simpsonj

I believe, though I stand to be corrected, that if you put in the 1.6tb drives with the 600gb drives, the RAID would only use 600gb of the 1.6tb drives, effectively 'wasting' 1tb per drive. I suspect you would be better off creating a separate RAID for the 1.6TB disks.

Just out of interest, where did you learn how to do this? Any particularly good websites or video tutorials out there? It's been on my todo list for quite some time, but I've not found a good 'Getting started' guide.

Is it possible the laptop is causing the loop, if it's connected to both the physical network via the USB-C hub and WiFi? Shouldn't be an issue, but doesn't hurt to disable one or other.

Yes, provided the device is enrolled in Google Admin and the following settings is configured: Device settings - User Data - Erase all local user data This will erase all local data on log off, giving a fresh login each time. There are a fair few other settings that need to be set on both Device settings and User & browser settings pages, notable Restrict sign-in pattern, turning off Powerwash and enforcing a GB Keyboard. It would be worth going through both pages of settings and ensuring it's configured so that users can't change anything or bypass your restrictions. If you can find a guide somewhere, I would recommend it (my Google-Fu has failed me).

Maybe they just want to be able to do assessment without it changing, and breaking, every term. Or be able to reuse reports they've made last year, without the entire system being broken in an attempt to shift everyone to Quick reports. Or not have slow down every Monday morning, or at the start of a new term. Or be able to rely on scheduled reports coming out when expected. Or be able to merge contacts for students. Or be able to make a timetable of rooms being used quickly and easily without resorting to a Pivot Tables. There are a lot of things I like about Bromcom, but the nature of it being cloud based has meant they has pumped out a lot of updates, which we have no control over, that has then broken a lot of the functionality that had worked previously. I can see the appeal of a system that has great and flexible functionality that, in the main, rarely gets changed to the point it doesn't work anymore, or having to completely uproot your previous work.

Just out of interest, did the phone have a pass through (so it can pass on the network to a PC)? Was that pass through connected back to the network?

130 Hours into Persona 5 Royal and I've almost reached the extra palaces that weren't in Persona 5... I seem to only play games with hundreds of hours of gameplay lately (Baldur's Gate 3, CyberPunk, Pathfinder: WotR) and the next few games lined up are also monsters in size (Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader, Octopath Traveller 2 and DioField Chronicle)

I agree with the others, this sounds like a loop issue (someone plugging a network cable back into the wall, rather than into a device, or possible linking up switches with multiple cables) Worth checking whether the Spanning Tree Protocol enabled on all switches? As well as checking your external connection, it's worth pinging internal devices (Smoothwall, Core Switch, Domain Controller) and seeing if they respond in healthy manner. If possible, you could try disconnecting each edge switch from the core one by one to see if that improves the reliability and isolate the problem. I'm sure they are more sophisticated methods, but this is fairly tried and tested!

Depending on how small your school is, you could install Lansweeper (or similar) https://www.lansweeper.com/ Free for 100 assets or less, even if you just used it to scan your switches, it might find the laptop attached to a port.

I would imagine Smoothwall support wouldn't help until it's updated to the latest version, which may help the problem anyhow. As a comparison, at a site with over 700 clients, my swap file is 9728 / 7,998460 so that definitely looks like that's an issue! RAM usage is about the same (4GB / 32GB)

Radical Image Optimization Tool - https://riot-optimizer.com/ Has been my go to for a while, can do batch images as well.

We've provided a MiFi device with a 4G SIM card that the school pays for. Seems to have worked quite well.

Try loading from the DVD and running sfc /scannow - didn't detect any issues Kept the DVD mounted and booted as normal then ran the dism repair, using the mounted DVD as the source - claimed the source files could not be found I've got a company to do the transfer, so unless they ant to try resurrecting this server, I think it's done. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions, don't think this puzzle will ever be solved.

One of the best investments the school has made in my opinion! The DSL likes it because it ties directly to CPOMS, and there is an escalation policy in place of who deals with what level of ticket. From an IT perspective, I like it because it's pretty easy to setup, and I no longer have to plough through thousands of captures every week! I believe it's helped head off a few safeguarding issues, which is absolutely what it's designed for, and it's really not particularly expensive either. They gave us a months free trial around this time last year, so definitely worth checking out.

Smoothwall Monitor, but a good list to look through is the Safer Internet Responses and see which matches your needs.

Nope, still trying to load up the Local Session Manager (which will fail) and no command prompt available.

I'll give it a go!

There are events in Event Viewer that mention NTLM (and that I shouldn't be using it) so I'm presuming it's going down that particular route. Whatever is stuck trying to log this account in presumable isn't a service, as they all get restarted. So a file, or registry entry would make more sense. No idea how to repair/replace/rebuild those .dll files though, if they are causing the problem.

Essentially can't get past ctrl+alt+delete, the login box doesn't show. I've disabled ctrl+alt+delete requirement via GPO and now it shows my admin login trying to login for about 0.5 seconds, then flips back to the time and date screen.

A fair question, and I think that would need to be risk assessed at school level. The monitoring used at my school includes key strokes, so would pick this incident up. But ultimately, I would point you in the direction of the LGfL Online Safety Audit, and the section on Monitoring as that is pretty comprehensive and asks all the questions about your E-Safety provision that the IT and Safeguarding team should be answering.

I've understood monitoring to be the active monitoring of what is happening on your internet connection. For example, who is alerted if a student is looking up safeguarding concerns, what actions are taken, etc.

Feels like this needed a bit of a GUI update to go alongside this change. I've also got a fair few double categories, as what was once a custom group is now 'official' as well. It would be useful to have someway of knowing which one is 'official' (and therefore get updates) and which are custom categories when making a policy. Guess I'll just ended up renaming all my custom categories!

Do you mean using DelProf (or the Powershell equivalent)?

It does look like my admin account is 'lodged' in the system, and it's constantly trying, and failing, to login with that account, and therefore it's blocking all other accounts from logging in. Why a simple reboot doesn't clear this though, I don't know. Maybe something stuck in the Registry somewhere?

No SCCM in place here. My servers only have the absolute minimum of GPOs deployed to them (Default Policy, Network safe zone, Certificate auto-enrollment, Smoothwall certificate, Smoothwall login script), so I don't think it's a GPO thing. Can't login locally, can't get to the username/password field at all. Dropping it from the domain is my nuclear option; at the moment I can at least access the server via Powershell and command line. The moment I take it off domain, if it doesn't allow me access, I'm left with an absolute potato! Thanks though, I'll try blocking inheritance on this server's OU, see if it is a GPO thing.