Sophos Anti-Virus Management Console

In the week just passed the management console for Sophos was triggered to push out 10.2 of the Sophos client; the update triggered a large amount of warnings on the dashboard, but this very quickly dwindled as devices were used throughout the days afterwards.

VAMT

We have installed on our WDS server the Volume Activation Management Tool to help us resolve and monitor licence activations.

2003 x86 DC to 2008 x64 DC

In the grand scheme of things it is now time to migrate our DC from Server 2003 x86 to Server 2008 x64.

The jump to 2010 will be held back for a bit.

The new O/S has been built and all updates applied.

The role of DC has been installed but not applied. The 2003 DC needs its scheme updated first.

Update: 10-12-2012
The 2003 DC has had it's scheme updated and the new 2008 R2 x64 DC has been brought online.

Failed HDD in Raid rebuild

A replacement HDD arrived today for Horizon's raid. Just plugged it in to let it rebuild.

WSUS

Installed, configured and reporting as expected. This should hopefully put a stop to laptops and tablets needing to install updates almost every time they are used. Instead, they can all be updated on maintenance days.

Update 11-11-2012
Always helps to make sure all updates are applied to WSUS before getting it to try and check with itself. Patches applied and now all devices can see WSUS and report back to clients without errors.

Windows Deployment Services

WDS is back up and running after some time - not working.

Images are now easily created, captured and distributed once more.

Update: 08-11-12
Managed to create a WDS deployment USB key by replacing the install.wim file on a OS Bootable USB key. Granted it shot the file size from 2GB to 8GB, but this image can be deployed in approximately 45mins on a 1 Ghz Acer WS500 tab with everything pre-installed.

More cabling

You just cannot have enough network points.

Our suppliers are in this week adding additional network points throughout the school.

Web cams arrived

Our webcams have arrived. These will be installed this week.

Update. 30!10/12
Webcams installed. Hardly noticeable.

Primary Depository

Our primary file depository server was successfully migrated to Server 2008 R2 64-bit over the weekend.

It's capacity was dropped from 1TB to .5 TB to free up server space. However it will easily expand if .5 TB is reached.

It currently resides on Origin but will be shunted to Horizon this coming weekend to ensure no degradation or performance issues with other servers occur.

Server Side

In order to bring Axiom inline with Hyper-V like Horizon, Origin and Olympic; services on Axiom are being re-created where necessary on Origin and Horizon.

Our DC on Axiom has been partially transferred; when our holiday kicks in we'll re-image it for the final push.

CleverTouch Rollout

With the recent purchase of two CleverTouch 65" screens; our staff can't wait to get their hands on one in their own class room; so we've been looking at how exactly this could be rolled out; after all - these things are not cheap. We can drop the price if we drop the size from 65" to 46" but that is not doing anyone any favours.

Web Cam Update

We should be taking delivery of our web cams this coming week; then during the one week holiday period to follow we'll get them all fitted in the class rooms. Teacher Usernames are ready to be rolled out.

Comms infrastructure

Additional Comms infrastructure for our school wide communications facilities were finalised today; this will be installed this coming holiday.

We expect to know which Comms solution we will be going with by February to be included in the next financial years budget if all goes well.

Installation should be during August 2013.

Procurement of HD Webcams

As part of our technology push into the classrooms, we will be kitting out all of our classrooms with HD webcams for use with Google's Hangout and Microsoft's conferencing facilities.

Telephone enquiries.

Had a visit from a company today to discuss our telephone needs.

We are again planning our vision of improved communication and laying the foundations of a communication system that we can build on.

We produced a list of our requirements and situations that need meeting and look forward to the cost implication.

Full IP based internal communication.
IVR (multiple)
Call transfer/forwarding to mobiles.
Follow me feature.
Schedule for extension diversion.
Active call transition from mobile to desk and desk to mobile.
Caller ID to Name matching from our MIS system.
Caller pop up on PC with caller details
Dial and control active calls from pc
Messaging (pc and mobile)
Call recording.
Call auditing.
Caller ID auto routing.
Voicemail.
Voicemail to email and alert.
Panic button to alert key staff phones.
Intercom for school wide emergency announcements.
Staff hot desking
External screen with staff names with pending voicemail counts
Phone in each classroom and corridor.

Clever Touch screens arrived

And they are HEAVY!!!!!

Virus/Spyware alert

This started late last night. Loads of machines and servers reporting a possible virus/spyware.

Thankfully it's a false positive. But my mail box was almost in melt down. My poor phone has been "Bing"ing all night.

CleverTouch

We are in the final phase of securing two 65" CleverTouch LCD interactive screens. These screens do away with projectors and alignment issues.

Whilst all our classrooms were kitted out with Casio Bulbless projectors two years ago, we are still three years away from their end-of-life, so we are fitting our two new classrooms with these.

Each of these units will be accompanied by a TOSHIBA satellite pro laptop.

Pupil Logins Rolled Out

By the end of Friday we had successfully rolled out pupil logins to our KS2 pupils. Feedback from staff is that the kids are "thrilled".

KS2 pupils have access to their own school email account, access to our Learning Platform as well as their own storage area.

Quite Monday

Not much happened today.

Our pupils don't come back until Wednesday 5th, we have a Development Day tomorrow (the 4th), and today (3rd) is still classed as holiday.

Today has mainly been tidying and throwing away packaging. Well, I say throwing, more sorting for recycling.

I also had to do some creative accounting so that our Printer Management software quite complaining about licenses. I simply disabled all KS1 pupils in Active Directory; after all, we are only pushing toward KS2 with unique login details this year.

Also had to restore a template in SIMS, our dinner registers were printing pupil reports. Whoops.

Windows 8

Downloaded and installed Windows 8 onto one of our Slates.

I must say, very quick, much more than I thought it would be. Smooth animations. I'll have to stick it onto our domain to see how it fairs there.

Update:
I've decided to roll out Windows 8 out to our keyboard less ICONIA tablets.

Let's see how our kids react to them and see if they find them useful for their learning.

MAK limits

Had to contact Microsoft twice today, our Multiple Activation Keys for Windows 7 and Outlook 2010 hit their limit.

Outlook has been increased, just waiting on Windows now.

Mathletics

Promoted our pupil records in Mathletics today, just need info on group assignments, to put the kids in the right Math groups.

Well that works!

Today I am mainly finishing up on laptop installations, the ones I am doing today are for our SEN and IT Learning area.

Just before 9am our Fire Alarms were set off by the use of a vacuum cleaner, well, turns out it wasn't a vacuum cleaner and more of a "VAC"; dust from the refurbished ladies toilet went straight up the nozzle and out the vents; this causes a plume of dust triggering the sensors; at least we know the system works.

Multi-Media

I'm just re-installing our newly acquired Multi-Media machines.

These will be placed in our learning hub to be used for video editing and connected up with our Mechanical Lego, Robotics and other interactive kit.

These machines are:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Intel Core i5-2320 processors (3Ghz)
8 GB Ram
1 GB Dedicated NVidia GT610 Graphics card.
1 TB Hard Disk
21.5" HD ProLite Screens

Admin Day

Whilst the bulk of the End of Year procedures in preparation for the new year have been completed, I'm using this morning to finish off and re-check everything.

Our MIS system is ready for the new year.

Our Active Directory users have been promoted into their new OUs.

Exchange mailboxes have been generated.

Tomorrow I'll work on printing login labels and lists.

Our computer monitors arrived and our faulty laptop was collected.

NAPVS18 our pupil storage server had a hiccup today, it was up but didn't want to be seen. Do slight change to it's DNS and a reboot later, all is working.

Tested our new pupil logins to make sure their new profiles load as expected and save data on NAPVS18, and it did.

Loads more books have been added to our Library System thanks to several helpers. We look forward to seeing that in action on September.

More laptops

Today has been another day of installing laptops.

Our desktops arrived, but waiting on replacement screens as the ordered set are out of stock.

POE switches also pending delivery.

One of the new staff laptops that was faulty out of the box is due to be collected tomorrow.

Bulk install time

Today has been mainly installing our new laptops with Windows 7 Enterprise.

Thankfully it's pretty much automated these days, 16 done in a day.

Also time to unpack and setup our charging trolley.

I'll do it all again tomorrow for another 16.

Upgraded Moodle

While I was in the upgrading mood, I thought Moodle (our learning platform) could do with its update to bring it up to version number speed.

Audit Server Upgrade

I decided to re-install our Audit Server installation rather than migrate it.

The backup and restoration of data went well. Just under 2GB of audit data.

Migrate Horizon to Origin

After everything was checked to be okay, I started moving the VMs from VMServer (Horizon) to Origin.

I started with our Audit Server, but stopped it as it was going to be a weekend job to move that; so migrated our Terminal Server and SIMS servers.

Finally got those migrated by 7:30pm, although the last few hours was finishing up via remote at home. Better than watching a progress bar at work when I could be driving home.

The Audit Server remains.

Network Services

This morning it looks like the Network Services server had some issues with migration. It's overnight logs show that it's seeing the domain but not acting on it.

Re-attempting the migration again after checking the original still works.

Migration to Hyper-V

Today I have mainly been working on our migration from ESXi 5 to MS-Hyper-V.

Whilst I cannot fault ESXi, their recent pricing structure is outside of our budget, and MS-Hyper-V comes in quite nicely.

All the VMs from Origin have been transferred to Olympic - using a combination of VMware converter and vmdx2vhd.

I had slight trouble migrating our exchange 2003 server as the Hyper-V tools wouldn't complete their install., but persistence won the day. I had to convert a few times before it took.

All services were up and running by 3:15pm, not bad considering I walked through the door at 6:20am. I think I had lunch.

Tomorrow I will re-task Origin from ESXi 5 to Hyper-V, now that its been freed-up, and hopefully start migrating VMs from Horizon (VMServer) to it.

Rain doesn't stop play

While it may be pouring down outside, work in the school continues.

Although saying that, the guys developing the outside area are still working in those conditions.

4th Server Arrived

Our fourth server arrived late afternoon today.

It has been unpacked and placed in the rack cabinet.

Installation of services will start tomorrow.

WSUS

Our offline WSUS hard at work updating our new installs.

Building custom install

Apart from clearing out an office, I've been making a start on creating the custom Windows 7 CD/USB Install for our new laptops.

It took a while to get all the drivers sorted, but now the build CD has those pre-installed.

My next step will be to automate the Key insertion and activation.

These machines will have a custom login screen too.

Charging Trollies.

Our new Charging Trollies have arrived.

Time for recycling

56 cartridges to be sent off

Steps to combat Spam

Whilst we have not suffered tremendously with Spam, we do experience the odd one here and there.

However, to step up our fight against spam, especially in light of our new email users from September, we have added SpamHaus to our message filtering. This will crack down on known spam sending IPs and return then as undeliverable.

4th Server to join our family.

We look forward to bringing online this August our fourth server named "Olympic" in honour of the London 2012 Olympics, joining "Axiom", "Horizon" and "Origin".


This fourth server will run Hyper-V which will house our replacement Exchange 2003 with Exchange 2010.


Each Server is a 2 x Intel Xeon E5620 2.40Mhz, 24GB Ram, 1.8 TB Hdd, Raid 6, Intel system.
Axiom and Origin are running ESXi 5 vSphere, Horizon running VMWare Server


Over the course of August we hope to migrate the other 3 of our servers to Hyper-V.

Messaging Service

On the 23rd of July our Text Messaging Service changed our Outbound texting number. This change was followed up by a message on our Facebook page, Website and text to all primary contacts and staff.

Projects for 2012/2013

This year we will be expanding on last years total infrastructure and hardware replacement.

15 additional laptops for years 1/2.
30 additional new laptops for years 3/4.

Expand server capacity to house new exchange server.

Move Internet infrastructure hardware to dedicated cabinet freeing up space in our main cabinet.

Expand network infrastructure to pre-school area.

Upgrade our Data Recovery Centre to 12 TB capacity.

Unique IDs

As part of our 2012 plan, we will be rolling out unique IDs to our year 3,4,5 and 6 pupils so that they can log on to utilise our network services as themselves rather than groups. This will allow them to save their work in their own storage areas, access their own school email address, and use our Learning Platform.

The benefits allow the school to more accurately monitor and control what pupils have access to, whilst allowing pupils to actively manage their own work areas.

We also plan on increasing our IT provision by adding more computers for our pupils in years 1 through 4.

The Story so far...

In August 2011 we completely replaced our infrastructure, which involved splitting the site into zones; taking out old cables and switches, running new fibre, expanding our network to our community rooms, replacing all our switches and servers.

We also changed our Internet provider from RM (SEGfL), to BT (10Mb Symmetric Fibre connection 1:1 ratio, scalable to 100 MB within 30 minutes notice and 1 GB if required); this meant purchasing and controlling our own Firewall, web and content filtering.

We also kitted out our site with a large wireless array, allowing pupils and staff to work without wires in any part of the building.

With the dismantlement of our ICT suite, we purchased approximately 100 additional devices in a mixture of Tablets and Laptops and installed every computer with Windows 7 Enterprise and Office 2010, along with an assortment of educational software to keep our pupils engaged.

We also installed five digital signage screens and placed them strategically around the site so that we could display our pupils work and achievements as well as school promotional material for all to see.
Our server room was also expanded to house our new servers and in-house cloud services.