dancingdruid

I've got flaky broadband at home so I use a 3g connection as (regular) backup. This uses a USB dongle. I could connect to the internet using the 3g app on the stick and still use my NAS/networked printers on my home network, only internet traffic was routed over the 3g connection. I've got a new laptop and it has an internal HSDPA card, which I hoped would remove the need for a great plastic sausage hanging out of the side of my laptop. It's a Dell and uses their Wireless Manager software to manage the network connection. It connects fine to the 3g network, but if I am connected to my home network wirelessly at the same time all traffic is routed over Wifi and so any web pages time out. Is it possible to force internet traffic to use the 3g connection? I'm sure it is possible because the (nasty) software on the USB stick did just this. I've never had to deal with connections on multiple networks before so I'm a bit out of my depth.

The head of science is ultimately responsible for science teaching in a school. The head of ICT should do the same for ICT teaching. The trouble is the divide between ICT teaching (which happens at a departmental level and across the curriculum) and the need to have strategic development and management of the ICT hardware (I'm including admin machines in this category). In an ideal world these posts are distinct from each other. As Ric says, some schools haven't split these two roles and still have people who don't understand the technology in enough detail making purchasing details. It would be interesting to see which schools are still stuck in the past.

You could always use Google Forms - enters the data captured into a spreadsheet that you can download and do pretty graphs and stuff in excel. I've heard rumours our school will be using surveymonkey (Free).

Perhaps when there are more plugins etc available I will like it more. My firefox plugin list is quite big. I also thought it seemed a little cutsie/comic-strip-ish. For the meantime it's back to Firefox (and ubiquity - the best plugin).

If you use Ubuntu server it's easy as pie. Walks you through if you know what all your settings are to be. You may have problems maintaining a system if you have zero knowledge of it though - I'd recommend installing yourself and learning the basics (it isn't hard at all).

I know that my headless Dell SC440 with 2Gb ram and 2x500Gb drives in raid would draw 78w. Adding a 3rd (non-raid) 80Gb drive for the OS increased the power consumption to around 85w. These figures are for idle/low load. When booting or under heavy load the server would draw around 100w. I measured these values using the exact energy meter mentioned in this thread. What is frightening is when you work out what it costs to run at load 24/7 with energy prices at current levels. Those energy meters are quite addictive - you find yourself plugging all sorts of appliances in to see how much they cost to run (standby mode.....)

I had that router or one very similar. The adsl version (which I bought) came with a seperate ADSL modem - a 2 box solution. I never used the modem but kept it for future use (it cost an extra £5). Router is excellent - and can be flashed with third party Linux based firmware if required. I'd second this recommendation.

I've got a Three mobile broadband dongle which I use as a backup to my home connection and when out and about. Despite using it heavily I have yet to use more than 1Gb traffic - I'm on the £10 a month contract (reduced to £5 a month since I have a mobile with them too). The speeds are pretty fast at home and in quieter areas. I've found the speeds in the town where I work are pretty slow. For simply checking email the speed isn't really an issue (I used to do this over GPRS). The only problem I have with Three is where there is no signal. No signal = no connection. With the other networks they have a 2G network to fall back on. The USB dongle itself is pretty good, works with weak signal and the PC sees it as a modem and storage device (for installing drivers). I think that £10/£15 a month is pretty insignificant for a school.

But if you didn't apt-get upgrade would you get to keep the same wife version for ever?

I think this post illustrates the need to give hard facts to back up an opinion. I've had dealings in the past with EDIT (when that was their name) and like with anyone I've had good and bad. I've had someone on site the same day to reimage my laptop (we didn't have an image onsite with MS Office). I've also had someone come to sort out a problem with the network who were stumped once they'd tried pinging the router and had no idea what to do next. (Thankfully they got out of the network installations game ages ago). I think technical support is always a problem since it's hard to recruit knowledgeable staff to first line support and many customers want to speak to someone who can help straight away. It's like phoning Sky and being told to switch your box on and off, or phoning your mobile phone company to be told to clean your SIM card contacts. As for network installations etc - different schools have different requirements. What works for a primary school may not work for a special - that's one of the drawbacks of the way the LA groups them into the same category when clearly they are not. Perhaps next time posters could give a little more information to back up personal opinions - it also helps those people who seek to make improvements.

I alternate between Placido Domingo singing "Time to say goodbye" and "Disco Inferno" by The Trammps. How to decide? .....

Sky plus for a subscriber is free. Sky plus for someone who is not paying to receive channels is £10 per month. I wonder how many people think that it is worth £10 per month when you can get some channels thrown in for a few quid more. From Sky's T&C

I've traffic shaped with dd-wrt but perhaps there is no need for traffic shaping - just share a torrentbox (torrentflux, utorrent etc with a web interface). Something like this could have its own bandwidth limit and some torrent progs like torrentflux allow user accounts etc so you can share out the bandwidth this way.

I don't see the point of this. I guess many do what my mum used to do when she had enforced password changes at the bank. She had a list of them in the back of her diary and rotated through them. I know for a fact that our office manager has done this too for county payroll and admin systems. Does this make for a more or less secure system?

Agreed. Make sure you configure your defaults first - I ended up changing my document settings in bulk through phpmyadmin. Docman is very easy to work with for simple tasks and is quite flexible

I was wondering how schools coped with storage of staff laptops? Do staff have to take them home or do they just get left around? I can see many staff here refusing to take them home (quite rightly so) if they were prevented from using them at home. Secure storage in schools is often a problem and I wondered how other schools coped (I'm wondering if storage of portable data projectors is also a problem).

I've tried my Nokia 6120 classic as a HSDPA modem and there was no obvious difference at home between that and my broadband connection (although the 3 mast is at the end of my street!). Was nearly as fast at school although it did suffer from the odd lock up. This was on Three. When you add the internet package to a phone on Three, you can use the data in your package either from the handset or your laptop connected through the mobile. The downside of this technique is the way it gobbles your battery. I'm guessing the speed will not be as nippy now that they have really started to market the service - I tried it months ago - although I would still recommend it on that basis. (I've also got a 3G vodafone card modem somewhere but I never managed to get 3g reception here - and gprs was painfully slow.). Check out sim-free kit at Expansys.

I considered WHS and didn't like the restrictiveness of it. There are some neat features demonstrated on some of the microsoft video blogs but in the end I opted for Ubuntu Server 64bit. This is running my webserver/ssh/torrentflux/ushare (stream to xbox360)/samba plus I keep adding more and more stuff. BTW I've got a dell poweredge server with 2x500gb drives (raid) and a 80gb drive with the OS on - comes in at 85watts so not as green as some of the more power friendly options!

Kaspersky here on 2x Vista machines. Long training times as mentioned earlier though. I've also used avast which seems just as good - and I've not noticed a difference in responsiveness (I'm sure my pc did speed up once I removed Norton though to put on Kaspersky.....)

I'll have a look at some of the options suggested. M$ products aren't really an option since my LAMP stack is running on Ubuntu We are a school involved in a lot of outreach and county development (not ICT related) and are looking for an easy way to share resources (potentially lots) with other schools and users whilst retaining some control. In an ideal world we'd have used the TES resource bank but if you've read their terms and conditions with regard to copyright you'd see why we are avoiding them. Thanks again for the suggestions.

I'm looking for a solution to serve lots of word/pdf documents from a web site in a kind of repository. I've not really seen anything that looks easy to set up and administer. Ideally I'm looking for an open source solution. Has anyone experience of anything suitable?

I used powerline sockets recently to hook up my XBox 360 (it was the same price as the xbox wireless adaptor and much more versatile). I bought the cheapest netgear ones on Ebuyer that had a good rating and so far they seem ok. Speed is fine for streaming video etc and works between floors in my house - more expensive than running extra cables though.

I can recommend the NSLU2 - I have 2 of them and they are versatile. You can run linux on them and turn them into a mail server/ssh server etc whilst still functioning as NAS.

I'd use ssh on a home machine (or even your router if you can run dd-wrt). Use putty to open a tunnel to your machine and then connect over your tunnel. I sometimes use remote desktop this way - works fine and I feel safer leaving SSH open to the Internet than remote desktop. I'd recommend dd-wrt firmware for anyone who has a router based on a compatible chipset - it really is very good.

I considered WHS but decided on ubuntu server instead - the price was only one factor, but the main factor for me was the transparency of Ubuntu and also the control you have. My ubuntu server at home is running: LAMP server SAMBA Torrentflux Dyndns updating client ssh server exposed to Internet In its favour WHS does pool disk space well, but I didn't like just having a web front end after being used to having full control over ssh. Is there anyone from a technical background that would pick WHS over a linux box?