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I don't think today is a 'cloud' issue, a security solution released a definition update and machines received it...could have theoretically happened with any AV/security vendor We had a similar issue several years back where a McAfee drive encryption bug started to blue screen Windows 7 32 Bit machines and funnily enough the solution was broadly similar to this one (boot into recovery mode, run a command etc)...but to get into recovery mode involved the pain of manually having to decrypt the drive encryption first!

'Shuttle' PCs in the early 2000s, these days of course even smaller (Intel NUC and the like) but back then in a world of massive PC cases they were THE FUTURE!!!111 The main reason I remember them is I was in work experience in an IT Department back then and was building some up and decided to nearly kill myself by working on one whilst still connected to the mains and letting my fingers touch one of the power supply contacts...

I was in high school 1999 - 2004 and clearly remember the rise of the smart board around Year 9/10 so 2002 - 2003ish, Geography got a posh SMART Board with different coloured pens whilst Media Studies got dumped with the Promethean! As a kid back in those years it felt like the future (particulary when you then went to Maths and were treated to their top of the range OHP!), as someone who then went to work in education IT for 10 years or so the novelty rather quickly wore off trying to support the damn things... In my current workplace we still have a door controller system from the late 80s / early 90s in 24x7 use although the software isn't quite that old (having said that last updated around 2008!), the 'server' is a Windows 7 VM because the communication driver refuses to run on anything higher (trust me we tried and tried and tried after ignoring the supplier telling us that!), management keep promising to look into replacing it but funnily enough then go quiet when the pounds and pence quotations come through!

Thanks for the suggestions In the end I decided to just ditch the script and install FreeFileSync on the server and set up all my sync locations on there which works perfectly as a scheduled task running every 10 minutes and is about a million times faster at getting the job done too

Long story cut short, we have a script which essentially does a Robocopy of some patient PDFs from a folder on the server to several PCs I've just included the most relevant parts of the script below #Loop through wards and process those in the list $wardList = $param.SelectNodes("//wards/ward") # XPath is case sensitive foreach ($ward in $wardList) { $wardName = $ward.getAttribute("name") if ($folderName -eq 'ALL' -or $foldername -Contains $wardName) { $DestinationFolder = $ward.getAttribute("target") $SourceFolder = $Charts + '\' + $wardName $log = $ward.getAttribute("log") $Logfile = $Logs + '\' + $wardName + $(if($log -ne '') {'_' + $log}) + '.log' # Copy Folder with Robocopy Write-Host "Synchronising $SourceFolder with $DestinationFolder writing $Logfile" Robocopy $SourceFolder $DestinationFolder /MIR /R:1 /W:5 /Z /LOG:$Logfile /NP Another XML has a ward list defined e.g. If PC123 and PC345 are both online when the script attempts to run, great! They both get the files If PC123 is online but PC345 is offline then PC123 will get the files but PC345 won't However if PC123 is offline but PC345 is online then the script seems to give up after finding PC123 is offline and PC345 never gets the files as a result Is there a simple fix other than telling the users that the particular PCs should never be turned off which we must have told them about 100 times now and they still turn them off anyway!

Zero, it got me thinking these past couple of weeks how I've now not worked in education for FIVE YEARS Although we have had to start rolling out Office 365, which isn't quite the simple task we had hoped for...in fairness to the users I never had to sign in back in the days of Office 97 to simply type a document either I suppose! I did like the particulary optmistic user who assumed now they had been upgraded to Office 365 all their documents had been magically migrated to OneDrive so they no longer needed to use the VPN...

With regards to SQL Management Studio, connect to the instance(s) then simply run a new query :- exec sp_who This will list all databases and who is connected to them, there will be some active connections no matter what e.g. 'administrator' as you running that query is a connection to the database in itself But perhaps the easiest way is to keep things simple, shut down the SQL services (Either via SSMS or even just the standard Windows services console, it will list the instances if more than one as seperate services e.g. MSSQLSERVER1 MSSQLSERVER2) and give it a few weeks to see if it breaks anything Both SIMS and Veeam do use SQL but I presume those instances are installed on the individual VMs, can't speak for SIMS but unless someone has gone to the effort Veeam will be running a SQL Express instance

Not sure if there are many NHSMail admins on here but they've been migrating accounts to Office 365 recently and seem to be going a bit more 'full steam ahead' after a few teething issues when they initially kicked off the project Anyway we have had a bit of a stressful week since we have a number of accounts set up to various servers and the like which suddenly came to a grinding halt with logs showing '4.3.1 Insufficient System Resources', hmm well the mailboxes aren't at quota and the system resources are in the cloud so not much we can do about those, initially we wrote it off as a temporary blip with NHSMail Turns out they had migrated the accounts to Office 365 (they do send a warning email to the mailbox that they are about to do this, but since we don't generally open these mailboxes we aren't going to see that!) So if you have any services configured to use pop.nhs.net and send.nhs.net they simply need changing to outlook.office365.com and smtp.office365.com You can check what platform a specific account is running on under the NHSMail admin portal, 'Exchange on premise' is the NHS platform and 'Exchange online' is the 365 platform

As mentioned I would highly recommend looking at AJTek WSUS Automated Maintenance, I'm sure even on a tight school budget they can find $60/year down the back of a sofa! https://www.ajtek.ca/ But I get the feeling Microsoft have quietly left WSUS to just silently die in the background, we now use ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus but I think that comes in at £££££ At least with Windows 10 you generally just get a single cumulative update each month rather than 1,000,000 individual patches from the Windows 7 days!

I hate Google for doing this, if they had just said 'right from update XXX Chrome will update and reinstall under C:\Program Files' that would have been fine as we have auto update across the estate, but instead existing installs remain under Program Files x86 and new installs Program Files

Thanks for the suggestions, for now we have just gone with a site wide desktop shortcut that opens an Internet Explorer InPrivate instance and goes straight to the NHSMail site with some communications to point this out to users, not ideal but it'll have to do for now... -The saved network credentials GPO setting seemed to have no effect -Removing caching / clear history of all passwords is a longer term fix, as we need to check it doesn't bugger up several other sites / systems first -I would love to remove generic accounts full stop but again sadly not a quick job to do so! -We got a nice shiny new VDI / Imprivata infrastructure in at the end of last year, but at the moment that project is on hold due to Covid -Give me back Exchange 2010 and Outlook!

The powers that be are currently having a bit of a panic over an issue that has been raised We recently started migrating over to Office 365 (for email primarily at the moment), but it isn't strictly ours it is owned by NHS.NET Several computers currently use generic Windows / AD logins, e.g. a ward just logs in as WARDABC rather than an individual user as otherwise they start moaning it would take to long to switch user etc. whilst playing a game of real life 'Operation' The problem is then the individual member of staff wants to check their email, so they open a web browser, visit NHS.NET, sign in, check their email then close the browser window (annoyingly I believe 'remember me' is ticked by default which is hopefully going to change in the near future, I believe we could change this if we owned the 365 instance but...we don't!) Then another member of staff comes along, and is signed straight into the first member of staff email! A massive data protection headache of course... (it also seems to affect services such as Microsoft Teams even if you 'sign out' you can sign straight back in as the initial user without knowing their credentials for some reason!) Has anyone come across this issue and if so what are some of the methods used to resolve it? As a temporary solution we have fired out a Internet Explorer Inprivate shortcut that loads up the site and advised anyone using a generic login to go through that, but it only takes one person not to use that advice and we are back at square one! Perhaps enforcing Inprivate browsing for EVERYTHING under a shared login but we would need extensive testing for this idea to check it doesn't affect the 958,444 other web based systems they use on a frequent basis...

We are all of a sudden having similar issues with Windows 7 in particular (although think I may have also seen a Windows 10) Connected to the network fine but there is a red cross over the network icon, which stops certain applications from running as they think there isn't a connection or it isn't properly set up KB4569736 KB4570673 KB4571687 KB4571719 KB4571729 One of those seems to have caused it but not sure which exact one...

Just had my antibody results...I've had it at some point...no idea when as I certainly never felt enough symptoms to consider self isolating!

As I work in a NHS Trust all staff, contractors, patients, visitors now have to wear masks It got me thinking about the staggering amount just being chucked away, just staff alone - 4000 staff, having to replace the mask 2-3 times a day, 7 days in a week, 84,000 masks! (obviously not quite the reality as you wouldn't have 4000 staff working at the same time 7 days a week but still!)

I like how this also means there is a Windows Server 2004 available ‘Hey boss we need to upgrade from Server 2019 to Server 2004!’ ...also apparently why it is 2004 to begin with rather than 2003 as that really would get confusing!

Just using Roadkill Unstoppable Copier to copy the data across to a new 16KB cluster sized volume (as we found the existing one was 4KB so couldn't extend past 15TB in the future!) and it is absolutely firing through it The advantage is I set up the same named root folder on the new volume and set up my required permissions, now when it is copying the data into there it automatically inherits the correct permissions I have set so win win

Thanks for the suggestions, apparently the supplier has a way to move the data and check integrity at the same time...we'll see! (I checked with TreeSize, for anyone wanting to know...6,223,156 files in 184,162 folders!)

I have a 15TB (Yes TERABYTE!) archive for one of our systems, medical data so it has to be kept for 99999 years The problem is it is comprised of millions and millions of sub folders and tiny files I have now moved the data from a standalone SAN to a Windows VM but need to set the NTFS security permissions up... Is there a way to set them in such a way at the root folder that sub folders and files will inherit the security settings from root without scanning / applying to every single sub file as Windows normally seems to do? Otherwise it could take weeks, even months with the amount of files within it!

Turns out McAfee was knackered, once I reinstalled that it works straight away!

A task isn't running properly on one of our servers since Friday so I thought I would launch a Powershell command prompt manually and try running it However when I do 'Windows PowerShell Copyright © 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.' is displayed then just a blinking _, it never gets to the point where I can type starting commands! Which probably explains why the task is failing (There are no powershell.exe or similar running in Task Manager either) Any way to resolve other than a full server reboot?

Absolutely fantastic! Thanks

I'm out of touch with this, I used to import thousands and thousands of students in a former life but now I work in the NHS and am involved in one of these new Nightingale hospitals who wants 958584939 generic user accounts generating by the end of...well yesterday! All I need to do is: Full name / username : ABCUA001 / ABCUA002 / ABCUA003 etc Password : Same for every account initially Place in the ABC Users OU and add to an AD group if possible 'ABC-Users_Group' although if not no big drama as I can do that afterwards Just to add the cherry to the top, the user accounts have a matching domain PC account, e.g. ABCUA001 would log in to ABCPCA001 and we would like to set these user accounts up so under Account > Log On To we would like to limit them to logging in to their matching (but differently named) PC account if that makes any sense whatsoever, not sure if that can somehow be scripted too when creating them I feel embarrased asking this as I used to do it daily for 7 years in education, but my mind is well and truly frazzled after a weekend of trying to implement what would be a 3 year project in 3 days! :/

Thanks for the Quick Assist tip - this could come in very useful for me tomorrow! (I didn't even know it was a 'thing' in Windows 10!) We have a Cisco AnyConnect solution in place for VPN but now with recent events every user and their dog is requesting VPN access, the trouble being people self isolating at home...with their work laptop which doesn't have the AnyConnect client installed, so at least I can hopefully jump on a few this way and get them up and running

I went to Amsterdam Friday just gone and returned yesterday, it was pretty much business as usual until 6pm Sunday and then it was suddenly shut down time...which was rather annoying as I had literally just walked into a nice steak restaurant for tea to be told they were forced to close due to the extra measures announced Monday was quite a surreal day, they weren't messing around at all even fast food outlets at the airport were shut! (Supermarkets and convinience stores still open although of course busy) The queues around the 'coffee' shops suddenly grew quite large, but I see today the decision to close them totally has been reversed as they were worried it would just spill out onto the streets otherwise