localzuk

I'm yet to watch the second episode, but the first was 80% period romantic drama, 20% almost War of the Worlds. What is all this relationship nonsense? This is supposed to be about a guy battling to get to his love, not giving us the entire backstory to why he loves her...

As most VMs are "single purpose" on my network, we go with a dynamic expanding C only for the majority of roles. The only ones with an extra disk are things like our SIMS servers (as we follow our support team's guide for setup, so it matches the rest of the county), our data servers and our SCCM servers.

No, our pupils are a little young to need it. Plus it'd break the bank rather!

I have been unable to get this to work if I include Adobe Acrobat at all. Does your package include that? Try without it. We currently only use Creative Cloud on a few admin staff machines, so we just deploy the Creative Cloud app, and let staff choose the programs they want once it is installed. We use SCCM for that.

We decided to go with Securly for this. Can deploy it via G Suite, and it is enforced centrally then.

Just to point out that WatchDog support is also hardware support - so for as long as you have it, it covers the hardware. If you have an AP that goes pop in 4 years, your WatchDog support covers its repair/replacement. We just renewed ours here, covering 60 APs and 1 controller. Cost us about £3730 for 3 years cover. So, it isn't overly expensive.

That isn't a new thing. 4 year olds didn't used to start school knowing how to use a mouse before either. Touchscreen devices have added extra knowledge.

The simple reality of the Chromebook vs iPad debate is that it comes down to a few choices. 1. Affordability - Chromebooks are far more cost effective. We got 2 in 1 devices for near enough £200 a device. 2. Form factor - iPads are still a consumption device without accessories. A lot of learning is typing still. There's no 2 ways around it. Children are expected to write reports and essays - doing this on a touchscreen is not as easy as using a keyboard. Especially for those with fine motor control issues. You can get keyboard accessories for iPads, but you have then added complexity to the mix - you now need to keep the iPad and the keyboard charged. You have also added an extra cost. 3. Apple are not "school friendly" any more IMO. We've got a stack of iPads that are a few years old, that a school purchased and didn't register properly (so they're locked to various Apple accounts). We have the invoice details, and have submitted requests to have them unlocked but we're weeks on now and still nothing. We found out they rejected the entire request for 30 of them, because there was a typo in 1 of the serial numbers, for example. Schiller seems to be equating "ooh, they're shiny" with educational outcomes, and that just doesn't add up. He's derisive about Chromebooks being good for testing too. Guess what, schools need to test their children!

For 4k, you're basically gonna be stuck with senders. Or something like this... https://www.qed.co.uk/cables/hdmi-digital/qed-performance-active-hdmi.html Apparently they work.

No idea, sorry. Never used Inventry.

You can read Paxton cards using any reader that can read Hitag-2 cards. We use Inepro SCR708.G USB readers with our Ricoh copiers. The number you get from them is different to the number used by Paxton itself, but it is a unique ID nonetheless.

Not to derail, but SIMS is a legacy piece of software now. There are alternative products. But yes, you're correct, virtualising server loads directly into the cloud is not cost effective (without designing a new way of running it - shared VMs etc...). My comment was actually about the language you used to deride your colleague, and in doing so deriding those of us doing the same thing.

I don't really understand your attack on the concept given by that new person. There is nothing stopping an organisation doing exactly what they pursued - it just requires a lot of work to get there. I say that as we are embarking upon a similar journey. Started this year with Chromebooks for one of our academic years, and will continue being rolled out until all children have them. Teachers are currently being given one of those same Chromebooks as well as their existing Windows device. Further down the line, those Windows devices will be removed - once we are sure everyone can do everything they need to via Chromebooks. The thing for us is making sure we don't jump to anything before replacements can do everything we need. The vast majority of our computing is done "online" already to be honest. The number of legacy programmes has shrunk year by year. We are doing this after having done what you did - merged our network onto a single domain, with schools connected by leased line PTP lines. Only the main site has servers any more. Classrooms don't generally have desktops in them, with teachers having laptops instead. I would suggest that your post comes across as incredibly unprofessional, accusing other professionals of being fan boys for pursuing a newer technology. People wanting to use something is not a reason to continue to do it. If we did, we'd still be on XP and Office 2003 - as people didn't like the change...

We're with Exa for internet, and have Sophos XG on a failover pair of UTMs for firewall/filtering. The DDoS issue was a very rare problem to be honest.

I suspect it'll still catch some oversize loads. Just not all the rental trucks. No more free meals for the hungry bridge.

So basically the same as buying Chromebooks every 3 years instead. I've budgeted for replacing ours every 5 years, but we could manage 4 years if we wanted to.

Are they £150-£200 laptops? In the context of this thread, 6 year old £150-200 laptops.

After 6 years? You'd just be replacing the device. I've never found any school using 6 year old laptops successfully, Windows or otherwise.

So, that's 30% more expensive and needs a trade in device. Scale that up and I would've just paid nearly £20k more for them, and would've needed 310 devices to trade in. Get rid of the trade in, I'm guessing that was £50 per device, and my cost would've gone up nearly £40k. Killing my entire project as it would've been entirely over budget. Oh, and that £200 per device is for 1 in 1 touchscreen devices. For a simple laptop device you can knock at least £50 off per device. Just proves my point really.

Monitoring does not always mean that you need a technical solution to do this. Our LEA put out advice on the new requirement when it came in, highlighting that a mix of setting up automatic logging with emailed reports for certain categories on web filters, and making sure there is always a member of staff present in the room when children are using the computers would be classed as monitoring. However, if you allow children to use computers unsupervised, you should probably look at some form of active monitoring. Also, monitoring doesn't always mean real-time monitoring.

I don't get the issue with this to be honest. Chromebooks are very cheap devices, and if you buy them at launch, you get 6 years of support for them. Point me at a Windows laptop that cost £200 and is still fine after 6 years? Doesn't exist. You'll be struggling after 2 years with such a cheap Windows laptop.

Do you have both 32bit and 64bit boot images on your server? Distributed etc...? I remember having issues when I only set up the 64bit stuff, as it still needed the 32bit even though none of our machines were actually 32bit.

I'd recommend looking at the Samsung PM883 models. £250 for 1.92TB.

I'll stick with Andrews & Arnold. Expensive but worth it IMO.

Don't think our fixed electrical testing has ever meant my kit has gone offline! They kill circuits/distributions as they go, but our UPSs have always kept everything on for the time its been going on - they don't need the DBs off for long. Powering down the whole site for several days seems absurd and unnecessary. Especially as we have staff in all year round these days. That said, I have had to turn servers off for a long period in the past - when we had asbestos removed from our server room. Servers were turned off, and cocooned in plastic for a week.