Hightower

That is absolutely awesome. I saw the highlight at the start of the news, but had to go out so missed it - thanks for posting it up. It's the way she runs towards them that is crazy, it's like she's just skinned John Terry and is sprinting towards Petr Cech to tuck the ball nicely in the back of the net, a bit like Onuhua did when we beat them 3-0

There's plenty of RM bashing threads. This is not one of them.

Best part is when they are going over the bridge, 2 bikes in chase and a helicopter, and they are going about 10.5mph (yes, I did mean to put the point in there!)

About Impero - I had a ballpark of about £3k for the first year, and about £1k per year after. Does this sound about right for a school with around 300 machines?

Yep, I struggled on but have now managed to clean the failing server of users

A lot of our teachers have replaced their smart board pens here with dry wipe markers. If they need to write on the 'proper' whiteboard they can quickly grab a dry wipe pen. If they want to use the IWB they pull the smart pen from the locked drawer and remove the dry wipe from which ever colour they need. Works well, never had a mishap where a teacher has used the dry wipe on the IWB, and when a pen goes missing they simply replace it with a cheap dry wipe.

Our kids struggle to make saw dust in DT here! lol

One thing that always annoyed me about Promethean was that you needed a pen, whereas smart allows you to use a broom shank if you so desired. Anyhow, our Prometheans are still used so no donations available from us I'm afraid

Has the autoloader ever worked, or are you just configuring it for the first time now? How does the autoloader connect to the backup server?

Not sure what it is, but to restore the boot loader could you not stick a Hirens disc in (it is legit now right) as I'm sure that has a tool on it for that.

Anybody been watching the goodness that is on Sky Atlantic HD? I watched the first episode of Boardwalk Empire over the weekend and it was good. Looks a lot of good shows on there.

Otherwise known as 'arriving on time'?!

Well yes, that's how it works in my eyes. Either arrive on time, or be prepared to get requests if you go in early. If I can't be bothered to deal with people before I'm due to start I'll hang around the house for longer on a morning.

I'm not specialised in anything at all. I do a little bit of everything (or try to). I can play guitar, but no expert. I can tattoo, but no expert. I can play football, but no expert. I know about so many subjects, but no expert. So I'd be rubbish at master mind!

Got to echo @Bossman's comments. We've been using Insight for around 18 months, and it's a great product at a GREAT price. You do need internal hosting, and it must be a Windows box of some sort. You also need a SIMS client installed on the box. One of the best things about it, as @Bossman has said, is their after sales support. The amount of times we have wanted something changing - phone/email them, and literally minutes later there's an update to the software for us to install and utilise requested updates.

Yeah, so you give yourself a bad name.

I didn't mean to challenge it in that way I meant I thought it might be fun to create a passworded zip, and see who can crack it.

I feel a challenge coming up.....

On a side note of telling people "I don't start until 8:30" - if you don't want to work until 8:30, why are you in work before 8:30? Most days I come in early to get stuff done, but fully expect to be interrupted. Turning staff away I believe gives the department a bad name.

I'll give you half a twix and a used plunger? EDIT: But only if you pay for the courier.

So you're running a Hyper-V cluster, and all your DC's are virtualised?

That's now what I'm thinking. Physical DC can just be DC/DHCP/DNS etc as well as backup and AV server. Then VM DC's (x2) can be file servers for users but do nothing else (except the jobs of a DC and file server). How's that sound? Physical DC to have RAID 1 HDD's for OS, and 2 Hyper-V boxes RAID 1 HDD's for Hyper-V OS, but everything else on SAN? Does that sound about right? M$ article here states: Planning Considerations for Virtualized Domain Controllers It's all very interesting, but starting to make me VERY uncertain of which route I should head down. EDIT: My bad, didn't even read it properly lol. "Maintain physical domain controllers in each of your domains. This mitigates the risk of a virtualization platform malfunction that affects all host systems that use that platform." Well there we go. M$ advice to have physical too.

Good article here: The Domain Controller Dilemma - Virtual PC Guy's WebLog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

What about this - would this setup be fine? I was under the impression that the way I wanted to do it, if I lost a physical host the VM would failover to another host, thus keeping all three DC's up and running. What happens in this new example if I lose the first DC? If you had 3 new servers and a SAN, with ~700 users what would be your ideal setup?

Well, I want three DC's on the three new servers. Is it even worth virtualising them then, or am I far better leaving them as physical machines with the Server 2k8 OS directly on them?