We’re the guys and girls from my school holidays and because of all the cool work we’re doing right now we have decided to start a blog 
Expect to see some exciting things soon
Hello world!
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Providing schools data and school holidays
You know that website that provides school holidays? Well I have to make that work.. Delivering the holiday dates to you is really easy, no drama there. We use a bunch of technologies to solve the problem of handling lots of requests per day.
Building a database of all of the schools in the world
This really requires a separate post but I will touch on it lightly here.. We use a number of data sources to build our database, all of the data sources have an automated tool which extracts them, compares the data to our stored data then updates our database. Our database is rather large, we use sources such as edubase for UK, US, RU but things are very different for our Chinese brothers.. We have to call up the district offices and ask them to send us a list of schools, worst case scenario is they give us a list over the phone. We also use some open data maps to get some rough data. Finally we use web mining to “detect new schools”, this gives our database an organic life and allows it to grow without any government input. By combining all of this data into one source we have a huge data set that we can begin mining from. We have been able to solve the problem of schools changing name/closing by using some clever insight analytics and by looking at search patterns for certain school names.. Here you can see a school that has either closed or renamed, blue showing the old name, red showing the new.. When you correlate the lat/long you can calculate that it has been renamed.. Simples!
Mining
Get out your hard hat and your birdy… We’re going web mining… We rolled our own web mining platform, this took a lot of my time up, I have no idea why I did it this way because using tools such as rapidminer would have probably been quicker but that’s life.. Our mining platform is a product of 2 years hard work to press, it’s job is to go out onto the internet, find a school, find relevant data and store it. So for example, we go out onto the web, find a school and store the holiday dates as a “data dump”, this data dump is just a copy of the page in whatever format it is stored in. We use naive bayesian filters to cluster the data into different categories and basically go from there.. We wont be releasing our mining platform publicly, it’s not worth releasing because it’s so application specific..
Language support
MSH now supports most languages and is now classed as a global service. We used mygengo to gather translations and then we need PHP strings to render them based on the users URL IE de.myschoolholidays.com gets German results. It couldn’t be more simple. The hardest part was crafting the initial language file and finding a good partner to work with.
Cloudflare
Another recent new addition is cloudflare. Cloudflare sits in front of our varnish stack and provides us with the ability to compress Javascript, cache requests etc. One thing Cloudflare sucks at is providing round robin so it actually reduces our ability to provide high availability. Cloudflare’s always online feature sucks pretty bad too. Despite these things it does reduce page load times and takes ~20% load away from our cluster, this is a good thing, hopefully they will resolve their current issues (I have 4 bugs filed with them) and we can move forward.
Removing images
Our other task to increase page load speeds is to remove all images. We did this by replacing images with icons using a typography set. This sped up page load more than you would have thought, it’s pretty impressive!
Google Web fonts
Is a blight.. Y u need 150KB? So my trick w/ Google web fonts was instead of using the usual item in the head I load it in with javascript at the bottom of the page, this stops the on ready event from being blocked and means the user can use the page early on…
Potential company changes
We are in discussions about sharding MSH out of it’s current parent company PT. We have a bunch of reasons for this, the biggest one is that the two companies don’t match up, the skill sets required to deliver the MSH service is completely different required to deliver day to day PT services.
Outsourcing
Most of our workers on MSH are not based in the UK, we use a number of remote worker platforms to help us find the right employees. We actually require quite a lot of manpower to do “initial country learns”, this is the process of learning about the structure of a country, how their holidays / councils / districts are layed out and also the language/social nuances.
So there you have it, a huge update and a lot of information about how we go about getting our data, it’s resource intensive and it’s a pretty big job as there are ~50k holiday sets each year each containing ~200k points of data.
Anyway if you get a sec please check out our performance and let us know what you think.
Primary Schools – Single or Dual Server Environment.
One of the biggest single I.T. purchases a school will make is the replacement of its servers. With typical costs of £2000 – £2500 per server, possibly with installation and migration costs on top of that, it’s no wonder that support providers, keen to ensure their customers are making the best use of their budget are questioning whether schools need the traditional two server approach.
Why do we have two servers?
The traditional setup within primary schools has been two physically disjoint networks, one for curriculum users (teaching staff and pupils), and one for the administrative staff. This provided two sets of ring-fenced resources, both servers acting as file and print servers for their users, with the admin server also hosting the SQL databases for MIS systems. The security of these databases was often cited as a reason for keeping the two networks disjoint. However, using robust security practices will be just as effective at protecting sensitive data, and much less restrictive to users authorised to use that data.
What’s changing?
The changes in the way technology is utilized mean that there is more and more cross-over between traditional admin and curriculum use.
Members of the senior leadership team, who have traditionally needed to connect to the admin network, may be teaching and also need access to the curriculum server resources; this would require logging on to a different computer, one connected to the curriculum network, with a different user name and password.
Teaching staff might wish to have access to the MIS systems on the admin server, whether this is for something simple like desktop registering, or more advanced, such as pupil progress recording.
So how is it changing?
The first step in closer integration is the physical joining of the two networks, to allow data to pass between them. This allows for the crossover of data between the systems, but doesn’t allow for some of the greater benefits that can be achieved through the joining of both servers into a single domain. With all machines at a site belonging to a single domain for the whole school, it doesn’t matter whether a user is a curriculum or an admin user, they can log on to any client machine, with a single set of user credentials, and have access to their data, whether it is stored on the curriculum server, the admin server or both. There is also potentially simplified access to shared resources such as printers, as well as greater flexibility in the event of a particular printer failure.
So can we just have one server?
The answer to this question is simple enough, yes, yes you can. With the relative power and storage capacity of computers increasing all the time, many schools who are keen to make budgetary savings see moving their current curriculum and admin servers on to a single machine to be an excellent way to cut costs. Essentially all you are really adding to your MIS server loading is the file and print server role for the curriculum users, and a little overhead for handling things like user authentication. Given that your new server will have a more powerful processor, more memory and probably a better disk subsystem, all that you need to do is add sufficient storage capacity for the curriculum users and you can happily run your school on a single server.
Should I have just one server?
In many ways this is a trickier question. The single server approach, whilst seeming attractive, does remove some of the potential resiliency you could achieve through retaining a two server architecture. In theory it would be possible to make the servers fully redundant with data being mirrored across both servers. Then in the event of one failing, a few minor configuration changes would allow the school to continue on virtually unaffected in the event of server failure, something which would be impossible in the single server school, (or even the traditional style two server school).
It is unlikely that the complexity of such a high degree of resiliency is necessary (or even desirable) in a primary school environment. However having a second server to help maintain the core server functions such as active directory, DNS, DHCP etc., would allow many I.T. functions to continue unaffected within the school whilst a failed server was replaced. This is something well worth considering in the current environment where the internet can provide access to teaching resources and applications in the event that local server based applications are unavailable.
Weighing it up. . .
Single server offers potential savings on hardware costs, and systems management overheads, only having to administer a single server. Its potential weakness is that the server becomes a single point of failure for the whole school, rather than just the curriculum users or admin the staff. However so long as the school have reliable backups, both of it data and active directory, a recovery shouldn’t take more than 48 hours (assuming access to replacement hardware).
Twin server systems have the advantage of maintaining the active directory in the event of a server failure. This will allow users to log on, and with a little forethought in implementation allow access to the internet, shared printers and whatever user data is available on the remaining server whilst awaiting the install and configuration of the replacement server.
Article by Steve Dulson, schools network engineer at Primary Technology
Primary Schools – Single or Dual Server Environment.
One of the biggest single I.T. purchases a school will make is the replacement of its servers. With typical costs of £2000 – £2500 per server, possibly with installation and migration costs on top of that, it’s no wonder that support providers, keen to ensure their customers are making the best use of their budget are questioning whether schools need the traditional two server approach.
Why do we have two servers?
The traditional setup within primary schools has been two physically disjoint networks, one for curriculum users (teaching staff and pupils), and one for the administrative staff. This provided two sets of ring-fenced resources, both servers acting as file and print servers for their users, with the admin server also hosting the SQL databases for MIS systems. The security of these databases was often cited as a reason for keeping the two networks disjoint. However, using robust security practices will be just as effective at protecting sensitive data, and much less restrictive to users authorised to use that data.
What’s changing?
The changes in the way technology is utilized mean that there is more and more cross-over between traditional admin and curriculum use.
Members of the senior leadership team, who have traditionally needed to connect to the admin network, may be teaching and also need access to the curriculum server resources; this would require logging on to a different computer, one connected to the curriculum network, with a different user name and password.
Teaching staff might wish to have access to the MIS systems on the admin server, whether this is for something simple like desktop registering, or more advanced, such as pupil progress recording.
So how is it changing?
The first step in closer integration is the physical joining of the two networks, to allow data to pass between them. This allows for the crossover of data between the systems, but doesn’t allow for some of the greater benefits that can be achieved through the joining of both servers into a single domain. With all machines at a site belonging to a single domain for the whole school, it doesn’t matter whether a user is a curriculum or an admin user, they can log on to any client machine, with a single set of user credentials, and have access to their data, whether it is stored on the curriculum server, the admin server or both. There is also potentially simplified access to shared resources such as printers, as well as greater flexibility in the event of a particular printer failure.
So can we just have one server?
The answer to this question is simple enough, yes, yes you can. With the relative power and storage capacity of computers increasing all the time, many schools who are keen to make budgetary savings see moving their current curriculum and admin servers on to a single machine to be an excellent way to cut costs. Essentially all you are really adding to your MIS server loading is the file and print server role for the curriculum users, and a little overhead for handling things like user authentication. Given that your new server will have a more powerful processor, more memory and probably a better disk subsystem, all that you need to do is add sufficient storage capacity for the curriculum users and you can happily run your school on a single server.
Should I have just one server?
In many ways this is a trickier question. The single server approach, whilst seeming attractive, does remove some of the potential resiliency you could achieve through retaining a two server architecture. In theory it would be possible to make the servers fully redundant with data being mirrored across both servers. Then in the event of one failing, a few minor configuration changes would allow the school to continue on virtually unaffected in the event of server failure, something which would be impossible in the single server school, (or even the traditional style two server school).
It is unlikely that the complexity of such a high degree of resiliency is necessary (or even desirable) in a primary school environment. However having a second server to help maintain the core server functions such as active directory, DNS, DHCP etc., would allow many I.T. functions to continue unaffected within the school whilst a failed server was replaced. This is something well worth considering in the current environment where the internet can provide access to teaching resources and applications in the event that local server based applications are unavailable.
Weighing it up. . .
Single server offers potential savings on hardware costs, and systems management overheads, only having to administer a single server. Its potential weakness is that the server becomes a single point of failure for the whole school, rather than just the curriculum users or admin the staff. However so long as the school have reliable backups, both of it data and active directory, a recovery shouldn’t take more than 48 hours (assuming access to replacement hardware).
Twin server systems have the advantage of maintaining the active directory in the event of a server failure. This will allow users to log on, and with a little forethought in implementation allow access to the internet, shared printers and whatever user data is available on the remaining server whilst awaiting the install and configuration of the replacement server.
Article by Steve Dulson, schools network engineer at Primary Technology