AB_IT

Hey All, Long time no speak but I've got a bit of a dilemma and it's currently keeping me up at night. We have a member of staff here who has spoken with their son who is a developer and has advised her that she can utilise Claude to code applications from scratch, host this application on our SharePoint and use it in production. I'm no developer however I know a small amount of fundamentals to get me by. The issue is the first app that's been created Claude wants us to register it as an app in Entra so that it can use our Office 365 logins as authentication to who can access the application. This member of staff to my knowledge has no past experience in development and so I raised concerns mainly around security and integrity of the app as though it's been developed, I'm uncomfortable giving it access to services without knowing if the app is secure, an example off the top of my head is Claude could potentially hallucinate or similar due to the long conversations and prompts and as a result mess up the code sending data to who knows where or what it's doing with it so I wanted to get it checked by a developer which we're in the process of doing. It also needs a Database which it wants to use Power Automate and SharePoint lists to log the data. It's basically a HTML form which is filled out by members of staff and then that information is sent to a dashboard. It uses .json files and HTML files hosted on SharePoint. That first app is still undergoing checks and is yet to be put in production, I've had to get an external IT support company to check it over and help support their implementation of the app, however this weekend I recently received another email saying this same member of staff has created another application. It wants similar; where an app registration in Entra would need to be created and then it would utilise our O365 logins in order to allow certain staff members to authorise a request for certain kit and then also recording an invoice. This seems like real serious stuff and the member of staff is speaking about having an audit trail. The additional problem I seem to have is that the CEO is working alongside this member of staff and wants these things to go into production. I just feel quite uncomfortable around the fact the software developed by Claude has no support attached to it, requires permissions from our current systems and users, I don't have the expertise or questioning ability in order to support these applications if something goes wrong or to ensure Claude is doing the right thing and is doing what it says. It all just seems a bit hard to navigate and is worrying me as more and more of these apps are being developed. I don't want to be the IT Manager who just says no for the sake of it or pushes back, I want to enable users to use this new technology but I'm concerned about quite a lot here. The external IT support company said they are getting requests from other companies with the same kind of thing and where positive about it, so I presume it's more common than I think? What are your guys suggestions, should I be more open and happy to approve these apps or am I right in pushing back a bit here? Also what are you guys doing in this scenario? Any help would be most appreciated, thanks all

It's a home users VPN connection that goes through their home ISP and connects into our network. We have re-imaged and it fixed it for a few months but then the same problem is back. It can't be her ISP as other devices are connecting fine through the same VPN connection.

Hey All, Ripping my hair out over this one. We have a member of staff who is using a desktop PC at her home to connect into our network over an OpenVPN connection. For some strange reason DNS keeps falling over and no DNS names will work when connecting to servers. However we can use IP's but this messes up Group Policy as it's all DNS based especially things for like her redirected profile folders. She has a laptop and I've even been to her house and these work perfectly fine including connecting my own laptop, it's just this desktop which is setup in the exact same way. We tried all the usual steps such as a DNS flush and DNS register, I've checked all the settings and done an nslookup and it's correct. In the end we reimaged it and rejoined it to the domain. This worked perfectly fine for the last 2 months or so and now it's done the exact same thing again. It can ping our DNS server and is sending requests to it. It's able to access public DNS because browsing to websites work fine it's just on our network. It's very strange, has anyone come across this kind of problem before? If anyone can help point me where to look I'd really appreciate it, our team has wasted so much time on this.

Thanks All! So a proper electrician it is. Just a pain we'll be spending extra money out of my budget, was hoping I could save some cash lol.

Hey All, Just wanted to check if it would be a problem, basically bought this big UPS that's going to help power some of the servers. It requires however a hardwired connection into the back so Positive, Ground, Neutral wires to be stripped and the screwed into the back. Is there anything wrong with me using a Kettle Lead, stripping it and just wiring it in myself, plugging it into a UK 3 Pin Socket or is this a fire hazard etc...? Maybe I'm being dumb but thought it was worth the ask Thanks All

Thanks all for your help The dealership has now said they will pay for the full repair.

Hi All, I purchased a 2022 Kia Stonic for £14,250 3 weeks ago, £750 of that was a part exchange bringing it down to £13,500 which I paid in full cash. It was from an official Kia dealer. I cleaned it for the first time on Tuesday and noticed that on the roof there was a rusy stone chip about 8mm x 4mm. I didn't think it'd be a big deal so took it to a stone chip place to get it repaired. I also took it to the local Kia dealer which I didn't buy the car from to get their opinion. Both said that because it's been neglected for so long the rust has spread underneath the cars paint, they would need to respray the entire roof to ensure the paint didn't bubble in the future. One quoted £750 the other was £350. Quite a difference in price. However they both said to contact the dealership I bought it from because they should be fixing it since I've only had the car 3 weeks. I've tried to call the Kia dealership but was put through to their switchboard who said they were busy and couldn't answer the phone so they will call me back instead. Nothing. So I've sent an email with pictures and full explanation to the sales chap I purchased it from but haven't received a reply yet. This was a lot of money to spend and to say I'm gutted is an understatement. I can't afford to pay out the £350 repair cost currently after spending so much on the car itself. Does anyone know what my legal position here? Could they just bluff and say I caused the stone chip even though due to level of rust this is incredibly unlikely? Do they have to fully fix the roof since I've now raised it within 30 days of me owning the vehicle? I'm really worried, not sure what to do. I hope you guys will be able to give some advice 🙂

Thanks all for your help and input. We've discovered that for some reason our reseller have removed all our licenses from our Tenant. Working with them to try and get something sorted.

Thanks! So it's not effecting everyone then. So strange. A colleague of mine has also found the following Reddit thread I'm getting the following error message when trying to browse to outlook.office.com/mail UTC Date: 2025-03-28T09:59:27.339Z Client Id: 45C3DC7AD12B48E2A9CD6A93BCFF949E Session Id: cfc05766-12ec-4d7d-a95f-8e27bc25cba4 Client Version: 20250307002.17 BootResult: configuration Back Filled Errors: Unhandled Rejection: SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data:undefined|Unhandled Rejection: SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data:undefined|Unhandled Rejection: Error: 500:undefined|Unhandled Rejection: SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data:undefined|undefined:undefined|undefined:undefined|undefined:undefined|undefined:undefined err: Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Storage.TenantAccessBlockedException esrc: StartupData et: ServerError estack: s@https://res.public.onecdn.static.microsoft/owamail/hashed-v1/scripts/owa.mailindex.8b53afd4.js:1:142760 y/</<@https://res.public.onecdn.static.microsoft/owamail/hashed-v1/scripts/owa.mailindex.8b53afd4.js:1:155397 st: 500 ehk: X-OWA-Error efe: LO4P265CA0289 emsg: TenantAccessBlockedError

Hi All, This morning been battling with some staff as O365 seems to be down for us. Just wanted to double check and make sure it's not only us, can't seem to find any thread on any forum saying there is issues. Has anyone found out a way around this as of yet? On the admin 'Service Health' page it says they're having problems with eDiscovery however they're only expecting a new update at 4pm today so this would essentially mean we have no email services all working day! Thanks Everyone

I don't understand why car manufactures can't just cover the underside in plastic trim to prevent a lot of the rust issues. My Civic for example has a very large plastic undertray with a little middle hole to easily service the engine. I rarely clean her and a lot of the metal thats underneath the plastic looks almost new, no rust or concerns. The bit they didn't cover in plastic trim is the exhaust and rear axle. I bet if they did it would be fine. Plastic is also incredibly cheap so I'm unsure as to the reasoning behind not covering these components? Maybe someone with more understanding could tell me why. Also why are cars still using cambelts? I had one on my Clio years back and it was an expensive job getting it changed out and things. My Civic has a cam chain and though I know some are noisy mine certainly isn't and runs really quiet. Why aren't cars fitted with chains instead? My one other concern at the moment is the V-Belt that drives the alternator, water pump etc.. this has never been replaced or changed in it's life however it's probably due one. I'm just hoping my girl keeps going, cars don't excite me like they used to when I was a kid. I actually purchased an 2020 Aprilia SR50 scooter about 3 years back and rebuilt the entire engine. The whole engine was great fun to build in my spare time and the cost came to around £700 with branded good quality parts, considering my rear axle on my car has cost £750 it seems like a steal. It's so much fun and takes me back to being young again, also the 80+ mpg is a win especially when I get paid 45p per mile at work. It's one of the last scooters which was a 2 stroke engine so it can go pretty fast, I know they're bad for the environment but since it's engine is 0.05L I can't imagine how bad it really is in comparison to a car, the EU made it to difficult with Euro 5 emissions for manufacturers to still produce 2 strokes and so that time has ended which is a shame. When it does go wrong parts are so cheap for it that I hardly flinch recently purchased a new carb for it at the expensive cost of £11.99 new, I mean that's a Large Costa Coffee. I don't drive it in the rain/winter however so this is probably what's keeping it in good nick!

Thanks everyone I'm going to keep saving and investing my money whilst keeping my car on the road, replacing things and maintaining it myself where I can and hope that it lasts me another couple of years. I'll nurse the clutch until it starts to really play up and then just take each day at a time. Maybe the silly thing to do here is to buy a brand new car. Especially since no one knows how the cost of cars will change in the future and what will happen to mortgage interest rates. Playing the waiting game with my car might just mean that used car prices drop to a more reasonable level later on and in the meantime I've paid off a good chunk of my mortgage with my savings

Thanks all for your comments. I wasnt expecting this much help. It's interesting to hear all your takes on this and I'm considering everything you're telling me so please keep the comments coming in @3s-gtech - The clutch I think needs replacing, sometimes it can be awkward to get into first/second gear, most of the time it's okay but it's becoming more frequent and there have been times at traffic lights where I've needed to put it in first and drive but it won't go in. I have also on 2 occassions now felt some slippage when accelerating hard onto a motorway or similar. I've also found that my car especially in colder weather will slowly judder whilst it's in gear like the clutch is released, I'm in gear and it feels like the car is rocking forwards and backwards until I change to a higher gear. I'm presuming this all point at the clutch especially since as a result of this I tried changing the gearbox oil but smoother changes thinking it needed this but it hasn't made a difference. I don't mind changing the clutch if I could have a mystical ball to tell me that nothing else major will go wrong on it for at least the next couple of years, however if it all comes at once then I'll be screwed as with the rear axle and clutch it'll likely be more than the car is worth. I'm comfortable doing most work but huge jobs like the clutch I don't want to do myself so labour costs are silly. I don't think having a car on lease is something I want to consider, I don't like the idea of renting something, I'd rather own and have an asset that I can pay off immediately than rent or pay any kind of interest on a purchase. Thanks for your reccomendations though

Hey All I'm hoping you lovely sensible folk will be able to help me make up my mind with regards to my car. My car is a 2011 Honda Civic and I purchased it with around 30k miles back in 2013. It has never really ever let me down except for standard things like brakes, servicing once a year and the odd minor repair. It's now got 125k miles on it and recently 'slowly' more and more things have started to go wrong. Nothing that I couldn't fix myself so I've been fixing it to save money. Suspension things and stuff. Recently I took it in for an MOT and it failed on the rear axle, it had corroded and needed full replacement. I couldn't do this job and it would have been too big of a job so I was quoted £750 all in and it needed new rear brakes so I supplied the part and they said they'd fit for an extra £50 since they where working on rear axle. I've reguarly looked after my car, I could wash it more but I'm always on time with maintenance schedules and recently did a bunch of work changing Gearbox Oil, Brake Fluid, Anti freeze etc... It runs and sounds lovely and as it owes me nothing I now don't really worry about silly things like parking it somewhere. For a long while now I've been saving money and have a bit of a financial plan. My mortgage renewal will be up in 2026 and when the fixed term expires I'm going to look at what the rates are but also put about 30-40k that I've saved into the mortgage to pay off a large portion of my house leaving me with less than a 50% LTV and also take off 5 years from my mortgage. If I keep doing this in the next 10 years (I'm 30 currently) I'll be mortgage free. Then the plan is to hopefully rent the house out and move into a bigger home. However realistically my car now needs a new clutch, it's old and this will cost around £1,500 with flywheel bearing etc... Then what if the alternator, water pump a bearing goes etc... It starts to cost more and more. Which I'm worried about investing another £1500 into my car for something else to go like a head gasket or something. I've looked at used cars and thought I'd be able to find another used car at 6-8k, 2 years old with little to no mileage, how wrong was I! The cost of new cars is ridiculous, mine by WhatCar valuation is worth around 2k it's a knacker by this point, I was thinking I'd be lucky if I get a grand back for it. As I look for used cars around 2-4 years old with no more than 30k miles on the clock it's starting to creep up to the price of buying a brand new Dacia which my dad has had for 5 years now and hasn't had any problems with. Dacia have just released the Dacia Spring which is fully electric but can go 130ish miles on a single charge, more than enough for me plus no engine for services, tax etc... Sounds good and it's £12,995 if you shop around a bit literally brand new. A Honda Civic 4 years old with 35k miles is averaging around 9k. WHAT!? So my question is this, what would you guys do. I don't like spending money on cars or on anything for that matter my main goal is to pay my house off as it isn't dead money at least. I treat my finances very seriously and I'm careful. Do I invest in my current car with a new clutch, flywheel and hope that in the next 3-5 years nothing else goes wrong or do I buy a used car at inflated prices for around 9k or do I buy the Dacia new electric vehicle and hope that the electric over petrol cost including maintenance fees more than offsets the use for a petrol car. Any advice/help is really appreciated as I know if I don't make a decision I will do nothing and regret it later. Thanks everyone

Sent you a DM. Yes it is me.

We have been having constant problems with the Printer Map of GPO's, basically it was hit or miss on whether it would actually map and then sometimes it would just freeze. Tried everything, changing drivers etc... But to no avail. Basically I think the RDS server is just very old (needs decomissioning really) but haven't had the time or recources to do it as of yet. Print deploy before we found out we needed VDI licenses was working like a dream and fixed all our issues, I'm presuming because of the different way it deploys printers. All these things only started happening since the Print Nightmare issue and I didn't want to keep the hole open in order to deploy them. Type 4 Drivers are non-existant so we're a bit stuck without print deploy.

Hi All, So I've tried to setup our VDI Print Deploy client (we had to purchase a seperate license for VDI) on our Microsoft Remote Desktop Server. I've installed the application as per these instructions and ensured the config file shows the correct Application server along with ensuring the services are running etc... Issue is that it's just not deploying the print queues and the GUI application won't load upon a user logging in. I can manually start the GUI by browsing to C:\Program Files\PaperCut Print Deploy Client UCT\pc-print-deploy-client-uct and it will open, shows I'm logged in as my user but just says there's no printers available for me? Additionally I've checked the relevant ports are open and that the IP address of our RDS server is listed within our PaperCut server to deploy two print queues. Any ideas on what I can try? Thank you!!

Unfortunately it needs to use the app. No web browser version on either.

Hi All, Hoping you can help us. We've got some android tablets that will be setup around each of our sites and will be mounted on a floor stand. We have two apps we require, one runs our visitor sign in and the other runs our staff sign in. We want to simplify this as currently the person has to go back to the android home screen and open the app for either staff or visitors. Ideally it'd be nice if there was a middle-man app for example that we could make it default back to which has two simple buttons that are essentially shortcuts, One buttong that says staff signin and another that says visitor signin and then pressing one or the other brings up the app in question. Then I was thinking with inactivity it default back to the app switching app again... I hope this makes sense as I've used the word app a million times but it's kind of difficult to describe. Any ideas or ways that we could achieve this? Thanks everyone

Hey All, Hoping someone here might know what's going on. Basically we have a Leased Line coming into one of our buildings and a SIP/VOIP phone system. The leased line has an external IP dedicated to this phone system which is mapped to our Phone Network VLAN (Confirm this by putting a device on VLAN and asking Google What's my IP). We have two other VLANS that point to a different external IP. Since doing this however the phone system will work and then if no one has dialed out externally for some time the phone system won't see an incoming call from an external number. Using Wireshark we can't even see the traffic on the network almost as if the UXG Pro is somehow preventing the incoming call. If you dial externally again from the phone system once it's stopped working and then straight after dial into the building again it starts working for a while? Thinking it's the firewall I've tried making two entries in the firewall to allow all port/traffic from the two external IP's which deliver the incoming call to the phone network but to no avail. I've also removed the phone network from the 'Suspicious Network Activity' list and added 'SIP' option to Contrack Modules to see if that would do anything but it's still having problems. The Unifi Controller isn't showing me anything in the logs that I can see. If anyone can help I'd really appreciate it as we're really stuck with this one!

I wouldn't agree with this at all. Yes there are certain PC's that aren't upgradable but the vast majority I'd say even in MicroPC's that Dell, HP produce have upgradable components such as the CPU, RAM and Storage. Later down the line things may become less upgradable but that's very dependent on the use case. For example; it might make sense for companies/schools to buy into non-upgradable computers in order to save space and get the best bang for buck when it comes to eco reasons and to save power. There will always be a market however in gaming for upgradable, custom made PC's and actually the amount of PC gamers has grown over the last few years as has the sale of individual components for PC building. This skill is transfferable across to businesses and schools, for example being able to understand what components to inside a computer and what they look like helps aid troubleshooting even if perhaps things are soldered down. Installing an operating system and understand how that works along with the BIOS is also something that is helpful. Setting up a Local LAN to play games seems recreational but actually the children are learning what an ethernet cable does, what a switch does, how computer communicate etc... which is all information that isn't normally taught by the standard curriculum in schools. I've seen 13 year old children touch the screen rather than use the mouse and keyboard in front of them because they've never had access to an actual computer before. I understand things are becoming more mainstream but there will always be a market for this kind of thing and it's growing in the consumer space. Coding is a very important thing to understand although this is already baked into the curriculum and I wanted to give these children and parents something different to experience that is physical, we're also talking about disadvantaged children in low income areas is where I'm focusing, these children tend to learn better via physical play and their educational background or more common conditions such as ADHD in those areas might mean that coding isn't as easy to focus on and they might not enjoy it as much. Practical work seems to work better for these children in order to learn. Unfortunately they won't be able to take the computers home with them, it will be around a 2-3 hour class where the first house will be building the computer, second house setting up software side of things and the LAN and then they get an hour of play time depending on how quickly they get through all the above steps. I will make this clear on the day and in advertising though and they'll need to work in teams of 2, class of 25ish with 12 computers so it wouldn't be fair to let one child take the PC home and not the other. They also technically won't be my computers to sell off as they'll still be my workplaces, maybe my work won't mind giving them away but with the fear of data protection etc I think they'll want them back and still properly recycled and as the IT Manager I'll be reccomending this anyway.

Thank you, that's worth a go. I'll ask the village hall when I enquire and just see if they provide tables and chairs as part of the rental. Consumables and things are fine, tea, coffee and juice for the kids is fairly cheap from places like Aldi so I don't mind supplying these. I'll ask about Insurance also as if I can somehow use their insurance that'll be much easier. Thank you I'm hoping so and I hope I can try to keep costs down - a few hundred pounds is fine for a budget but I don't want to be spending in the thousands. With regards the destruction, I was just going to format the Hard Drives, I know I could boot and nuke but it'd only be for 6-8 weeks in the autumn and then the PC's would be returned back to my work place and I'd do it yearly if it was a success. So technically I won't be keeping the computers - would this all be above board do you think? I'll look into insurance - hopefully it's not too costly especially for the amount of time I'm looking at running it for. Also above I might be able to use the Village Halls insurance? I won't even bother licensing them. I was just going to download and install a trial/unactivated version of Windows and use that as it will only be for a few hours and then they'll be wiped again. I didn't think about PAT testing. Again - can I not use cables temporarily from work that have already been PAT tested? I'll look into DBS, hopefully especially as the parents will still be around it wouldn't be much of an issue? Food for thought though, I'll have a look. Yes we're using standard computers although they tend to be Dell Optiplex's which actually aren't too sharp or awkward to work in. They also have plastic tabs on some things like the fan to remove them easily. Thermal paste is cheap that doesn't bother me I did think about the games and licensing part. I'm not sure how I'd do the licensing of it yet but I was thinking about them playing Human Fall Flat, Rocket League or Overcooked. These games aren't that physically demanding either so I'm hoping some machines which don't have GPU's would be able to run it with the iGPU? I'll be honest - the reason I want to set this up is because things like this exist. School really focus on coding as well now and I used to find it so boring anyway. I hated the idea of just coding something. The exciting part of what got me into computers when I was a child was opening the up, breaking them, learning physically. I think coding is overdone and is quite a difficult thing to get into. The idea behind building a computer, turning it on, troubleshooting and it eventually leading you to playing video games with your friends signals a reward mechanism that I don't think coding competes with if that makes sense. I remember being a kid and building my first computer and certain things I missed even after researching like thermal paste for example or what to do with the BIOS. I think giving kids this age the basic understanding of how to build these gives them confidence and understanding in something they're interested in which i think is a lot more positive than just learning coding. Plus the coding used by children that age isn't actually real coding anyway and doesn't have much relevance to real coding platforms like JAVA or C++ etc... I really think what's missing from the IT curriculum in schools is hardware.

Hi All, It's something I've been thinking about for a while and something I'm passionate about. I've got this idea about setting up a not for profit kind of thing where I could work with disadvantaged children and help out the parents a little bit. I have free time on my hands over weekends and evenings so my idea was to look at advertising via social media and offering a free service to a limited number of kids (primary school age) and parents to come along to a practical IT lesson. My idea really was the physical side of computing, showing the kids how to build a computer, allowing them to work in teams in order to do so and then turning on the computer, setting up a very basic LAN with a switch and allowing them to play a few LAN based games. I thought it would be educational and fun for the children who are interested, maybe also give the parents a much needed break and give them free coffee whilst they're their so they can talk to other parents, make friends and socialise also. I've worked with kids like this in previous roles in schools with things like an IT club during lunchtimes and to be honest I miss working with them and want to feel like I'm giving something back. I've also thought that sometimes children can be a handful but I've had to deal with this previously and I was always praised on how I handled them. I'm not even sure where to start or how to go about this? I've looked into pricing for a village hall to rent and then I'd just need some basic chairs and tables, a coffee machine etc. In my work we go through a lot of computers, currently paying a company to recycle them, I was going to speak with the CEO and see if they wouldn't mind donating the PC's that are to be chucked away to me and this whole venture. What do you guys think? Is this a good idea? Is there something I'm missing or could something go wrong? Do I need anything for working with kids? I'm DBS checked in my current job, do I need some kind of insurance? Any kind of help or advice you guys could possibly give would be really appreciated

Yeah, I've just checked. The MSI downloads the file with the server name in the filename. I have been renaming this however to PaperCutDeploy and then deploying that, could this be the issue? I didn't think the filename would matter? EDIT: Oh my god, it does apparently matter... Well now I feel stupid. Thank you ever so much for your help that's been driving me crazy all day!!

Hey All, So I've contacted my reseller, they don't seem to have a clue and PaperCuts response was to basically go to my reseller and I'm a bit stuck. I'm trying to use Print Deploy in order to deploy our printers to Client PC's and 2 x RDS Servers. I've treated a test user and test domain joined PC to ensure it all works. I've followed the instructions on PaperCut to use the cloning tool to upload our print queues to the server and I've setup all my zones properly pointing at the IP I'm testing. The issue I have is I think with the MSI. Basically there's a file located in C:\Program Files\PaperCut Print Deploy Client\data\config\client.conf.tomel which shows the server address as being a loopback address 127.0.0.1 instead of our PaperCut server address or hostname. I am deploying the MSI using Group Policy and downloading the MSI from the server, I have tried both downloading it remotely to a client computer and using this MSI and also downloading it locally on the server and using this MSI. Both install setting that file to look at the loopback address. I've also taken Group policy out of the equation and just installed the MSI manually but still no avail. If I manually change the config file it all works fine and deploys the printers appropriately although I can't do this on 500+ machines. The print deploy page under Enable Printing also has a settings tab with an entry point for hostname which I've tried adding but it had no effect and another for application server which likewise is the same. What am I doing wrong here and does anyone know why it's not installing with our servers details in the config file? I've added some screenshots below to better explain, I'm at my wits end I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here?