NathanH99

Thank you, I will have a look into this.

Is this something you have tested and done in a working enviroment? The idea of it sounds great but leaves with me concerns... One school has around 1000 devices, all of these devices being azure joined and azure managing the authentication worries me.

Hi All, I work inside a trust of 9 schools, we are experimenting / looking into moving our primary domain controller from onprem into azure. So far I have been able to setup a azure domain controller, an IPSec tunnel and then a local domain controller. I have been able to get them connected and replicating as expected which is great but the cost of the IPSec tunnel was way too high I had to turn it off. (Luckily using the trial money so far...). If you have done this I would massively appreciate it if you could share how you connected your on-prem to azure? Also any experiences / advice in general about azure virtual machines / domain controllers is welcomed! Thanks, Nathan

Hi, I am a network manager inside a trust of three secondary schools and multiple primary schools. On the 11th of March 2025 we started to experience some network issues at all three secondary schools and potentially primary schools. Over the last few weeks we have been investigating the issue and so far have found out the following The network issues happen when at least a room of 32 computers are being signed into at the same time however more that sign in worst the issues are... therefore we see the network issues at most lesson starts. The cause of the network issues is from the site deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com, which from research is a content delivery site for many companies including Microsoft. On sign in to a computer this site is sending roughly 30/40mb to each machine that is being signed into resulting in the network crashing for around 10 minutes, speed tests come back at around 10Mbps and the LAN comes to a halt. When looking at the App History in task manager "SVCHOST" is roughly using 600Mbs of network per sign in. When looking at Data usage for the past 30 days, system is using a lot of data usually around 40Gb or 10Gb a week. We have recently discovered that this does not happen to accounts which are not federated with azure and are local AD only. We have tested this many times and the results come back the same each time. The current theory is it is something that is downloading / updating during the sign in of a azure federated account as we use single sign on. So far the following actions have been done however no progress has been made. Windows store apps have had there automatic updates disabled. Windows updates have been disabled Microsoft Teams has been uninstalled OneDrive has been disabled Delivery Optimisations have been setup to the Microsoft standard. Does anyone have any idea what this could be? What we can try next? Any software to track down the culprit? Any advice is massively appreciated! Thanks in advance, Nathan Screenshot of Realtime smooth wall logs Extra Info about one of the Schools Internet line - 1Gbps up and down leased connection (Ruled out due to each school having different ISP) Switches - Unifi Pro switches with a 40Gb backbone (Rules out due to each school having different Switches) Firewall - Smoothwall S9 Computer count - 1000 roughly

You can buy active Display Port to HDMI adapter which work fine for another School in our Trust in this exact config. Something like the below https://www.amazon.co.uk/DisplayPort-Adapter-Compatible-ThinkPad-Desktop/dp/B07ZNNRYFL/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?crid=3ADSKD0DIPOD1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.oV05Bo4lEYzNUZN6ms3-MSXDWFgz-rG1b0U-lhYls7-Ir7mWCleKovc4_vGkJl73ozfg8cQtsx-bwWDZIc10J4Iyb6INpyJ5y9CVcTniOCzsKLNcB8DqVbE596IBf4YzNnRz6nEmUDgbwz6LVshsOCKkhMbVHwt-69FnAUgj3ahEKN6EN8FnYSvLqlTk87Z6tJ6gaxNZguTg7Uok9Vz2zJc-HFysX-ptaIkma1u_diU.v1wDPe29M2Cx854e1vLP34sm8fa5PfDH06q6eHkLHgs&dib_tag=se&keywords=active%2Bdisplayport%2Bto%2Bhdmi&qid=1738147656&sprefix=active%2Bdisp%2Caps%2C79&sr=8-1-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9hdGY&th=1

Yeah that was my other idea however we would still want the one cable, so would be looking at going USB-C Dock to HDMI Splitter to Monitor and TV which as synaesthesia says would probably cause more issues... I guess there is no perfect method without sacrifice

Agreed however staff area already use to having double screens which are 24", going to one screen which is 15.6" would cause me grief.

Hi All, I work in a Secondary School where we are looking to go down the route of using laptops as teacher stations instead of standard desktops. Our plan was the following Buy USB-C Laptops and USB-C Hub Monitors Plug USB-C laptop into USB-C Hub Monitor via USB-C and then plug the TV into the USB-C Hub Monitor which would passthrough the display. This would work. The issue we have is the teacher would end up with three monitors (Laptop screen, Monitor and TV) which they would need to configure correctly in each room they worked in so that for example the Monitor and the TV to duplicate and then the laptop to extend which is way too complicated for our staff and especially supply staff... We need a solution where the teacher plugs there laptop into the USB-C cable and the monitor and TV always show the same thing without any user intervention I would be interested in hearing what other schools do which do laptops as teacher stations, Thanks, Nathan

We are now looking to use https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/networking/dns/deploy/primary-geo-location and from testing seems to be working, this fixes our smoothwall issue however not our DNS issue

Thanks for all your help and advice on this! I think I have come to the conclusion there is no fix from Smooth wall on this one and I will need to look at a method to ensure the device hit the correct DNS every time or look at doing it through VLAN's

Is there another solution we can try which is different to what we are currently doing?

We have also raised it with support however was told there was nothing Smoothwall could do so id be really interested in how synchronising secret knocks work and if that is our solution, Thanks!

Ah apologies yeah thats correct devices are sometimes going to the wrong School DNS then knocking on the wrong smoothwall

I don't fully understand what you mean, they all share the same DNS record the clients need to look for being Secretknock.sw however at each site the value this record points to will be there own Smoothwall box which will have a differnet IP per school

Yes that's correct each site has a DHCP server with server options to push DNS settings, our current only fix is only pushing the local DNS server to clients for each site however if that DNS server goes down then they have no DNS.