localzuk

We use Veeam to back up to NAS, then Cloudberry to back up that to Azure. The NAS presents as an SMB share, yes.

Like it or not, subscriptions are the way everything is going. Software, hardware, food, you name it, there's subscriptions for it. I suspect it'll all start as "all you can eat" packages, but eventually we'll start seeing Sky or Virgin type "choose the packages you actually want" subscriptions instead. So I can select strategy, simulators, etc... But leave out sports, racing games etc... Streaming games are inevitable. I get 7ms ping for google.com here, which is basically nothing, even in highly competitive games.

Deduplication opimisation runs nightly, rather than in an active way.

We don't have the staff for that sadly. CPD is managed by someone else in the Trust also.

If performance only suffers via VPN, then the VPN is the only possible culprit. Meaning you have only a couple of options - 1. move to RDS or 2. Redesign your inter-site connectivity.

Performance? Pretty much "average to poor" all the time. We only have the accounting client installed on the servers and on an RDS server, which all the finance staff use. No VPN in use at all.

Kindles or Kindle Fires? Kindles themselves are managed by the account settings in the Amazon account aren't they?

Its not too bad. We can limit it to internal use, for example. Ah, I call our server changepass, but the software is "Passcore". https://github.com/unosquare/passcore

Free version. Works a treat for sharing passwords in our team. Well, if one of the team didn't keep forgetting his password for it anyway! Website that allows users to log in and change their password. Not actually launched it for users yet, as I'm still considering whether the security hit is worth it. Ah, we use the switches mostly, with 7 APs in one school. Also, they send stats back constantly - so there is 2 way communication.

Yes, the daisy chained ones are using RS485 instead of IP to communicate, so they won't get IPs.

Your daily change isn't just "size", it is files editing/changed. So, 25GB of files have changed, even if only the disk increases only 1GB, there will be a lot more files that have changed. I would say that in today's "large disk" world, 25GB a day change is not a lot, and 2TB is also not a lot of stuff. A NAS with 24TB of RAID 6 storage would be £2300. To give some comparative numbers - our H drive VM has 2.5TB of data on it, and the incrementals are roughly 38GB a night (uncompressed). For our entire setup, on 7.4TB of data leads to 174.6GB of uncompressed change, compressed down to 42.4GB each night.

Putin.

We currently host DNS for a bunch of our external domains, host a status web page, and store off-site backups there. We currently have 31TB of data stored in Azure cool blob storage. Costs are predicted to be £78 this month. We use Cloudberry Ultimate to back up to it, and we do a "full" backup every week. Though, this is a block level differential so we have a "full" offsite we can download for disaster recovery. Day to day backups are still onsite. Cloudberry is configured to delete old things after the 30 day "must be stored" minimum limit.

You don't buy credits with PAYG afaik - you just pay for what you use on a linked credit or debit card. At least, that's how my personal Azure sub works. It also means you're protected from runaway costs. That £1.50 isn't a lot, but it scales a little bit. £20 in every £1000 spent free. 2%. Not to be sniffed at.

2 x DCs 2 x NPS 2 x Data storage (H drives, P drives etc...) 1 x PKI 1 x KMS/RDS licensing server 1 x MFA host 2 x VMs doing backup work 2 x PSF servers 6 x SIMS servers 5 x RDS related servers 2 x SCCM servers 4 x Web servers 1 x Xibo 1 x WSUS 1 x SMTP relay 1 x VCSA 1 x Print 1 x Phone 1 x Passbolt 1 x Zabbix 1 x Helpdesk 1 x Changepass 1 x AB Tutor server Plus a couple of legacy servers that are just there for reference at the moment. We very much follow the "one VM, one role" rule of virtualisation. You'll need your own DNS for internal DNS. This is only sized for very small installations. We ended up buying an XG server, as our device list grew to about 30 or so devices.

You get more for your money with Open license. You buy it in blocks of £75 each, but pay a little less than that. I last paid £73.50 each.

Erm, Paxton recommend Cat5 or CR8723/C1352A. The way the system works is you have an RS485 line. Each unit is connected in series from what I was told. So, if you have a faulty ACU, you end up losing connectivity between that unit and the end of the line. You could also have a problem with the cabling between the next working ACU and the first one in the line that isn't working. Finally, you may see issues if your line is missing the termination resisters at the 2 ends of the line. We have 14 doors on one line without issue.Paxton recommend using Cat5, or CR8723.

My cluster idles at 40% CPU usage (as it is running >40 VMs). Active usage can see it going up to 80% usage during the day.

Yup. Watched people play it on Twitch too. It can be a tough game, that's for sure. Good fun!

Peter.

Considering how much they charge for it, I would have to say it isn't worth the money - we've looked at it and we'd be able to buy half our entire Trust's server cluster every 3 years with just the cost of the PSF Cloud.

Sorry but this is just semantics. With a Trust, centralised means exactly what it means. The other schools have no servers, only the central server room does. Centralised. Also, the words used are clear from context. "Centralised servers", in context, means the equipment is all hosted in a central site. Our cluster runs servers with dual 700W PSUs, 4 of them. Those are standard rackmount servers. Nothing special. A single server running an 80W PSU is most certainly not going to provide services covering 30 schools!

Can you not simply stick a CNAME record in there and point it at your real website address?

Schools don't get "certificates of ownership" for sch.uk domains, but they are registered with Nominet. However... Nominet no longer list any details of ownership, due to their changes of Whois due to GDPR. They do have a document on their site about school domains - https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/nominet-prod/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/27104952/Schools_Domain_Name_Rules.pdf Do you not use the domain for your school site? Might it be worth setting up some DNS records to point to your actual school site if you don't use it at the moment? That proves its for a school.

How are schools justifying charging for materials required for education, counter to the Education Act? We have print archiving enabled, so we can see exactly what children have printed, limit their printing each week and if they ask for more we can look at what they've printed to see if they've wasted it. If they have wasted it, that would then be a normal disciplinary issue (just like wasting paint or glue in art/dt). If they've used it for work, they get more prints.