Category Archives: IT

On wednesday I’ve got two Contractors coming into school with some new hardware and a mission:  BUILD ME A NEW NETWORK!

Being an ICT Teacher, I’m on the front line in the war against ICT Problems.  I hear about them first, experiance them first and am effectively the “first line” IT Technician.

I’ve inherited a mess of a network,  an oddly spec’ced poorly performing Windows 2003 Server (lots of Hard disk, lots of processor, less RAM then my desktop machine) acting as the Exchange, File and DC.  A member server running 2008 doing the printing with a disk fault, and a database server that wasn’t properly licence with more disk faults….. Oh and 170 new Computers, a mixed bag of Wireless points and a set of Network switches that last saw action on ARPANET.   Continue reading →

Microsoft Licensing can be flipping confusing.  I’ll break down our decisions here because it took an long time to work out what to do.  Firstly if you’ve got a computer running Windows, it needs an OEM Licence – the manufactorer needs to licence the machine when they sell it to you.  I’m not going to go into using Linux, it gets complicated.  If you use it on a network and it connects to a Server, then you need a CAL (Client Access Licence). You can get CALS for Windows Server, Exchange (Email), Sharepoint (Weby thingy) and probably SQL but I really dont want to think about that.

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