AngryTechnician

Our involvement with said school was to provide the technical knowledge to help bring the entire situation under control, and with the hosting company (Fasthosts) we did seize control of the site back fairly quickly, though Fasthosts did inexplicably allow the old NM to change the sodding passwords BACK again at one point before we gave them some verbal abuse over the phone about proper procedures to establish whether you are actually dealing with the real customer or not. SMT at the school had a fair inkling something was 'not right' with their NM and we were initially brought in under the guise of acting as consultants to help improve the school's network provision, as we were a much bigger school with a much bigger team and network. Our actual brief was to answer SMT's question of "is our NM screwing us over?" Which he was. And I suspect he knew full well what we were really there for. I don't know if any legal action was eventually taken against him; I think the school was just glad he was gone. It actually got a lot weirder after this; I wont go into it any further on a public forum, but if any of you see me at a conference or the like, ask me about when they hired their new NM...

Something not too dissimilar happened to a school I was involved with a few years ago when they sacked their NM. The dismissal was not only fair but utterly deserved, but he retaliated by (amongst other things) changing the password on the webhosting and altering all the contact forms so that they went to other accounts he controlled instead of to the school.

I'm pretty sure that just showing the video live from the site in class does not violate any copyright, unless the entire video is infringing (in which case it shouldn't even be on YouTube). Downloading the videos does violate YouTube's terms of service, however.

Basically, smaller scale solutions. We hear a lot about fully-blown clustered Hyper-V solutions when small primaries can't afford a SAN - but they could still benefit from virtualisation. We get pushed towards SCCM when SCE is a lot easier to set up for small networks. We hear about UAG for remote access when we might be able to get away with something as simple as Application Request Routing. From my point of view, Microsoft spend a lot of time pushing their bigger products, or the more complicated configurations, that are more suited to larger schools and universities. Those solutions often provide the most flexibility, but at the cost of additional complexity that isn't practical with a small budget and one bod in the IT office. Sometimes simpler is better, and the simpler products and configs are out there if you ask around enough. P.S. Having dealt with the three above examples myself, I'd be more than happy to chat with anyone at MS who would like to discuss how some of the 'case-study' solutions could be simplified for smaller schools.

Not wanting to sound like a Microsoft fanboy, but that article is one-sided, poorly researched, and factually inaccurate (partly due to being out of date - it was written in 2009). As for the OPs topic - I'm pretty sure you can't use a service like DynDNS even for testing Live@edu. You will need access to a registered domain for which you can properly control the DNS records.

Interested! I'd second the suggestions about App-V, I've used it a bit and have found it extremely useful for software that has proved troublesome to deploy using traditional methods. Even if people aren't sold on the 'virtualise everything' concept (I know I'm not) I think more people would like to know about the option.

Directly below this text should be a mirror.

Not quite a red herring because they are actually used, but our entire Lower School department has Promethean boards and are insanely jealous of the Upper School with their touch-sensitive SMART Boards. I've always maintained that SMART are better for younger children (even if just for the fact that they can't pull the sodding pen nibs out and eat them), but various past decision makers in our school decided otherwise.

What version of Android do you have on yours? On the original 1.6 version the home screen is locked to landscape, but in 2.2 it changes by tilting just like everything else. Not sure about 2.1 as I never installed that disaster of a build.

Interesting, I knew that fixed one problem with IE but didn't know it might work for this one too... thanks for the tip.

DO NOT SEND IT ROYAL MAIL. I did the same a few years ago and they utterly destroyed it. The box looked like it had been sat on by an elephant and the screen was smashed. I tried to claim on the Special Delivery insurance. They asked for the laptop and damaged packing to be sent to a Freepost address for claims evaluation. They then lost it as packages to said address aren't tracked. I never got a penny. I would second the suggestion to try Parcel2Go. They use proper couriers.

We've got one, but it was just done on a decent video camera borrowed from a friend and one of the ushers manned it for us, so it's not like it cost us much.

Hmmm, 170 pages, just a little light reading then... :S

I don't know about Samsung's latest netbooks, but the incredibly popular NC-10s cannot take any kind of rough treatment. We had repeated problems with keyboards, screens, and power buttons, and to top it all off they have a single screwpost holding the hard disk in which is prone to snapping off because the case plastic is too flimsy.

This part in particular is definitely BS. I'd be tempted to ask them to either provide the text of this imaginary law or find someone else to do it, and next time they want you do do something over the top they give you a reason that isn't made up. The more practical advice above stands. We also keep all our photos on staff-only drives, but not because there is any law saying we have to control access to them.

OK yes, ISA does function as a reverse proxy. I wasn't able to get it working in that way - what I found was that downloads were truncated (large files had the last few kB missing, while small files came down completely empty). I ended up deploying it in onto a server with a direct port mapping from the public facing IP. It wasn't my preferred option but it was better than not having it at all.

I had that when I was trying to use HAP behind a reverse proxy. Is that the configuration you're attempting?

Page 4 of the link m25man provides above has a formula that seems straightforward enough. It also says "You can exclude employees who are non-desktop PC users, such as maintenance or food service staff." So, if they don't have a login, you definitely don't count them, and it would seem that if they have a login but only use it for, say, remote access, you might not have to count them either. It does also mention that the formula may be different outside te US< but I think we can expect it to be pretty similar.

Oh dear, the jobs agency seem to have mucked up the advert a bit (at least I hope it was them)! Look at the bullet points... Now I can understand the first 4, but they aim to ensure the pupils will be responsible for leadership of IT support? And developing strategic direction? And manage the budget?

For some reason, the article page is only showing the first comment from this thread.

"Innovation Hardware Fund" On the grounds that the innovation is so cutting edge that the teachers couldn't see it coming (even if it was sounding a foghorn at them from 3 years away).

For anyone interested, I've just spotted that these guys are exhibiting at BETT on stand T28 (Gallery level)...

I think you'll find there are some mugs doing down later in the week too. I'm not going until Friday, for example.

Got ours just before the New Year, if I remember correctly. Certainly an improvement on last year when they didn't send my badge and lost my ICT Co-ordinator's registration entirely.