 2010, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2; Service Manager 2010; the Management Server license for Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2; the Management Server License for Data Protection Manager 2010; and, rights to manage Virtual Operating System Environments (VOSEs) plus the Physical Operating System Environment (POSE) provided the POSE is limited to supporting the virtualization capability.

And he has a pair of wellies with the 'special' straps:p

No, it's not right, on the core switch you assign an ip address for each vlan as per your configuration in op and use this as your default gateway address in that vlan. In your example you would set the default gateway to 192.168.40.254 if the code example given earlier was used on your core switch.

It's recommended by HP to move the management off the default VLAN, http://www.hp.com/rnd/pdfs/Hardening_ProCurve_Switches_White_Paper.pdf

The default gateway is used by the inter switch communication traffic and if you use stuff life snmp on the switches. If you don't have it set to the core switch and you move say a monitoring server which uses snmp to a vlan then it won't communicate. You only need an ip address on the core switch, the only other time you'll need an ip address is if you move switch management onto it's own VLAN and then you'll need an ip address for each switch in that VLAN.

That looks spot on. Few other things: Make sure routing is disabled on all the switches that don't require it and the default gateway on all switches except your core switch is updated to your core switch that's doing the routing. When you've set up the switches, on each one download the configuration file and also go into the console cli interface and do a write mem. Some of your edge switches may be defaulted to 8 vlans max, change this if required. For added security you may want to look at moving switch management off the default VLAN. Oh and make sure you've got a stress ball to hand ;-)

Yes you can have multiple ip helper addresses. You only want to specify the ip helper addresses and the ip address on the switch that will be the default route for the vlan.

Yep, strange, I did also send them a bit of a ranting email yesterday, don't know which one had the desired effect;) They haven't given me any indication as to what the error is yet, it's currently being escallated higher up the chain. Have to be honest, I don't really blame Capita support either, it's one of those types of problems where it's very easy to assume user error and I'm sure all of us in a support role have done that on numerous occaisions. Now off to play with deploying a load of the Microsoft System Centre stuff, I'm sure my head will be coming into contact with that brick wall again with this as well, must invest in a crash helmet at some point....

Oooh a 1Gbit/s for 22k, *drools* Bet our lot would still have that running at max capacity.

The bill you see in school from the LEA for the connection is not the true cost. LEA's up to now have been top slicing things like Harnessing Technology Grant to fiddle the price schools appear to pay. Now some of these grants are going, you may well find the LEA price escallating over the next couple of years.