Blue_Cookeh

I suppose it might make patching/new features easier... So I suppose the decision is do we live life on the bleeding edge or do yearly updates!

To get a mirrored port you'll need to login to your switch and set that port to do it. I know on HP there's an option called 'mirror-port' but not sure about Cisco etc.

- Contractors are recabling the entire school to hide ghastly trunking everywhere, pull everything into our first server room, and clean up a comms cab - Introduce a couple more VLANs and enable routing now we have a core switch - Double up on APs at reduced power - Make sure BT don't screw up our leased line install (going from the LA' 6Mbps bonded DSL to 30Mbps uncontended fibre! Awww yissss) It'll be like having a whole new physical network! Then once that's done... - Win 10 deployment across existing and new batches of netbooks - Reimage ~20 desktop PCs - Deploy DirectAccess to staff - DR testing - Find out why Meraki doesn't work through our damn Sophos UTM - Reconfig our iPad estate - Fix AD/O365 sync problems we have - Sort out my shiny new HyperV host for some redundancy

Whats the difference between Edu and Enterprise streams? I was planning on going Enterprise since that's what (I assume) EES is likely to give us. Looking at the table the only key thing is LTSB... what's that? You can tell I've kept up with W10 releases so far...

Been testing it on the @VeryPC; Classmate Netbook ready for a deployment over this summer... Absolute bliss using it on there, but I can't find a driver for a device listing it self as Unknown with a PCI ID of ACCE0001. Seems to be working wonderfully so far, and my SCCM task sequences are pretty much the same as they were with our Win8.1 deployment. Now if only Office 2016 were out earlier!

So long as your usernames and UPN is the same as Office365, you can use GPOs to make Outlook fill all the relevant settings in on first start, and then all the user has to do is enter their password.

Microsoft best practices tell you to use a subdomain of your public domain, like ad.school.cty.sch.uk. See http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/17974.active-directory-domain-naming-considerations.aspx

Installed an Avaya IP Office 500v2 system the other day with Avaya 1616 handsets all round. Brilliant little system, VERY powerful and not at all expensive! We got the right cards for both POTS and ISDN lines, but the system has SIP capability for when we finally get a half decent Internet connection. We went down that route because we didn't want to run or maintain a server/VM, very much set and forget. Just make sure you have power fail provision. Remember your SIP trunks probably won't be working in a power cut unless you're fortunate enough to stick your entire infrastructure (inc PoE switches) on UPSs...

To be honest I'm surprised you don't have any VLANs already if you have an IP based CCTV system. We're a smallish school and I've just implemented them so a) our iPads can have a transparent proxy, b) for guest wireless access and c) to separate IP phones from our computer network That's not a huge amount of broadcasts, are you running Wireshark on a machine with a mirrored port? You'll only be seeing your own machines traffic (and not ALL your broadcasts) if not.

Thanks a lot guys, will definitely be looking into these @IanT; What bugs were there? We've been running our current 2530s for the best part of a year or so now without any problems... I do keep firmware up to date on all our infrastructure though.

Budget is mostly my problem too... unfortunately schools expand and my IT budget seems to stay the same! (or someone else comes along and spends it on software and IWB->TV upgrades ) I'm really looking for something to aggregate fibre from the 2530 access layer, really not looking at copper since some of the runs in the future will be spanning multiple buildings.

Hi All, Our school is expanding once again and now I'm looking into redesigning our wired network! Currently we have 3x HP 2530 switches (x2 for access, x1 for servers/VoIP etc) and we'll be looking at adding two or three more. At the moment these are chained together but now I'm looking at getting a core switch with fibre to the access layer, and Layer 3 routing. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm keen to stick with HP for now but am open to others (that aren't Netgear!). Preferably I need to be able to connect up to 6 access switches, with room to grow. Thanks

How will your APs know what traffic to tag with what VLAN even if you manage to do that?

Moved ours to Eclipse Internet - Straightforward business connectivity, communication and cloud computing solutions using tag ECLIPSE about 8 years ago no probs. Then we use CloudFlare for our DNS setup.

Isn't pulling the power cables out more of a "class control" issue?

UniFi APs and a UniFi Outdoor+ (coupled with an airMAX 120 degree sector antenna) to cover our playing field, all powered off Toughswitches so we don't have a mess of horrible PoE injectors. Works flawlessly for our multiple SSIDs/VLANs/WiFi phones

It's a bit of a game with these sorts of schools. I work at a relatively small school, but we're heavy users of IT. The cost of licensing per FTE is far cheaper than outright buying licenses for all our servers/work stations. We license for Windows/Server/SCCM & CALs and it made far more sense for us, especially since we like the ability to upgrade to the latest and greatest software every year or two. After a year or two we wrote off the perpetual licenses we had from before EES. They were old and the school had moved on.

We use Pugh.co.uk for our MS and Sophos licensing (they managed to pull us a massive favour with Sophos ), but they may well be contending with @Millgate come next renewal, since there's relatively little between the quotes... We're on an EES contract.

This is really interesting... it never occurred to me to 'trick' WSB into doing multiple backups like this. Are you guys using iSCSI and backing up directly to that drive? Having not played with iSCSI before, would I need to VLAN it off or can it run across our default VLAN? Not entirely sure what the traffic is like for it...

Nope. You need OEM media.

Simply put, we don't take user's passwords. If I'm swapping a laptop out I assume (and users know this) that all data is stored in places where we have folder redirection in place. This way, I have a quick scan through SCCM to see what was installed on the old laptop in case they have anything non-standard, add those onto the new laptop after we've deployed the OS to it, and pass it onto the user for first login. Keeps their account secure, keeps me out of their stuff, and makes my job with rebuilds easier In the case of Windows laptops, MBAM will force encryption, in the case of Macs I'll manually enable FileVault on an admin account.

Try running the switch on the mains, and try running another piece of hardware from the UPS for a while IMO.

That's what I'm thinking... KISS might apply here but I'm just spitballing for the moment!

Hi guys, Just wondering who here has setup ADFS for Office365? It's quite tempting to set up in our school, DirSync seems to be a bit naff once you get into the nitty gritty of it. I've been looking at it and my main concern is setting up redundancy. We have two internet connections - fine, I could stick it on two different servers - fine, but have you guys gone as far as to make sure there are redundant paths across your network for this for example? It seems a bit overkill for our primary but on the other hand DirSync seems to be too unreliable, or easy to break.

They're policies for the CleverTouch Lynx software that carry the license key etc. May just apply a reg file during SCCM deployment of the program...