Blue_Cookeh

We have our .sch.uk domain with Eclipse Internet, but I had to call them and have it done manually over the phone since their online systems don't accept .sch.uk domains. Nameservers point to Cloudflare, and our site is hosted with WebAnywhere since the HT likes the easy customisation, support, and content management.

No, it's all or nothing on the AADConnect side. I suppose you could just not add the SSO URLs into the Intranet zone for staff users?

Interesting that you chose ReFS on your file servers, I value dedupe far too much.

I got it working last night. 1. make sure TCP9090 is allowed outbound from the machine you're running AAD Connect on, 2. make sure the two SSO URLs on the page OP linked are added to your Intranet Zone in IE. 3. I had to run the config two or three times for it to successfully update Office365 and our AD environment.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong but I tried setting this up about 2 weeks ago and couldn't get any single sign on working at all

I have to wonder if you could get away with some kind of Mac thin client setup... Get a few Mac Pros, get a third party rack mount for them, load VMware ESXi on them and run a load of Mac VMs, using your old Mac Minis as the thin terminals. You're legally allowed to virtualise ESXi on Mac hardware. Maybe it's a crazy idea.

You'll need to use ADMT to migrate data from the child domain into a brand new AD domain. There will be problems. How big is the primary? You might be better off just building a new domain, creating a trust between the child domain and the new one, then slowly migrating users and PCs across manually, with a goal to decommission the child domain in say... 12 months. If it's a small school I'd be inclined to call all laptops etc in over the summer and just build a new domain, rebuild PCs etc and start fresh. You need to plan to do this before the split off from the LEA, the child domain won't last long without contact with the parent.

When I was trialing it I used a Hyper-V VM which seemed to work just fine, but when I went live with it my intention was to get a firewall that would physically separate parts of our network so I went down the appliance route. At the end of the day the appliances Sophos provide are just supported Intel machines in a fancy box anyway.

Sophos UTM has done wonders for us.

I don't think the US DoD are selling many IPs off to UK schools personally!

I'd bring it up and force the issue personally. There's no reason for it.

We've been with BT for 3 years and had 0 issues aside from about 3 minutes of down time one night. On the other hand we had a 100Mbps service with Virgin and had no end of issues. Firstly Virgin kept giving us "free" speed increases, only to up our monthly bill two months later, and 2. every evening we were being throttled down to 0.2Mbps. Our support was escalated up to Tier 3 and they still couldn't find the reason why. Oh and have they fixed their god awful streaming issues yet? Virgin used to shove everyone's YouTube/Vimeo/Netflix etc down some sort of proxy that completely broke them for many customers. We left Virgin to go with BT and haven't look back.

I think you're definitely barking up the wrong tree with this one and would say it's most definitely pfSense/your router/your firewall screwing it up somewhere. First port of call would be to continually ping the IP and go investigating firewall logs IMO.

Yes, that will put that physical interface into an LACP bond on whichever Trunk Group interface you choose (Trk1/2/3/4 etc). You want to put the same NICs from your server into the same Trunk Group to form the bond. You'll then need to untag/tag the VLANs on that Trunk Group and set the bond up in Windows using Server Manager.

If RAID drivers dont work then your installation media is likely bad.

We also found the auto update feature wasn't working. Also in the newer versions of the Sync tool Office365 can write passwords back into AD if users change them online. The newest password set will take precedence if they conflict AFAIK.

Using HP terminology... We have 4 NICs in each Hyper-V host. x1 NIC is a standard untagged port on our rack switch. x3 NICs are LACP bonded on the switch and in Windows, the Hyper-V switch is then assigned to the Windows bonded interface. This bond is untagged on our data VLAN and tagged for all others. This means if I need a VM on our data VLAN I just assign it's NIC as untagged, if I need it on another one I just VLAN tag it within the VM options in Hyper-V.

I'd say there's a problem with your trolley somewhere, you shouldn't need a 32A circuit for that. Does your trolley turn on plugs in steps? Our's enables each strip with a 5 second delay between them to stop trips.

As someone who had/has jobs in the private sector, with education only being part time my 2c is this: I can't see educational IT jobs ever being particularly good. Schools don't pay enough for the skills they're asking for. You're expected to be an all round jack-of-all-trades IT person on not much more money than minimum wage in some cases. I enjoy having the flexibility and responsibility of driving IT in a small school but on the other hand, I need to eat and fund a lifestyle! As time goes on schools are no longer term-time operations and your responsibility is far more than just a couple of IT suites. Suddenly a school's network is now supporting BYOD, IT suites, 24/7/365 working from home and any other new fangled initiatives that come our way, much like a professional business without the money to support the staff or infrastructure. Going into the private sector (think large business) you'll be highly specialised on a specific team for (example) Active Directory, Application Support, Networks, Security, Desktop support, VPN etc but you can expect a hell of a lot more money for what you do, with better pensions and benefits. You'll end up with less holiday and (potentially) more stress and/or office politics but at the end of the day I find it a lot more worthwhile and rewarding than working in education. Find a good employer that will look after you and your professional development and you'll be sitting on a gold mine. That said, if you really want to future-proof yourself you should be looking at fully automated infrastructure. Think using something like Ansible to build a fleet of Linux servers with no input, or using Puppet to configure a boat load of Cisco IOS devices in one go. It's all going 'DevOps'-ey... I hate that term.

In your situation, once you move over to Google Apps and moved both your ADSL lines to your Smoothwall I'd be looking at running two Hyper-V servers on Windows Server 2016, both running at least 1 VM that hosts Active Directory/DNS/DHCP/user profiles. This would give you the redundancy you need.

Civ V and all DLC for £8, yassss

Looks to me like you have to buy it through the Windows Store for Business and deploy it out as a licensed Modern App through SCCM or something. https://businessstore.microsoft.com/en-us/app-detail/9NBLGGH4R2R6/0016/00000000000000000000000000000000/online EDIT: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edu/windows/school-get-minecraft more help? @dhicks

I had the same experience. Wanted to move to onsite filtering a couple of years ago and Smoothwall's quote made me choke too, I don't understand how they can justify their price. We ended up with Sophos UTM for filtering/firewalling/TMG replacement and have been very happy with it. The cost of the Sophos UTM for 3 years was less than the cost of Smoothwall for 1 year if I remember correctly.

Education, since thats the only edition the OVS EES agreement covered (although I hear this has changed). Either way, I'd be deploying CBB instead of LTSB. If you have SCCM then CBB upgrades aren't an issue, and it means I don't have to go around reinstalling fleets of machines everytime a new OS comes out.

It's not just temperature, you need to look at humidity too. In general 20-23c and between 40-55% relative humidity is the best for a datacenter/server room.