dalsoth

Typing this very sentence.... No really, I am studying at the moment. Waiting for the GF to get back from a gig also. Drinking tea and resisting the temptation to turn on the tv to see if Carlito's way is still on!

Just make sure that you are getting the required number of quotes required in your schools financial handbook. You should have something like that which states how much the cost should be before you need to gather additional quotes. If not, ask your bursar. You may have a procurement policy. If you have the auditors round from the council they will not be pleased if there is no paper trail or records kept of past quotes. They may think you are on the fiddle. Network Manager or Technician, perhaps you should clarify who is actually responsible for those things when the bleep hits the fan. Preferably make sure it's the guy who actually is the budget holder.

Have had Acer laptops and a few computers in the past and they were rubbish. Poor quality. HP any day and failing them i would resort to Dell. I understand this site needs to pay it's bills so i can understand where the mods are coming from when they do things like this. After all i don't have to pay for the site to keep running out of my own pocket. One thing though. Explaining that you have had offers for user information from the site and that you would never consider giving it out is something that needs not be said. I have not inspected the site's terms and conditions and am no expert in law but that sounds like it would land you in court should you even have that in the back of your mind as an option. It is not something to use to justify your honesty. No offense meant. It is a great site and a great resource for those in education. I admit though i am not a great poster here and i do adblock all of the adverts on the site and rather enjoy the "by blocking ads you play into the hands of BSF" thingy as it makes me smile, don't know why. I block all ads for all sites and if a site goes under because it can't pay the bills then so be it. Hopefully if the members here liked the site enough they would all chip in and you would not need these sycophantic sales people posting how lovely they are all the time and how they care about us and our problems . Dislike sales people really and after years of hearing them say the same things it gets old. Just my thoughts, no offense to anyone intended. Nitey night.

I doubt your calls would even get past my technician. He fields all cold calls. Unless i am looking for something we just take companies details from an email address they send them to and file them away for when we need something. If he is feeling particularly annoyed by the half dozen or more sales calls a day (particularly the same companies ringing up despite being told there is no money this year) he just gives em an email we never check or tells them to call at 4pm when we have gone home. Most times though we work with those we have built up a relationship with. Occasionally we will add a quote from another company but usually regret it as most are just bluff and bluster.

Congrats!! Phone in sick and have a beer anyway haha

In a conversation with RM not too long ago i was told that should they get the bid for my own area, most likely a few network managers would survive and would have responsibility for a number of schools. On the ground there would be a few technicians scattered here or there. Great for the few that get the positions but job losses or demotion for the rest. I know the employment aspect is not the main one for some of the forum posters here but i am happy to admit it is one of the major issues if not the major issue for me. Unless you have not noticed the job front is not looking too rosy at the moment. I have been shafted by management here and in other schools for so long that i truly understand the problem with many schools is the poor leadership from the top. Nothing will improve if the leadership are not committed. If they barely know anything about BSF as is the case here and yet have signed up for it then god help them as it will be another disaster. I wonder how long a managed service is going to put up with 20 keyboards trashed in a week before they start to charge for these and other items at silly prices. It is then that it will dawn on them the mistake they have made. At the moment the leadership in many schools are probably too lazy to fully comprehend what is going on. It's little wonder that the majority of us who are not on the SMT have no clue about BSF and are relying on hearsay and forum comments. Like others have said, if we were made a part of the process perhaps we could have had some positive input but unfortunately we are surplus to requirements and it would really only just annoy the companies involved if they had to humour us and our suggestions before shifting us off to the job queue and carrying on regardless. My advice to anyone worried about their jobs post BSF is to get your certifications done if you have not already and be ready to move out of education. The ship is sinking. It may take a year or two but it's going to happen.

BSF can work but can also fail. This video makes it seem as though the school was living in the dark ages before they came along. Perhaps it was, but it should not be put up as an example of what all schools are like pre BSF. Some schools have a fantastic ICT team and will lose out from BSF. Propaganda. The reality for many technicians and network managers will also be a loss of employment in one way or another, sooner or later. We only see a guy enthuse about how his ICT team are flourishing and moving up the ladder in their new company..... Let's hope when the contract renewal comes up that they win the bid again or those technicians that do get employed will have a shock when they no longer have a school (if they aren't carted off the side elsewhere in the meantime).

Straighttalk, first post i notice. You are probably that guy in the video talking rubbish. This video only insults all ICT staff who currently work in education. There may be some technicial staff out there doing a poor job but then again there are bound to be plenty of BSF schools that do a poor job. The reasons behind it will be quite diverse. The issue won't disappear as soon as BSF takes control. How many of us have ever had a poor service or product from a private company? Surely not??? Picking on poorly trained and supported technicians as an example is poor argument on your part. If you can promise a better service in ALL schools than what is currently provided then fair enough. I doubt that will be the case. If people want to vent on here because they see a video promising everything they already provide. All the while portraying it as something new, fresh, exciting and ultimately much better than the shabby service they used to have, then they have every right. The truly sad part is that most teachers and management at my school would look at this video and think wow that's fantastic. You can be superman but just don't expect thanks for it. They will drop you in a heartbeat because ultimately you are just that annoying support guy that tells them they can't install limewire on the school computers. Blabla off to bed.

Had a quick look and liked what a saw. Looked very swish

Perhaps remove the default gateway if it is set on the DHCP server for the clients. If the students log on by pulling out the network cable and then untick the school proxy or load portable Firefox or other stuff to bypass the school proxy this may help.

All of us need to pray hard to the snow god for help immediately. Let's keep the snow rolling into next week and we might be able to make it to half term. Nothing here yet, i am even doing a snow dance to help things along.

Wales pah!! You are going down! England all the way. Watch how we crush the Italians and know that is coming your way soon!

Can i also say that the F series work much better with a full case off and clean inside with toothbrush Get your techie on to that too ASAP. Dust waits for no man!!!!

May be different to you but on an RM Exchange set up they recommend to restrict the students groups from accessing the GAL then to create a new GAL for the students with the filters for only those you want them to see.

Sounds like you want Windows Home Server.

We installed Firefox on all laptops for use at home. We then configured internet explorer to go through the school proxy and restricted the staff from accessing the connections tab to change it. Staff can use firefox at home and have to use internet explorer when at school. There is also a proxy switcher program available i think which makes it easy to swap from each location that you can set up as a network package to roll out to laptops. Think this is the link to the proxy switcher. Not used it before except to try on my own computer. Looked quite nifty but i only checked it out for 2 mins and moved on to something else

You can self study any course really and sit the exam whenever you like usually through Prometric or PearsonVue. If you are interested in a MS exam, you need to register at prometric and then you can log in and select a test centre near you and a time that suits. You just turn up, sign in, get escorted into an exam room with a computer and get on with it. Hope that helps.

If they are school laptops could you not set this up through group policy? If they are not school laptops and they are personal, i would have strong reservations about letting them loose on the network without suitable VLans etc.. We have had consultancy work done here and have seen the results that can be achieved by non school laptops connecting to the school system. Not pretty.

Great forum dedicated to IT certification with a fair few Edugeek members there also. Check it out as they always have great advice and info on all of this. CertForums

Ask your buddies the site agents to throw a spanner in the boilers and voila! I doubt i will be so lucky to have my school closed but i am praying hard to everything that's evil.

Our school selected Talmos without any input from us, then worked out what a big mistake it was and wrote off perhaps close to 30k.

examcollection.com = Braindump http://www.certguard.com/search.asp

Clonezilla, open source, ugly, but effective. Used many versions of ghost and acronis with issues on one thing or another. Clonezilla just works. Tutorial on clonezilla here but to be honest it looks confusing but is pretty straight forward. Just accept all the defaults, choose what you want to backup or restore and then point where from or to. Thats it.

With regards to TrueCrypt and full laptop hard disk encryption, could we encrypt each hard disk using the same password and use a single rescue cd or is the rescue cd going to need creating for every laptop? We have nearly 100 laptops and i don't really want to have to store all of the cd's for them. Any tips would be appreciated as we are looking at implementing this if we can make it work for us. One other thing to ask on the topic. Do you guys have a policy that staff do not use any memory sticks other than those supplied by the school? How do you enforce this? I don't like to mess about with staff owned equipment as i will not take responsibility for any damage. Do any of you use any products that prevent usb from being used or restricted to those allowed? Is that even doable? Thanks for the info in this thread so far, has been useful

Thanks for the link, nice site.