Blue_Cookeh

Installed without a hitch yesterday, just waiting for all our clients to catch up now

Plan for the future. You don't want to run a whole school using servers in the cloud. Be prepared to rip all cabling out of a temporary building and ditch it, you don't want to reuse cabling. Also again, plan for the future. A rule of thumb I use is pull double the amount of ports and cabling I'll need when having the work done. If you can afford it, ditch the whiteboards and get touch screen TVs on the walls, our teachers found them much more reliable and flexible than projectors/IWBs. Just my 2c What does your budget look like? I'd make my life easier and push as much as possible so when you do expand, you won't be making major changes. If you can get servers with Hyper-V now, do it.

I'd show you if I could see through the dirt on the Windows...

BitLocker forced via MBAM GPOs.

Your DirectAccess shouldn't be connecting when laptops are within your network. It sounds like your Network Location Server is having issues somewhere. See this page: DirectAccess Network Location Server Guidance | Richard Hicks' DirectAccess Blog

Yes, we do. We stick (Gov) on to the end of their display names to make it obvious too. Our management are very good at leaving governor's personal e-mails off important messages too, so they're forced to use our school accounts.

How do you know this is a DirectAccess issue? It sounds to me like your DA is working perfectly and there's something else going on when your staff are on site. When your staff are on site, what's the status of DA on the client?

LA will forward the port from a public IP address to 10.1.2.3 on your local firewall. At home you'd be going to 123.123.123.123:85 to access it (where 123.123.123.123 is a public IP the LA assign you).

Yes if you're using the Office365 version. Of course, you could go down the painful route of an on-premise deployment

I wouldn't bother downgrading, a fix is coming in the next day or so.

As per the title, if you guys are running continuous updates in Chrome. An update is due out in the next day or two to fix it. More info: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=544255

We literally did this about a month or two ago. We went down the licensed route so we have a frequency allocation and use Motorola digital radios on it. If you shoot us a PM I can give you all the specifics when I'm in the office tomorrow, we've been very pleased with it all so far We went with a few handhelds, a couple of desktop radios and have charging cradles dotted around the school. We have radios in every class room, a couple in the office and some for outside supervision. The company we bought them from did all the software upgrades and programmed them all for call groups, one to ones, broadcasting from our head etc.

Microsoft gave me a different store link which seemed to work. Just open up a support case from your Office365 portal

Got a link to the self sign up page?

That's a really interesting post, would you mind diving a bit more into your infrastructure for supporting those? Are you running OpenDirectory or Active Directory? How are you locking these down? Do you use any remote management/MDM, if so what and does this apply to Macs also? Are you Time Machining all of your staff Macs? What sort of server is managing this? I'm genuinely interested now...

Exactly this. We're so flexible with iPads now I don't blame them. Staff are using them for registers in class and on trips, logging into our phones with them, and kids can even take them out onto the field now we have outdoor WiFi.

We have 35 Samsung N130s sitting around at the moment that are too slow to do much with... 2GB RAM, 2.5' 250GB HDD and the rest of it. Was tempted to upgrade them all to 4GB RAM and an SSD but I'm not sure it's cost effective on 5yo+ netbooks at this point. I was tempted to bin them (management have already written them off our asset registers) but will be watching this thread closely now... I think we'll end up seeing the back of them anyway, iPads are grabbing more of a hold in class now and we have new netbooks with SSDs (thanks @VeryPC! ) for anything else that needs a keyboard and staff seem very happy with them.

As others have said, management simply doesn't seem to be there anymore. We have a few Macs but they're a pain in the ass to manage since it's not worth investing in something like Parallels or Centrify, and the first party support from Apple simply isn't there anymore. Things like SMB are STILL broken. We're ditching them as time goes on... but I still love my rMBP at home

We're a primary and went for the HP 2920-48G a couple of months back, it's layer 3 and has room for expansion later on. Be warned, it's a little noisy though!

As others have said, Windows does it automatically on standard HDDs. You can see this as part of the optimization task in Task Scheduler. No need for third party solutions.

If you're after a FOSS solution, you can do this with Nginx quite easily.

How many APs are within close proximity of where the issue is happening? It sounds awfully like you've got too many devices on an AP. How many are using a single AP at a time?

Does this only happen when you have the new batch of laptops online? How many clients are sitting on each AP? You may need to turn power down on the APs and put more in to load balance a bit. Where are you routing your VLANs?

We've bought all our UniFi gear through @Millgate without any probs. Been running and expanding our Wireless network for the past couple of years now. I was quite impressed how it performs considering it's so cheap. We have a couple of Avaya WiFi phones that link back to our PBX and we can walk from one end of the school to the other end of our field without quality issues in a call We've got standard UAPs deployed indoors and a couple of the Outdoor-AP+ things to cover our field with sector antennas.

Where does your proxy server sit? If you have a firewall between your guest WLAN and the Internet/proxy servers just block the ports for staff proxy and 80/443 to stop direct access, this is what we do since we don't route guest WLAN on our switches.