mbedford

We implemented 3CX in the last 6 months. We had similar issues, mostly with call audio quality, but also a bit of delay issues. I put the cause down to some part of the call chain (caller to callee) having to transcode between different codecs. So where the two ends of the call cant negotiate a supported codec, the system has to convert which may cause delay (I am just applying a bit of common sense thinking here, i could be completely wrong!) After playing around for a bit, ended up with the following codec lists and ordering that seems to be working well for us I would contact your SIP provider (we are Gamma) and see which codec's they recommend. Check which one's your handsets can support and if there is a match, put that near the top of the lists. My thinking with the above setup that we have was this (again, I could be talking complete BS!) LAN codecs - Primarily desk phone to desk phone, high bandwidth connections, so i chose supported codecs by our handsets (Fanvil) and ordered them based on higher bandwidth and voice clarity first. WAN codes - External calls? People on a WAN link with lower bandwidth availablity, I went for codec's supported by our SIP provider and also ones which prioritised better compression and lower bandwidth, but still a suitable level of voice clarity.

I think the days of us blindly following the decisions made by the US Gov't are behind us personally.

You can import a list of users to the user portal for Autodesk to pre-create the account, so yes using a CSV similar to your example. The students wouldn't need to do anything, other than perhaps receive a welcome email and password reset, assuming you are not using SSO, if you are, then they just click login and present there standard credentials. I agree with your license server woes, I despise that FlexLM software and used to send the air blue with comments about it when it broke.... looking back now, i should have stayed quiet.

We make use of Autodesk Fusion 360, that has moved over to a user based licensing model. They still offer the free license for EDU but, in a similar fashion to MS Office and Adobe Creative Cloud, you now have to have a student account created beforehand to use the app. You can have up-to 3000 named user licences, but you cant automatically sync against your directory unless you purchase a business license (read: EXPENSIVE!), have to do periodic CSV imports or manual account creation for students. The impact isn’t huge for us as its quite a small cohort who require it, but still, its a pain for a solution that has really been set and forget for years now.

Simple enough to achieve on the local machine. How you get that data back to you in a useful form is a little more complex. $searchAccountName = "test" $searchResults = Get-LocalUser | where {$_.Name -like $searchAccountName} if ($searchResults){ [pscustomobject]@{ Name = $searchResults.Name PCName = $env:computername } } This will list any users that have user display names like "test" (case insensitive) and also the hostname of the machine the script was ran on Personally I would run this as a shutdown script for the next machine reboot, add a bit of code to write the output to a SQL table, or depending on how many results you are expecting, an email ? Hope this helps.

Don't worry, normal service will resume when the clocks are actually due to be deployed outside of London. The first three will be cancelled, the fourth will terminate at 2300hrs rather than 0000hrs. On weekends, they will only display odd numbered hours and occasionally the numbers will either forget to turn up or just go on strike. But, rest assured, after a couple of years of above inflation cost increases for said clocks, service will get worse. Can you tell i used to have to get the train to work 😁?

Logon script that writes to a SQL table on a server. Also do the same for logoff, same table. User 1 - ON - 14/10/2025 1115 User 1 - OFF - 14/10/2025 1135 etc You could get ChatGPT or CoPilot to throw together the code for script in seconds. If you want to be more security focused, use Stored Procedures (MSSQL) or whatever they are called in MySQL to ensure that the user can only send new entries to the table and not do any Selects or Inserts etc.. Thanks

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We use Sophos UTM for our webfiltering and I am very much able unblock any URL I want, regardless of which list it was identified in. I agree, the list itself should not be changed, but preventing admins from administering a system is like using a sledgehammer to push in a thumb tack, its the wrong solution to the problem.

AOVPN is the VPN service, you wouldn't route it through another VPN service. Instead you would configure your on prem firewall to allow the AOVPN connection from the outside world into your AOVPN end point server and from there into your network.

I agree with your interpretation, but in practice. How do you prevent a system admin from changing the block list? I administer our web filter and of course, I am not going to do anything untoward, but, I am not prevented from doing so. Any web filter which did prevent the system admin from disabling or enabling features is not going to get much more than a cursory glance from an evaluation at purchase time. What if the IWF or CTIRU accidentally blacklist a legit site, i know, unlikely, but over the last few years, life has taught me the things that were once very unlikely, actually aren't. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Cloud+outages&t=ffab&ia=news&iar=news

Honestly, you have larger issues here than just device encryption. Firstly, stop giving your users local admin, anywhere, especially remote users with VPN access. Get your users to use there domain accounts with restricted permissions. I understand your pain with domain accounts on remote devices, but local admin access is not the right solution. Take a look at AOVPN (Always On VPN) - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-access/overview-always-on-vpn We use it, its a bit of a pain to setup, but once done, it provides seamless connectivity to our network for remote users, allowing them to use domain logins and get a more or less similar experience to that onsite.

Interesting question there. I wonder what everyone's views are on the latest SIC guidance (May 2025) regarding internet filtering https://saferinternet.org.uk/guide-and-resource/teachers-and-school-staff/appropriate-filtering-and-monitoring Specifically https://d1xsi6mgo67kia.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Appropriate-Filtering-for-Education-settings-2025-final-clean-2.pdf Page 2 at the bottom To me this reads that system admins should not be able to amend\change blocklists. This sounds like a mistake. Normally I'd say we can just ignore this guidance, but the definitions here are apparently cited by the DfE and in the latest KCSIE documents, making ignoring it a lot more troublesome. Thoughts?

New machines, DVI and HDMI only, not ready to change out 300 monitors which are DVI and VGA at the moment and current machines use VGA, so I need a stop gap for a few years. Two options, new cables, or DVI\VGA converters.. still not sure which way to go, but cables seems the easiest and cheapest at the moment.

Good morning, Anyone know of a decent supplier that I can get DVi to DVI cables from ? As cheaply as possible... Im happy to accept boxes of spares that you guys may have lying around in store rooms. Need to be either of these two pin outs (Both DVI-D) Thanks

We give every student £5 every term. They can add more as they require via visiting our Library and either doing a card or cash transaction (FE College here). Very rarely do we get the problem mentioned above. I will be honest, as the budget holder for printing costs, I never say no to a student who has run out of credit and needs to print something. If my organisation cant afford for a student from a not well off background to print off a few pages of paper, we are doing something very, very wrong.

Its not by any chance this portal is it? https://edexcelonline.pearson.com/ We had a very similar issue, there tech support suggested we instruct staff to reset passwords at home rather than at work Turned out, the Javascript which they use to enforce password complexity was hosted on a site different to the web host for the rest of the site. Our web filter was blocking that other site. We ended up unblocking http://springboot-dev.priv.pearsondev.tech (i think it was that, do an F12 in your web browser and look for where any *.js files are being pulled from). Did that and voila, it works. I'll be honest, I didn't bother informing Pearson support, I didn't fancy the argument.

+1 Meraki I was against a cloud managed solution for years, and had to deal with useless WiFi (Fortinet, Meru, HP..) Moved to Meraki, 140+ AP's across 5 sites, works well... Well as well as WiFi can be expected to work.

I dont know if SCCM works in a similar way, but MDT and WDS (The MS alternative to SCCM's deployment method) just uses an SMB share and WinPE connects to that and applies the image using DISM. So, at its most basic level, the firewall rules for allowing SMB shares should be enough. But SCCM, in its nature of being a horrible beast, probably has some additional requirements, like the custody of your first born...

Thanks for the link, that actually gives me a bit of ammunition in my battle to justify us not installing it on our RDS solution. We use Shared Device Licensing which is pretty clearly not allowed based on the info on that page.

+1 for the multiple DP's with them being local to the machines site. What link speeds are you looking at between these sites? A classroom of reloads with a base image of 20-30GB is going to hammer your bandwidth. We used to do this over a microwave link between two buildings, 1gbps link, once 5+ machines were downloading the image, we used to get all sorts of trouble just getting the other clients to download the boot image, never mind the OS image.

You 'may' get it to work. But the Adobe forums are littered with comments about apps failing installs, not updating past certain versions when used on a Windows Server OS. We used to run in on Server 2022 RDS install, but have recently removed it when moving to 2025. The user experience was poor anyway. Adobe Windows OS Support - https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/kb/operating-system-guidelines.html -- "Windows 11 versions 23H2, 22H2, 21H2, and Windows 10 versions 22H2, 21H2 (LTSB branches aren't supported)." No mention of Windows server which I would take to mean, isnt supported.

Thank you everyone for getting back to me so quickly. I will look into this these.

I am looking for advice here. A friend's son has had an accident which has resulted in a loss of his ability to move anything other than eyes and limited head movement. The worst part of this, is that he is fully awake and aware of his surroundings. He is hopefully on a road to recovery, but its a very very long road. I have been asked if I am aware of any solutions which will allow for basic control of a computer, mainly for media consumption (play\pause videos etc) using just eye movement. We have tried the eye control built into an iPad, but its not very effective. Any ideas? At the moment, money is no object, lets look at whats possible and then worry about the costs. Thanks

As other have said. Backup, backup, backup. Until you are certain you have valid and repeatable (tested) backups, dont do anything else!