klawd

Not using any more. But I did think it showed some vision for a change, using open source components, and modular design. Non microsoft based, which was a bonus we felt (teach methodology, rather than software). Although the admin burden is gone, we ran the tests fine and got some useful information out of it. Now we have to go back and look at other ways of assessing ICT.

Possible? Most likely From the experience of FMS being a total temperamental POS that seems to be stuck in Windows 95 land, I would be extremely reluctant to go anywhere near its innards, personally.

If you want to send email over the internet, you will need to have a server that will allow you to relay to it (usually your isp) or setup your server to deliver direct using DNS lookups. You will also need to configure the domain so that the MX / mail exchange records point to your IP address to recieve incoming email.

Probably like many other schools, toshiba cold called us and were trying to hike this product. Turns out it is very limited in what it is compatible with, and shockingly expensive to boot. If memory serves, it was £5000 plus a quarterly fee, of 400 some odd quid. The other cost to consider would be the need to upgrade to a full version of MSSQL, if you are going to be storing a lot of binary data in the database. We would interested to know how you get on, the system seemed rather expensive for what it claimed to do.

Note: I am forced into using SIMS so my experience is only based on that product. Sure, but at least lets have this flexibility. Most schools are interested in data reporting that means something to them, rather than end of year returns and all these other statutory requirements. SIMS does not have to (and should not attempt to) fill every niche a school wants. Yes - who exactly owns the database? Lets not forget that it seems many schools are forced into using SIMS because its what everyone else seems to use, rather than its merits or reputation as a quality product. It is no surprise that schools want to develop their own solutions, rather than giving another few £xxxk to Capita each year for a "new feature" that should have been included from the outset or one they can create for a lot less. If there really has to be such tight control why not have an arrangement where schools can read or write to the database as required, if they want to, using the business objects API. If the school then wishes to redistribute a product it has created commercially, it can pay Capitas license fee. For a company that is allegedly in service to schools, it seems to be rather protective of data that it does not actually own. Without the diligent data entry by schools in the first place, there is no "SIMS database".

Hi I actually created psPrint - could you elaborate exactly on what you're having problems with? The way I run it is by using a shortcut that is created the the shared menu program files/startup folder. It will attempt to find the ini file in the same folder as you ran the application from. If you are having issues, you may like to specify the full path to the ini file. e.g psprint.exe p:\admin\printers.ini The program has been running live on our system now for over 18 months without issue. I would be happy to assist further in this thread or via msg if you prefer.

We are using Axis 216FD cameras for the past year now, some comments: - Dont waste your money on the Axis Camera Station software, it is a rip off, and has LOADS of issues with it. Milestone is a much better package and runs with many different makes of camera - Axis software only works with Axis cameras. - You will need a decent network to be able to get quality footage out of the cameras. We have found MPEG4 footage from axis cameras to be so low quality to be useless. The alternative is MJPEG and this means high bandwith. Our 8 cameras are using a constant 15MB/s bandwith. - Recording takes a fair bit of processing power. If you do not have enough then the footage will stutter, connections will drop etc. We have 2xP4 2.8ghz servers, 512MB mem, serving 4 cameras each. We have tried various CCTV software packages, and none have fulfilled our requirements. I am now working on an in house recording solution as I think its a rip off paying an extra £70 for an Axis license every time we add a camera.

We are using ZipGenius, it handles RARS fine http://www.zipgenius.it/eng/index.php Also has nice user friendly UI, compared to 7zip, which kinda looks like a Windows 95 app. Not open source but hey.. Why do most open source apps look so ugly.....

This is precisely why BSF will be halted IMO. Schools already under BSF will be completed but the rest of the waves will be "postponed" (indefinately) and mysteriously never happen. Just need to wait it out....

I have been following this topic with both horror and interest...... The reports I have read so far have demonstrated BSF (or renamed PFI as it really is..) to be a failiure. The reports stated there to already be a lack of funding in the initial stages, causing delays of several years in implementation. I believe there was also a TV documentary on this a while ago, I forgot the name of it, but its findings showed the the same problems. Could it be the case, as with many other government initiatives, that this dies a death when the bills start to come in and the government cannot continue funding. Think of how many other initiatives have come and gone. Look at the recent KS3 ICT testing debacle. It seems to me that there are huge hurdles for the government already to implementing BSF. Including: - Funding, it is easy to quote huge figures of investment, but how sustainable is it and where is it coming from? - The LA, local authorities in many areas have a vested interest in keeping ICT away from the private sector, and it seems they have managed to do this very successfully so far. - Headteachers, from the experience I have seen, a very powerful force. There are many schools that have partnerships and working groups to promote their views, and in our county this has been very succsessful at changing initatives or blocking them altogether. - The government themselves: The next government may decide that BSF is a disaster and stop it in its tracks. If this does hit our school (and we are not yet convinced that it will..) We have already discussed the situation and would opt out of the funding. When you look at the small print, the funding really isnt that massive (based on the fact it seems to be a loan), the money will be managed by the private company (so your £250 workstation, will be billed as £600) etc etc.

If the drive powers up, you can use R-Studio data recovery software. It takes a while but is extremely successful at data recovery.

There is a utility called the Custom Installation Wizard that comes with office resource kit that allows you to configure an outlook profile . prf file and save it. Then all you need to do is deploy this file to the clients. In the profile you can use vars like %USERNAME% etc so you only need to configure 1 profile, and then when the user runs the .prf file it will substitute the correct values. One final thing: Are you really going to give year 6,7 + pupils access to the full outlook client? There is quite a large amount of personal information that can be stored in the global address list. There also does not appear to be much scope for locking down the outlook interface.

This might be of some use... LaunchinIE http://www.whirlywiryweb.com/q/%2Flaunchinie.asp its a free DLL, but requires some setup on clients (registry entries etc) Another (but non-free) way of doing it is: IntraLaunch http://www.particlesoftware.com/en/index.html Both seem to work fine, I am experimenting with both for incorporating an application launcher into intranet.

Currently using a certificate from RapidSSL They are a UK company, took about 5 minutes online, and it is trusted by default in IE. It cost $69, more details here http://www.rapidssl.com/ssl-certificate-products/rapidssl/ssl-certificate-rapidssl.htm

I agree with you on some of these. However, things such as the VLE are (in our case) hosted by a seperate company, accessable from any internet connection. Who we use for internet access is irrelevant. The biggest potential benefit I can see, is that being on the same WAN, we should be able to get LAN speeds to and from this "educational network". But in our case (and all schools in the same county I have spoken to...) this is limited to 10mb - our usual upstream. We get no benefits of being able to access any such "NEN". No teaching staff here have ever heard of it, much less require access to it. The only benefit I can see that we get, is that County can provide remote support for admin over the RBC connection. Even this could be done using RDP and VPN if they really wanted to. Like talking to a brick wall. They have been deliberately obstructive and unhelpful. We went ahead and did it anyway. We had a dire connection up until recently, and if we were not locked into a RBC contract for the foreseeable future, then we would have kicked them into touch months ago. Everyone blaming each other when there was a problem, ridiculously restrictive firewall, no access to router, no VPN access, unwilling to even discuss opening ports or reconfiguration. Massive downtime.....yada yada We are a hub providing access to other schools via our RBC connection, we used that as leverage. They turn a blind eye to how we manage our internet connection and services, and in return we make sure nothing bad happens to the their router. Seems to work well. We are able to run a good system, (Exchange,Web hosting, VPN), and can run it with far less downtime, and faster speed to go with it.

Can you elaborate on this? All the documentation I have seen on this implies that Volume Shadow Copy Service can handle "live" files without a problem. I have not noticed any problems backing up SQL Server 2000 with NTbackup. But I would like to make sure I am doing backups that will actually restore.

We have been using our own ADSL connection (seperate from the LEA connection) for the past year. We originally used Easynet ADSL (2mbit) which is linked to the NEN and provides filtering for schools (for an extra cost) We have just migrated away however since it was too expensive (£1300 per year) to Nildram. We now have 8mbit down and 832kps up on the business package, which costs around £750 a year. Speed is excellent. Our County connection is supposedly 10mbit, but Nildram is faster (go figure) This allows us to provide a proper VPN connection for staff, host our own exchange email, staff do not however use it for browsing as it has no filtering on it. If we could dump the rip-off county connection, we would do it tomorrow. We are locked into some RBC contract however. The County have no problem with us using an ADSL connection for VPN, we were in fact advised by the county to do this, if we wanted to allow VPN access (they have no plans to implement this until 2009)

Is there a reason for starting and stopping the SQL Services? I assumed volume shadow copy was designed so you didnt have to do this. We currently use dbattach to backup the SIMS db then copy it to another server + upload it offsite. Other backups (Exchange + sql) are done using a custom NTbackup script.

You will want to be using as few GPO's as possible. The more you have, the longer it will take to process and logon. If you can get away with just one policy with all your settings, then do it. If you are only setting user settings in a policy, make sure to disable computer processing for that GPO (and vice versa). I have found this to make a big difference to logon times. Those are the actual Microsoft guidelines for configuring GPO's.

I have found the buffalo boxes to be shockingly slow. What I have done is get some old clients, load them with windows 2k3 (because of the cheap license) and shoved a few SATA hard drives in there. Having a seperate machine means its really easy to add more storage and you also get the flexbility to upgrade other components. I then use ntbackup with some custom vb scripts to rotate the backups and sort out the logs. This seems to work fine for backing up SQL, Exchange and user data.

Probably a good idea to check for sure what services the LEA provides and make a list of what you require. You may find they provide contracts which tie you into several things, some of which you may not be able to provide otherwise, or worse, contracts that tie you in for years to come (RBC contracts especially) I would also check liability for the various services you provide. One of the advantages of using LEA services is that you can always blame them if anything goes wrong. (e.g if students circumvent filters etc)

Allied Telesyn make excellent switches, fully featured, at a reasonable price

You could probably do this with URL rewriting. I am looking at implementing the same thing as you and found this free utility after some searching: http://www.iismods.com/url-rewrite/index.htm It is basically an IIS implementation of mod_rewrite for apache.

As stated above, your A record "mail.penybontprimary.org.uk" does not resolve, (for me at least), so your email is probably ending up at your second available mail exchanger. When you change records on a .uk domain it can take some time to filter over the internet. You may also want to change the priority, as it may cause problems with having two "priorities" ie, both at 10 the same.

Ouch...high price... I recently got a certificate for our OWA box...UK company...took about 5 minutes online, trusted by default in IE (no warnings) $69, get it from here http://www.rapidssl.com/ssl-certificate-products/rapidssl/ssl-certificate-rapidssl.htm