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.

No it returns the Smoothwall IP from the DNS which the current device is connected to each time. We have a new zone on each schools DNS called sw and then within that a CNAME record called secretknock which points to the local smoothwall IP Address which does not replicate therefore each school has there own zone and own pointer to there local smoothwall, therefore when I take my laptop to another site it should request secretknock.sw from the local DNS and tell my laptop what the local smoothwall box IP is however often we find devices are communicating with other DNS servers across the trust and being told the IP of the smoothwall box at another site which is then breaking filtering

Hi, We are a trust of 9 Schools, where we have a single domain and single tenancy therefore each site has its own domain controller with its own DHCP but the DC and DNS are connected to the same domain. We use Smoothwall Firewall at each site and have a site to site connection between each site. We use Smoothwalls Cloud Filter on our azure devices to filter them when they are on and off site. To make the cloud filter work we have to a put DNS record into each Schools DNS to tell the laptops the IP of the Smoothwall box local to the site we are on. The issue we are having is that devices are often communicating with other Schools DNS therefore the laptops are getting told the IP of the remote smoothwall not the local smoothwall which then breaks the filtering, I understand if a device fails to communicate with the primary DNS it will then attempt to communicate with the secondary DNS however I am failing to figure out why they are failing to always communicate with the primary DNS. Our current temporary solution is to only push the Local DNS server through DHCP which we are not happy with as it reduces redundancy Anyone with Smoothwall cloud filter have the same issue? or does anyone know the culprit of the DNS issues we are having could be? Thanks in advance

Hi, We are moving away from Google Classroom and moving to Microsoft Teams this Summer. We are a large secondary School therefore we are having issues with students who do coursework subjects using AI to write there essays and the exam board catches them out. Can anyone recommend any software they use which ideally integrates into Microsoft Teams that checks for AI and plagiarism. Thanks, Nathan

Hi, We recently moved to OneDrive for all students (1600) and we are having issues with students work sometimes not processing quick enough mainly with Microsoft Access documents it can sometimes take five minutes for it to sync a 1Mb document we have a 1Gbps Line into the school, has anyone had similar issues? any fixes? We have files on demand enabled through GPO Thanks in advanced

Hi All, Thank you all for your suggestions and questions I really appreciate it. We are going to have a look at a Aruba solution, More information on what we require is below We will be setting up Multiple networks / VLAN's for Backups, Staff Wi-Fi, Sixth Form Wi-Fi, Guest Wi-Fi, then the main network for all school owned devices so L3 switching will be required. We are wanting a reliable solution that is going to last us 10 years plus and a solution that will have a minimal down time while giving good performance. We also want to have the ability to easily expand the farm if we need to. Our network is quite a high loaded network due to the amount of computers we have and the demand for computers meaning the majority of the time all computers across the school are in use plus the misc tablets etc. Any other questions please let me know and once again I appreciate all the feedback

Hi, I am the ICT manager for a school of 1600 students and 200 faculty, We are looking to completely overhaul our current infrastructure with new switches, after working with several companies I have been offered solutions from the following brands Fortinet Cisco Meraki (Too expensive) Netgear Without going too much into detail does anyone have experience or recommendations with for switching brands / models. I originally was looking into Unifi however after a bit of research I'm under the impression that this brand would not be good enough. We have around 750 desktop machines 200 laptops and around 100 misc including tablets We currently have around 5 48 POE Port Switches and 24 48 Port Switches Thanks in advance

Hi, I work in a high school and I am testing cloud storage instead of the traditional file servers. I have so far installed one drive sync app on the desktops and created a group policy to manage the settings such as auto sign in with domain credentials which works great. I am struggling to auto sync Sharepoint Library sites on logon which I have created. I have created another GPO which maps the library through the One Drive group policy's and this works however takes hours to sync the drive to the computer which would not work in our environment as student and staff are logging into different machines all the time. Is there a way to map the Library site straight away on login? If not I don't see how cloud storage would work. Thanks, Nathan

Hi all, Our redirection group policy's had been deleted and recreated with the new mappings and since then all users intermittently have been losing there taskbar or have not been able to pin anything to the taskbar. If I disable the new redirection policy then the taskbar works 100% of the time. All the policy is doing is mapping start menu and desktop to the network location which works 100% of the time, Anyone had similar issues? Thanks

We are planning on testing it with one or two shares we have. We have a gigabit line into the building so hoping we should experience a some what fast experience.

Hi All, Thanks for all your advice everyone we are most likely going to stick with what we have for now and possibly move towards a cloud based solution.