ledow2

Hi everyone, I have a vacancy for an IT Technician for January. We're looking for a school technician, from managing printers to creating users, AV and scheduled event setup (bell timings, projector setup, presentation setup etc.), converting data, creating accounts, first-line support to staff, pupils and parents, managing iPads, etc. all the usual jobs up to and including certain server and service responsibilities, and regular new projects to be taken on. Further details here (the JD and application pack goes up here in a few minutes): Staff vacancies - Edge Grove School We're a boarding prep school (ISI Excellent in all areas), ~500 pupils, 2 sites in large grounds, ~200+ Windows 8.1 clients, ~500+ iPad/Chromebook 1:1 devices, etc. from Nursery to Year 8. Cisco Meraki networking and wireless throughout, IBM Bladecenter servers, Schoolbase MIS. We're near Watford, easily accessible from the M1/A1(M)/M25. I can schedule a site visit for anyone who's interested, and will fill in gaps as much as I can for anyone who asks.

And you're not offering mail, or web, or any external service whatsoever that also gives away your presence? You can ping your ISP gateway, nameservers, everything on route (anything that responds to traceroute will tend to respond to ping), Google's DNS servers, BBC News, and just about any domain name of a web host you choose. Allow, rate-limit if necessary. Because when you're next outside and trying to see if the school connection is up (e.g. trying to connect from home and having problems with RDP not responding), you know in one packet whether the connection is down, or just the RDP service, for example.

Roaming for all, with redirection for the sake of simplicity (documents are then stored outside the profile making profile resets really simple - just move the old profile out of the way, and a download to their desktop doesn't get downloaded to every machine they ever touch). :-) It all depends on what you want to do. Do you want your users to be able to change their own settings to their own preference and pick up those settings everywhere they go (roaming)? Do you want to strictly enforce every possible setting in a one-off config that's tricky to update, before your users are using the system (mandatory profiles)? Personally I think the latter are silly. Roaming profiles have more of a network usage, but it's nowhere near detrimental - ignoring DOCUMENTS, gigabit to the desktop means an Gigabyte PROFILE (stupendously huge on a managed system) takes 8 seconds to download. And that's only if the machine has NEVER seen that user before, otherwise only the difference is transferred. First logins on computers they've never used pull down their entire roaming profile but they shouldn't be allowed to let their profile get out of hand anyway (it's easy to exclude any folder likely to get out of hand, e.g. Downloads, Google Drive, etc. from profiles). Power users object strongly to not being able to change simple settings (and in those cases, you really don't want to have to change every setting on their behalf every time) and if your GPOs and security are in such poor state that you're relying on mandatory profiles to enforce settings, you really need to look again at what you're offering people. When a user changes a harmless setting and logs off, they expect that setting to be present on their account when they next log in! Many places use mandatory profiles but I find them completely inflexible and users are never happy with them. They are also a pig to update a simple setting on, in comparison. Roaming profiles have to be configured PROPERLY (i.e. separate documents and profile, store in separate places on the network, don't let them get out of hand, make sure permissioning on the shares is correct so they can update their roaming profile correctly, etc.) but they then work like people expect. And in the rare circumstance they go wrong (500+ users, I do a profile reset about once every six months and usually because of other problems that occurred during logoff, e.g. power or network events), you just move the profile folder and the next login recreates it. But at least then users can do simple things for themselves.

Ping is harmless. At best it lets you detect presence of a machine on a certain IP (which is exactly its purpose!). If you're offering out file and print sharing, that's a) more dangerous and b) doing exactly the same (i.e. letting people know the machine is there). The paranoid people who worry about ping packets don't realise that almost all scanning tools since the 90's have had "don't wait for ping reply" options, and can probe every port on the machine / connection in seconds whether or not ICMP echo responses are received. If you're offering any service at all, whatsoever, then ping does nothing more than you're already doing. It's pointless to disable ping on external connections or internal connections. The only thing to do (which, again, isn't ping specific) is make sure you can't be flooded via it. No modern machine allows the old ICMP-packet attacks, and you can be DoS'd whether or not you bother to reply to a packet or not (you still received it, so it still took up bandwidth etc. whether or not the port was closed or open). Don't listen to the nonsense. There's a reason that, by default, almost every machine and operating system on the planet responds to ping by default.

A/C in server rooms, comfortable room temperature is 20 for humans, computers just want *consistency* not any one particular temperature. Temperature changes are the enemy, really. My rooms have got to the 30's when A/C has failed before (nobody ever has UPS/generators for that!), at which point I expect stuff to start warning and/or shutting down. I don't care about the temperature inside the cabinet so much - I don't directly measure it. The room temperature and the power of those devices determine that. Exhaust temps on blade-servers in A/C rooms are currently 20-25. It's 22 in my (non-AC) office. The thing I hate is the people who come into the A/C rooms in the summer and go "Oh, isn't it lovely and cold in here" and then shelter in there, but in the winter are found saying "Oh, it's so warm in here, how do you work in here". When the temperature varies by less than a degree all year round. Just proves to me that all the "my classroom is cold" stuff should just be ignored.

Sorry to play devil's advocate: Am I the only one to not use any of this expensive pay-for stuff for IT-only things? AD user creation? Done by Powershell. £2k to do a one-time user creation of a list of users seems inherently overzealous. And en-route it populates our access control and other systems that can't auto-sync and which no specialist software would support without bespoke coding anyway. Helpdesk/Asset/Inventory? GLPI or a thousand free equivalents. Teamviewer? Really? Visio / Project is okay, I suppose, but only for one user seems a waste of buying a special tool just for that, and more than one user seems too expensive. I'm pretty sure over 15 years, I've never bought anything software "just for IT" (ICT as a subject, yes, of course, IT deployed out to every user, sure. IT as in the department? No). I'm reminded of https://xkcd.com/1205/ and there's a point at which money-saves-time but, honestly, even creating/syncing 1500 users is a one-off job executed once a year? Spend half a day writing / stealing a script to do it and keep a copy if you change schools. £2k is a month's wages of a technician, at least, and they could sit and type that data in inside a month, let alone copy/paste or come up with an automated method. We're not "cheap" when it comes to the right tools and the stuff to support what's in school, but I can't name a thing software-wise that I would need enough to pay for it to run the IT department side of things. The nearest I ever got was Exchange email signatures, until I found the right GPO/script/Word template combination to automatically handle it for me and stop users changing it, and that's not even something that applies to any-other-way of sending email from a school account (which all have nice configuration options). Maybe it's just me?

I have to respect the bravery of jumping in on this post, but to me I don't see why that has to be listed separately if that's the case. In our case, nobody is really reeling at the cost of the service provided, but that they aren't optional. I don't see the point in even separating the two items (software and setup) if they, as I was told, *must* be taken together. However, what really bothered us was that when the charge was clarified, there was no clear explanation but an awful lot of excuses and no leeway. Lots of nods and agreements and then a "But we still won't take it off or even reduce it" attitude. To be honest, we don't want to spend time branding on Firefly at the moment because - initially - we always roll-out in-house. Installation isn't a chore. MIS integration, although helpful, is the reason we have a Data Manager, an IT team, and a support contract for MIS software. For a while, Firefly will be nothing more than our Intranet, and then move to resources for our boarding pupils, until we decide to deploy it outside to parents (which is the point at which, and not before, we'd be interested in such services). Bringing in that many people, in what is an approved summer project for us, is just delay and repetition of in-house skills. We considered Firefly to be a deployment that we were familiar with and comfortable with the internal workings that we could deploy rapidly, hand over to the IT teaching staff (who are responsible for our Intranet and various portals and run their own Sharepoint servers and VM's), have them start the transition over the summer and look towards full external deployment when we were comfortable with it. For us, the real blocker are the conditions attached to certain finance arrangements that back a huge IT roll-out this summer. They make specific restrictions on how much hardware, software and "other services" are catered for and where items can be listed in the budget (I think mainly it's about the reclaim value to the various banks if they ever need to recoup their loss, they just can't recoup "services"). As such, tying the two items actually stops us buying. For reference, Frog were perfectly happy to strike all such charges without even thinking about it. They provide a quote with their software, and they have listed entirely optional training, setup and integration charges if we decide to exercise them (which we would intend to do, at the right juncture). But I'm not as familiar with their software and don't have people already championing it to me on our staff. Hell, they were willing to supply a pre-fab VM image (which they normally only do for larger secondaries, and had to specifically check the possibility with their tech teams), at a competitive price, and would be able to send me it tomorrow if I got the go-ahead. I've held off on their recent calls while we try to find ways around it. I'd also like to say that our IT strategic consultant is highly experienced with Firefly and the setup of it, theming, branding, installation, reinstallation, MIS integration, etc. - they've done it at several schools, from scratch and on reinstalls / rebrandings, and are greatly embarrassed that their recommendation has caused such bad will with the school within minutes of first contact. I have to say that the "Head of Sales" that I spoke to was positively hostile at the suggestion that we might want to do things ourselves, and my consultant colleague was similarly annoyed at their attitude. To state my position, I've already sold Firefly to the teaching side of the IT staff and the SMT. Backtracking now will be an embarrassment and a shame, hence why I'm battling on to find a way to get it deployed. We've sent staff to several schools where it's been deployed and could play with the real thing and they all think it's fabulous. Our IT Consultant's experience was relayed to us as positively glowing for the software and its capabilities. However, the experience we received on first contact was enough to put a stopper in our deployment plans for Firefly for this summer. My Bursar and consultant are now suggesting against the software, fearing similar future hostility. As noted above, we're looking into alternatives. Given the opportunity, I'd still prefer to deploy Firefly - it's what we've promised and what we've demonstrated - but the experience has tainted myself, my IT strategic consultant, and my Bursar to the point that I actively sought out allies on these boards, and looked for assistance to see if they was some way around this. The price we were quoted for software, we're happy with. We'd just like to pay that, get the software, and do what we like with it - and most importantly see what we can make it do rather than be dependent on an outside design service like many schools get trapped into with any kind of CMS system. I don't think that's an unusual, or unreasonable, request. That's how we work. That's what we do as a school. We like to work our way. We rarely meet obstacles doing so. Of course, no project on this scale would happen without staff training at some point, etc. but that's not where we're at - and not what we want to buy at the moment, and honestly and truly not what we can slip into a random line on our budget (I've spent a week conversing with our Bursar over this exact issue, and they cannot budge in some areas and are unwilling to cull in others if the attitude we've received so far is all that awaits us in the future - especially if we are going to be a "niche case" in your userbase). It doesn't help that other companies are quite happy to strike those portions without even blinking an eye, and that we've got in-house staff who have experience at other schools with the same software. I'd love to use this software, from what I've seen and heard from colleagues at other schools (and the comments above), it's worth it. But I can't buy it without pseudo-optional things that we don't want, can't pay for, and which would only delay our deployment. I don't see how that's building long-term relationships with customers. Let me buy your software!

Glad it's not just me then... I wouldn't mind, I just don't like the surprise charges, the dishonesty (what's the charge for, exactly? Why isn't it included in the quote for the software, or an optional extra?), the compulsory nature, etc. I can find the extra money but I'm loathe to if it's just going to result in a paid-for meeting that, actually, we'd rather skip and have done in-house on our schedule anyway (and which, like in your case, will probably be moot by the time it happens). And the head of sales at Firefly got increasingly annoyed when I asked him about it, and couldn't give me reasonable responses to questions about what it was for, why we need it now, why we can't do that separately, etc. It's stuff like this that taints future relationships and something like a VLE/Intranet that we're planning on using Firefly for is not something I want to start on bad footing.

I'm not questioning the value - just that the price of my quote doubled overnight for an "installation" service that I was then told was an "integration" service that then became a "branding / templating" service that then became a "user training" service. And apparently, WHATEVER it is, it's "compulsory" if I just want to test the software in a VM ready for a September deployment (we're happy to buy, we're happy to train, we're just no happy to have things doubled without warning and for "compulsory" services that have a completely separate price to everything else).

Hi both, Sorry to dig up your thread, but: We've just undertaken a quote for Firefly and they are saying that there is a "compulsory" £2000 training/installation/setup charge (i.e. they won't sell us the software without first going through branding meetings and doing the MIS integration, etc. themselves) on top of the software install price. They won't sell us just the software, without this "training" charge (and so we can't install pre-summer without paying it AND scheduling such training). We're normally quite happy to take on any such things in-house, but that wasn't an option, apparently. Given your comments above, were you somehow able to skirt this? And do you have a contact at the company that may help?