Kipling

The core switch can act as a telnet client; so assuming the core switch is able to see the other switches you can telnet to the core switch and then from within that session telnet to the other switches.

Yes you can run loop-protect on all ports, its relatively light weight; it works basically by sending out a packet and listening for it on other ports, there’s no reason to enable it on uplink ports to other switches but it does no real harm.

We also use SSL Explorer but we don’t bother with the RDP part for teachers or pupils, they just have access to their school network shares. The teachers find it quite intuitive to use and the kids of course have no trouble with it. We run the windows version. If you want a quick look at it give me a shout and I’ll pm you a username and password to try.

Had the same problem a few years ago and after trying a few different ways (switching to roaming profiles for staff etc) settled on making staff laptops dual-boot. There are two installs of XP on each laptop, one on the domain to use at school (which gets updates etc) and the other one not on the domain but frozen, which teachers use at home. Neither partition can access/see the other and documents are synchronised via a third partition. It works well and the laptops don’t cause us half the work they used to.

A very good point and succinctly made.

Exactly, and because of the micromanaged curriculum that’s pretty much what gets passed of as homework. I think that’s the crux of it. At ‘A’ level home work can be use because the teaching and learning style changes (slightly) from spoon fed procedural information instillation to a less prescriptive / more open learning style where the concept of learning a subject rather than learning packets of information starts to come to the forefront. Below 6th form, until the school curriculum becomes less rigid and teachers are allowed to teach with more flexibility, homework can’t really offer much more than more-of-the-same and that doesn’t really have too much value.

I think it should be scrapped completely. It is absolutely valueless. The kids at the bottom simply don’t do it, the kids in the middle mindlessly rush or churn through it just because it “has to be done” and the kids at the top waste their own time sweating over work that more often than not doesn’t get much more than an “acknowledgment tick”. It’s also a tool to penalize/punish both the slow (“finish that for homework”) and the fast (“do the extra questions x to y for homework”). Its nothing more than an archaic way of teacher letting parents know that work is being done, and in this day and age there are dozen’s of better ways to do that.

Oddly some laptops would, on occasion, appear as though they’d been deleted from the domain, that is to say as though they had had their computer accounts deleted in AD (but they were still there); the only cure was to physically connect the laptop and then genuinely remove it from the domain and rejoin it. It didn’t happen a lot but enough for it to be annoying – we ran with 64 laptops for over a year before (temporarily) switching to using PSKs. We even tried dropping back from NPS to IAS 2003 but it didn’t help. It could of course have been entirely unrelated to the IAS but time was short so didn’t look too much further into it (switching to PSKs made it a bit too easy to put it on the back burner )

Never pinned it down but we used to use IAS etc and found random laptops would sporadically fall off the domain and we’d have to rejoin them – it was quite a strange fault. We switched to using PSKs as a short term measure (a year ago ) and it works much better, at least in regards to falling off the domain.

I couldn’t be any more impressed with hyper-v, easy to set up and works faultlessly. We run 13 servers including a DC on one hyper-v box and it’s never put a foot wrong (we maintain a lower spec backup server ready to take over the main functions in case the physical server should fail) After a few test installs the DC was the first server we virtualised in anger and we’ve never had a single fault that can be attributed to hyper-v

£8052 last year for roughly 1100 combined staff and pupils, on 400+ workstations and about 40 printers. So that’s roughly £7.32 per person or £201.3 per printer.

We tried being very tight with printing and it backfired to a degree with endless pupils whining for more credit because they “have to print their homework for the next lesson”; we’d then go trough the ritual of checking what they had printed that week and finally give them more credit. It became more trouble that it was worth. We then started giving lower school £1 per week, upper school £2 per week and sixth form £3 per week with colour pages costing 20p and mono 5p. We found teachers were topping-up pupils a lot (too much) because by the end of the week many pupils had used up their credit printing junk for teachers earlier in the week. So we are now trying a flat £1 per-pupil-per-period throughout the school with no top-ups, teachers can access the kids areas and print work for them if need be. We are also looking at using release stations, so the pupils won't have any credit and the teacher will have to (bulk) release printed jobs each lesson, thereby having all that lessons printing charged back to them. Hopefully that will be the ultimate solution in kerbing excess printing. As an aside, I can’t recommend papercut highly enough. I haven’t found a single scenario it hasn’t catered for.

Although it is technically possible to record the content it is in breach of the iplayer terms and conditions, particularly sections 5 and 12 I know that because I was asked to do the exact same thing recently (and declined)

Thats a very good point, as an example we’ve just had to replace a whole suites worth of batteries (32 of them) on laptops that are only just over a year old.

I did a few speed tests and posted the results in a past thread (copied below), it will give you an idea of speeds. I can’t comment on a completely wireless solution (and to be honest I share your reservations about it) but in our current wireless setup, which is used in addition to wired PCs, we limit each access points to a maximum of 18 connections and get a perfectly usable system that way. It doesn’t get use for anything too bandwidth demanding but it works fine for general use (office – internet etc).

Another vote for Yamcam, its a very simple program and it doesn't stamp the pictures.

And that in a sense is the point, all the other stuff can be done on a combination of an iPad type device, remote access and their own computers (if they wish to work from home) Part of the original laptops-for-teacher scheme was to encourage teachers to be more comfortable with IT – to let them play with it – experiment and learn; those days are gone, being able to use IT (for the business side of teaching) is expected, it is a base skill. So the idea of laptops being dished out as “home computers” is nonsensical when there is now more appropriate equipment that money can be used for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying its all or nothing. Some teachers will always need special requirements.

Not at all; badly used IT crowbared into a lesson for the sake of “using IT across the curriculum” is much worse than not using IT at all. How many times have you heard “just go on the internet and research that” when the kids are sat in the library! Using IT to solve IT problems is a natural thing for us but teachers have other tools, forged over centuries of teaching, and IT is only a very small and often insignificant one at their disposal.

In a purely business sense I think it’s more a case of the schools requirements rather than the users requirements. The school requires teachers to input registration data into sims, the school requires that teachers are contactable, the school requires that reports are completed, etc If a user “wants” to use IT to teach and “wants” to prepare that work on a laptop, at home, then it’s up to them to use their own means to fulfil their wants. Of course it’s not as black and white as that but mobile IT in teachers hands is probably more of a business tool now than a teaching tool, and if its not now – it will be in a few years.

Yes we are considering it (sort of). We are not replacing any staff laptops this financial year (apart from any that fail completely) and instead focusing on getting a PC in every teaching room; following that we hope to start phasing in the iPad / slate / iTouch etc to staff. In connection with that we are currently evaluating the TeacherWebFolder package to enable sims access to portable devices. I honestly think that staff laptops have had their day, in fact I think that the Laptops-for-Teacher scheme created a bit of a monster by giving teachers the impression that they are entitled to (what many consider to be) a computer to use at home – ie “their laptop”; and despite the scheme finishing years ago schools are now under a kind of unofficial obligation to still provide staff-laptops because its now “the done thing” A much more useful tool now is definitely a PDA type device, providing a single point of contact to each teacher, combining phone, email, access to sims and emergence support features all in a pocket size package. Once there’s a PC in pretty much every teaching room I can’t think of anything a teacher needs to do throughout the day that can’t be accomplished on an iTouch/iPhone etc.

So it’s more to customise the software a little with a splash screen rather than any form of forced licence compliance. In that case I think the best solution is the one Arthur suggested a few posts back. To summarise it: You supply your program in an uncompressed format with an msi file and have a dummy licence file included within the structure. The network admin then has a few options. a) Contact you and get the correct licence file emailed across. Replace the dummy file with the new one and push the whole lot out over the network. or b) hand install the software on one PC using your current online registration system. Once completed, copy the newly downloaded licence file from that PC and overwrite the dummy file on the server; then push the whole lot out over the network. It’s simple, it’s guaranteed to work, it doesn’t run into any user permission problems and it allows users to continue using the software when not connected to the network. If the software gets upgraded all the admin has to do is make sure the real licence file is copied over the dummy one again and let it roll out to clients.

This is the bit thats causing a hiccup, you want the program to copy registration data from the network to the local drive so that if the machine is taken off the network it will still find its licence; but you want that to happen on every run, which implies doing it under standard user permissions. Like Arthur says, your choices of locations are limited there. Also what’s to stop someone with a 10 licence version, installing it on a hundred pc’s and then deleting the registration data off the server. All 100 machines will happily look to their local licence copy and work without blinking. How about this (based on sibelius’ licensing model). You supply only one CD/download. The CD has the user program and a licence server program. If the purchaser only bought one or two licences then they install them by hand and register with you over the internet as they currently do. If they bought say 10 licences, they: install the licence server on a server (or pc that is always on) start the licence server and “install” a key/file/code emailed from you which dictates how many concurrent users can run the software. Modify a file in the install pack (you suggested tm.config I think) to point to the licence-servers IP address/name. Push out the (now modified) user program over the network to all clients or run it from a network share etc. [*]When a user launches the program it queries the licence-server so ask permission to run (the licence server keeps a count of how many users are currently using the software). For home users there’s no simple solution. There will have to be an element of trust, you could use the same key/file/code that the licence server uses and have your client program look locally if the licence-server can’t be found; if the key/file/code has been installed locally then allow it to run. Not much protection but it could have the school details embed within the key so al least there’ll be a splash screen. Advantages Good on the network because it can be installed everywhere. No chance of accidentally going over licence because the licence-server will prevent that. Allows you to sell more licensing options, e.g. 100 user, 200 user, 300 user etc. Disadvantages. More involved changes to your current code base. A licence server to write/test. Doesn’t address home users needs too well.

Definitely avoid doing that, it would mean us copying it into every uses “documents” folder or making changes to appdata etc in profiles, the same goes for HKCU – that again will mean making changes to users profiles. If you need to store registration data, it can be stored in HKLM (a standard user can read that, just not write to it) or in a file on the local machine (“Program Files” folder is perfectly readable to standard users). An installer will be able to write to either of those locations whether it is done locally (assuming installed by admin) or through an msi & gpo setup. Where do you currently store your registration data? – in the registry I’m guessing? I don’t think you are going to find an easy one size fits all solution but to amalgamate some of the suggestions in this thread, how about this possibility: (Given that you’d like to only have to maintain one version and that we’d like to avoid per machine registration; this should only require a very simple change to your main program) Issue your software as an MSI (almost) exactly as it is now. Allow people to register by hand if they wish or if they only have a few licences. Issue an additional MSI to site-wide licence holders which does nothing more than set a few registry keys in HKLM with data about the licence owner/school info. Your software then simply checks for that key: If its there, then don’t bother with all the registration checks, allow the program to run and display a splash screen detailing ownership/usage permissions etc. If the key is not there then perform whatever checks you currently perform to see if the program has been registered by hand. Advantages You only have to maintain one program. Not a big change to your current code base to accomplish the changes. Network admin will be happy with the simple install. Home users / staff laptops not on the domain will be able to use the program. Upgrades will not affect the site licence side of things. Disadvantages Not super secure in a software protection sense (although you could scramble/encrypt the data in the registry keys to help) How does that sound?

Like everyone else here I seem to spend a ridiculous amount of time fighting, cajoling and coaxing programs to work on a network. It’s all too common for programs, which are otherwise very good, to have painful installation requirements. Some companies get it very right (autograph springs to mind) and have an excellent configuration program and an easy rollout; some get it very wrong (like rising-stars assessments). It’s good to see a developer doing some market research in this area. My best advice to you is to forget all the registration faff; all it will achieve is disgruntled network managers / IT techs. If you are collecting registration information to get usage data then just do it transparently in the background, if you are collecting it to protect your software – then fair play to you, but I think you’ll find that most of us will go out of our way to keep within a licence agreement at school. In terms of install configuration, if it will run from a unc share (a real one, eg, \\server\programs\languages\taskmagic) without requiring any form of write access, or if it has an msi and (optionally) a transform (with a custom editor ideally) then that’s about as easy and smooth as it gets and everybody will be happy

Just a thought I’ll throw in, I’m pretty sure you can use ruckus wireless points as stand alone APs – that is to say without using a zonedirector (I’m sure someone will confirm that). That way you could start with a couple of (self managed) very good access points and won’t have to abandon them later if your wireless coverage needs to spread.