Tony_Mc

I am really shocked by the saleries in Secondary schools vary so much!? if a server goes down in a school, SO MANY lessons are affected!! why are the pay scales so messed up?

PAT testing will be a MASSIVE pain and for that much money more the school has just saved money. We have a chap here who does the PAT testing and it is pretty much half his job, most of the year he is going around the school testing items and marking them up. I think you have been really missold that deal and the school should know they are taking the p***. You sounds like you know your beans but it is such an awful time to be looking for a new job and if you put the school in a position where they feel you will leave they will fill your boots easily with someone half qualified for half the money. I worked at a primary school 3 years ago, I was on 13.7k, It was a small school 50 computers one server, email. I also did the site manager role and PAT testing. It was a nightmare and when I asked for more money I was told "there isn't any" I got a job doing some contract work in the city and went up to 39k. You can turn it around and it was the scariest move of my life but also the best. if you really know you are worth more, dont accept anything less! Tony

Can I give you an honest opinon here?

oops re-read it.

cheers for the help guys, got it working. Vista is very pretty but it does have some real odd features. anyhows, all going now Thanks Tony

yes, the vista client is a member of the domain. yes, my account has Domain Admin access.

So we have a couple of Vista business lappys for my tech and me. sims.... OK, so I have tried to install sims, I have the mapped drive, everything looks right yet i get this error. "SIMS installer was unable to write to the SIMS application shared directory supplied "S:\sims". " I am baffled. Help!

XP pro here as well, more and more being bought into the school.

I think there has been far too much in the papers. It is her life and all but every "toilet" paper has it on the front and that makes me sick.... there is only one person making a LOT out of this and that is Mr Clifford.

Thanks for your support guys. A friend of mine suggested that we build a box with Debian on it, very minimal install, install Squid and then use Dans Guardian. bypass Ranger completly. Tony

Hi I have a query from a someone I work with... At his school they use Ranger and from what we understand ( I have smoothwall here and have never used ranger) Ranger blocks pages by what is in the title bar at the top (the blue bar) it does not block from content. the question is, students are getting to Facebook through proxys - his school also uses Synetrix but has used up all the 200 blocking pages he has allocated. Any ideas on blocking proxys or a way to get Ranger to see what the students are doing.. excuse my ignorance but I don't know much about Ranger. Thanks Tony

from what I understand if there are any kind of child protection or SEN it needs to be stored for the life of the pupil, that is how i understand that side of it.

We back up a total of 9 servers and 1.3tb all over cat5e, the whole backup run for that can take up to 40hours over the weekend for the full (slowest example) then very short incremental backups during the week (20 mins to 4 hours) It would be quicker I suppose on gig network but without experience on that I couldn't say. Restores are MUCH faster, really pleased with this side of things all in all very happy!

Hi We use an RM diskbox as D2D2T, onto 4tbs of drive then onto LTO4 tapes in a 16 tape loader. with this we also use Symantec backup exec 12.5 if you can afford a system like this (cut down for less data and the other way for more data) then it is worth every penny as I honestly sleep better now that we have this solution. Tony

We have trialed quite a few machines, the original eeepc, the 901 and now the 904hd. We also have an aspire one and nc10. the nc10 is by far the prettiest and works really well, but is more cash. the 901 is OK apart from the HDD as it is small and struggles with xp pro. the 904 is great as it has a HDD (160gb) and fantastic wireless and battery life. we will be issuing the 904 to mobile staff shortly. it is also a little larger so is really easy to type fast on. didn't think too much of the aspire....

Firstly good luck with your interview. I came my current job from about 3 years technical help at a small school and at a bank. I have no certs and currently the only cert i would be after is something to do with Exchange. What I have found is that in schools it is a very unique operation structure, you will find that a lot of your job is spent with budgets, training and managing the staff and SLT. If you can keep the SLT happy and the staff feel that the network is being managed you will have few real issues. perception is everything and I don't mean you have to ever tell fibs, I have always been very honest with the management here and that has stood me well. I manage a fairly large school (1440 students, 220 staff, currently 9 servers and just under 1000 machines ) and a lot of my job is organisation and liaising with staff to work on improvements to what they use and how IT helps them work. Yes, knowing your stuff is very important but you might find that more of your time is management, something that an MCSE doesn't qualify you for. Please don't think I am rubbishing certs as they are something I have tried but didn't have enough time to see them through. experience, confidence and a smile will really do you well. Tony

Thank you for your reply. My opinion of Sophos is completely based on how many problems I have had removing viruses from the network when using it. I am sure I would be in a much worse state if I had no AV but I feel that when using it I don't get as much protection as I should either way it is what I have so i will go through the links you have sent me, one of which I have already completed. For the record this is a brand new install on a new server done exactly as instructed by LGFL. once again, thank you for the advice and yes, "utterly useless" is a little strong, moderately unfit for purpose is perhaps a better way of putting it. Kind Regards Tony

Hi guys I am hoping someone here can help with this, we have a large number of infections of this virus on my network, Sophos seems to be utterly useless. I am trying to find a quicker way of cleaning up other than doing the very VERY long winded way Sophos want me to (took 12 hours on a machine with a 200gb drive, dont really wnat to set that loose on a server with nearly 1Tb) I have a Deputy with every folder on her memory stick suffering from this infection which she brought in from home, I cleaned it once, she needed something so BAD that she put it in the infected computer at home again and brought it back into school, even though I asked her not to. *sigh* Any ideas or advice, my brain is fried this week Ta Tony

This is at work http://www.speedtest.net/result/421923027.png

hey guys So we are starting to use the MLE at my school, we have a pilot group running and they are coming up with some great content. one thing that is used quite a lot in the school is Youtube, teachers love to use this site and I understand why. They can access the Youtube, but student computers can not. So the question I have is how can we use smoothwall to let embeded youtube files through yet not grant full access to the Youtube site. We could let each individual vid through by adding the url in the "user defined sites" but that will eventually end up with more and more work for us and is not an ideal solution. Has anyone got any ideas on the matter? Thanks tony

How would offsite backups suit you? 40gb - you can get dats for thats. The problem you will face with HDDs is that you have to have some kind of rotation, backing up is the easy part as you know, making it resilient is the tricky bit. Tapes are the way to go unless you want to do it all off site. that is only my opinion though

Data Barracks who we used were using encryption that was military standard. No one was going to get into THAT!

External drives can cost as little as £70-100 for 1tb... My last school really didn't value the sims data but I am sure that would change if they were to lose it!? What about paying for off site backup with someone ? all of the data at my last school (primary, 50gb) to about 500 a year, something like that i believe.. that is one option!? Tony

Backing up to a drive is great, but what sort of disaster recovery do you have if there is a fire? tapes can be taken out and stored away from the server room/off site.

We have just had a D2D2Tape system installed which was very expensive but it has really REALLY helped with providing a massively stable backup solution. First things first, how much data are you backing up? (i know you said about the 500gb, but would be good to know) ta Tony