mikes

I hope no government department is buying a batch of these mice from a nice manager in PC World who happens to personally know the purchasing director of said government department.... but such things could never happen in this country

Hi a few of our fileservers are hitting quite high CPU usage on the indexing service, despite indexing being shown as "complete" in indexing options. I was wondering what best practice for indexing is on Windows fileservers. Does the index allow client computers to search files using the index? (i.e. if i disable the service, will Windows search be a lot slower for users at their workstations); or does the indexer only apply for a user at the server console? Is best practice to have the Indexing service disabled on fileservers? it is causing a not inconsiderable usage of CPU resources across our vhosts.

our old NM went with RMCC4 when it just came out (against my advice) and it was a disaster, added to the fact our old NM bought these slow ecoquiet core2duos it barely worked tbh. Building machines worked for about 2 weeks then whenever you built a room at least 50% would fail. It would take 10 minutes from pressing the power button, to getting a usable desktop. The whole thing was a mess tbh. Network shares randomly didn't appear so I had to write a VB daemon that checked for drivemaps and mapped the drive if it had failed. When he left we decided to go vanilla; we did it during the summer. this was about 4 or 5 years ago now ? I only work 2 weeks in the summer and there was only the Data Manager helping me, we decided to go with a local firm based in Cardiff. We went with VMware, 3 physical hosts running Server 2008 or 2012 (i forget which), and SCCM for software management. SCCM works pretty much like CC4's software deployment process, you can deploy MSI's or .exe's with the correct unattend configuration. e.g. we used the office customization tools to configure office for unattended install; same with adobe CS4's unattend tools. building a machine involves PXE booting, it then installs an unattend install, the SCCM software manager installs and installs all the software; WSUS handles updates. The cardiff firm installed the physical Vhosts and all the VMware infrastructure, they also set up the domain controllers. I handled the software packaging and print servers. Can't remember how we did the mailserver. Our bigger problem was replacing the RM MMC, we use impero as a replacement for RM tutor; it also comes with a CSV user import tool. we import the CSV, assign them all mailboxes, takes about 30 minutes. we also have SSO with office 365 using ADFS / web application proxy. (this was set up a year later) we had some teething problems the first week back (user profile permissions were wonky so profiles weren't saving), print mapping was a bit funny, but otherwise it went pretty well, wouldn't go back to RM at all now. edit - we also use Veeam for backup, which works very well with VM's. we can restore an entire VM in a minute or two, restoring guest files is v easy (we also use shadow copy). with RM they supplied Symantec Backup Exec which was total trash. it would randomly fail to backup, would randomly fail to restore, and I tested out its bare metal restore which did not work at all - if we had a catastrophic server failure with RM, we would have been there for days setting it all back up.

I can imagine things going wrong with this policy too. I am a fairly young looking guy, I lost my ID badge. I am at work and hear a bang that sounds like a gunshot, and kids scream. I pull out my issued sidearm, and go to the coridoor. A new long term cover teacher (who I've spoken to via e-mail a few times but have never seen), does the same; walks into the hallway, sees a young guy (me) with no ID badge in the coridoor with a handgun; what does he do? blows me away. turns out the bang was a science pressure experiment someone left the lid on too long for.

used to love lime and orange tic tacs, would eat 4 boxes a day. then they changed the recipe and now the stuff tastes much more bland; also if I eat more than 2 boxes of the stuff now it will make me mass produce bile (honestly, poop will be green with bile and I even threw up thick green bile; happened 3 times each coinciding with eating 4 boxes of them in a day) - are they trying to make these things more healthy, yet failing miserably with all these new untested chemicals? i like how they advertise Coke Zero as the "same great taste" - it is not the same taste at all; all these artificially sweetened drinks have the same nasty chemical taste to them. I know too much sugar is bad for you, but I am a grown adult, I can take care of myself; I know how to keep to a healthy weight, it's not difficult.

well I hope this shooting sim takes into account that walls in schools are incredibly thin; if you fired an assault rifle in our school it would probably go through at least 3 classrooms. You know in America if I was a teacher I'd probably bring a pistol into school and keep it locked in a drawer; at least then if a nutter comes in you at least can protect some kids. I think the culture over there is very nasty, everyone for themselves, helping others is seen as lame... look at how the cops behave over there, they pull a gun before they open their mouths. Honestly I think the situation in US schools is something out of an orwell novel. you walk through metal detectors as you go in. a strict no drugs policy (meaning no paracetamol... they stripped a 13 year old girl down to her underwear because she had a 400mg ibuprofen - https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/03/24/1947221/strip-search-case-tests-limits-of-4th-amendment - one school issued each student a laptop, and used remote admin tools to spy on those students when they were at home; when the students asked about why the webcam light kept coming on, they were told lies about it being normal and that covering up the cam with tape was considered "damage" - what kind of a country are we talking about here I am so glad I live in the UK where the most scared I feel working in a school is worrying about if an oldie will crash into me during the drive home! and the worst our nutters seem to do is slash a few tyres - edit - and your bit at the bottom about issuing teachers handguns was sarcasm - i am pretty sure one US state is ACTUALLY issuing every teacher with a sidearm, for real, i will try to find the link - edit 2 - US gun laws: Colorado to arm teachers in classrooms - BBC News it's colorado - this year, when SMT ask what courses I would like to go on, I'm going to ask to go on a firearms training course

seems a bit OTT for me. I'd rather take the Glock, at least you could go plinking with it

we have onsite IT support here (me), I am an ICT technician and we have no Network Manager. I run the DC's / Servers, the LEA run our switches (I used to run our switches too but they took that from me), we are on a giant WAN with all the other Schools. It used to be interesting as they hadn't firewalled off the other schools, so I could access other schools shares etc; they finally firewalled it all off last year. I think it is par for the course, we looked into moving away from our LEA for broadband etc (some schools in Newport ditched their LEA for a BT line) - but for us it seemed the budgeting wouldn't allow it (or that is what I was told). We would have to factory reset all of their switches and reconfigure them, we'd have to get a new IP phone system (it links in with a central LEA controller); it wouldn't be plausible to do.

It's too bad the UK government can't put together a distro for school use, with the configuration/packages etc already done. If done correctly it could save the taxpayer a lot of cash that otherwise goes to MS. But we know what our Government is like, they would spend billions on big name contractors, putting out some garbage that doesn't work. Also I find it odd when people say, in Linux vs MS debates, "You need MS because you get full support" - you get no support at all from Microsoft, and according to their license agreement, they do not guarantee their OS for anything whatsoever.

Hope this is ready by Summer (knowing MS it will be... Summer 2018)

Hi a quick question on how you all send video evidence to exam boards e.g PE and Drama videos ? I used to use DVDfab to actually encode the disk as a DVD Video playable in all DVD players, but I am wondering if that is a bit over the top and if the exam boards might actually just prefer the MP4 on a DVD (so they can copy/paste it etc?)

exactly the same error we had and funnily enough the same solution too ! We also tried testing disaster recovery in Backup Exec and just couldn't get it to work - we came to the conclusion that the software didn't really work, and if we had a disaster we would be screwed.

I have this too since a recent WSUS update... I remember an update broke it last year, now I am getting: System.IO.IOException -- The handshake failed due to an unexpected packet format. going to try WSUSUTIL... it seems after every update now you have to check everything to make sure MS haven't broken something (like when they randomly changed GPOs without notifying anyone)

This is just a simpler way to have SSO than the current AD FS / WAP that we are all using, correct ? I currently have AD FS / WAP working for SSO, this seems a simpler way but not worth doing for me as I already have the AD FS / WAP working well?

does your mobo have onboard video?

Hi I have a problem with one of our servers (running as a Windows Print Server) - the machine basically runs very slowly - installing a driver will take 20 - 30 minutes, stopping a service will take 5 minutes etc etc - checking Resmon shows hardly any CPU, Memory, HDD usage etc - no problems with high handle usage, etc. While this is happening, users can still print to the printser, but after a few days it will show an "RPC service is unavailable" error and the server needs to be restarted (which takes about an hour). This is a virtual server in Vsphere; we have moved it from one vhost to another with no success (the other servers are all fine) I have seen this a few times with MS Windows - it will just grind to a halt and the only solution is to reinstall the OS (putting it down to Windows Rot) - has anyone seen this and might know what causes it?

We give the teachers read access here; we mapped the root of the student work folder to the teachers as a drive. There aren't many teachers with the technical ability to navigate through the subfolders of the various year groups etc; so they mostly end up getting the pupils to e-mail the work to them anyway (via a dept handin address) One caveat is that the folders show up as "My Documents" instead of 16usera due to the desktop.ini, but there are ways around this. I have no reason not to give the teachers write access to the student's home folders, but we decided against it for all the hassle it would cause e.g. teachers accidentally trackpad dragging files away etc. Nobody has asked me for write access anyway.

Hi, I have come back from the summer holidays to find that one of our exchange users passwords was compromised, and that the user was sending vast amounts of spam over the summer through Internet Mail... does anyone have any advice on securing MS exchange? the users password was bruted... the OSS mailservers I have used in the past had connection limits to hinder bruiting, but I can't see anything like that in Exchange... also is there a way of limiting a users maximum e-mails per week? sendmail had that but I can't find it in exchange? thanks; I am going through the users mailbox now and a number of people have e-mailed back having a go

Our LEA threatens us that if we leave their broadband, we will be in danger as our LEA connection is "encrypted".. anyone had e-waste companies threaten them with data protection fines?

Do you mean the ability to lock down / control what students can see/access in the Control Panel (personalization, mouse, etc) - this is very limited in Windows 10? My school is very particular about what students can and can't do on the computer (no control panel, no funky mouse cursors, no adjusting the toolbar etc) - does this not work as well in Windows 10?

Yeah I was thinking that... does it clean out the bloatware that is already built into Windows?

Thanks - do you recommend running this again with Domain Computers on all GPO's - or just doing it manually on the ones I use security filtering on? It is obvious the quality of development at Microsoft is getting worse...

well i thought the question wasn't "shall I use WSUS" but "should I deploy optional updates to servers" ? I have WSUS but this is the first I have heard about not deploying optional updates to servers? I deploy or decline them individually depending on what is in them

I ran the manual fix as described above and it has fixed it luckily.. My WSUS server (the server OS itself) updates directly over the Internet from MS, perhaps I should change it to update from its own WSUS, I am guessing that is how most people have theirs? I can hold off a week or so then and let other people beta test MS's updates for them

My WSUS broke too with a similar SQL error - I couldn't get the WID to work, it didn't like the NETWORK USER account or something I ended up comissioning a new server VM and re-installing it from scratch... and afer the latest batch of Windows Updates, it promptly stopped working again damn MS software is garbage... don't they test this stuff? (to them that's the end user's job) I have 706, going to hope the manual fix works...