localzuk

Education volume licenses include "upgrade" licenses. Home edition is an eligible OS to upgrade from. Also, in general, you aren't installing pro editions, you're installing the Education Edition.

Big problem I have with the 4060 is that it is barely better than the 3060 was. At the moment, it seems like it'd be a waste of money. LTT did a video on it yesterday saying it was now a good price, but there are basically better options.

Smoothwall has Azure AD based auth I believe. As does Sophos XG.

I would suggest that this is also something that needs looking at too - old software, that isn't being supported any more, should be withdrawn from a security risk POV, as well as a data protection risk POV. I know budgets don't necessarily fit, but they didn't here either, and we've managed to eliminate it all over the last 5 or so years. Several attacks on schools have been through outdated software according to the DfE technology standards.

My comments are based more on the fact that your school used its existing kit for 10 years. So, is this new kit likely to be expected to last that long? If so, going for those few extra items on the spec ensures a bit more longevity. And yes, if you're on a slower connection in a rural area, you're likely to see some investment from Connect the Classroom at some point, both in terms of wifi, and potentially internet connection speed.

Have you looked at MS's support topologies page? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/hybrid/connect/plan-connect-topologies Are your different forests able to be accessed from that single AD Connect server?

I would highly recommend an SSD of 240GB or above. We have had some 120GB SSDs in the past and we had no end of issues with them filling up. If your laptops are intended to last for a similar length of time, I would also be specc'ing 16GB RAM these days - doesn't take a lot to use up 8GB in Windows now, so give it a couple of years and 16GB seems like it'll be a necessity. Finally, you should be looking at Wifi 6, rather than AC. The DfE technology standards say schools should be implementing Wifi 6 these days.

Interesting! So, "daily driver" activities should be done on a separate machine - be that machine a VM connected to from your client, or a separate physical machine... So, potentially, if you use a single RDS VM for admin tasks, you could end up effectively with 2 VMs to connect to? One for daily driver activities, one for admin tasks? As I wouldn't want to install all the admin tools on desktops in our office.

One thing to take into account is that the guidance on "appropriate filtering for education settings" requires network level filtering in schools.

You don't have to have a single box centrally - you can have a failover cluster of appliances. We have a 2 box cluster at our core, and that handles all our schools. In the 7 years we've run this design, we've never lost both boxes (we used to use Sophos, moved to Smoothwall).

Most big name filter/firewall solutions should be able to handle what you want. Sophos XG can do it, and companies like Fortinet etc would be able to as well. However, I'd question the design of the system first - would it make more sense to redesign your connectivity, so all sites connect to a single ISP, and then have a central filtering/firewall device at their datacentre instead? Fewer boxes, simpler network design, no VPN links to worry about?

Not sure about reports, but you can view the audit log via Logs -> Audit Log. Then put the username of the admin in the Change by filter etc...

I know its a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but at the moment, in education, I can't see a huge amount of value of a professional association unless schools recognise that association and see membership as an advantage. Schools have a habit of hiring IT staff based on cost alone, so being a BCS or $other society member seems like it wouldn't be of much value to school IT staff. Now, a school IT staff focused union, or division of a union would be a good thing - existing unions don't seem to be overly interested in us lot.

I don't use a comparison site for this - I usually contact a number of providers and run a bidding process based on our requirements.

ChatGPT doesn't *know things*. It estimates what an answer would look like if someone said it. It is a "next word guesser". Not AI or even an "answer engine" like Wolfram Alpha.

I have an IT Admin RDP server we use for our admin tasks - allows us to limit access to lots of things to its IP. I installed Windows Admin Center on that. One thing to remember is to install your own security certificate, as the self signed ones expire fairly quickly. I used some of the scripts here to sort out the template and generate a certificate via our CS server instead of using the self signed one.

One example of another tool that LTSC prevents use of is the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Adobe don't support it on LTSC.

So that then begs the question - why use Windows at all, if you aren't using the ecosystem? DfE guidance has been to move towards cloud tools for quite some time now.

We install new software pretty much all year round, as teachers identify new tools that will aid in their teaching. I've deployed at least 10 new packages this year here. Neither does the Edu edition of normal Windows? Main reason I'd say LTSC is an odd choice is that you're effectively cutting your staff off from newer developments. With so much being cloud based, and the integrated nature of tools like Office, OneDrive etc, I cannot see a reason why it makes sense to effectively cut a chunk of the ecosystem off from being used. We deploy several store apps here, for example. I suppose my main thinking is that LTSC removes a lot of flexibility.

OK, so I get why people looked at it originally. The change from the old way to the Windows 10 multiple releases a year was a big jump. But Windows 10 is now 8 years old, and they adapted and moved to the semi-annual channel system quite a long time ago. So, my question is more why are people are still using LTSC now?

Its your network, and you're the customer, so I would expect them to do what you want. Our CTC provider is doing so.

Depends who you get it from. But the servers I bought, I had a replacement stick of memory out to me next day for an issue I had.

The only times I have experienced one way audio the causes were: 1. Our firewall port forwarding being slightly misconfigured. 2. Our SIP headers being misconfigured in our PBX - we had multiple external IPs, and the SIP server was using the wrong one to say where traffic should reply to in the SIP headers. So, calls went out, but traffic coming back was directed to the wrong external IP, so audio didn't get through. Gamma should be able to give you a copy of the SIP trace, and you can then inspect the headers to see if anything looks wrong.

For those people who use LTSC releases of Windows and Office, why are you using them? MS's guidance for LTSC is that its for more "static" workloads, such as, say, an air traffic controller system. Rather than a general purpose system like a school PC? Especially as things like App Store doesn't work on LTSC without a workaround/bodge.

We had a problem with a previous SIP provider with specific mobile networks. Does the issue you're seeing happen for all callers? Does it happen from a normal landline?