psydii

We've been having similar problems all year. For us it was mostly the use of USB-C in the mix. However in some cases it wasn't, and firmware / driver updates did improve reliability. The most reliable connections have been hdmi->vga +audio adapters (with USB power) over the legacy cabling. It has been noted by one install team that metal connection plates are only about 90% reliable when HDMI/DisplayPort is in use. A chat with VESA a couple of years ago lead me to the conclusion that DP-DP using RBR rated cable would provide the most consistent experience. i.e. generally 1080p as it's support for 4k is quite limited, so it wont try negotiating something fancy at marginal cable lengths. To quote: "Limitations for DP? That is a broad question. If you are referring to cable length, optical solutions are available up to 100 meters. If bandwidth, many USB-C docks operate in a "2+2" configuration, where 2 of the high-speed lanes in the interface are used for DisplayPort and 2 are used for superspeed USB. In this config, if your source supports DP High Bit Rate 2, you can expect up to 4k @ 30Hz. But if using a 15m passive cable, the DisplayPort link will likely train to High Bit Rate and resulting resolution will be 1080p. The DisplayPort link will train to whatever condition works regardless the max supported data rate, often (incorrectly) referred to as DP 1.4, 1.2... DP is controlled by the graphics driver and results may vary with Intel, AMD, Nivida (my emphasis)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/sharing/organization-relationships/create-an-organization-relationship

Data formatted and presented properly to governors should be anonymised through aggregation if the governors expect the report to be granular to the individual student level then there is a problem with the relationship between governors and the school. And the LA has now taken over. Even if the reports are not well anonymised, there should also already be the appropriate paperwork to cover the sharing of data between the school and the LA, there should be no problem with LA accounts being the recipients of the data. (assuming these accounts are covered by the existing agreement). Having to manage multiple accounts is a pain in the ***, I can totally sympathise with their position. As I can with yours. But again, choose your battles wisely.

Pick your hill to die on carefully.

Has anyone got experience using/evaluating products from these two manufacturers? Which way did you go? Why? Thanks, P.

Yes that is it. You definitely need to shrink the log file, set the recovery mode to simple, and limit its size 1Gb should be more than plenty.

solus ldf is the sql database logfile - this is huge. a full db backup followed by a shrink should sort that out. SQL Server bootstrap cache - I have no idea. WinSxS - Never touch this ever - It's the magic that prevents DLL hell. Installer - Never touch this ever. It breaks uninstall and application repair capabilities $patcache$ - Not sure what this is? (I might go look it up in a minute) But I would leave well alone. SOLUS Logs - If they are straight-up text files, they can probably be pruned - check solus documentation. The ldf is where you can get the biggest win. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/logs/manage-the-size-of-the-transaction-log-file?view=sql-server-ver15 Rough rule of thumb in my experience with SIMS, if the transaction log is more than twice the size of the database then there is something not quite right (perhaps with you backups, perhaps with routines that are running) edit: there is no sign of the solus database in that screen shot... where is it?

It is past the end of mainstream support though, so investigating the problem under a pss ticket is bending the rules. Server 2016 goes end of mainstream support at the end of THIS year! Jump straight to 2019 if you can. Side note: SQL 2016 goes end of mainstream support today!

In increasing difficulty: Stop start sql server to shrink tempdb (consider also setting an appropriate minimum size to avoid unnecessary performance hits each time it grows, https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/6493/sql-server-tempdb-tutorial/) Shrink the transaction logs https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertutorial/3311/how-to-shrink-the-transaction-log/ Move the database files to D. https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/6689/sql-server-move-database-files/

au contraire! Exchange is very famous for its security. Its been in the news and everything!

I think I heard a uni based techie say they managed to get something to work via this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/group-post-events?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http Personally we use Salamander which can put timetables (but not Teams Meetings) into Outlook, however last time I checked I got the impression they didn't feel the Team Meetings with the above api worked in the way most of their customers needed it to.

Use the hostname, not the IP address for connectivity. Otherwise you fail back to NTLM authentication.

Switchshop Lever (wireless specialist, completely vendor agnostic) ITEC Group

...and sometimes they refuse. I have had a very apologetic family solicitor on the phone, fully aware of what was being asked, almost *everything* had to delivered. We did get concession that administrative notes like trips lists and data that was formally stored else where (such as detention lists or circulars from the SENCO) could be excluded. The thing is, any exclusions don't stop the data appearing in the ediscovery phase - you still have to review them before excluding. On names appearing in documents/emails: Only the part of the document/email that discusses or pertains to the subject are required to be disclosed.

"should" **takes a long hard look at an Exchange server full of 20 year old mailboxes**

There are ways to automate Lenovo dock firmware updates. https://thinkdeploy.blogspot.com/2020/12/lenovo-dock-manager.html I haven't tried it. In my experience dock firmware updates do not reliably fix the issues as presenting. It might, say, fix it for 50% of users, but the others will still have problems The dock on my desk today is failing setting up connection to my monitor - triggered by my reconnecting it when the laptop went to sleep. No amount of rebooting, or power cycling the dock or laptop will return it to its previously working state. I had this problem a few months ago - and one day it just started working properly again. I cannot state to you all how much I hate these things.

create the teams by hand using the format: YearStart - YearEnd CourseName KeyStage Block Then let the teacher import the kids using the Team salamander automatically created for the timetabled class. Techer then puts a note into the automatically created Team directing the students to the manually created one.

We've been using them for a few years. Over the last 12 months we have had problem after problem. I don't have a good word to say about the Lenovo G1 or G2 USB C docks. Might be on the laptop side of things, but after each round of windows updates a new set of devices cannot connect reliably through them using DP / VGA. Absolute disaster.

I just left them at the default. If they can see each other over layer2 / Layer 3 then they use the Ethernet cabling as backhaul. If they can't see each other via the cabling then they come up in mesh mode and use wifi for backhaul. You really don't want them to be in this mode if you have class sets of devices, but its a handy level of resilience if you get a cabling fault. I assume you are using Cat5 because it is already in place? If you are installing new, you really should try to put in CAT6a. For what its worth an 100Mb/s ethernet backhaul is superior to it failing back to a wifi mesh in almost all scenarios where you would be looking to have IAPs.

The redaction tools in advanced ediscovery now work well for us last time we had to do this. Acrobat Pro for everything else. We've done this four times now, the first few using Acrobat only. Running the process through advanced eDiscovery this last time saved us *weeks* of work.

Attributable to "Psydii talking down the pub to mates who run bigger things out side of education", sorry. Consider this though the implantation costs of the functional equivalent of SIMS in the charity sector is £1.5M+ and that E3 for 100 users is closer to 300,000 than the 30K it costs for a largish secondary school. Hardware costs are comparable, but business will often buy fancier toys.

I'm just going to leave this thought here: Putting SIMS server onto its own subnet, and then configure acls to only allow access via an Remote Desktop Server (and obviously ACLS to allow SIMS Server<->AD + Management platform) could be a relatively low cost, quick-win for improving security, though obviously does nothing to address bad-guys with DA privileges. To our new member with little in-school experience: the money available in schools for IT going through Academisation, or new build/refurbs is not indicative of the investment everywhere else. Schools that went through BSF ten+ years ago will likely still have a great core network design (with multiple MSTP domains, load balancing and strong ACLs), but these schools would unlikely to be able to replicate that should they have to replace it today. IT expenditure in schools is <10% per FTE of an equivalent sized 'knowledge worker' based business. Just look at colleagues gnashing their teeth because in order to get enough devices each year they forwent TPMs and now are locked out of Windows 11.

RDCMAN is back from the dead and is now available under Mark Russinovich's Sysinternals Suite of tools. Current version is 2.81 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/rdcman

Not played with Teams handsets yet (but will do as I can see the benefit of dedicated desk phone) However on our legacy VOIP handsets the support LLDP-MED, so all internal edge switch ports are tagged with the voice vlan so if a phone gets plugged in it automatically uses the phone vlan, and if a non phone is plugged in that uses whatever the untagged vlan is (typically printer or staff-data, but occasionally cashless-catering).