Vlad_the_Emailer

Hi All, Sure you've all had calls from filter vendors just making sure that you're aware of the update to the requirements for schools to spot radicalisation, at a cost of course. Anyway, it seems that despite putting in place rules that pretty much force you to keyword search, it seems that that there's no actual Home Office compiled resources to allow you to do this, nor do any of the organisations I've contacted seem overly enthused about providing help to compile one so my question is, is anyone out there is running a webfilter that isn't from one of the big companies and if so, what are you doing about phrase lists to your existing filter? Cheers, J

The real question here would appear to be "How much do you trust Microsoft?".

If you're running Windows desktops, you can use the group policy manager on one of the clients to admin the GPOs on the Linux server. Are we talking Linux clients?

Hiya, For servers, I tend towards either Ubuntu (or Debian which is the distro that Ubuntu was built on), or CentOS. The advantage that Ubuntu has is Canonical support if needed and a very large and active support forum. Debian has is an immense amount of pre-packaged software (that trickles down to Ubuntu) and many developers like the fact that it's a fairly stable, vanilla distro which makes their job easy. The Debian software management tool (apt) is also excellent. At the moment I have CentOS on my mail server, our weather station runs Debian 8 and our webservers are on Ubuntu. Long term I see them being moved to Debian as the current OS versions reach end of life. To summarise, Debian or Ubuntu.

Indeed. Once you have set up Samba 4, you use the standard tools on a Windows client to manage Active Directory and Group policies. It is pretty seamless.

With all the warnings of disaster that'll come from increases in sea temperature, someone should warn Satya Nadella that designing machines to release large amounts of heat into the sea may make him look like a bond villain.

But that's the way that works best. The real skill is making sure that the cost is low enough to ensure that paying the increased rate is less traumatic than backing out so you'll just stump up the difference. History is littered with dodgy software licencing deals which is why we don't sign up for anything we can't easily ditch.

Hiya, RDP is a doddle as there's a fair few clients for Linux, KRDC, TSClient to name a few. Personally I use KRDC as I can flip between servers using both RDP and VNC in one tabbed GUI. As far as I remember from a previous thread on the subject of Microsoft Licencing where the fella actually called Microsoft to ask, the need for CALs depends on the exact make up of your network. If you have all Linux servers, i.e. DCs and members, you do not need CALs for clients. You do need Windows client licences for whatever version of Windows you have but CALs only become necessary if you have a windows server, and as far as I can tell this includes member servers as well as domain controllers. The need for CALs also includes Linux webservers, but only if the services they provide authenticate against a Windows DC. If you auth against Linux LDAP or Samba 3/4 you don't need CALs. The exact details I can't remember but I'll trawl my mail when I get 5 mins and see if i can find the original thread. Unfortunately, Capita seem unaware of the fact that not everyone may not want to run MSOffice. Bar the government enforcing vendor neutrality and open standards, I can't see us ever getting away from Office for SIMS. I may badger the DfE on this one and see what they have to say for themselves. A terminal server running SIMS/Office would allow you to access it via a non Windows desktop. Patching depends on what's broken. A limited test is a good start and open source projects forums will often turn around a fix faster than commercial vendors. I've had a fix from free software writer in less than 10 minutes before and called Microsoft one day only to get the reply when I'm 30 ft up a ladder on a different site the next. Whether you try to DIY is a matter of your confidence level but 9 times out of 10, someone will already has found the problem and posted a fix. Downsides definitely do exist but they will mainly be down to a lack of familiarity and the culture shock of text config files over wizards. From the server side, performance has usually been better with Linux and Windows servers have run out of steam under less load than a Linux box but as I've never tried a server 2012 core it's hard to know what difference dropping the GUI would make. On the whole I'd say you have to give it a go to find out if it's for you. I may put together some info if I have the time to try and make a sort of one stop shop howto based around a single Linux version. If you want to know what I see the plus sides as being, the limited experience I have with powershell makes it look like in the rear compared to BASH although again, this could be a familiarity issue. Linux software RAID is useful as I can put an array in a server, and if it blows, put the same array in a different server with different hardware and re-assemble the array without having to track down matching hardware controllers, etc.. we haven't had a support contract on any of our servers for over 10 years. You also never need to reboot unless you want to. No nags, no forced restarts and if you really want 24/7 uptime you can use splice which patch the kernel and load the changes without restarting. DRBD is also useful for redundant data stores, a kind of server level raid.

Morning All, Long term Linux admin here who's been watching the thread since Friday and is seeing a lot of calls for Linux info. Basically, between 2005 and 2012, we ran 450 Windows XP clients against Samba 3 although, when per staff member subscriptions came along at the same time as Windows 7, we put in Server 2008R2 DCs with NAS boxes and Linux member servers. Captain cautious here chose Server 2008R2 instead of 2012 as the AD schema is workable on Samba 4 so we can bale if we feel like it. It looks like this may not have been a bad decision. We run all our webservers on Ubuntu and our mail server is running on CentOS. Control freaks as we are, we like stuff in house. Our budget is also limited and has been for a long time so we like the control over spending that we get from doing it in house. So, assuming people want to prepare an escape plan in case things get nasty/expensine, what is it that you want to know? Distros, Linux servers/Windows clients, Linux servers/Linux clients, DIY cloud stuff, mail etc.? The admins appear to have a Linux page up so what do you want to do?

The Internet connection is the only thing that isn't included. Website, VLE etc, are all hosted in-house as they come from our budget (Moodle, Joomla freebies etc.). Everything apart from that is considered ours.

We were fine until the upgrade was forced by the EOL of SIMS XP support and XP itself. Up until then we had 7 second log ins and it worked fine. Annoying :|

Thanks for that, these are all very helpful. As an aside, another quick straw poll that would be helpful is topography, i.e are people fibred up, e.g. fibre from core to distribution and copper to desktop or are people still mainly copper from core to end user? The only fibres we have here are 2 1GB links to outbuildings that are >100m from out core switching.

Hiya, No worries, most of our stock PC and server kit is refurb and I think only one of our servers is less than 3 years old. Not long ago we applied for a capital grant to fibre the school but lost out by 0.2 of a point. For 6 years we ran a Samba 3 network with XP which had uptimes of 99.7+ % but upgrading to something that'd support Win7+ with a total budget of zero was the straw that broke the camel's back. At the moment I'm questioning the point of continuing.

Hi All, As a noob to edugeek, hi in general but I'd like to tap people for assistance, via PM if necessary. I've been working in a school with 800 pupils for 8 years. Our budget has to provide and maintain 450 PCs/Laptops/netbooks while also providing laptops for around 50 staff, printers, toner, Windows, Office and AV licences, all infrastructure and effectively anything that's digital or can be connected to a network bar photocopiers which are contracted. To carry out this task we have averaged the grand sum of £30,000 a year (really, there are no noughts missing) with the highest year being £40,000 and the lowest £20,000. Now having been predicting that sooner of later things will go tits up for about 3 years, they finally have and I'm looking at gathering opinions on how much is reasonable to run a network this size. If anyone would like to share info which, if PM'd will not be put on-line anywhere I'd be very grateful. Cheers, V