localzuk

GAM is definitely your friend for getting info about classes also.

Stupidity and fear have always been a dangerous mix. This is why some of the attacks on the government lying seem to miss the point a bit. Of course the government are lying - if they told us exactly what was happening, a LOT of people would be a lot more scared than they are. To use Pratchett's term "lies-to-children". We know what the population of the country can be like when they panic. Hell, we had people calling 999 because KFC ran out of chicken. Managing people's fears is as big of a task for the government as managing the virus itself.

We have just allowed this for one group of staff in our Trust - for one purpose only. They have been booked on some training, and the training firm uses Zoom to deliver the training. That's it. That's all I'm comfortable with them doing at the moment.

Happy Birthday @Dos_Box!

Don't have one really these days - machines that are having issues mostly just get re-imaged - takes less time and gets them back in their user's hands quickest. Drivers, AV etc... is all part of our SCCM task sequence. We used to spend a lot more time diagnosing issues, but it'd mean devices being out of use for longer generally. Can re-image a laptop in 20 minutes.

Yes. Your employer has the right to direct when you take your leave (this isn't a new thing, that's always been the case). However, they must give 2 days notice for every day they wish you to take. So, if they want you to take 2 weeks, they must give 4 weeks notice.

The way I did it was. 1. All users are sync'd from SIMS to Active Directory using ActivMan 2. Synchonise that with G Suite using GCDS 3. SimpleSAML.php for SSO login, so no need for password sync or anything like that - it all uses your own AD to handle actual logins 4. A Powershell script that converts groups created by step 1 into Google Classrooms - this step is optional, as it depends if you want to manually create classrooms or automatically populate them from groups etc... However, if you don't use AD for users, and instead are going to stick with class level logins (inadvisable with the rules on appropriate filtering and monitoring of internet access these days), you could probably just use something like Google SDS - https://support.google.com/a/answer/7552844?hl=en which will take CSV files and turn them into what you want.

We're 3CX users here too. Total work needed to get it to work externally? Downloaded the client and opened the config file it sent me as a user. Done. Firewall ports were already in place to use the SIP trunks we have.

One thing I've noticed in my home office - my lighting is not up to scratch for working with. Normal LED bulbs only seem to provide about 800 lumens of light, same as a 60W bulb. Nowhere near bright enough to stay engaged in front of a computer all day. Might be worth taking a look at your own lighting too, if you've been feeling sluggish/sleepy after a relatively short period sat in front of your computer, not to mention eyestrain. Just ordered some better lighting for myself, but in the meantime I've added an extra lamp to bring the brightness up a bit.

Who will look after the key workers' children during those days?

They should be, yeah. Ours are. We're even double checking about the bank holidays, and have scheduled people in on those days too just in case.

For those looking at holiday time stuff - this law firm seems to have a nice explanation of it all https://www.elpamsolicitors.co.uk/holiday-leave-use-it-or-lose-it/ Basically, it seems to be that they can direct you to take holiday time, and they can operate on a use it or lose it basis.

We can operate nearly entirely remotely for support, indeed we are doing - 2 of us on at a time, 1 off. We're also providing support to parents when they need it, remotely. However, we can't do anything onsite except what can be achieved by a visit on one morning a week if needed. As the schools are all going to be operating through the Easter break too, we can't do our usual maintenance work either. However, during the downtime, I have asked my 2 techs to use the time to learn something new. One tech is learning more powershell and some C#, the other is learning more about active directory and group policy. I've got multiple coding projects I have not had time to get done.

Server is running on 1.3.4

So tempted to post a Bad Taste Bear in response to that @hardtailstar.

From Monday, my team are now on a rota - 2 weeks on, 1 week off, for the foreseeable future. No point in all 3 of us sitting watching a mailbox for the 6 tickets that'll come in every day. Plus a Monday AM site visit if it is deemed necessary (which only 1 of my team is actually able to do anyway). I can't see these being very often.

Well, we've changed our plan now. None of us are going to be onsite any more, except for a weekly pop in if anything needs physically doing on a Monday morning. And we suspect that we'll end up fully closed sooner rather than later anyway. We have so few children in, there is no need for onsite IT support all day every day. @Scotbynature I would personally turn around and say no. If the school is closed, and the government have ordered everyone not going to critical work to stay home, then you should not be going in. The time has been and gone for faffing around with laptops.

Of our team of 3, 2 of us are working from home (I'm in various vulnerable groups, so have been for a week), 1 is onsite covering the 4 schools that are open with physical requests (which seem to have died off day 2). I've emailed our management to find out if that 1 onsite is actually needed every day going forward or if we can just move to an on call system, maybe with a dedicated day each week.

Check the settings for your RDS collection - you can manually specify a limit. I have our cluster set to 40 connections per host.

Had more staff password resets than child password resets today!

People aren't paying any attention to the social distancing stuff it seems. Popped to the pharmacy earlier to get my repeat prescription. The pharmacy has sensible things in place - queue outside, queue 2m from each other, etc... Whilst I was there waiting, 3 people walked straight past me in the queue and went into the shop. A couple of people walked straight up and stood right by me. Why are they STILL not getting it?!

Well, this is fun. When this post came up I thought "huh, why would you want to turn that off?" and today? I turned it off on our domain, because I have a reason to! Glad this thread got posted!!

Same. All my working stuff is happening in a different web browser on my home PC, and my work profile is turned off after work hours. Gotta make sure you have down time!

All depends how they've built the platform - how it scales. Apparently, it broke so badly yesterday that some of the messages schools sent didn't actually send. I got an email this morning saying one of ours hadn't gone out! Not really what we need during all this.

We have shortages of "essentials" - loo roll, bread, paracetamol, milk, veg, etc... However, the shortages are not actual shortages. There's plenty of stock in the supply chain. Just they don't have the logistics to haul it all out in the volumes people are buying it all! So, what little they do manage to get to the shops is gone almost immediately as people there panic buy.