psydii

For those of you old enough to remember when The BOFH was *really* good. I really recommend you go and check out Old Coder Guy on tiktok. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGeRe3rmP/ He's also got a book out: "If you only plan to read three books in your lifetime... then this should definitely not be one of them. But the fourth? Again, still no. A bit of career advice, a bit of management and leadership advice, and absurd stories about things going wrong more often than they went right. Most books make a straight run at topics like "management", but Old Coder Guy flanks that s.o.b. and pops out from the box hedge it's walking past, where it will never see me coming until after I've taken out it's knees with our three iron of wisdom."

This page seems to have a trick for enabled vanilla shadow copies (rather than system restore points - which is a ui/capbabilty built on shadow copies).... https://pureinfotech.com/enable-previous-versions-windows-11/

The opposite end of the spectrum is chaos. The world operates in the spectrum between these points. There are millions of jobs where you are still require to "be a machine" and fit the processes and culture of the organization. Even creatives work in "industries". We need common languages, dialects, behavior, expectations to quickly and easily work together towards common goals. In some areas those guide rails are more obvious, in others less so.

With a no-coats-on-in-the-building rule those wearing coats are more likely to be carrying something they shouldn't than those who are following the policy. ...and uniforms in general provide also a similar lack of places to put things that shouldn't be in school, and make it easier to spot anomalies. A uniform also creates a brand identity, which is a well understood tool/component for building an organizational culture. Any large organization needs people to focus on the bigger picture and the details, a uniform policy is a signal that school is paying attention to both. It can also be a proxy for addressing other behavioral issues, including improving behavior of students outside of the school premises - wearing the uniform they are not completely anonymous, and student in uniform is intrinsically (by yes, not universally) more inclined to accept the authority of a member of school staff while not actually in school. Of course a terrible leadership can make a terrible uniform policy and genuinely make it the center piece for their plans to address behavior, but for most competent teams they know it is just an outward expression of a more subtle strategy. Now a lot of this is management theory, and therefore its standing depends on prevailing opinion of today's thought leaders, so opinions will always differ.

If you feel strongly about this, you might want to start looking for another role / promotion elsewhere. It sounds like there is a considerable gap between your vision and that of the incoming leadership, at a time when the national guidance aligns more with how you have had things running. Hiding behind "that's how other schools do it" is not a sign of strong/good leadership, and this might just be the first of many decisions that make things worse. IMO. YMMV. We have almost zero problems with off-task kids on YouTube. Occasionally a new-to-the-school senior leader questions things, but they quickly come around when they see the benefit of our teachers running classes where they don't rely on techincal power to keep the class on task. Some teachers do struggle, but they either up their game or leave. I will say that the architecture of the building supports us here. All our IT Suites are U shaped so the teacher at the front can see all screens (and student body language) at a glance, and that where laptops are in use teachers are advised to be on their feet roaming from the back of the class to keep a similarly comprehensive view of the students and their laptop screes. In the laptop scenario, when the teacher is at the front talk-and-chalking, students are required to put their laptop screens at 45deg to send a clear physical signal they are engaged with the teacher and not distracted by a screen. (in a traditional IT Suite, they are required to physically turn to face the front or return to the desks in the middle of the class.

I would also strongly recommend you look for more platform agnostic tooling than VBA. At some point VBA will be more of a hassle to customers than a 3rd party product is worth. (SIMS requires them and if they've moved off that there is a good chance your product is the last thing that requires them).

Large secondary. We do not block Youtube. Never have. Also strong argument that blanket blocking YouTube fall foul of the current KCSIE guidance to not over-block. We do make use of restricted mode, so by default it is very limited. If users sign in (using their school AzureAD/365/Google account) they can also get access to additional videos and channels that have been specifically authorised by staff. We have an additional group policy that works in conjunction with the above to block specific users who have had that sanction applied. I haven't used it in over four years.

+1 We do offer remote induction too, using self-service password reset for their first log on, which seems to work well, but in person is always preferable.

Random thought: was the drive also mounted at a reparse point?

what happens if you try to access them from a shell running as Local System?

+1 Judicium

Ahhh they joy of further customising the highly customised rpl boot of RM LanManager to squeeze in an IPX stack to play doom deathmatch. Any how... to the question: our fully cloud devices are autopilot/intune/AAD managed and don't even get line of sight to our legacy infrastructure. Would be interested to hear how the MAT is approaching print management/accounting, building access control and cctv.

In Outlook [on the web], delegated mailboxes are [also] two clicks away, but can sit there through the day as a separate tab.

Shared mailboxes are still a thing? You don't have to create a full blown Team for the purpose. (indeed this scenario and many others like it are poorly served by the 365 unified group set up, even though having a Team attached would be a great idea) Also delegated access to mailboxes are also a thing that can and, in the scenario where there is an absence and a deputy/2ic needs to step in, should be done.

Wikipedia puts the earliest versions as 83/84. (and really SIMS 7 is a completely new product and code base when compared to the 1990's version). The mind-bending piece really is that SIMS evolved alongside the development of mainstream spreadsheets, so running a school on a spreadsheet is not 'old fashioned', it almost entirely never happened in the first place!

Did you know that SIMS is older than Excel?

I'm getting flashbacks to Meru.

I've not had quite that experience but digital video output running at 5Gb/s+ is very sensitive to the cable and connector quality. If it doesn't carry the USBIF (usb-c) or VESA (DP) branding, it may well not work at longer (1.5m+) distances. Cables that are reliable in mass production are expensive. We don't have much to do with DisplayPort, but for our 10m HDMI runs, the *only* 100% reliable cable is the BlueStream (other cables will often work fine... mostly. But not always. Not everyday. And not with every laptop) Having had to cough for Bluestream, I can see why the only people who can charge enough to make a a reliable 2m USB4 cable are Apple. The amount we've spent on cables over the last few years to get reliability is very close to the cost of a proper HDMI cable testing rig - a tool Linus of LTT (momentarily) balked at the cost of. I've also had a chat with the DP public support team at VESA, and the really short version is: buy a certified cable that runs at the speed of the fastest device connected. The end points will then negotiate a working resolution/refresh rate. The greater the bandwidth required the lower the chance of the two devices successfully negotiating at longer distances.

Ugly hack, but have your tried de-restricting the app store on those machines to get it installed, then restrict it again? Our work flow here is that during imaging or monthly checks we move computers to have a less restrictive policy to ensure software and updates install promptly before re-applying our standard more restrictive set. Seems to work well enough for everything we care about.

https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/gb/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/100-series/lenovo-100w-gen-4 Note it has a hardware maintenance manual which, while no guarantee that parts are obtainable, is a good sign. (however this is an 11" model)

Look at some Intel N100 based devices. With a 128Gb SSD and the Share User config set (can be done without requiring intune) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/set-up-shared-or-guest-pc?tabs=intune They have roughly the performance of 2016 i5s by containing only the efficiently cores (and the cut down igpu) from the 12th gen i series. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/alder-lake-n-surprisingly-efficient-gaming I believe Lenovo has some 14" edu models due in the country soonish.

I'd hope with govt money behind the project an RF Survey was done and AP deployment designed using that information. Something I have noticed is that from time to time updates / new hardware causes weird issues, and then everything needs to be updated (Bios/Firmware/OS/Drivers on all devices and APs) to restore stability. Also when tendering for our WLAN 5 years ago, I testing showed the ac 4x4 APs were a league ahead of 2x2 and 3x3 APs for the client mix we had. The equivalent tier APs today only support ac clients at 2x2 - which would be a significant downgrade for a significant quantity of devices. Also I am very unclear whether ac clients force ax APs into ac mode or whether an AP can serve multiple ac/ax clients at their respective full speeds 'at the same time'. If fear the former, and thus ax APs might actually be worse if your end users' devices are old. FWIW IP/DHCP/DNS issues on our WLAN have been resolved with either AP reboots (one or two APs on a three/six months cadence seem to just go weird), or firmware/driver updates on the clients (happens most often with new models, after a few driver/firmware releases they stabilise). The suggestion above to 'turn off' ax features and force everything to ac seems like a reasonable troubleshooting step to me, and a fairly easy one to execute.

This seems like a case of nominative determinism.

Been playing with the Azure Universal Print with Papercut (on Prem), it took about 5 minutes to get set up and printing: https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/ng-mf/applicationserver/mobile-universal-print/ (but we already had per-printer security groups controlling printing locally so we could just re-use those in Azure) Costs don't seem too awful if you have A3/5, we project costs to be around $1800 per annum for our 3.5M pages. There is a cap of 100Mb on a job, but we don't seem to have jobs over 50Mb. *but* it does require an on premesis component (the papercut/legacy print server). Some form on on-prem bridge is required for non-cloud native printers (i.e. almost all of ours).

About 18 months ago some of the server team starting making noises that after many years AD was seeing engineering resource allocated to it. Now they have big announcements to make at Ignite at the end of the week. Teasers in this thread: https://x.com/WSV_GUY/status/1721849494055035029