neilault

Do any of you have a booklet or advice sheet you hand out to your staff with regards to Music Copyright and use in school etc? Basically just wondering if I can use it and "modify" it to get the basics across to mainly the music department. I.e. use of CD's, ripping music, bringing in "downloaded" MP3's, use of iPods etc etc. Hoping you can help... Neil

We have recently setup a shared public calendar for the Academy that is now visible via a website for everyone to see. Just wondering if it is possible to automatically add this calendar to everyone who has an Exchange email account? Therefore they will see their own calendar AND the Academy one without having to subscribe via OWA or Outlook 2010. Hope this makes sense? Neil

We currently have an onsite Exhange 2010 Server so all students and staff are used to their standard domain login externally and single sign-on when onsite. I really don't want to have to replace this to be honest, I feel it gives up much more control over email etc than either Live@edu or Google Apps for Education can give. Not taking the other features into account. Just that for now, CLOUD is the word!

Sounds like a good plan. I am guessing it will be mainly used for now on Android tablets and old PC's turned into "thin clients", possibly with Microsoft Thin PC as that is now included in our ESS Agreement, though that will depend on the Citrix Receiver. It's a shame they have no bootable version of the Citrix Receiver! Then when it comes to room replacements to look into new style thin or zero clients. Defo need to see it working in production first though.

Students and staff would go nuts if we didn't have synced AD passwords and single-sign on. Do yo uknow how difficult it is to remember multiple passwords? Not sure on those domain, will take a look in a minute. Had to get a load of domains and ports unblocked by SWGfL just to get this far! I will be so glad when we leave the local grid! I have also contacted Live@edu to ask for support and they are "working on it" apparently.

We have only been given one initial quote but what we have so far is: 10 to 100 Users - £66.21 + £18.10 support (per user) 101 to 250 Users - £62.07 + £17.01 support (per user) 251+ Users - £57.93 + £16.03 support (per user) And they are concurrent perpetual user licenses. Hope this helps?

CyberNerd: As we are on the Microsoft ESS licensing agreement (which includes the Microsoft VDA license) the Windows 7 licensing is done on the number of full time staff rather than the number of actual devices. From what we have been told it will therefore be all covered.

We currently have our own Microsoft Exchange 2010 server located onsite that provides email accounts to both Staff and Students (1GB max mailbox size for each user currently). The current "buzz" word with the head is CLOUD! And yes he knows that both Microsoft and Google provide free email based solutions. I kind of like the idea of Microsoft providing 25GB of Skydrive storage to each user with their Live@edu solution but it's not very easy to use at the moment with no ability to map network drives to it and no Android (the way we are heading with tablets) apps currently. We have attempted to try the Live@edu trial by setting up a test subdomain and using this. Yes we will save money on storage but any software costs saved by getting rid of Microsoft Exchange 2010 from our license agreement will be replaced with getting Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010. And this is where my experience so far is far from being pleased! Endless problems trying to get AD to sync via FIM2010 to the Outlook Live service. In fact still getting an error now with ps.outlook.com certificate revocation (any ideas on this one?). Are any of you going down the Cloud email route? What way are you going? And is it worth it? And has anyone come across the Live@edu problem I am having?

We have downloaded and installed the Citrx VDI-in-a-Box trial and installed onto a ESXi 5.0 server. Must say we are pretty impressed so far with the provisioning of Windows 7 virtual machines to users. We have just ordered some trial Android tablets to test and see how useable a VDI solution will be on a tablet via the Citrix Receiver app. Does anyone down in the South West area currently have a Citrix VDI-in-a-Box solution in production? We are interested in taking a look at one in action with more users than we can currently get on our trial. To know of any problems etc...

The Adobe Reader and Securus issue is a known problem. You have to untick the "Enable Protected Mode at startup" checkbox under the General settings of Reader.

Could be the issue here too then as we run Securus. Mind you it hasn't happened quite so often recently since we installed the latest Securus client. Never thought that woul dhave been the cause! Current client version 7.00.25

Did anyone ever find a solution to this? Our Windows 7 32bit desktops and laptops randomly still do this and they are all SP1.

I agree, a lot more work to do. Just in the middle of deciding if we go down the Hyper-V route rather than ESXi. We have been playing around with a couple of production Hyper-V servers and it is a very comptent product with a lot of advance features like the full VMware offereings, but it is such a nightmare to configure!

I can understand your argument in a way but I don't think it's the case here. We were a Media Specialist and Trust School with the BBC as one of our trust members. With this we set up a our own ex BBC TV studio and also we have two onsite Radio Stations broadcasting 24/7 locally on 87.7FM as well as over the Internet. With this in mind the media storage needs are excessive and demanding on the network infrastructure. Also being based on two seperate sites that are seperated by a main road and linked via a 1.2GB laser system we had need to base some servers on that site to reduce the traffic over the laser link hence the duplication in some of the clustered resources. And one final thing as we are investigating the possibility of moving away from our local grid (SWGfL) we have had to provide our own filtering servers and proxies before we could proceed. As for costs I imagine it is quite excessive, the electric bill is very high. We have implemented automatic server shutdown and startup for servers only needed during the school day as well as IT room shutdowns after school hours. Things were worse before I started her 4 years ago as we had over 40 non virtualised servers so we are reducing!

Secondary School with Sixth Form. Totaling around 200 staff and 1400 students based over two laser linked sites. Physical: 4 x Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V Host Servers 7 x VMware ESXi 4.1 Host Servers 2 x VMware ESX 3.5 Host Servers 1 x Frog VLE 1 x Securus NG 1 x Bloxx TVT-1250 1 x Terminal Server (for Thin Clients) 1 x Backup Server 1 x Media File Server 2 x Test Development Servers Virtual: 2 x Domain Controllers 1 x Read Only Domain Controllers 2 x Web Servers 1 x MIS Server 1 x Exchange 2010 Server 3 x File Servers (Clustered) 3 x Print Servers (Clustered) 1 x Sophos Antivirus Server 1 x VMware vCenter Server 1 x Microsoft Virtual Machine Manger 2008 Server 1 x Library Server 1 x Network App Server 1 x SQL Server 1 x Microsoft TMG 2010 Server 1 x Symantec Ghost Imaging Server 2 x Terminal Servers (Student and Staff remote access) Storage: 1 x HP MSA SAN (with 2 extra arrays, currently 26 mxied SATA and SAS hard drives with around 17TB of storage) 2 x Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 4TB Drives (used for offsite replication between the two sites) 25 x Western Digital 3TB USB3 Drives (used for incremental, weekly and monthly backups) As for the rest of the network: 70 x HP Network Printers 65 x HP ProCurve Switches 700 x Staff & Student PCs 200 x Staff Laptops Wireless: 1 x Cisco Wireless LAN Controller 8 x Cisco Access Points 1 x Nortel Wireless LAN Controler 6 x Nortel Access Points 6 x Netgear Stand Alone Access Points Bit of a nightmare to look after at times, we have a team of 3 and an apprentice.

We currently have two IP ranges provided by the SWGfL and due to the way they setup the routing through thier router it turns out that all traffic on the secondary range is capped at 30MB speeds and therefore has very slow network access at busy times! SWGfL recommend that the routing is done at our network level via a layer 3 switch and to therefore VLAN the two ranges. Obviously this is a huge lot of work to configure each switch (we have over 50) and as I understand it each port will belong to a particular VLAN and would require planning. The other option as I see it, is to request a complete new IP range big enough to accomodate all the IPs we need and setup everything on this new range and therefore not need any routing. I know we would have to run both IPs on our servers until the external domain records were updated. To further complicate things we have BT installing a new VoIP system in the next couple of weeks and they have not suggested setting that up on a VLAN but woul dit be advisable to do? What would you do? VLAN or new IP range? Please help!

Sorry about this, quite new to VLANS and switching. So what you are saying is that we would have to configure each port on every switch on our network to either be part of DEFAULT_VLAN or SECONDARY depending on what is connected to that particular port? Thus when moving patch cable we woul dhave to make sure the port was configured to the right VLAN each time?

We currently have two IP ranges as follows: 10.3.80/22 10.3.79.0/22 We need to setup a system to route between the two ranges as our previous SWGfL router was capped. We have one HP ProCurve 2650 switch with IP of 10.3.11.253 and configured with the following VLANS: VLAN 1 - DEAFULT_VLAN IP: 10.3.11.253 Subnet: 255.255.252.0 VLAN 3 – SECONDARY IP: 10.3.79.253 Subnet: 255.255.252.0 This switch has IP routing enabled and has one connection on port 50 which has been set to Tagged on both VLANs and connects to a HP ProCurve 2910al with IP of 10.3.11.248 via port 22 which also has been set to Tagged on both VLANs. The 10.3.11.248 switch has its default gateway set to 10.3.11.253. We then have two laptops configured as follows: IP: 10.3.11.20 Subnet: 255.255.252.0 Gateway: 10.3.11.253 10.3.79.250 Subnet: 255.255.252.0 Gateway: 10.3.79.253 When these laptops are connected directly to the 10.3.11.248 switch they can ping each other and all gateways fine. Adding a HP ProCurve 2900 with IP of 10.3.11.247 and default gateway of 10.3.11.253 connected via port A3 (10GB) to port B1 (10GB) on 10.3.11.248 with both ports set to Tagged on both VLANs. When the laptop with the 10.3.79.250 address is connected to the 10.3.11.247 switch it cannot ping the other laptop connected to 10.3.11.248 switch or any of the gateways. Swap the laptops around and they work ok. It seems there is no route back for a device on the 10.3.76.0/22 range when connected to another switch other than the 10.3.11.248 one. Routes on the main routing switch 10.3.11.253 are as follows: ProCurve Switch 2650(config)# show ip route IP Route Entries Destination Gateway VLAN Type Sub-Type Metric Dist. ------------------ --------------- ---- --------- ---------- ---------- ----- 10.3.8.0/22 DEFAULT_VLAN 1 connected 0 0 10.3.76.0/22 SECONDARY 3 connected 0 0 127.0.0.0/8 reject static 0 250 127.0.0.1/32 lo0 connected 0 0 And the routes on the other switches are as follows: NSR-MAIN-02(config)# show ip route IP Route Entries Destination Gateway VLAN Type Sub-Type Metric Dist. ------------------ --------------- ---- --------- ---------- ---------- ----- 0.0.0.0/0 10.3.11.253 1 static 250 1 10.3.8.0/22 DEFAULT_VLAN 1 connected 1 0 127.0.0.0/8 reject static 0 0 127.0.0.1/32 lo0 connected 1 0 Any ideas on what we are missing?

Hi Everyone! Does anyone know how I can get the current attendance percentage for a supplied student from the database? Our College would like a program displayed on student login that shows their current attendance percentage. Ideally via SQL but if needed a daily report that contains the percentage for every student. Hoping you can help... Neil

Notifications of HTTPS inspection is what we plan to use it for. So that legally we notify all users we are inspecting all secured traffic. Just to cover us as one of our SLT is an ex lawyer

Don't suppose you remember what settings they are within HKEY_CURRENT_USER?

We have just decided to make the move from Bloxx to Microsoft TMG and I have finished setting up the server. I am now at the point of pushing out the TMG Client and have done this through Group Policy to a test virtual machine. However when someone logs on the main TMG Settings window always loads. Has anyone come across this and how do you stop the settings screen from showing? I only really want to use the TMG Client to inform the staff and students of the HTTPS inspection. Please help! Neil

Hi, Bit of a cheek, but we are looking for a School, College or University who has deployed a large number of Thin Clients throughout their network (a couple hundred or more) and who wouldn't mind two network guys from Coombeshead College coming to see the setup and performance etc... Would need to be in the South West area, Bristol to Cornwall Hopeing someone can help and show us a decent working setup. Neil

We provide staff with laptops for use at home and also within the College. We provide them with a local administrator account and also they have their own domain accounts. Do you do similar and do you allow them to use the local accounts within the College or force them to login to the Domain and provide support and services that way? Also do you provide local accounts with admin rights or just limited? Just interested as we are looking at pushing a recommendation to SLT that all staff use Domain accounts when onsite and that local accounts are set back to limited. Neil

Managed to get it to work. Was just me being silly! I had forgotten to disable the settings "Grant the user exclusive rights to Links" and "Move the contents of Links to the new location". Having no write access to the redirected folder the policy was failing. Many thanks anyway. Neil