midweek

Considering I switched to a new service supplier for our internet & leased lines, have a new cloud based Fortigate UTM and have reconfigured the VLANs across two of our sites things are eerily quiet. Horrible feeling of the calm before the storm........

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I guess I'll just have to source the stuff myself. I really thought there would be companies who would take things like this on as a full project but it seems not to be the case.

Hi We have a very small ICT Suite that we are looking to refit to make better use of the space and I wondered if anyone on here knew of a good company who would project manage something like that? The companies I've spoken to seem to do either furniture and/or hardware but not stuff like lighting, electrical and network points etc. Sure I could just buy a bunch of all-in-ones, slap them on existing desking, get some sparkies in to do the lights but really wanted something a little more professional. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Cracking fun to start with but gets boring pretty quickly. However there weren't many maps at launch and I haven't played the DLC maps. Probably worth a tenner though.

Does sound like an overheating CPU. Maybe run something like Real Temp and see how hot the CPU is running and how close to the max they are running.

And the "British Isles" includes Eire! We live in such a confusing part of the world.

Ha ha! That's a wee bit unfair. Nowhere did I say England is horrible. I actually like it here and don't foresee myself back in Scotland any time soon. Doesn't mean I don't have an opinion on the future of my country of birth albeit without a vote! This referendum has been so vitriolic with no middle ground allowed that I'm actually about the least proud of being Scottish as I've ever been.

I think the problem is that the bloated financial sector in places like Edinburgh would like to continue to have the security of the Bank of England should they require bail outs in the future as they did recently. A non-aligned pound wouldn't have that (I presume countries who use the USD don't have Federal Reserve protection either?). Personally I think Scotland will be fine either way. We've been producing high quality, educated people & political figures (not that snake-oil salesman Salmond of course) for centuries and punching above our weight so, in the long term, Scotland would do ok. It's the short/medium term that is the danger. £100's of millions have already been transferred from Scottish institutions to English counterparts on the back of the last poll. That would leap in the event of of a "Yes" and who knows what damage that could do. Or Scotland could gamble, use the Euro, leave rUK with all the debt and start fresh with a big two fingers south. Might work....!

Some New York Times economist described an independent Scotland as "Spain without the sunshine".

Technically if Scotland have to apply to join the EU they'll have to sign the Schengen agreement which requires border controls with all non-Schengen countries. The UK is non-Schengen. Queues on the M6 and UK Border Force patrols on the trains at Berwick. Groan. As if getting home for Christmas wasn't effort enough.

Thanks Rob I had to reset Profile Manager and then specify local home folders using the Mobility settings which seems to have removed the issue. The other SMB share I mount through profile manager does actually display the correct permissions. Progress at least.

Hi All No doubt this is related to the funky SMB issues with Mavericks but.... I have upgraded a couple of clients to Mavericks 10.9.4 and enrolled them into Profile Manager successfully. Most of the settings seem to push successfully (Dock looks OK, an SMB share to a windows shared server area works as does an AFP share to the Mac Server) however whenever a network user logs in it mounts on the desktop the hidden directory where all my AD user folders are kept (lets say "\\winserver\users$" as an example). Now the logged in user can open this share and browse through all the other user folders regardless of the permissions set on the Windows Server side. Now I know Mavericks and SMB don't get on but how do I stop the folder mounting in the first place? As a rule we don't bother with the home folders from AD as the pupils just share their work using a shared folder on the Mac server or the mounted SMB shared folder I specify in Profile Manager. Cheers for any thoughts on this!

about 15MB

Huge difference. Was going from random login times from 30 seconds up to about 5 or 10 minutes in some cases (frustratingly it was never machine specific) to pretty much 20 -30 seconds across the board.

Agree with Sted. I think I have one email for the Administrator account in VPP (so I can download the token for our MDM etc) and one "facilitator" email ID so I can actually purchase the apps etc. It's a minefield! I have managed to get apps to now silently push using VPP and Meraki so things are improving since the dark days of imaging every ipad with configurator each time you wanted to add an app. Keep at it!

When I was having slow login problems I found this old thread a Godsend: Microsoft releases massive Slow Boot / Slow Login Hotfix Rollup (KB2775511) The other thing to check for is wayward print drivers, particularly if your using GPP to distribute your printers. Might be worth starting with no GPOs being applied to the laptops and then adding GPOs one by one to see what causes the slow down.

Sadly I contacted Meraki support this week and they told me they only help people with paid support contracts.

Nah - Modern day Noah gets asked by God to save a bunch of animals and gives his answer...... Forbidden Plane - Robby the Robot and Leslie Nielson sneak out and give a fine finish to wooden objects.

Have just gone from an HP school to a Ruckus one and can second that sentiment! The HP hardware is fine but the controller is unbelievably bad. Ruckus is beautifully laid out and simple in comparison.

Wow. Only reason I was looking at the Smart boards instead of the C-Touch was that "all the staff use Notebook so I'll have to stick with that". This news changes things dramatically. Weren't Promethean pushing free collaborative software at BETT too? Would make Smart Amp AND notebook licensing seem a very expensive option.

You could look at AutoAid I'm covered with them but haven't needed to use them yet so can't personally vouch for the service, however when I was looking to replace my extortionate AA cover these guys seemed to get good reviews.

Just back from a holiday out there staying with various ex-pat mates. I was struck by just how happy and settled they all are. None of them can imagine moving back. Sadly I'm 10 years older than you or I'd be getting that 2 year visa and jetting off asap. I think that visa has some odd stuff about doing agricultural work and what-not but I imagine it'd be easier to gain proper sponsorship from a company when in country. Australia mostly missed the last recession but their economy is heavily linked to China (raw material exports etc) so if/when the economy there shrinks then Oz will feel it. It's already really expensive ($10 a pint!) but the wages and standard of living are much better than over here. What have you got to lose?

I wonder if the bods at Smoothwall would care to comment on whether they'll be able to deal with something like this?

I know that this post is a few months old but did you ever get anywhere with backups for Google Apps? Management at my school are wanting to press ahead with putting some mission critical stuff on Google and I have told them we need to sort out some form of backup (student document collaboration is one thing but I think this needs much more thought). I've had quotes from the likes of Backupify and Spanning but they seem mighty expensive! Ta

Hi mate Absolutely possible. That's exactly the setup we have here (although we don't use the shared calendar stuff yet). As I recall you just have to put a meta tag on the home page of your website and a couple of CNAME entries in your DNS. As long as your DNS settings continue you point to your exchange for email then you should be fine. User's then log in with your domain suffix (i.e. [email protected]) but it doesn't affect where your email goes. We also use GADS to manage users which, once set up correctly, works quite well. I'd also advise trying to get the password sync installed as part of the process as I didn't and really regret it. Haven't looked at SSO yet. Google support are actually really good at guiding you through this (in my experience anyway). Take heart knowing that if I can do it so can you!