ScottStevinson

In the light of the government's mistakes with loss of personal data in recent months, I'm currently looking at just how secure our data protection practices are. One thing I'd like to improve is the security of staff laptops which are removed from site. The majority are XP, but a couple are Vista (myself as NM and a couple of early adopting staff who specifically requested it when they had new machines). Basically their documents are synchronised between the laptop and one of our servers when the laptop is connected to our network, meaning that an up to date copy of documents is always stored on the hard disk of the laptop. So basically what I need is an inexpensive way of encrypting the local documents folder so that it's useless if the laptop is stolen, but still synchronises OK with onsite servers. Any ideas? Scott

Hi All, Sorry if this is repeated elsewhere. I'm the NM of a Junior School ~300 users, ~100 machines. I'm in the process of putting together a Network Ops Manual containing the following: Staff AUP Pupil AUP Data Backup Policy Asset Management Policy AD Diagrams (Visio) Physical Building Plan (Switch Locations, Cable Runs, etc) IT Disaster Recovery Plan Server Roles IP Addressing/DHCP Scopes WiFi Infrastructure/Coverage Key Contacts/Suppliers for Emergency Have I missed anything out here? Anything I should add? Thanks Scott

Thanks for the Heads Up Do you know where I can buy this software and how much it costs? The "where to buy" link on their website just takes me round in circles when I select Europe and then United Kingdom. I'll give the trial a go sometime soon Many Thanks

As some of you may have seen from other posts, I've just got a rack of 18 laptops for classroom use. The problem we have is that the teacher stood at the front of the classroom cannot see what is on the childrens' screens in the same way as they would be able to in a traditional ICT suite with machines around the outside. I've looked at SynchronEyes as I like its functionality - the only issue seems to be that the students machines (in this case the laptops) are tied down to a specific teacher PC. This causes issues as the laptops move around between eight classrooms, and I need the teachers' machines in all of these classrooms to be able to take control of the laptops without any reconfiguring. Am I missing something in SynchronEyes? Is this possible? If not, can anyone recommend an alternative program? Many Thanks

We've used the Dell Latitude D6xx series ever since it first came out with the D600. I've just had anoher 18 D630s delivered today - very impressed. I did dip into the world of HP laptops a while back, although only briefly. I bought a couple of NX6310s when they were practically being given away and I immediatley saw why! I buy HP desktops and servers, and their ProCurve switches, etc, all the time but I wouldn't touch their laptops again. Always be wary of Dell's pricing though -you can get huge discounts with not a lot of effort. I got the D630s reduced by over a hundred pounds per unit with just a little haggling! Scott

IntelliTone Toner and Probe As we only use copper cable, we bought the above Intellitone kit from Fluke last year. Cost us ~£120 from RS and we've never needed anything else. Spot on. Scott

Yeah I understand the point regarding drilling, etc. We've had to make a bit of outlay initially in terms of buying kit to do it. My regular toolkit including Dewalt SDS, Long Masonry Bits, Trunking, Screws, Rawl Plugs, Drums of Cat5, Punchdown/Crimp Tools, etc. Was worth it for us as we did a total network rebuild last year as soon as I had the ability to correct years of previous underinvestment and reliance on county ICT advice (you all know the story...) With the help of 3 other guys we managed to get the whole school rewired with new cat5e everywhere. Now got 7x 24 port switches. Not bad for a school with only ~270 pupils As for fibre - I totally take the point on that one as well. Fibre is obviously a lot more strict when it comes to bend radius' etc, and having someone who really knows what they are doing with it is advantageous. As for us, even our backbone runs from switches to server room are all less than 100m so its just 2x 1gb trunks which does the job no problem. Scott

Who does your data cable installations? I'm at a primary school and seem to do all mine myself! Just today I've spent the morning with the trusty SDS Drill and cordless screwdriver putting trunking up and stringing cable through ceilings. Colleagues of mine at larger schools have their estates teams run the cable, and the IT support team just punchdown the ends into the relevant patch panels/faceplates. On the other hand, theres still some schools who pay specialist companies ludicrous amounts of money (~£80-£100 per port) to run copper cable for them! What do you do?

I've got 18 Dell Latitude D630s being delivered to go in my new laptop rack tomorrow. Going to attempt to use my slipstreamed XP SP3 CD to format over the crappy Vista Business that comes as standard now, and then use WDS Legacy (why oh why couldn't it just stay as RIS) to make an image. After that it's a matter of seeing whether the other 17 machines will take the PXE boot and install okay. Will keep you guys posted as things develop. Scott

We're only a medium sized junior school ~ 270 pupils in 8 classes. Using HP Procurve 1800 switches site wide. We've found them to be excellent as although they are not truly layer 2 managed as they have no serial port on the front, you get all the layer 2 functionality provided through a web interface. Therefore you can get a switch with 24x Gigabit Ports plus 2x Mini GBIC slots for ~£200. Our configuration is as follows: Core Switch with 2gb trunks to 2x new main servers (HP ProLiant ML350 G5) and 1gb single copper to 3x older servers (Dell PowerEdges) 2gb Cat5e Copper Trunk from core switch to each of the 6 remote switches (All ProCurve 1800s) Gigabit to all desktops. Works a treat for us. Supports VLAN etc not that we have a need for it on a site our size. The main advantages for us are trunking and gigabit to the desktop. Scott

First Post Guys Sharepoint Portal is a good bit of kit. Basically you need to work out whether you are going to have an intranet and a separate external VLE/Extranet or have them combined as one in order to meet the DCSF target of having an online learning platform by 2010. Possibly a better way of doing it would be to have it all as one, so internally your users automatically authenticate against Sharepoint/Moodle (via LDAP), etc, and externally they must enter their domain credentials to login. Obviously there are security issues to address here with regard to making domain member servers/domain controllers web facing. A number of my colleagues at other local schools have chosen to host their intranet/extranet solutions internally but on servers not part of the windows domain. They authenticate via separate user databases which are replicated by scheduled script with Active Directory. Personally, I favour the approach of hosting extranet content on a web server in a datacenter off site. Scott