synaesthesia

A man after my own heart Likewise, it scares my tech when I break out the soldering iron - although I usually take those things home to do as I have the kit there. Good idea testing each-others work too. And indeed, calibration is part of the budgeting for it. As much as some people might find it an imposing task for IT, or indeed devaluing, I think it also offers a good opportunity to get hands on devices on a schedule as well as the compliance, asset management and general condition of everything. Of course that's everything electrical not just IT, but like yourself - if a MIDI keyboard comes our way (or as a result example, lighting desk/DMX controllers) I'm not going to turn it away and tell them to pay some expensive company to fix or replace, I'll do my best to help. Possibly a generational thing; if I stuck to my job description, nothing would get done!

Yeah, I generally wouldn't trust a USB-C cable of more than a meter especially if it's doing more than just power and a single screen - for that reason I prefer the idea of docks on desks, and avoiding HDMI socket fatigue on the screen. Laptops with replaceable USB-C ports aren't too difficult to source unlike HDMI. However it's still a faff - we're mostly HDMI and we go through silly amounts of cables. We're trying to get staff to make use of wireless casting where possible, unfortunately this is rubbish on Promethean devices. Works great on our Viewsonic boards though.

You're a week early?

Argh, too early on a Monday. I read that as MDMA and thought that was certainly one way to give you a morning pick-me-up!

Can understand that, however it was our thought May annoy our replacements in years to come but that's no skin off my nose if helps us here and now.

Exactly! Literally had our local label-louts test "Y" kettle leads 3 times for some reason (but standard kettle leads only once). Several items passed that shouldn't have been, several items tested that weren't even electrical or mains powered, and the majority of these companies also test everything annual which absolutely is not necessary or even recommended.

Have it? No Joint effort of course but we make efforts to be proactive by knowing what we have, where it is and what condition it's in rather than wait for people to start moaning. Swings and roundabouts, if we didn't do it we'd probably end up spending as much time fixing the issues that don't get flagged until it's too late.

Indeed, there's an issue with comms in general - advised to untick the option to send push notifications too.

Makes sense for us as we can tie it in with asset auditing and general equipment checks. Don't really have time to spare, but as we'd be doing that anyway, there's not a massive extra load.

Hi all, Looking at bringing PAT in house after years of abuse by the usual sticker-jockeys. We have a very high end tester - 14 years old but apparently still supported and used. Want to look at options though, mostly cheaper, more portable setups that ideally will store & download results over wifi or USB to CSV or included 3rd party software. Seaward stuff looks half decent, and have my eye on the Primetest 250. Does anyone have any recommendations please? Don't want to spend a fortune, but in an ideal world would like a kit that has a label printer. I know labels aren't mandatory and I'm considering options there (i.e. labelling only if failed and logging everything else against the asset tag as I'd upload to Civica/Parago) but a connected/compatible label printer would be good. It seems to be finding the balance between the price and the labour involved - spend more and we can reduce the labour by doing labels as the test is done etc, spend less and we have to use another device to log & label.

Cheers. We're on MF already. Have finagled it a bit as we are a single print queue school with only 8 devices. Added a other virtual printer with permissions locked down and added that to the Chromebooks. Not perfect but it'll be better than nothing

Would always very highly recommend Wave9. Great service, great company.

I believe it was the user being logged on elsewhere (in this case a mobile phone) using an old password, the smoothwall bit was a red herring.

Spent a bit of time pouring over various sources this weekend and there's a definitely divide. Many of the shills are cooing over the performance from it whereas lots of people not conducting paid/sponsored reviews are saying it's not a patch on a similarly priced Windows laptop. Some of those however haven't even had their hands on one, so I'm still taking that with a pinch of salt but some are definitely reputable. I'm very happy to see the level of repairability though, and not at all surprised that some parts would stay soldered otherwise they would be cutting into their higher end products. But that's the rub - I know full well that this is the first free/cheap shot of crack to get a junky addicted, and once they've had that taste... I would be very annoyed if any schools went down the route of getting these in any quantity as a result.

Is it possible to have any sort of granular access with Mobility print? Currently ours is pretty open and we've had to be careful with who gets it to prevent abuse - pretty much just 6th form and Year 11 have access. We're not 1:1 on devices but quite a few chromebooks dotted around various departments. In an ideal world I'd like to be able to publish only certain printers (easy enough) but only allow certain users to be able to use those certain print queues or better yet, users of a certain batch of chromebooks only have access to print to a certain published printer (such as our DT department chromebooks to the DT printer). I can't see anything documented that says this is possible and wary of overcomplicating what we have. Google Workspace settings have the same deployment method for all users (as it's a user policy rather than machine). Has anyone been able to achieve anything like this please?

Probably as the name is the only link to the originals or Reincarnation. Having played it - it's meh. Arcadey every-day nonsense and not even close to being worthy of the name.

Well the Splicecom site is back, with a full rebrand to Selectvoice. Half their site doesn't work unless you want to buy something.

Same supplier here, had nothing from them - but perhaps as they're already aware we're jumping ship they might not have bothered. Sites dead here too, doesn't bode too well!

First I've heard of it, we're on an SV1000 but getting rid of it in Summer thankfully (such an old fashioned crock, it's awful!) Our supplier is normally quite good at comms so would expect to see something shortly if that's true. Either way, EOL just usually means no longer supplied as new rather than not supported outright (I hope!)

Is it possible to use Redstor akin to other cloud storage without their native software? i.e. add it to Veeam as a repository?

Indeed - I must admit to being a huge fan of Veeam and was sad to see it go for us

Those ring a bell and probably goes some way to explaining why I thought it might be possible. Just searched through my history with Redstor support and that first link came up to say it's not supported, which they said specifically in writing. Advised to back up the host, excluding the systemstate, VM files and quorum drive as well as the CSV.

Yeah, was overkill (and slow, HDD based SAN) for what we used it for. Single host now running 8 guests on SSD's and it's a million times better (with a hot-spare host ready to go in case of failure).

That's how I had it up until Christmas, and we had to do it separately too - so I had the host backed up but excluding the CSV so I had the config files backed up, and then each guest backed up separately. Yes, that did mean that restores file-level were to a working machine so you needed a blank-slate to restore to but I'm sure it was possible to do a bare-metal. I never got the chance to test however as I got rid of the cluster and SAN setup entirely at Christmas.

*twitches nervously* That actually looks...... decent? Leopard and it's spots though, the cynic in me is still shouting loss-leader or the free shot of hero in to get you hooked. Or maybe Satan is starting to shiver and something is actually changing for the better. Watching intently.