Willott

Interestingly, this is something I haven't yet got round to doing... I plan to VLAN my network this year and QoS, currently we're not noticing any quality issues (only really hit by hardware issues with phones - like the sockets for the handsets or cables to handsets dieing off), and the thing that surprised me more, over our 10Mb external connection for the trunks we don't get much if any jitter (no worse that any other phone system I've heard). Now up to 100Mb external and no issues reported. Cheers Will

How's you're current PBX supplied - from your description of 3 beige boxes with loads of wires, that sounds like 40 pair connection boxes or similar - this may be incoming BT cables, or linked to your PBX. Do the boxes have circuitry in or are they just wire to wire connections? What make is your current PBX, are there any digital handsets? It was issues like that that made me stay away from any analogue in my system. Made the jump from analogue/digital phones with 2 ISDN2e's for incoming calls straight to full IP. Interface cards and location of incoming lines were going to cause me issues - my PBX is fully virtualised running as a guest on Xenserver on our virtualisation cluster in the server room - high capacity connections direct to core network. I compiled asterisk to ensure there were no timing issues, but I think that things like PBXinaflash have sorted these issues (as they quite happily run as virtual machines). As far as incoming lines, I'd suggest the following: Have 2 numbers setup on your incoming VoIP provider, have 2 trunks, one aimed at your one of your main net connection external IPs, one at your adsl backup IP, setup your main number to go to your main net connection trunk, with a failover to the second number if it can't connect. The second number is targetted at the adsl trunk with failover to an analogue line, connected to a single analogue phone in reception, theory being, if can't connect to main, net connection may be down, so try secondary, if can't connect to secondary, it's most likely that PBX is down, so fallback to old tech! For outbound, normal routing would take care of connection failure. The only line we don't currently run over our PBX is the fax line - this was never on the old PBX and I'm still awaiting full T.38 support from Gradwell, and finding a way to do fax to email for confidential stuff before I try to implement it again (ie either multiple fax ready numbers or extensions or something) and something for fax to email as well - though that should be less difficult. Cheers Will

Yep, it's Gradwell | Enterprise VoIP | SIP calls | Sip Trunk - SIP It says £4 per number (2 concurrent calls), but they do discount for packages - we have 10 numbers (so 20 concurrent) for either £20 or £30 - they don't limit calls by number (so we can have all 20 going to one number and none going to any others) As for Gradwell, they're usually at the forefront of VoIP in the UK - their MD was part of the team that worked on 999 integration system for VoIP and they seem to be very hot on support - they've got a large cluster at each layer of their IAX2 and SIP platforms, and are continually developing their systems. I used them when doing business support previously and also had no issues. Cheers Will

We use external VoIP provider (IAX2 trunks). We've found that: They're cheaper than comparable digital/analogue phone line rental (we can have 20 concurrent incoming and as many concurrent outgoing as out net connection will support for £30 a month (I think) - compare that with ISDN30!) Can have multiple outbound carriers so can chase lowest cost calls. You can also load balance between trunks. Porting takes 1 day if you need to move between VoIP providers (rather than the 2 weeks for normal porting) Cheers Will

@InvisibleIntellectual - was sorted same day, thanks for that. Has anyone else been having random connection resets through filter.nottscc.sch.uk? Been having a few today and Synetrix can't find any sign of issues on their proxies.

For access control/visitor management we have VMPro/VMAccess - Visitor Management, ID Cards, from Visitor Management Limited UK. Uses mifare cards, so can then be used with the MFP system (if that's mifare reader). I'm trying to convince relevant people that we should extend papercut to have readers capable of integrating mifare cards... I'll see how that goes! As far as the cards themselves are concerned - the mifare cards come with a unique ID embedded in their chip - as far as I know they can't be reprogrammed. You then add the card to the relevant system against the relevant user. With VMSecure, for permanent staff IDs, they have a web printing service (which can work out cheaper than buying mifare cards and printing yourself - depending on how many cards you print each year) with next day delivery. For temporary staff, we have stickable labels which are printed (on an inkjet currently, but they do work on some lasers), stuck to a mifare card and then a protective plastic sheet stuck over them. The benefit of these are that the cards can be reused (needs a little SQL query currently but they may add the ability into VMPro software) and assigned to a different user. Can't remember costs off top of head, but they're not too bad at all.

So... do you start at the bottom of the scale, or for example, I got 475 as a job score, do I start half way up scale 5?

Network manager in a school with 200 machines (ish), original JD assessed as scale 5. Now I need to have the 2 job descriptions since assessed and see how that works out. I'd be interested to know what the sales people (specifications engineers), engineers and managers at EdIT are on - probably significantly more as they have to look after more schools/machines. It still bemuses me that they have no sight on how much private sector workers get payed for similar jobs (for example, a network manager in a company with 200 machines may well be looking towards 30-40k and similar responsibilities), but I suppose it's the burden we have for public sector work

We've got both in place... old one still in use, awaiting an engineer to switch us over from old to new... had the new router in place, connected to the new circuit (but not to our lan) since mid december.

Congratulations - expecting our first in July Just remember, at the 12 week scan, sit so you can see the sonographer's screen (then you see baby before mum does... I didn't do this, honest!)

Has anyone tried sending email to an EMBC school? I've reported the issue to helpdesk, but I can't resolve mx1.embc.uk.com or mx2.embc.uk.com from the 1C1N network, which may be where the issue lies...

Not got mine yet - it was missing from the pack, apparently it's meant to be being couriered out...

Ah, the old synetrix misconfiguration issue... not had any of them during the switch over :/

I've been having a look around for PCI-E 8x cards, I can only really find 16x (and from the looks of the slot/cards there's no chance we could stick the 16x card in the 8x slot). Anyone know of any decent workstation type cards in the 8x format? Otherwise this may be the downfall of this idea here.

Could database availability group be what you're looking for from a HA PoV? Uncovering Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs) (Part 1)

Haven't you been given access to netsweeper for your school? You can do some control from there (although it only links to IP or EMBC user account). May be a way of providing the access without buying in further lines. For example, I've got a single IP assigned to my smoothy box, with a different filtering group setup in netsweeper to allow a much wider range of content through to the smoothwall box (which then does the filtering). I've basically done this (kept some of EMBC's filters in to cover my back). Only issue I hit now is we still go via their load balanced IP, so if the one squid box that we connect through throws a wobbly, it stalls our net connection for a min or two until the load balancer notices and kicks us elsewhere (or the squid box reboots... not sure which). EMBC are very reluctant to open up port 80 outbound for any machines (understandably so), and I've also been unable to gleam multiple IPs from them for upstream proxy (as they want to load balance themselves) which would provide us with a solution where if Smoothy is unable to connect it tries another one.

From my understanding: You license your desktop packs based upon the number of full time staff you have. You license your servers based on the number of licenses you require for the servers/services you run (ie if you have 10 Windows servers, 2 SQL and 1 Exchange you'll get 10 windows server licences, 2 SQL licences [dependant on whether you're licensing per CPU or what for your SQL] and 1 Exchange licence) Work at home rights for staff seem to be included (but it's that old must be used for work purposes thing which mean I've never given this out!) Software Assurance also seems included Student licensing is available for their home computers, seems to be purchased on a per student basis, minimum of 100 licences

The supplier got their terminology slightly incorrect - you can still buy Schools Agreement (ie desktop count), the new agreement is Enrolment for Education Solutions, as mentioned above, based on FTE count. For comparison purposes you need to be considering ~£25 per desktop or (from detz above) ~£38 per FTE. I would guess that this is for standard CAL pack, does anyone know enterprise desktop suite pricing? Renewal's at end of July, so I've got plenty of time! In most secondary school cases I would think that EES will be more cost effective than SA was, and may also get a few Select agreement persons to move across. It'll be interesting to see what primary schools find with regards to this vs Select.

In Outlook 2007 try the following: * Create a new message in Outlook. * Go to the Options tab in the message's toolbar. * Click Show From to make sure it is enabled. It should allow you to send from other addresses then. The second issue may be more difficult to deal with. Cheers Will

Depending on how old your Dreamweaver/Photoshop depends if you'll be able to get an upgrade or have to buy outright. Best bet is contacting a reseller - I can find buy outright pricing on Product Categories Cheers Will

LG or samsung would be my suggestion - it always used to be that these two manufactured their own panels, whereas others buy in someone elses panel and tag on their own electronics.

Muchos thanks from here as well... Though opening it in the office to see what it was may not have been the best idea... got glittery stuff all over the floor now!

Have you checked out the wiki page? CUPS and PyKota - Wiki This was what I used as a basis when I setup pykota (have now moved away to papercut so can't really be much more help).

Windows Virtual PC: FAQ No longer requirement for hardware virtualization

Have a look at the driver advanced settings and have a fiddle, that has sometimes cured slow transfer rates/connectivity issues with the normal laptops we have here.