Katy

There's a "999 database" of number -> physical address which all the comms providers have to maintain. (My friend works for one and has been saying how difficult it is to pull 999 database support into the automated system he's building, as it's a different way of setting for ported numbers vs non-ported)

The hosted version has always been awful, it's so slow that our librarian got it in 2012 then barely used it - we discovered when she left that it hadn't been used for 3 years, then attempted to get it set up for the new librarian and gave up. Performance is dire and the support not much better.

£80 a month for what appears to be "unlimited" labour is a bargain, I would expect he would also have an hourly rate as an alternative to a retainer (if it was me, I would) so if he does, they need to work out if it's worth having the callout with free time for £80/month, or £0/month plus whatever hours are required.

Depends on what they get if they have to call him in - does the £80 include anything or not? Either way it's a bit like insurance really - waste of money if you don't need it but if something happens you're glad you paid up.

The calculator reckons it'd be £29 a month instead of £39 a month (for both combined) so not too bad... Going to get one fitted as we don't really use that much water

So people with meters paying £10-£20 a month, is that the total you pay (for water and wastewater) or just for the fresh water? I pay £39/month total at the moment without a meter.

After the thread about VM prices earlier I checked and I'm actually paying *more* than the advertised price somehow... Might swap to a water meter myself, 2 of us with dishwasher and washing machine but don't really use that much water.

Mum switched to a water meter when she was on her own, think it was about half the price of not being on one.. however I moved back in, followed by my sister and her boyfriend so she got it changed back quick. Think she might have had the meter switched back on now we've all moved back out again!

I pay £50.24 a month for the 350Mbps down/20Mbps up "no traffic management" broadband only (it used to be £45 this time last year but they put the price up every other month, and it's advertised as £48 a month currently)

If all fails I've resorted to printing and cutting out then photocopying (or scanning back in)... when I've felt like an hour of fiddling with settings is just a waste of time and paper.

Not got a touch screen or anything other than mouse on my PC, so no handwriting font for me

Is the correct path showing in the User's properties inside AD Users & Computers? Does the folder exist on the server with the permissions your script has applied? In the second half of the script you could also just use your $HomeDirectory variable rather than concatenating the username and the server path again.

I was told "old emails are being resent" but in our case they were clicking links which opened Outlook 2016, writing and hitting send, then closing Outlook before it could update the folder or send the message... so months later when they do it again but leave it open long enough it was sending them.

We use USB1.1 extenders over cat5 for about 90% of our Promethean installs (mixture of ancient boards and 5 year old board). For some reason they seem more reliable than the USB2 ones (although if you have a newer board and want the sound to work over USB - it's awful over a USB1.1 extender) Edit: When using these we keep the USB sections as short as possible - 50cm USB cable from board to adapter, then the PC end the adapter has its own 10cm cable which plugs into the PC.

We're the same as most with intake year and name, but in the format 18JoBloggs. (Makes for interesting usernames in primary though as we call it "The year they entered, or will enter, year 7" rather than "intake year" hence a year 2 pupil would be 23JoBloggs)

We tried something similar, you end up with people who want to work late complaining they have to mess about to do so (or can't if you disable it), and in the end it was the same member of SMT that requested it wanting to work late here!

No idea on shared filtering, unless the rest of the trust is using a cloud based system you'd need VPN linking each site and to run all your traffic through another school. We used to do it with our trust but it was slow and unreliable. We get all our connections from Lloyds IP. https://www.lloyds-ip.co.uk/ Should mention the £37 I pay is actually £48 as FTTC requires a phone line to run on, so line rental pushes the price up.

Hopefully you will have somebody in your trust who will be able to sort all this out for you - if you've got 1000 pupils between you there should be some decent IT staffing in place I'd have thought. @SchoolsBroadband obviously target schools and can provide combined connectivity and filtering, I can't recommend or otherwise as I've never used them. We use Lloyds IP (who are not school specific but business specific) for our connection and phones, and we have a Smoothwall virtual appliance on site to take care of the Internet filtering.

We're about 700 pupils, the price is for the connection type and speed so not based on pupil count (the filtering is usually licenced per user though so does scale with school size), but that was just as an illustration (as you said you're currently spending thousands a year on something very slow) as to what a 100Mbps up and 100Mbps down fibre leased line might cost (guaranteed bandwidth etc and comes with a decent Cisco router). For the size of the school you could probably get away with a business level FTTC, think we pay £37 a month for our FTTC line (which runs as backup incase the fibre drops), we get about 70Mbps down (20Mbps up) on that as we're very close to the roadside cabinet but again you'd need filtering on top.

Specialist is whichever contractor wins the tender to rip the existing truss and lighting out and install new, this time they are all from companies who only do stage/lighting/sound stuff (last time out of my control we got a general building contractor so it was a complete mess hence why it's being ripped out only 10 years later)

Well the options are mount on the truss or like for like replacement of the existing one which is a 30m throw plus a very long cable to RS232 it. Think we're just getting LED PAR cans, if we do get moving lights they won't be moving whilst we are projecting and the movement feature will mostly be used as a way to change where they point without getting the ladder and stick out. Anyway I'll just be buying the projector and handing it to the specialist who is doing all the rigging/lighting/sound stuff.

You could move to a "normal" ISP's business product and probably save a fortune, although you'd then need to pay for filtering which can be expensive depending on the size of the school (we pay about £2000/year for our filtering). Alternatively there are some providers like Schools Broadband which offer similar to the LA where they do the filtering for you, not sure if they offer it over cheap connections like FTTC though. Also depends how rubbish your current connection is - you should be able to get 100Mbps leased line at a reasonable rate (we pay about £5,000/year for ours)

Going to have to go on a lighting truss, if we were to drop a pole for the projector it'd have to be about 5m long, bolted to an arched ceiling... however the only people who will be messing with lighting are us so it should be safe enough.

Tried it on a http server (not https)? Pretty sure it doesn't work over HTTPS.

24 but the majority of the drives are 5 years old. First 5 years we had one drive fail (in year 3). Never had multiple failures occur together so never had any data loss or service interruption. Edit: The HP one has 12 drives (as they're 3.5s) but that's also been reliable enough (it's now 9 years old)