Olliedawg

Anyone able to recommend some decent walkie-talkie's/radios for our exam staff? The ones we have are falling to bits & are fairly old now. No budget in mind, although the cheaper the better!

SO for anyone still interested, I managed to isolate the issue to a cab in one of our IT rooms. It was indeed a network loop. The cable management (or lack of) in this specific cab was an absolute state, to the point you could barely see the switches. (large cab with 3 48 port switches.). I wish I had taken a photo of this to show you all, it would make you cringe! Decided to just strip all cabling out of the cab & start again. Now this is the first time I have actually done this myself, and I don't think i've done a bad job . On the plus side, I have been monitoring network traffic all this morning - NO Packet loss, no jitter .

Worth trying to add a GPO for Software Restriction Policy, finding the path of the software on the C:\ drive and setting to unrestricted for students? We had problems with Avid Link / Sibelius when we first deployed these to our music room..

Think i've narrowed this down to one of our IT rooms. All 3 IT rooms were in use this morning during form time, as soon as students began logging in, network went crazy. Packet loss all over the place & ping spikes up to 200ms. Going to have a real good look at all 3 of these rooms, as well as the switches for these rooms.

We're on a leased line through Opus. They have reported no issues though. That's what is making me think it may be a network loop, as i'm sure that some of our older switches do not have STP enabled, or even have the feature at all.

Hey all, Earlier in the week a ticket was created in relation to phone lines having poor connection outbound. I have been monitoring over the last few days and we seem to be getting pretty serious packet loss/spikes. (Ping to ISP) packet loss to our ISP, high ping spikes + jitter on random occasions. (Ping to router) Also getting random ping spikes to our router, highest of which was 2000ms. I have contacted ISP and they have tested the line, fine from there end. Does this sound like symptoms of a network loop? If so what are the best practices to deal with / find the cuplrit? We have a range of network switches across site, some being newer Mikrotiks, others being assortments of Netgear/HP Procurves (nearing 10 years of age). EDIT : seems to have stabilized a little after around 10 minutes.

We have some of these also, no problems yet - although now i'm slightly concerned after reading this...

We are using locked down Exam domain accounts on laptops for students with word processing needs. They have no internet access/network drive access & automatically open onto the ExamWritePad software, with an exams printer mapped. Not had any issues with this setup so far

Thank you for the response - I've only really heard good things about it, thought i'd ask some fellow IT folk on here . SLT are keen to make the move away from ParentPay. I would like to stay with Vericool, although they do not currently support MCAS/Bromcom Payment with their till system (it is in development apparently).

Hey all, Does anybody use Bromcom/MCAS dinner module in a secondary school & if so how is it? We currently use ParentPay / Vericool, but looking to cut out the middleman (Parentpay) to save us a bit of money. TIA

Pointless as they wouldn't be able to play it really, as you need to physically move around. Plus, like ITGuyNW said, they dont tend to spawn pokemon near schools. I can confirm this because a few years ago i used to play it!

I had to set this up last year in a suite which contains 34 PC's.. PITA but got it working in the end. It does seem a bit dated for today's standards

Thanks for that will check it out. We are looking to migrate DC's to either 2016 or 2019 this summer, as those are the only remaining VM's we have, which are not at a minimum of 2016.

Hey all, At the moment, we have no way of doing a mass gpupdate /force. If a change has been made to a group of classroom PC's for example, we have to manually go and type this command in using admin creds, to ensure the change is made & not relying on the automatic refresh of GP. I have seen that you can force a gpupdate to an entire OU within GPMC, although when I try to do this I get errors stating connection blocked / RPC not available. This can be fixed via a simple starter GPO apparently named " Group Policy Remote Update Firewall Ports ". For some reason, this is not in my list of starter GPO's on any of my 3 DC's. Does anybody know how I can get this to appear? Or why it would be missing? DC's Windows Server 2012 R2 TIA

Would not want to be that guy/girl right now who authorized the change

No issues to report at my workplace as of yet.. Although I am unable to access the Volume Licensing Center which is a PITA

I'm finally moving our staff profiles away from roaming this next half term. Going for local profiles with folder redirection to their H:\ drive + Onedrive. Some of our staff have profiles as large as 8GB... dont ask.

problems (mo money mo problems!)

Sounds like it's worth a shot to re-image, if the sound test is ok on the BIOS then it could very well be some sort of windows issue.

Worth checking BIOS version of the laptops & seeing if there are any updates available. We had some issues with a DELL AIO not getting an IP via ethernet or wifi. After checking EVERYTHING else, i thought let me just check the BIOS version, and it was insanely out of date. Updated to a more recent one, unit now gets an IP no problem. Might be worth a try!!

We have a batch of Dell AIO's similar to that in my school. We did encounter some strange network issues on one specific unit which we just could not get to the bottom of.. Turned out that the BIOS firmware had not been updated since the release version which came with the board (2016!). We ran through the BIOS updates in order, and this fixed the issue we were having. Might be worth checking this on yours too?

Cheers, it does seem to work fine until I add the taskbar section, so something there can't be right causing it to fail to apply.. Made some adjustments but still not working with the taskbar code in there

Hey all, Hoping somebody can help me, really can't seem to get this XML to apply Start menu + Taskbar settings. The GPO itself is applying fine, just doesn't seem to be adjusting anything. Attached image of xml code

Hi all, First post on here, decided to make an account as I have found many helpful forum posts on here Is it possible to mass create folders within a team, with each folder belonging to an individual member (folder name being the members name) which only themselves and the team owner(s) will have access to? So for example, student Joe Bloggs would have a folder called "Joe Bloggs" and only Joe and the team owner(form teacher) would have access to the folder. Can't seem to find an answer for this anywhere TIA