matt40k

Sounds very wasteful. How often does your switches go wrong? If we're talking new switches, I've never had a core switch die that was in warranty, I've had ports stop working but so long as you've bought quality it won't take the whole thing down. The key seems to be quality, spare ports and support. Worse case scenario, switch dies, next day new one arrives. Believe it or not folks can survive a day without IT, even a high school! IMHO I'd prefer 1x 5406ZLs with dual PSU then 2x 2920, but hey, I'm no switch expert. I just know from experience you can end up chasing a mythical unicorn, the end-users won't notice the difference between netgear switch and all the bells and whistles Cisco setup. All they know is when it goes wrong and with a complex setup, you have more things that can go wrong.

Isn't there a DBDiag script you can run that gives you the names? Its basically a SQL script, but Capita have signed it - which gives you that extra level of confidence. One I'm thinking also gives you the physical path of the report - I know I've used it historically when needing to restore individual reports.

Ps thanks for not saying the electric bill doesn't come out of my budget

Hey if it works for you, go nuts. But for the OP who has the RDS and just needs more licenses, even at a qtr of the power, its still a £5 per machine per month in just electric Just bring the hidden facts thats all

Mmm, not ideal, i'll admit, but again, if we're talking about a secure location on a server... Ideally you could use windows authentication, though i've never tried to be honest with dbattach. Should work ok tho, check with your sims support - don't want it reverting back or conflicting with the one they setup or whatever

What? In the command-line? Well if its via Attix5\RBUSS\RedStor - its encrypted. If its via a batch file or such, then well, you've saved it to the C:, which only administrators who can log on can access - ie the folks who can reset it. Or do you mean, hey I've got this really complex password, how do I store it - keepass, lastpass, printed bit of paper in the school safe - key is more then one secure place.

Well "Forcibly closed by the remote host" is firewall. It could they have too many connections and its randomly picked on the machine. It could be its flicking between the wifi and the wired connection and it doesn't like that, it could be the firewall rule you have - only certain IPs are allowed. Could try pinging your router from the machine, see if you get any packet loss - if you do, you know you've got a faulty port \ wifi point. @mats - yup, stupid. I guess it was a case of they had someone who could write desktop apps, but not a web app. Shame. Least the data in cloud based, still really sucks they are exposing their database tier the world

Yer, looks like your have to contact your LA\ISP and ask for it to be unblocked. Believe the database backend is an Azure db.

Hate to pop your bubble, but if you check your warranty your often find it'll be void if it operates beyond office hours - psu and hdd often have a limited number of hours life for example. More importantly your looking at £21.75 per month per machine in terms of electric - https://www.ukpower.co.uk/tools/running_costs_electricity - 200 watts, 730 hrs per month so if you end up with 30 users, your looking at about £7k a year in just power. OK, hopefully you'll have modern PC with low power modes etc, but still, I can't imagine it'll be less then buy a few extra CALs.

How big is the sims .MDF and the .LDF? I suspect your LDF is swollen which is causing the performance problems. If it is, you'll need to check your backup process as it should be clearing down the LDF once its backed up. It's also worth checking the disc queue length - as this could be where the bottleneck is (which could be caused by the swollen LDF size). Personally, I wouldn't limit the RAM SQL needs, it will eat what it needs. The only time you put a hard limit on is when you have multiple services on the same server - which you shouldn't be doing nowadays what with virtualizations.

I wouldn't hold my breath, its going to be a while. If you look at where Google money comes from selling ads, Microsoft money (the bulk) comes from selling Office licenses. I wouldn't be surprised if they use the Safe Harbour agreement to get the data into the US where the rules are a bit more relax - remember they don't have the level of details Facebook has - Facebook knows your a male aged between 25-30 who's just had a their first child - so showing ads for baby stuff will prob work - Google has to be a bit clever how it works it out or waiting till you ask. Anyway, discussion for another day. Anyone else having trouble reading Google answers to this: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/159257-oct-2015-dfe-guidance-cloud-software-services-data-protection-act.html? Wonder if they are updating? More likely my internet connection is playing up again.

FYI - for those who don't follow me on Twitter, Microsoft posted this yesterday - A message to our customers about EU – US Safe Harbor - Microsoft on the Issues - it basically says about how they've done the paperwork upfront and any Microsoft Cloud agreements are covered by other policies beyond Safe Harbour agreement, so you're still covered by some EU law. It isn't just accounts - mobile phones as well.

https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/6535335265697792 Capita pricing is unfortunately not as open or standard. It varies so much.

Nope, its a highly configurable command-line application. Its very advance, stable, mature product - it works with a wide range of MIS systems and other services (Google Apps, Office 365, Moodle etc) - it can create users, groups, import timetables etc. Umm... EDIT: Appears the HTTPS site doesn't work, but the HTTP does. Also be interesting to see what Microsoft\Capita come out with, ie will this be free - https://sis.microsoft.com/ - if so, might make these sort of tools pointless.

Hopefully all that common sense you've been injecting will set, like not asking for data you already have

Isn't @GREED helping the DfE -

Not quite sure I full understand, I thought you could just restore a VM to a isolated network? Failing that you could just restore the db as simsBK then point your SIMS at it - someone did actually do a document about doing it after the backup completes to test it, also gives you a dedicated reporting/training/testing environment without much work. Also you've got the setup files already - if your s3 it can extract them? Meh

"experiencing connectivity issues" - guess they rushed to moved everything to the cloud and forgot to upgrade their internet pipe or setting up a secondary site in\near London as failover where you don't get connectivity issues. @Cache - you not virtualized?

Sure, would you like a photo of @PhilNeal debit card whilst I'm at it? Seriously though, get it from Capita. If it need it like yesterday, you've messed up. You never rush building a server. You'll only regret it later.

I twitched when I read this. Rather build a fresh VM, it'll make the decommission process easier for starters. SIMS will work on the Express edition if you're worried about cost - this will be OK for a while, but really the cost of SQL Server Standard is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. If you're hosting it, its not live and your not getting updates, why would you have to pay a "license" fee? I thought the fee was for if you have it hosted - to cover the fact servers aren't free? :S - Can you confirm @advanceduser?

Sure @PhilNeal can point you in the direction of a few schools - I'd be surprised if you'll have many\any on here, as its a techy forum and generally you outsource your techy problems if you don't have any techy in-house

Are you talking about the new Capita offering, SIMS hosted in Azure? Or hosted option a few LAs do? Also primary or secondary? The latter will be more complex so more prone to problems.

I think its is safer personally. They take a lot of responsibility (and thus problems) away. That said, you can't just fling a server up in Azure and get on with it. It has limitations you need to be aware of, so yes, I wouldn't put anything "important" up in the cloud for my first attempt but I wouldn't see not having access to the (virtual) bios as a problem

I think that more depends on your LA. If your a largely urban LA with one rural school, yer, its going to be poor service. I still think the geographical area idea is pretty dated for some things, things that require a physical presence onsite makes sense - assuming the grouping is correct - I know we have schools that are closer to other LAs that a partnership between the two would make more sense. Still it'll be a good to see virtual "LAs" appearing - I've spoken with schools where they feel isolated and there situation is unique but I know there are loads of other schools going through the same thing, not always within the same LA. Often it is the low-end of the social scale in rural areas where its more a question of inspiring the children then anything. It's surprising what effort being around successful people in nice buildings does vs shelf stackers \ council houses. Fully off topic now

@Firefox - Should be ok if its a secondary DC - re network config - I assume you read the thing about the IPs being dynamic and it losing its IP when its hard reboots (deprovisioned\reprovisioned)? @localzuk - Still political. So this MAT will be controlled by a single (Middle school) with primary schools under it (kinda like a mini LA) with a single boss - rather then multiple (primary) joining together on a equal footing with multiple bosses agreeing. Isn't this the ADFS idea? And if Labour comes in, they'll go back to LA maintained. Sorry, isn't this just a LA. Group local schools together under a government (so not for profit) department then buy\do in bulk