iSteve

Hello, We have experience of managing a few dozen iPads, but a department has just ordered 60 cheap Android tablets for students to use and I don't know the best way to manage / deploy them. We have Google Apps set up for school; I turned on Google For Work as this mentioned managing Android devices, however this then hijacked any Android device any user used to sign in, including personal phones, so we turned that off quite quickly. How does one manage an Android tablet - configuring what is and what isn't accessible to end users in a similar way to Apple Configurator in iPad land?

Hello, We have some staff users on laptops which are running 10.9.5 They are set up with Apple's "Mobile Accounts" so that their home folders synchronise with the network to enable use offline / at home. We've run this way for a long time, and it worked fine. Recently we moved from hosting home folders on a HFS formatted XServe running 10.6.8, to a Windows 2008 R8 box formatted with NTFS. Since then we have seen that some mobile account users are losing some files. The symptom will be: -User notices some, random files are not on their laptop anymore -User logs in to a normal desktop Mac or PC and the files are there. -Time passes, and the file vanishes from the server completely, i.e. it is not available from the desktop machine It's almost as if the files are missing from the laptop and Mobile Accounts, and the laptop "correctly" synchronises, removing them from the network, however they shouldn't have vanished from the laptop in the first place. Has anyone experienced this? Is anyone running Mobile Accounts with Windows based home folders? Are there any alternatives to using Mobile Accounts for laptop file synchronisation? Any advice welcome.

A minor update from me - We've had a bad time with the boards and our Dell E5450 laptops. Some work via a hub. Some do not work with a hub, but work bypassing the installed USB dado cabling and have to be plugged straight in to the board, some work without a hub, and with the installed dado trunking. Some work fine without a hub using the installed dado cabling.

Thanks - Not done much of this before - how would I restrict this to a specific OU of users, rather than all users on the system? And, can I output to a text file?

Thanks - Not done much of this before - how would I restrict this to a specific OU of users, rather than all users on the system?

Hi, Running Sevrer 2008R2 - I want to find a way to look through user's AD user properties, without having to right click their name > Properties > Telephone for each user. Specifically I want to see if their Pager and PO Box fields are populated. Is there a way to manipulate AD to, for example, show the 'telephones' property tab, and be able to page through each user? Failing that, is there a way to generate a report of which users have info in, for example, the Pager field? TIA.

Morning. Have tried a board with a powered hub - it works. So looks like the laptop does not provide enough power. 12 mini powered hubs on their way...

Evening all... We have recently had 12 Smart Boards installed, connected to PCs running Windows 7 Pro. Over the summer these PCs have been replaced with staff laptops, (Dell e5450s) running Windows 8.1 Pro x64. When I connect one of the boards to the new machines the laptop pops up a Windows bubble saying the USB device is not recognised. The Smart software says no board is connected. This happens with all boards on all the new laptops, so it's no specific to one machine. We've only used Smart Boards for a few weeks (being long term Polyvision and Promethean board users). Is this error common with Win 8.1? Is there a known work around? I have tried various things, updating and reinstalling drivers. As this is a Windows error message, I was going to try one of the laptops under Win 7 Pro as that should work (being the same OS as the desktops the laptops replaced). Any ideas?

We are currently using free cloud email for our students, however I have been asked to investigate Exchange, on site. I appreciate it may not be the best option, but I need to get a feel for how it's set up before I try and rule it out.

Hello, We may be about to move our school from our current email set up, to Microsoft Exchange & Outlook for aprox 1300 users. We have not run Exchange before, and I was hoping that someone may be able to give me some advice as to how it 'works'. For example, do you need one server to run Exchange, one to run OWA (for webmail), or one for the Exchange database, and one for the mailstore etc? Would we need to distribute the system over a couple of hosts for 1300 mailboxes? If anyone can give me a pointer or two, it would be much appreciated!

Thanks haldaradkenafin - this seems to do the trick after a couple of updates and restarts.

Ok, so using GP Modelling on a user where they are still referencing the old server, it shows that the correct policy / redirection settings should be applied. I guess this means there is something cached on the local machine which needs obliterating. Is there anything other than gpupdate /force which can do this? We have also enabled the policy which forces GP processing on the client regardless of if anything has changed.

Hello, We have recently moved our home folders to a new server. We had GP set up to redirect users' home folders. We have changed the GPO to reflect the location of the home folders on the new server. However, this does not seem to work for some users. There is one GPO for our staff, so this setting should be uniform for our staff users. If we run Group Policy Results from the GP Management snap in, I can see that for 'User A' the redirection path is \\NEW SERVER\User A, which works fine. However running it for User B, the result is \\OLD SERVER\User B. The GP Result report is being run on the same computer. Does anyone know why this group policy setting is not applying correctly for all users?

I expect you need to make sure the Web Server service is running in the Server.app

Hello, We are looking to replace our antique file storage and I am trying to research a better way of doing things that will yield better performance and more resilience than our 4 file servers with local storage. Without talking specifics products/models, I am looking to clarify the building blocks of my potential set up - I am considering a virtual machine host, running two VMs via ESXi. I have read that I can turn on 'fault tolerance' to have these mirrored to another host so that if the host or VM fails, the second machine will take over. Is this correct? We are running some VMs on ESXi already, but have not delved in to fault tolerance. These two VMs will be file servers, pointing to 2 volumes of iSCSI storage on a separate LAN. If I want my storage to be fault tolerant in the same manner, then I will need a second iSCSI storage 'box', but what is the preferred method to sync these up - should I use Windows Failover Clustering (again, new to me) - and if so does this require a separate server to manage the cluster of my two iSCSI storage boxes? My aim is to have a solution where both the VMs and the storage will remain online and in sync.

I've been having a play this morning. We've switched to IP cop in its standard form without Advanced Proxy or any other bells and whistles. I have created wpad.dat and proxy.pac files, they are hosted on the IP cop machine which is listening on port 80. Telling IE to use this pac file, works. I have then set the hosts file of the IP Cop machine to have wpad > 172.16.0.1, so I can point things to http://wpad/proxy.pac for the file Now...things start to get messy... Transparent proxying is turned OFF so I am forcing things to use the PAC etc I have tried to pass option 252 in the dhcpmasq file, however it seems that Windows machines don't requests this according to the DHCP logs. If you set the Windows machine to Auto Detect Settings, it seems happy. HTTP and HTTPS work. I have a MacBook on 10.6 which ignores everything I tell it to use (auto, pac), but is happy with explicit entries iPhone with iOS6 - unhappy with PAC, doesn't request option 252. Turning on transparent proxy, everything connects on HTTP but not HTTPS - as expected Does anyone have a solution working where BYOD users can get HTTPS sites? Help!

I presume we should set the BYOD DHCP to set option 252 for WPAD pointing to a PAC file?

Under testing, it's a Server 08R2 box. Have tested with IE, Chrome, and FF. Same situation with Mac OS 10.6 / Safari 5.1.7

Hi guys, We have a Smoothwall 3 proxy on our BYOD network. It is transparently filtering web access. We have found that it will not pass HTTPS / 443 traffic on BYOD machines. If you go in to the browser on the machine and explicitly enter the proxy in Connections > LAN Settings, you can access HTTPS sites. Remove this entry, and have it work 'transparently', and HTTPS stops. There are no errors or block pages displayed on the BYOD device, it just sits there and eventually times out. Any ideas as to why this is?

Hi all, Our school has a Ruckus system. At present we cater for BYOD by having an activation WLAN where users authenticate, then they are directed to our BYOD WLAN. Their traffic is sent through the controller to a Smoothwall box on a BYOD VLAN, which passes traffic transparently through our student level proxy filter and out to the Internet. This box also dishes out separate IP addresses for BYOD. This level of filter is too restrictive for staff so I have been asked to set up a second BYOD WLAN which does the same thing but passes traffic transparently through our staff level proxy. I believe I can get the Ruckus controller to differentiate staff and student users via group membership, but I'm not sure how I get the staff users to use a separate proxy on our BYOD VLAN, though I'm now at the point where I'm over thinking it! Any advice would be welcome...

Filtering as in proxy-ing? You can configure a proxy for them using the iPhone configuration utility, apparently.

Set up one machine with 10.9, image it, and deploy the image using net install / deploy studio?

On 10.6 you can enable Windows file services and the machine can act as an NT4 style PDC (so will allow your Windows PCs to join you 'domain' and log in). Only thing you will be missing is Group Policy MMC, but you could manage settings with .reg files run through a login script - this might not be practical though depending on how many settings you want to manage on Windows.

Hi, We are using Ericom (similar to Citrix) to publish apps in a web browser. We have an issues when publishing apps to students, which must be down to a group policy setting, but we are not sure where to start looking. How it works for staff (and how we WANT it to work) user selects their published app, it launches in a browser, if they minimise the app in the browser they see no desktop files, no start menu, no nothing - they ONLY have access to the published app. Desktop appears black, with no files. Great! How it works for students (and what we DON'T want) user selects their published app, it launches in a browser, windows configures "themes" "IE" "Windows Media Player" in a small box on the top left of the session, a Start menu and task bar appear, their files appear on the session desktop, app launches, but they can minimise the app in the browser and then doss around in Windows land. There are no settings within Ericom which are set to differentiate staff and student users, so we are sure there is something in GP that is causing this to happen.

Wanted -1x iMac G4 power supply. Happy to pay postage