simpsonj

Considering the Start Menu on my home laptop has stopped working twice, I wasn't too keen on building an image for a school and the above has definitely made me wait until Easter at the earliest. Should your start menu stop working (most likely because of Cortana), there's a weird fix for it. Run - msconfig Boot tab Tick Safe Boot and then Network Reboot and login with affected account Load up msconfig and deselect Safe Boot Reboot and Start menu should work again. One of the strangest fixes to a problem I've come across, but the alternative was to run a powershell script that just sat at 30% for an hour and didn't seem to do anything... Anyway, hope someone finds the above useful, and I would be very interested if anyone manages to get a Windows 10 image they'd be happy to use across their school!

SECURUS was an expensive outlay, but the ongoing cost per year isn't too bad now. I'm looking at other solutions (E-Safe) which would be a price hike. I think you're right though, if there's a no cost option that satisfies the needs of the school then that's the route to go down. REL Work only. Absolutely, light personal use is fine, no issues with that. I would hope that the AV/web protection does it's job properly and SECURUS is never needed.

We have SECURUS installed on all devices, including staff laptops which can be taken home. Staff sign an agreement stipulating that the laptop is for work use only and the AUP states that laptops are have SECURUS installed and that it logs their activity. We also have Sophos installed which has web protection built in, to reinforce the idea that these are school laptops, and should be used for work and not personal use. I would highly recommend, if you're going down the monitoring/logging route, that you install some kind of web filter on staff devices to prevent accidental or unknowing access to dodgy sites (or potential misuse by family members/flat mates etc). You don't want staff to feel that they are being entrapped, but rather protected from false allegations of misuse. Would be interested to know whether our setup would be considered overkill/illegal? Getting knowledge in this area is particularly difficult as there doesn't seem to be a cut and dried policy we can all follow.

Might be worth checking how many processors you've assigned to the server in Hyper-V. It doesn't ask you when you setup via the Wizard (IIRC) so I had mine with only one processor for a little while until I wondered why they couldn't run anything at any speed whatsoever! Right click server in Hyper-V - Settings - Processor and have a quick look there. You will need to power off the virtual server to make any changes.

Glad you got it sorted Windows Firewall only clicked for me when i tried to ping the client from the switch and it wasn't working, and then my techie asked whether I'd turned the firewall off or not... When you get down to it, the tricky parts are making sure that everything is documented, and inputting the IP helper command on the HP switches (Why that isn't part of the web console I don't know...). Once they are in place, vLanning isn't as daunting as it first appears. Mind you, I've still got a host of switches to setup with the new vLan, so I'll not count my chickens just yet! Also, I had to contact Virgin to get them to make the virtual switch (or IP route) for the new vLan, which had to be outside the existing subnet (they had set it to 10.104.0.0/16), just in case this of any use to someone with a virgin setup and Palo Alto managed router/firewall. Their support was actually quite helpful, but it does help if you know what you're talking about (which I can only half claim!). I think I'll be blogging about this later, if only to ensure it's all in my head when I inevitable come back to expand my vLans later.

Stupid thing, but ensure that the firewall on the client is turned off! PM sent

NAT is one of the few things I can change on our Palo Alto, so whilst I'm reticent to implement NAT if you're not recommending it, it might be my only route. Any pointers for what I should be looking to do? I've had an outside company have a look, and they've confirmed my vLan is setup as it should be. From a client on the new vLan, I can nslookup an outside website (BBC - Homepage for example) so DHCP and DNS are working fine. When I run a tracert, it hops to the switch, hops to the router, but then stops, so I'm assuming that the client can see out, but the router can't talk back to the client without some static routing being setup (ala the video @foofighterjim put up). Interestingly, I can't ping the client from the switch (target does not respond), so perhaps that's an issue too...

The only devices I could ping in VLAN 1 from vlan10 (or 50 in your case) were devices that had the switch set to be the default gateway... Your video has slightly confirmed by worst fear that I'm going to need to do some configure work on the router so that it recognises the different vLans I'm setting up. I'll have to spend more time on this tomorrow, but can you setup vLans on your Smoothwall? If not, you may end up in my current predicament. Just wondering if there's anyway to tell the switch to strip any vLan 'flags' when sending information down the port the router is connected to, or whether I can configure something else that doesn't involve me talking to Virgin media's rather 'school unfriendly' tech support.

No, it came up automatically, I assume after I gave the HP switch an IP address on that vLan... I wasn't trying to ping anything except the switch (as I assumed it needed to be able to ping it's own default gateway!) and the DHCP server (as I assumed it needed to be able to ping it to get an IP address, though that might not necessarily be true). Basically, my first big goal was to be able to set up a vLan that would get a correct IP address from the DHCP server, which I've (finally) managed! I would be slightly worried about the lack of acknowledgement of the vLans existence on your routing table, but @irritable_tech seems to have an idea!

Just for reference, my routing table is: IP Route Entries Destination Gateway VLAN Type Sub-Type Metric Dist. ------------------ --------------- ---- --------- ---------- ---------- ----- 0.0.0.0/0 10.104.150.1 1 static 1 1 10.104.10.0/23 Guest 10 connected 0 0 10.104.148.0/22 DEFAULT_VLAN 1 connected 0 0 127.0.0.0/8 reject static 0 250 127.0.0.1/32 lo0 connected 0 0

I've been following this thread with interest, and definitely picked up one or two helpful tips! I've not quite got there yet, but I've gathered some other information from other sites that might help, and if I put my thoughts down it might help the both of us? General info: Router is a Palo Alto PA500, IP address 10.104.150.1, and is our current Default Gateway. I have limited management of the switch, so couldn't use it as the layer 3 device. It should be setup to allow any address in 10.104.x.x range to access the internet. Main Switch is a HP 5308xl, IP address 10.104.150.220 One flat network, 10.104.148.0/22, with the idea of splitting this up with vLans once I get the hang of them! For a long time I was trying to use a HP v1910, which seemed like it was up to the job, but I think sent me down a fair few blind alleys. The setup So, I wanted just one more vLan to dump guest WiFi users onto, like foofighterjim we use Aerohive, so hopefully once the vLan is setup, setting up Aerohive to use it shouldn't be an issue. I wanted it to be a large scope (512 addresses), so created a 10.104.10.1/23 dhcp scope, putting the HP Switch's vLan10 address in as the default gateway. I've created a small spreadsheet noting the IP address ranges and IP address of the switch for that address range. In this case, the switch IP address for vLan 10 is 10.104.10.250. On the switch, I created vLan 10 using the web interface and set a manual ip of 10.104.10.250 255.255.254.0 keeping the default gateway of 10.104.150.1. I then followed http://www.hp.com/rnd/support/config_examples/5300xl_dhcp_relay.pdf to set the IP helper address. Essentially telnet onto the switch using Putty, and add ip helper-address 10.104.150.24 (my dhcp server) to vLan 10. I started testing but didn't really get anywhere. If I untagged a port and attached a laptop, it didn't get an IP address from the dhcp server. If I set one manually, I could ping the switch, but that was it. I needed to do two things. One, set a route for 0.0.0.0/0 to go to 10.104.150.1 so that the switch would know to direct any unknown traffic to the router, as per this discussion: New VLAN & Router Setup on 5308xl - HP Enterprise Business Community And then, after testing on a standard laptop, set the default gateway on the dhcp server to be the switch's IP address (10.104.151.220). Then, finally, the laptop set on vLan 10, could get a IP address from the dhcp server! Now my only issue is that the laptop hasn't got internet access, which I suspect is something to do with the routing table, but I can't seem to add another 0.0.0.0/0 10.104.150.1 for vLan 10...

If you're interested, a similar thread on how to vLan was started a day or so ago, can be found here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/156740-subnet-change-vlans.html#post1343661

Sounds like my summer work, in the exact same boat, know what I want to do, but not quite sure how to get it all to work... The only advice I can give is to try and keep your current DHCP scope (10.122.204.1) as part of your new dhcp or extended dhcp ip range. Will make life a lot easier as you only have to change the subnet mask and not every single IP address going. But you may get far better advise than I can give, so I'll be following this thread with interest!

I'm an hour or so in, and I'm not sure the transition from 2D to 3D has done it any favours, lost an awful lot of it's charm and I get the impression that they don't really know what to do with the camera half the time. It's the first game I've played where I've actively wanted them to remake it as 2D. But the intro music is brilliant, and the fights have the same rapid pace as the previous games (though I miss the cool sound effects!). Haven't really hit any major plot points, and only been one character so far, so far too early to tell whether the story is any cop. I think my major problem is that I've wanted to play this game for years so I've probably over hyped it. Oh, and thanks for the shout out about the Fire Emblem sale, properly enjoying that

As there are a few RPG fans on here, thought it worth mentioning that Suikoden III has finally had a PAL launch as a PS2 classic on PS3, and Suikoden I and II have reduced prices...

Have to ask, how are they planning on using the Apple TVs? Are they expecting them to just plug into the projector and boom, it's all working? Have they considered the impact they'll have on the network (Bonjour is a pain) and that most old projectors are VGA only, so even if they do connect to the projector via an adapter, they probably won't have sound? We tried to put in Apple TVs but had to give up because we discovered we needed new AV equipment to go with them, which we couldn't afford...

Interesting, as my school have never hosted their own emails (First class - Microsoft for Education - Office 365) we haven't experienced any major issues other than a rather horrible handover when the County decided not to manage our emails anymore, and not to transfer the mailboxes for us. The few times I've used Microsoft support has actually been very good, aside from the time difference and getting called after school hours. The 'I'm sure there'll come a day where O365 gets hacked..." just sounds like scare mongering to me. Okay it's definitely possible, but then it's equally possible that someone will access a mail server within the school as well. But then, I prefer important things to managed and stored on systems that the school could never afford to maintain. Our SIMS is hosted by ScoMIS, which allows for easy home access and is backed up hourly and is stored on a server farm with resiliency I couldn't hope to match. The same applies to Office 365, along with the added benefits that all our staff and students can now access web versions of Office, have so much online storage space they'll never fill it and can install Office 2013 on 5 devices, android, apple or windows. I have to admit, I've never strongly considered moving to a non-hosted system for email, should I be? Even if the school decided that Microsoft wasn't worth the cost of the EES agreement, and we went Open source, I think we would still go with Google Apps for Education over an in-house system.

In terms of improving laptop speed, I would make sure that they connect to a 5ghz network (where possible) as I've found that it's the wireless speed that slows a laptop, even with a SSD. Upgrading from 2008 to 2012 is going to be a biggie. Personally I've bought in a new server, installed Server 2012 and then migrated the roles from the old server to the new, along with any data. But I may be wrong and you can do it, so worth checking with other people! But then I had the 32bit version of Server 2008 and couldn't directly upgrade so YMMV. Otherwise you're setup isn't too far removed from my own, just gotta keep things chugging along as best you can and invest the money wisely. Batteries, RAM, SSDs, Wireless cards, any little upgrades or maintenance things you can buy that will make a noticeable impact are worthwhile, and teachers love a new projector if you can afford them!

Hmm, sounds like your graphics card has died. Is it an inbuilt graphics card (Ie part of the motherboard) or a separate (PCI, PCI-e) one? If it's a standalone card, worth trying to reseat it in the motherboard. If it's integrated, might be worth seeing if you can pick up a cheap one or borrow one from a friend? Also worth trying a different cable if you have another knocking about (VGA or DVI).

What he said really! In my case I've got lots of low spec servers running VMs, which is less than ideal (no money to consolidate yet), but putting all your eggs into one basket would worry me if you've got the option to run two, then I would suggest doing that instead

I'll chip in, but more because I'm interested in how others have done it as the way I've set it up is from trial and error rather than any training! 1, I use Hyper-V, seems to work fine with no major issues encountered so far. 2, This is the way I've done it, though I understand you can install a Hyper-V supervisor OS that will allow you to run Hyper-V and nothing else. I prefer a bit of flexibility at the cost of RAM and processor though. 3, As many cores as possible, talk to someone like @ICTDirect_Dave or @Millgate and they'll have a good idea. Rough idea for servers is 4GB per server plus 4GB for host, but you can never have enough RAM! Also make sure you've got LOTS of disk space, it's amazing how quickly it disappears. Also, it might be worth while investigating two servers instead of one for back up/redundancy. Have to ask the question, if the bare metal server fails, do you have anyway of getting your vital VMs up and running again quickly on another server? Where will you back up your VMs to? Highly recommend VEEAM (I'm just using the free version and it's great for backing up virtual servers, planning to upgrade over the summer). As I say, I'm not really much further along the line than yourself, but hopefully that might help a little!

Also add that OneNote for Teachers is worth a look. Currently trialing it here.

Kickstarter went down minutes after this announcement apparently!

As long as they improve the battle speed on 9 then fine Seriously, it takes about 30 seconds to load up a battle in 9, considering you're going to have at least 500 fights across the game, that means 250 minutes of just watching battles load up. I've tried three times to complete 9, and I can't do it. I reach a dungeon where the random encounter rate is stupidly high, and give up the will to live... Gotta love the card game in that, make it playable online and you're onto a real winner! But I wouldn't complain about 8 & 9 being remade, but I'm still stoked about the 7 remake!

Just Finished: Red Faction: Armageddon - A game saved by the Gravity gun being a stupid amount of fun. Just bought: Divinity II, Silver, Enemy Within (Damn GoG and Steam sales...) Most Hyped about: Fallout 4, FF VII HD remake, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Shemnue III all announced the last few days!