my world of IT

Well the new school term is upon us and I have (at last!) had the time to do a photo of my office setup. In the photo above we have- 2x HP 23bw 23″ IPS monitors These beasts recently replaced a pair of 1440×900 resolution monitors – given that I’m doing a lot of database work at the moment it only… Read more

Just a little snippet before hitting September…..Having recently tried to update the Firmware on my Plantronics Voyager Legand at work (using a Windows 8.1 problem) I found that the MyHeadset Updater (http://www.plantronics.com/uk/product/myheadset-updater) tool cannot handle web proxies (without having the URLs it tries to reach out to being in a authentication bypass list). As I only had one headset to… Read more

A few days ago I saw something on a social networking site about what Pizza would be like if it was a ‘Cloud Service’ – afraid I don’t know who to credit for it so I won’t post it here but I did give into temptation and make my own about Coffee!

After playing with Windows Phone 8.1 on my Nokia Lumia 1020 for the past few days (since general release in the UK) thus far my favourite feature has to be the ability for the phone to automatically turn back on WiFi (after a set period of time) after you turn it off. Certainly where I live and work WiFi is… Read more

The past few weeks at work have been filled up with going from what has been a very successful pilot of Moodle 2.6 to a fully featured install of Moodle 2.7.1. Hopefully as time allows I’ll be able to get out some posts about how each aspect of Moodle goes down with the staff and students but for now this… Read more

In this guide I am going to show how to perform a very basic setup of a HP ProCurve 2610 Layer 2 network switch using a serial to console cable. First up you will need a serial to console cable and a PC that has a serial port. If you don’t have a PC with a serial port (old HPs… Read more

Thanks go to http://fediafedia.com/prank/ for the original code.

This final network is quite possibly the ones that most Schools will shy away from on grounds of ‘security’ – where I work however that just isn’t an option as we have paying users of the school facilities right the way through the evening and weekends. Indeed the weekend after we put this public network in place we have ~110… Read more

The BYOD network is quite possibly the hardest to setup (and thanks to the Smoothwall support guys for spotting an obvious mistake I made on my DHCP config the first time round!) of all 4 of the SSIDs by also the most rewarding when you see 300+ students and staff connected on their Phones, Laptops and Tablet PCs. In a… Read more

Make no mistake I’m all for PRTG as my preferred Network Monitoring software so when I was asked to be featured in a case study I jumped at the chance. That study is now live and can be seen here – http://www.paessler.com/company/casestudies/oxford_spires_uses_prtg Another similar article can also be seen here – http://www.networkingplus.co.uk/case-study-details?itemid=351