On Tue, 2003-12-02 at 06:27, garry saddington wrote:
On Tuesday 02 December 2003 00:21, ICT Support Officer wrote:
My original post about how taxpayers' money is wasted brought about a good response and I am so pleased. There has been so many of you with strong hearts and most of all strong voice except for a minor few.
I would also like to mention LEA and their inefficiency providing support to schools in terms of so called ICT. No doubt many of you are aware that National grid for learning has been brought about and we seem to have some compulsory broadband connections forced upon us. So far I found the system unworkable because there are private companies involved. For example I wanted to run the school web server from school but the ISP will not provide a public IP address for the school. They also seem reluctant to re-root requests through their DNS to the private IP range they allocated for us in order to access school servers on any port. I proposed to my school management but LEA IT department gave us a bashful
I could go on but my point here is that it is not just Open Source software issue but other services too. Again we pay thousands of pounds for these services but we do not get back all the services we want. !!!Wasting the tax payers money issue here again!!!!
This is exactly what we have done with our broadband supplier. There was some murmerings about unsupported protocols (open ssh !!) but in the end they gave us two IP addresses re-routed to our internal range. Since we are paying for these services I believe that you can go elsewhere for them :-)
We remotely manage the Linux servers of around a dozen schools and
broadband ignorance is a real pain in the whatsit. Eventually (sometimes
in excess of 6 months) the LEA/consortium realise that SSH is a secure
method and the devil and his cohorts are not going to invade their
schools because we want to open a port for SSH access. We have had
schools threatened with OFSTED, the DfES etc for not paying a lot of
money to be connected to the broadband and then they are expected to
compromise their whole IT strategy when their understanding of the
issues is 10 times that of the LEA. We get banal things like ADSL is no
good because they need videoconferencing only to find that the reality
is that they can only videoconference locally because the security won't
allow them to do it out of the consortium - fat lot of good for a
specialist language college. How are members of the community supposed
to access the school for passing homework etc from home to school?
Ok, we get round these problems but is it any wonder that adoption of
new systems is slower than it needs to be?
--
ian