teejay

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One of the local farmers voluntered to test it I beleive....

Just phoned Ibis, parking through them is £10 per 24 hrs in two nearby carparks, one of them an NCP, you just sort it out with them on arrival. This will work out cheaper for me than the train, unless I go via a real round the houses route via London with 4 changes and getting back really late on the Friday.

I've yet to attend any EduGeek meet, so really looking forward to meeting everyone at last

Roof down and top down, now that could get interesting!!!

Yep, it does and is far quicker than Windows file servers. We run all our file shares from a Oracle S7310 and that replaced at least 7 Windows file servers, doesn't even break into a sweat and that's just running via 3 x 1Gb links using link aggregation, stick a 10Gb nic in and it will fly :-) BTW, what make are your switches? Also, if you fancy a trip up the motorway to West Yorkshire, you're more than welcome to come and have a look at what you can do. We use both the NAS and SAN facilities of our Oracle boxes, so can demonstrate both to you.

That would be great :-) What's the parking like round there, Ibis say they have discounted covered parking nearby, but wondered if there's any on-street/cheap parking?

Ibis booked for both nights :-) Now, question is, do I book the train, which takes over 4 hours, is 3 changes and to get a sensible price I've got to hang around till 1pm on the Friday, or do I drive, hmmm.

Yes, most decent SANS have 10Gb options, no need for fibre channel unless you have a stack load of servers and then it's best to seperate the traffic and not use your main switch for this. The Intel Fibre Channel over Ethernet looks a promising option, but I don't think it's around yet. Honestly though, from your initial post, look at a unified device that combines both NAS and SAN, but from your requirements you want NAS over SAN,

Oh, btw, if you are interested in the Oracle stuff, have a chat with HebdenLad on here, he works for Oracle Storage, top bloke (when he remembers to bring the biscuits, cough). Edit: Also, speak to the guys from The Cutter Project on here, they are the resellers for the kit so can give you pricing info.

Duke, you beat me to it! Another recommendation for the Oracle stuff here, cracking kit and competively priced for what it is, especially when you consider there are no licencing costs for 'extras' or new features which you can get charged for on other ones. I really would go for a unified storage device, the description in your OP looks like you really need for of the NAS type facilities than the SAN type facilities, so you would move all your file shares onto the storage device which serves these files directly without touching your windows file servers, leaving them to concentrate on being app servers. If you then want to virtualise your app servers, that's when you want the SAN facilities to provide shared storage for the virtual server images to enable failover and redundancy. You 'could' use a SAN for the file server side, but this is really just like attaching an extra hard drive to your file servers as they will still be handling all the file serving traffic, if you want to remove that load from the servers you need the NAS route.

Right, time to go sweet talk the HT into covering my travel and accomodation expenses It falls in half-term, so I'm coming whatever, just depends whether I'm bringing my tent or not:p Edit: Nearly fainted there, HT agreed straight away!

Same here, signed up, but need a confirmation so I can book the hotel :-)

Zimbra Open SOurce will do what you want, but it runs on Linux not Windows. I don't know of any true Open Source mail server that run on Windows. To be honest, if you are an eductaion establishment, then look at a cloud based solution like Google Apps for education or Microsoft Live@Edu, especially if you have limited Linux experience.

Procurves have pretty good protection against VLAN hopping, so don't worry about that. Just make sure all your switches are on up to date firmware. The only recommendation I would make security wise is to move your base network off VLAN 1, this is your biggest security threat on that setup. All switch management and communication is run on that VLAN by default, so it makes it quite easy to compromise if your default network is also on that VLAN.

If you want to keep a 3 year cycle, what about investigating how much you would get on ebay for the old laptops, you'd be surprised what they go for. Just remember to do a full secure data wipe and then restore the original OS it was supplied with. I really do avoid using laptops with students, apart from some for SEN, as they just get trashed so quickly it's just not viable for us.

Are indexing or compression enabled on either the target drive on your backup server or the external usb drive?

Would be coming from Huddersfield, can't decide whether train or drive as they both look to take about the same time. Novotel looks a bit pricey now, unless you know some way to get a cheap deal ;-)

What are the start/finish times for the event? Really want to go, just got to work out if I need to book accomodation as its a 4hr trip.

You can claim back tax for the interest part of the mortgage as thats an expense. You need to get an annual statement off your mortgage provider details interest paid and claim it back. You can claim for other expenses susch as maintenance of the property and depreciation of fixtures and fittings. Full details are here but it's one of those things where hiring a decent accountant who knows this stuff inside out is worth the money.

Moved to 7 during the summer and it's all working rather nicely. The staff got to grips with it really easily, including an upgrade from Office 2003 to 2010. We do have quite alot of old machines here, most of them worked fine with Windows 7. We do have some where the sound cards don't work and some lacking full graphics driver support, but a bit of a shuffle round of PC's to move these into areas where it wasn't important and we're sorted. Yes it was a big job and a complete pita at the time, but we're seeing the benefits from it as our support requests have dropped significantly so we can spend much more time on proactive support and preventitive maintenance.

GTP is regarded as part time as well, you're employed in a teaching post whilst studying it. A good friend of mine did GTP and after a few years teaching here emigrated to Canada. They wouldn't accept GTP as a teaching qualification as they regarded it as a part time course. He therefore had a choice of 2 years retraining as a teacher at his own expense, or go back into industry, which is what he did. So, if planning to emigrate, check what qualifications are acceptable in that country before you start your study ;-)

Are other people printing exactly the same thing from the same program or something different? Does printing from a different program or a different document work on the netbooks? If the netbooks are networked wireless do they work if networked wired? Can you also check that you have exactly the same version number of the driver on the netbooks as the one on the server.

In Server 2008 R2 you can (not sure on 2008, never played with it), Little Miss is running 2003. There might be some update somewhere for 2003 to do this, but I don't use it anymore so I've no idea. Edit: Sorry, think I misinterpreted your post. Yes you can use the utility I posted to map all printers and then use secuirty group on the printer objects on the print server to limit them to certain users/computers. Edit 2: Was discussed here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/65490-install-colour-printer-only-staff-but-flexibly.html

They go between classrooms with the lid open, so they don't have to boot up or log in again as for some reason the minute or so it takes to do this is too long and means they can't do their electronic registration as they have a 'computer fault'