midweek

Recently started using Veeam. We have decided to back up critical staff members 365 accounts to our site (all staff and students was too expensive and probably overkill anyway). Works really well. Only small gripe is that we have to have the 365 backup on a different VM from the Veeam server as 365 doesn't natively do backup to tape as part of the process. So we just backup the whole VM to tape. Have to say going from Backup Exec to Veeam has been a breath of fresh air!

Thanks I've been trialling a single nanoHD and, aside from the latest nightmare firmware issue, it's been pretty easy to deal with. Just hoping that scaling it up to the whole school will be a success (can't be paying Aerohive's extortionate renewal price to keep using 6 year old APs).

I'm getting quotes to replace our old Aerohive AP121 and AP330 with Ubiquiti. Money is tight so I've been looking at nanoHD's to replace the 121's and AC HD's in the higher capacity areas. Would love to get AC HD's across the board but the funding isn't there. We have a BYOD policy with about 600 children and the 121's will see about 20-30 devices max at any one time currently (general browsing, Office 365 etc). Has anyone actually used nanoHD's in an similar environment who could share their experience before I commit?

Hi Just testing UEV with local profiles so we can ditch roaming profiles with Windows 10. It all seems to be working nicely with settings being retained across logins. However I just wondered how people limit the first login to an acceptable time? Not an issue for teachers on PCs they use every day, where the subsequent login time is seconds, but on shared machines for pupils. Best I can manage is about 2 minutes on a PC with an SSD even after creating a network "Default User.V6" profile. Do users just accept the slight delay? I have modified the image wim so that most of the windows store apps aren't included beyond the basics like calculator, Snip & Sketch etc. Thanks

I'm just testing UEV too and found I had to register the UEV templates using powershell - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/uev/register-uevtemplate?view=win10-ps This may or may not be necessary but it worked for our Chrome template so worth a shot. Now to figure out how to keep the local profile creation time to a minimum for pupils/staff who use lots of different machines!

£5.5k ex VAT for our 1 year renewal on our old AP121 & AP330's. I've got a test nanoHD and have used Ubiquiti before so I am pretty sure we'll be taking that route. We can update our WiFi and do away with licensing for the foreseeable future for about 18 months worth of Aerohive licensing. Crazy.

I'm currently having issues with Windscribe and TorGuard on our BYOD network. I'm feeling that having a safe browsing environment and a BYOD policy are mutually exclusive.

No-one use Chrome extensions?

Hi All Just a bit of advice really. I'm relatively new in post and have been asked to roll out a few Chrome Extensions to users (OneNote Web Clipper and, shortly, Classlink SSO extension). I have the latest admx policies for Chrome and blacklisting everything (*) except the list of Force Installed extensions works fine in testing. However we redirect our roaming appdata to the user's home folder where FSRM heavily blocks what students can actually put in there (exe, js, etc). The problem is that installing these chrome extensions requires having a bunch of js files downloaded to the AppData folder where, of course, they are blocked so the install fails. I just wondered if anyone had any advice on how other people deal with Chrome Extensions? Presumably lots of schools use them? Obviously I could remove the restriction for .js files in FSRM (or add an exception) but that would have security implications. For reference the file server is 2008 R2 and the clients are Windows 7 x64. I'm probably being daft but I really don't want to have to say to staff "you can't have Chrome Extensions"....!! Thanks

If you like your music alt/indie with a New York bent: The Sounds In My Head

Don't be afraid to contact VeryPC's support bods. I seem to recall I had to get some 32-bit drivers in the past and they were very helpful in sending me the links.

By contrast I thought this was a poor movie (explaining why would be hard without spoilers). I can see why people would like it though.

On a much smaller scale we've got a small PC in kiosk mode locked to our library software (Junior Librarian). This sits on top of the laptop caddy. All the children and teachers have a barcode they use to scan out the laptops (and iPads in our case). They can of course put damaged laptops back without any checks in place but I suppose you could train your users to check the laptops before they scan them out and reports any missing keys?

Used it in a couple of schools now and had no issues with it once SCCM has been configured. I've used Sophos and McAfee in the past and it's been the easiest to administer. Security experts will tell you that it's more vulnerable than some of the other big AV solutions though, which could just be the usual sales doublespeak from competitors.

I used a couple of Ubiquiti Nanostation M's to bridge a 100M gap (and replace the 200M cat5 cable someone had decided to bury in a big circuitous, inaccessible route). It's only for a couple of clients so I wasn't too fussed about the speed but so far the link has been rock solid.

I had this a while ago. Sadly I just had to let the updates run their course and it seemed to go away after that.

Unticking that in my GPO was the answer! Thanks Dan

I've narrowed this down to IE settings being pushed using GPP. I just don't know which setting is doing it yet. Could be a mismatch between the server admx files and the IE version on the PC I suppose. I'll keep you posted.

Yep I get this sometimes. We still use a mandatory profile (but don't redirect the app folder). The process is - pupil logs in, which creates the local version of the mandatory profile as with any roaming profile, at which point IE will work fine. Then the pupil logs out (but leaves the cached profile of course) and any subsequent logins cause IE to fail to open. Only way I got round it was to delete cached copies of roaming profiles on logoff via GPO for our IT Suite machines. As this only happens with the mandatory profile, which is small, this doesn't affect our boot times. Doesn't happen with teacher roaming profiles. Ideally I'd like to ditch the mandatory profile altogether but our IT Teacher is very particular about how office programs, IE etc should be laid out for pupils so it was easier just to use one.

As I live a 10 minute stroll from work my day usually begins with being woken up by someone phoning at 7am with some "emergency" (forgot password, blocked website they simply must have that instant, etc). I am NOT a morning person. In all seriousness though as the solitary IT Support person my day is usually: - field any emails/calls as and when they are received - deal with any long term or ongoing problems as time permits - squeeze in any preparation for upgrades or future goals (Office 365 migration, up-scaling of iPad deployment and MDM, hardware replacement plans etc) Every day brings its own challenges!

Could you be thinking of Xperf which comes in the Windows Performance Toolkit? That will analyse all the startup processes. It's a bit tricky to decipher the output as I recall but it did point me in the right direction.

Take a look at this thread and make sure you are pushing the hot-fixes described in it (particularly KB2775511 I think). This sped my network logins up drastically after having similar problems to what you are describing.

Yeah. Spoke to them at BETT and they said they had no plans to have a freeze function in future models either.

We have a couple of 6065's. I had to put a low-profile graphics card with HDMI and VGA into our desktop PCs, which wasn't expensive. Just to warn you though the 6065's don't have a freeze image button so you tend to get the teachers flipping between mirrored and extended displays which has a tendency to mess with the resolution and subsequently they have to re-orient all the time. This is because the monitor resolution isn't matched to the 6065 but who's going to buy a 4K monitor! Having 1080p on both screens seems to create black borders on the 6065. I'm still testing this but so far the teachers have said the upgrade to a 6065 from a traditional IWB isn't worth the money.

I've set up owncloud for our 3 class sets of iPads. It's pretty slick but I don't think it'll sync picture and video automatically without a 3rd party app (maybe Photosync) Also it has a nasty habit of dropping it's settings whenever you update your ipads with Apple Configurator which is frustrating On the plus side with a virtual linux server you can keep everything in house for data protection.