sonofsanta

Same settings here, and likewise, don't think I've ever looked at them. That does seem short given AD DHCP defaults to 8 days, renewing at 4... I'd expect a guest system to be shorter but not that much shorter

Is it literally a case of putty in as root, run that command and job done? At least, for the next two days till you need to run it again... but it's easier than rebooting the whole dang box

Clearly it's a larger problem and it'd be nice if they'd just patch it properly!

We're also on an S10, FWIW, though it's about a year old

Ah, brilliant! I'll get on to support to ask them to replicate this (rather than buggering about and risking this myself) but it's bloody frustrating that two of you got a proper acknowledgement and solution and I got fobbed off with "it must be your network"... Thanks for this!

Leeds 45 right now, which isn't quite the most up to date looking at it, but as best I can tell it only started happening after we installed some updates earlier in the year. A MAC table getting filled up sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would cause this. If you can find the command that'd be amazing, I'll definitely test that next time I see the issue.

Good grief that's a stupid thing for Peston to say. March 2019, I'd agree less teaching was happening, though I don't think staff were exactly lounging around with their feet up--they were still working, just not necessarily teaching for the same number of hours. But for January 2020 specifically, teachers were expected to deliver a full timetable remotely. Five live lessons a day. They were literally teaching as much as normal, with the added workload of having to rework lesson plans from in-person plans. Different note: we've had the email go round here that, as of Monday and further to the government's announcement, kids no longer need to wear masks at all if they don't want to, and... it all seems very stupid and short-sighted to me, to be honest. In December we had a full half of the school at home self-isolating, despite all our work with bubbles and seating plans and what-have-you. I know community transmission is lower, but we've been open again for what, 2 months? And yet last week we had our first day of the whole academic year--including the first day back!--where no-one was at home self-isolating. The masks in classrooms, and the increased testing, have been working. It seems rather... science-ignorant to insist we carry on with enhanced cleaning (RIP all my anti-bac-drowned keyboards) but don't bother with masks for this airborne disease. Plenty of staff are still un-/half-vaccinated, and live with vulnerable people. Time and time again it feels like we give up hard earned victories to ease up too soon. It's like stopping with the antibiotics as soon as you feel better instead of finishing the course of tablets.

I've tried arguing this with Smoothwall support but they're insistent it must be my network, which I'm convinced it isn't, and makes no sense why it would be. So I'm coming here (a) to see if anyone else is experiencing it (b) to get ideas on more tests I can run to narrow down the cause/prove it's in the Smoothie. So we've been running BYOD through Unifi and Smoothwall for years. Never had any trouble with it. But since a few months back, we're starting to see an issue where clients connecting to the guest network are authorised but no longer get a connection; when you run an ipconfig /all everything is there and correct and it has a DHCP lease, but you can't ping the default gateway, even though said gateway is the Smoothwall that's also the DHCP and just handed out the lease. I either get "Request timed out" or "Destination port unreachable", neither of which are specific enough to really help. All this happens on its own VLAN: the Smoothwall uses port 2 to connect directly into this VLAN at the core, and it's routed at the core. It's a pretty straightforward setup between Unifi and Smoothwall: Unifi has Smoothwall's IP as its RADIUS Auth server, and Smoothwall has the Unifi AP address range as clients. That's all working because (a) nothing has changed in years (b) it does authorise the user. The only fix I've found is to restart the Smoothwall. The whole box. Unsurprisingly, taking down the internet for five minutes while we're in the middle of a hybrid-teaching paradigm is not particularly convenient. It does suggest, however, that there's some table or cache or something inside the Smoothwall hitting a limit; after a restart everything is fine for a couple of days, then at a certain point everything is broken. It doesn't discriminate between user, and once it's broken it seems to be broken for everyone. Nothing has changed on my network layout, physically or logically, to cause this. It can be resolved by restarting the Smoothwall and only the Smoothwall--to the point where I can connect a laptop to the guest network, verify the problem, restart the Smoothwall without disconnecting the laptop at all and as soon as the Smoothwall is back up, the pings start working. I'm at a point now where I'm scheduling an overnight reboot of the Smoothwall every day, which is ridiculous, really. I suspect the problem crept in with an update but with everything going on last year, and so much time off-site, I ended up applying a bunch of patches at once to catch up so I don't know which one it was specifically--plus I applied them before people came back on site, and it's the kind of problem that stayed hidden until everyone came back. It's getting irritating, though, and I'd really love to get it pinned down and sorted out. So: anyone else seeing it? Or got any ideas of testing I can do to narrow down the cause? (Though I just restarted the box this morning, so I probably won't be able to run any suggested tests till Monday morning...)

It's got to be this. We're all working in schools, we've all seen how quickly it can rip through the student population, and sure, none of them were that ill with it (not here, anyway)--but that's 1200 warm bodies for the virus to live in and mutate in before jumping back to an adult once it evolves past the vaccine's protection. If we don't vaccinate at least secondary age children we will never be rid of it and never able to relax.

Under 40s to be offered alternative to AZ vaccine | BBC News Now I wish I had asked to have the Pfizer when I got mine done a couple of weeks back...! (36, bumped up the list because I live with someone who was shielding)

Whilst I do love the complete lack of taste involved in anything 1990s, I don't have any pink socks, so I'mma plump for them. /votes /sees results ...well, good job I love the 90s design after all (This was not an easy choice. All three are great. Top design work, give that girl a raise etc.)

This article may be relevant: The best budget gaming monitors: 1080p, 240Hz, 4K and more | RockPaperShotgun

Seconding @Simcfc73's recommendation of The Mitchells vs the Machines on Netflix. Done by the same studio that did Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, but this time they use the tech to create a scrapbook aesthetic rather than comic book. It's an Extremely Online film but in a way that's not leaning on you getting specific references (though there is a feral hogs reference) but more about the way Gen-Z use technology to access the world, including the world in front of them. It's not preachy, it's very funny (Eric and Deborah-5000 are my favourites), Olivia Colman is clearly having the time of her life as the evil AI, it's heartfelt and gorgeous and absolutely up there with anything Pixar have done. It's worth watching even if you've not got kids, tbh.

Brilliant, works a charm! Thank you. (And it turns out Microsoft Print to PDF is better--just automatically saves with the filename, whereas Adobe PDF prompts each time. Easy as pie now )

I did try that first; it gives me the same two errors as described above, and then nothing else happens. I can print to Microsoft Print to PDF manually without issue (though it doesn't generate the filename automatically in the same way Adobe PDF does, but that's a printer thing, not an EWP thing) but from the command line it's doing even less than Adobe PDF; doesn't prompt me for a save location. Can't see any errors in Event Viewer either. Who knows what it's doing

First up--finally got round to using this in place of WordPad after years of meaning to, and it's wonderful. Nice clean interface, lots of configurability, every option we need. The exam boards should be paying you for providing this, seeing as they're the ones coming up with all the daft requirements that WordPad can't fulfill! I'm just trying to wrap my head around batch conversion to PDF for all the files in a folder, but it keeps throwing an error and generally acting weirdly. I'm going from the final command on page 34 of the documentation, albeit tweaked to reference Adobe PDF as the printer i.e. .\ExamWritePad.exe /FOLDER:"G:\DUMP\examFiles" /PRINT:"Adobe PDF" /COPIES:"1" Say I have three files in the folder. For the first one, it'll open EWP and then pop up an error dialog saying I click Close on that, then I get After closing that one, it then prompts me to save the second and third PDFs--i.e. it's skipped the first file--but when I open the PDFs, it's just printed a blank page with the header & footer but none of the actual exam script. Even weirder, the header it prints is from the first (skipped) file for all the PDFs it does save, e.g. student2.pdf and student3.pdf both have student 1's data in the header and a single blank page. (student1.pdf doesn't exist at all.) I've checked the Adobe PDF settings in Printer Preferences and it is set to A4 as default, and the .EXAMTEXT files in question are set to A4 (I assume that's default anyway?), so I'm not sure where the mismatch is coming from. Certainly I can open the file manually and print to Adobe PDF without changing any settings. I've tried opening EWP first to see if that wakes it up and gets it to check its settings, but that doesn't seem to change anything. All the behaviour I've described above holds true if I change Adobe PDF to a physical printer, too--the error messages, and the erroneous content of the pages it does print, so it doesn't seem to be related to the device settings. Where am I going wrong? This is version 4.5.3.0 installed locally on Win10 1903.

If he's got a GTX1660 then he wants a 1080p monitor, for sure--1440p will be too much for that card. 24in 1080p 120+Hz would be the category to look for, ideally VA or IPS as @mrbios says--VA has higher contrast so has more "punch", IPS is more colour accurate which is useful if you do other stuff on the monitor but it can have more glow/backlight bleed as well as the lower contrast. I wouldn't say it's worth spending on a G-Sync monitor. Cost an arm and a bloody leg and most Freesync monitors will work with an nVidia card anyway, even if it's not on a compatibility list (there's an option in the control panel to enable it now). Worth a Google to check, but all the compatibility list means is "nVidia have tested to confirm"; it's not an exclusive list. This looks a good pick for £160; iiyama are a solid display brand: https://www.ebuyer.com/1124498-iiyama-g-master-g2466hsu-b1-24-full-hd-165hz-1ms-gaming-monitor-g2466hsu-b1 RTings.com have no end of monitor reviews and searchable/sortable tables if you really want to dig into your wants and needs. Spent far too much time on there a month or two back, as @ICTDirect_Dave will attest. The Dell s3220DGF I got at the end of it is very nice, though

Ended up getting my first jab on Thursday, from Notts Trust of all places--20yo is registered at her uni address in Nottingham, so they sent her a letter inviting anyone living with her (as a vulnerable/shielding person--she's on immunosuppressants) to get a jab. That meant I ended up driving an hour to Newark Showground to get my science, but science I have got! UPGRADE UNLOCKED (I don't live with her at her uni address, to be clear, but she's been back with us since early November, so I am in a bubble with her. All a bit roundabout, really, but I promise I'm not cheating the criteria.) Had the AZ jab at 10am and felt fine most that day, then started to get a bit ropey about 7pm. Figured it was going to be downhill from there so took some paracetamol and set myself up in bed with Netflix, then had a rough night of sweats 'n' shivers; not the worst night of fever I've had (no hallucinations) but not brilliant fun, tbh. Felt a bit wiped out on Friday as a result, but keeping myself dosed up with painkillers was enough to keep it in check. Been pretty much okay since then: appetite a bit depressed (I think because my taste went, so there was no pleasure in food) and arm stiff like I'd done a day's heavy lifting in the garden, but all in all definitely a better experience than having COVID.

That's disappointing, I was looking forward to it from the trailer. "Cheap knock-off of John Wick" is especially disappointing given that it's literally from John Wick's writer; you'd think that if anyone could do a good job of replicating the premise...!

Probably not much more to migrate to the cloud from where we are--maybe cashless catering and the finance system in future, but neither of them are (a) quick (b) entirely in my power. I don't see any benefit (for our single-site school) to making AD and SCCM cloud-based, and stuff like print servers are obviously better here if I've got any on-site infrastructure available anyway. What benefits does Datacore offer over S2D? As presumably it will cost more (given that S2D is effectively free)

Does StarWind support Hyper-V too? I'm coming from the opposite direction, after a decade of Hyper-V I don't want to switch the other way, heh. What were the limitations you were seeing with 2-node S2D? I can find lots of obvious stuff about fault-tolerance and surviving multiple node failures (which feels a very unlikely chance, and honestly, is a single SAN any more resilient even with all its built in mechanisms?) but I've not seen anything discussing lowered performance, which would be of more concern to me.

Our Hyper-V hosts are approaching their 5th birthday, so we'll be packing them off to the great retirement rack in the sky* and need something to replace them. When I was looking in 2016, Storage Spaces Direct was new and exciting and not at all ready for a risk-averse little school to take on, so we went with the good old Fibre Channel SAN + 2 hosts set up again. It's stood me in good stead, as did the similar set up before that, but I'm aware that hyperconvergence is the new hotness and there's supposedly money to be saved on not having the SAN. I'm a practitioner of Keep It Simple, Stupid when it comes to my network, because I'm the stupid, but it's not necessarily clear if S2D is a simplification or complication. I know and understand the SAN architecture, but I'm hoping S2D is not particularly any more complicated to set up. I do hear rumblings that it's not as efficient on a 2-node set up, though, and is really designed for larger deployments; I'm definitively looking at 2 nodes, and won't need that to grow over the lifespan because the server estate is pretty settled at this point. So looking for opinions on how many have gone S2D/hyperconverged (e.g. Stone Equinox), how the set up was compared to installing a SAN, and what the savings and reliability have been like. Conversely, I'd love to hear from people who looked at it and decided to stick with the tried and trusted formula, and what swung it for you. *the switch rack in my office, where I'll reformat them to work as Handbrake factories for all the video evidence we have to capture these days

Ah man, that theme music! The true sound of a Sunday evening

Er, so, bit late for the photos--but we did get our box and distribute the goodies around the office accordingly. Much appreciated, thank you

Nothing to do with me, but just seen it on the grapevine: Boston Grammar School are looking for a new network manager. Full time (37 hours / 52 weeks), Grade 8/9 to be discussed at interview (current Lincs pay spine here). Closing date April 21st but need someone for immediate start, so they say. Job Advert Job Description Person Specification Application Form