Ephelyon

A recent licensing mishap with ESXi - we're fine now! - caused me to take a closer look at Microsoft's free standalone hypervisor offering, this being Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (which I'd never looked at before). I'm looking to create a virtual environment for Computer Science students, either for coding in or at least for execution of compiled code, to support of the new curriculum without compromising the main system. I've spent the past three days (yes days, not working days!) getting it sorted from start to finish and I'm happy with the setup now. Anyone else doing something similar?

Also, when would you get all your summer upgrades done if the school has to be open all the time?

I wonder what this "government-backed system that all schools use" might be?

AutoIt script attached. The compiled executable is then deployed via Group Policy to %WinDir% and hooked into the launch of utilman.exe through the Registry (also deployed via GP): HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\utilman.exe "Debugger"="%WinDir%\LaunchPARS.exe" LaunchPARS.zip

Out of curiosity, if you lost your network and therefore technically no longer had financial records going back 7 years... or pupils' educational records... what actually happens to the school? Can it be prosecuted/closed for this alone?

We've done something similar by replacing the Ease of Access button on the logon screen with a little AutoIt programme that runs PARS Connect in IE's Kiosk Mode, so teachers can quickly take a register if they don't have time to wait for logon etc. Thanks for the IIS VM specs. Out of interest, what are your respective SIMS VM specs? Trying to work out whether the slowness is also to do with the back-end rather than just the front-end...

I'm looking at giving it 4 cores and 8GB RAM over the summer - hope that'll do the trick! No SSD storage for it but it'll be on an array (with everything else) that has 25 spindles (10K SAS)... hoping that should do it...

Can anyone advise as to a recommended IIS VM spec for whole-school PARS Connect usage (around 700 pupils) for attendance, behaviour, detentions and the rest? It's been deathly slow on our current VM with 1 core and 4GB RAM even with just one concurrent user - which was probably to be expected! - but what kind of resource allocation are people finding that works well?

@timbo343, might want to redact school name.

Ah - finally someone who shares my views on the wonders of batch scripting!

The Earth will reach me?

Complete back-end server refresh. Moving to boxes with 24 cores, 128GB RAM and 7TB of storage.

Ah... that sounds like the database has been detached and subsequently re-attached (or updated/migrated) manually without using Capita's DBAttach tool. We had something similar with that before.

Does SQL Server Management Studio reveal anything - authentication logs etc? Also, are all databases attached as they should be?

@ICTDirect_Dave, was asking John for 5 of those yesterday (some desktops too), do you know if it's got anywhere?

Just as a side note if anyone is using AirVision, I've today managed to get the web interface working properly with IE11 if anyone has been having issues with that.

Here's a good guide on getting an NLB IP set up on both boxes; you could then just tell SmoothWall to forward to that "virtual IP": Setting up NLB on Windows Server 2008 R2 | bretty.me.uk

Ah... then we met at your most recent interview!

Assuming you've done something like first two disks in their own mirrored "boot/system" array, remainder as a RAID5 "storage" array, and that's set up in hardware (i.e. on the RAID controller), not software (i.e. in Windows), it should be fine. Actually... Cheshire... AiO1200 which was a standard part of County's big rollout going back several years... and looking at age... we probably know each other!

We did the same thing with our one of those before it was retired. It will run Win2K8 R2 x64 perfectly fine. @Bradlys can confirm as he's got it now!

Not condoning the act as such, but when the father is saying: I wonder if that's why she wouldn't shut up...

How is your backup and DR? Do you have any off-site provision? Virtualisation in place?

I agree it should be more important than it is, but what people are ignoring is that there are still going to be plenty of roles where it's not anywhere near as important as the ability to read and write well. As always, we need not to overbalance.

Because it's much less of a life skill, regardless of what anyone says. Also, depending on how well they do on that course (bearing in mind it's a core subject so they don't have much of a choice), not all of them will leave with the ability to write like that.

It is the school's job to provide part of that education. At secondary phase it is their job to generate the interest in subjects for future study, not to prepare them fully for everything they will ever need to know, nor to make them employment-ready the September after their exams. Remember when even university wasn't supposed to be all that work-related? What we do at secondary phase is very important, but it shouldn't be confused with providing the full picture. One thing that does annoy me is people coming along with the idea that "if we don't teach them X now, they'll never learn it" - they don't actually say it but you can tell from the look of desperation in the eyes - because it simply isn't true. Again, the school is not the last bastion for work-related skills; it is (among) the first. There will be plenty of time later to learn how things actually work in the real world.