gazlee

Hello everyone! Following a move to VoIP at one of our sites, I have a quantity of LG / Nortel and Panasonic digital proprietary telephones available. We tried getting these taken on a buyback scheme, but were told they did not hold value, so I thought I would offer them up before they get sent for recycling. I realise that most people will also be moving away from traditional PBXs onto VoIP, but if you are still having to maintain one of these systems they might be useful. LG / Nortel / Ericsson / iPECS 4x LDP-9208D 7x LDP-7004D 20x LDP-7004N 25x LDP-7008D Panasonic 12x KX-T7668 20x KX-T7665 2x KX-T7633 5x KX-DT321 4x KX-NT321 (IP version of the above) 15x KX-NT551 (IP) 1x KX-T7636 with 2x KX-T7640 key expansion modules If you are interested in any of the above, please let me know via a PM on here by August, as we need the storage space back. You will have to arrange collection from our Normanton HQ in West Yorkshire. Thanks Gary

I have done this with my CCTV using a DVB modulator, it takes the HDMI output of my DVR and encodes/injects it into the aerial cable so the CCTV just shows up as another TV channel in the guide. I can watch it on any TV in the house by just changing channel.

Hi there, we would definitely be interested in a few of the 48 port switches and in future some of the APs if at all possible please? We are an all Meraki MAT based near Leeds, but we have just taken on 3 primary schools that need moving off legacy council equipment and have no budget to do so. Ta Gary

Hi Steve, sorry for the delay, that makes sense, we are seeing the modern apps but not the folders, i assumed it would just get rid of everything. Is there a known way to hide them from the start menu for a subset of users without uninstalling them? Ta Gary

Hi Everyone, I'm working on our GPOs for Windows 10 1803 at the moment as we have moved away from Windows 7 this summer and one of the many frustrations that seems to have me stumped is getting rid of the default start menu contents. Previously in Windows 7 I would set a folder redirection policy for the start menu then use the "Remove Common Program Groups from Start Menu" policy to get rid of the shortcuts that existing in the all users start menu, however this doesn't seem to work correctly on 1803. The policy removes the standard desktop icons but the start menu just gets merged with our redirected one. Has anyone else tried this or know of a way to fix it? Thanks, Gary

Absolutely brilliant, we buy all our PCs and Laptops from them now. Incredibly helpful, honest and knowledgeable with everything from ordering to delivery. We get our machines pre-imaged and asset tagged at the factory so when they arrive they just need adding to the domain and putting on the desk. Warranty service has been great too, usually next day on-site. Special shout out to @VeryPC_Tom_B who looks after our account and always goes the extra mile to help us out! We have also used them for a lot of our more recent AV installations, the guys they sent were super efficient and tidy with the whole job.

https://nclt.ac.uk/vacancy-1-5-6-2/

Hi everyone, a bit of background first; I'm at a sixth-form college which is currently in the process of becoming an Academy, and at the same time, starting it's own multi-academy trust. Rather than on-boarding existing establishments though, the other sites will be built by us over the next couple of years so each one will be starting from the ground up in terms of IT and will be adopting our current centralised infrastructure. Obviously this is quite a nice opportunity to get everything right from the start and at the moment our attention has turned to our VLE, Moodle. It's used extensively by our ~2500 students and ~200 staff at the "mothership" campus and ideally we'd like to extend its reach to the other sites so theres one central Moodle, however, in it's current form our existing installation probably isn't going to be able to cope with the extra load (potentially another 1200 students at each site, one of which opens in September). The platform as it stands consists of two Ubuntu Server VMs, one dedicated to running the database on MariaDB, and the other doing the frontend and data storage, running NGINX and PHP-FPM, with a decent 300GB or so of content accross the various courses on there. So I'm faced with a few options as far as I can see: 1 - Scale the existing installation out on our VMware platform in terms of resources (more memory, disk space, CPU cores), and allow NGINX and Maria to spin-up more worker processes. 2 - Change to a cluster setup with multiple frontends and a replica database (though I have read that Moodle doesn't officially support clustering too well) 3 - Don't go down the centralised Moodle route and just have a separate instance for each location. 4 - Move it all out to Azure (or similar) and use it to scale on-demand. Concerns that keep coming up are mainly around availability in the event of outages - if the core campus goes offline, the other sites lose access to Moodle. However in the case of Azure, if the satellite campuses lose internet connectivity they're going to lose access anyway. Having multiple installations for each site negates this, but then it becomes a pain to manage when it comes to upgrades, OS patching and courses/enrolments, especially considering the remote sites are going to be limited to having a simple help desk with all second and third line calls coming through to here. Has anyone else been down this road before? If so, what has your experience been like? Or can anyone else see a better way of doing things? Thanks in advance, Gaz

@VeryPC Woooo! Only just had chance to have a look at the video! Thank you so much!

Ah thats great! Do you want to drop me a PM? Our photography department are interested in buying them if we're able to arrange a courier or something. Gary

@mikeyw bit of a long shot, just wondered if you still had these? Cheers, Gary

I've just recently chucked our tens of thousands of marketing photos from the past 10 years or so into the new Google Photos thing thats replacing Picasa, it's free for unlimited photos if you don't mind storing pics at a maximum resolution of 16MP (anything higher gets automatically converted down). The good thing about it is that if your original files are tagged with the correct date (which they ought to be if they've come off a digital camera) you can browse them in chronological order, it indexes the filenames and geotags so they're searchable by name and place, but the really amazing thing is the Google Images AI stuff they've put into it, it's able to recognise what things look like in pictures so you don't have to manually tag everything. I can literally search for the word "bus" or "football" and it will bring back pictures of busses or people playing football just based on how it looks, and it's reasonably accurate. I'm importing photos as they're shot from a share on our network using their Sync Client, so we still have a local backup copy thats organised into folders too.

Hi Mark, I totally agree that you need to separate the students blogs out into a separate subdomain, thats what we do here because we could simply never put the reputation of the college at risk by allowing students to post on the main website. That being said, I have a couple of ideas that might help you; if both your sites are Wordpress based you might be able to create a page on your main website and use something like an RSS feed plugin to pull in the most recent posts from your dedicated blog site. That way you'd still have the content "on" the main site, but the visitor would be (semi-transparently) taken to the other site when they click through to read a post. A much more complicated (but completely transparent to the end user) way of doing things would be to use something like NGINX as a reverse proxy to direct requests for a particular directory on your main site to the other blog server, that way the two blogs would be physically separated on your backend, but from the outside world they'd appear as one site. Gary

Hi @ChickenDhansak , we don't have any problem with getting connected before logon, it's just that there's a slight delay of about 10/20 seconds or so before the the connection gets fully established which gives the students ample opportunity to pull the old "my computer doesn't work, so I can't do anything this lesson" trick!

@kidpressingbuttons Are you using a preshared key or RADIUS there? In our environment they're all RADIUS authenticated by the computer account, so we don't have a passkey to enter if we were to do this.

Hi both, the laptops are mostly Very PC ThinBooks equipped with Intel AC 7260 WiFi cards, we have some other machines though with the same issue, and the APs are all Xirrus High Density Arrays with AC radios in a one or two areas and standard ABGN radios in all others. If I go in at the start of a lesson and tell them all to wait 10/20 seconds when the username and password boxes appear they all go in fine first time. So I don't think it's a capacity thing, considering we've seen the Xirrus arrays happily deal with 300+ simultaneous connections in our common room

Hi everyone, I've had a quick search around and unless I'm phrasing it differently I can't seem to see another thread where this has been covered. Basically at the moment we have a recurring issue, whereby students seem to be catching on to the fact that if they attempt to logon to a laptop as soon as it's started up, it doesn't have a fully established connection to the WiFi network and therefore throws up the "No logon servers available" message. Thus resulting in either a trip to the help desk for the student, or a frustrated teacher calling us out to the room saying half the class can't logon, only to find that by the time we get there everything is magically working! Is there a way to either stop a user being able to login until the network is ready, or give some other sort of indication on the logon screen as to the readiness of the network? We have the "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" GPO enabled, but it doesn't seem to have much effect in regard to our problem. Thanks in advance, Gary

Wooohoo! Thank you guys! Nice reference

Thanks for all the responses so far. Has anyone had to deal with the exam board requiring evidence of students setting up a small network between VMs and installing hardware peripherals etc?

Thanks computer_expert, I've been having a look at this. I'm also interested in knowing what software people have been opting for inside the machines. We're being asked to deliver resources for a very broad range of programming languages in addition to some way of doing networking between machines.

Hi everyone, next year we're going to be starting a computer science course and we've been approached by teachers with numerous requirements including access to many IDEs (like Visual Studio, Pycharm) for various programming languages (C, Python, Java, VB etc) as well as a requirement to be able to do some basic networking setup. Currently we have VirtualBox available which we use to allow students to mess around with an expendable XP image, but that's about it, it doesn't have network access (the function is disabled). Is anyone else doing anything similar? If so what software are you using and how do you keep security tight? Cheers, Gary

Bit late to the party but I'd be interested in your printer script too @gtg93 if you don't mind!

We're entirely Xirrus here, mostly arrays and a few APs here and there, and we've been very happy with it so far. It was a staged roll-out building by building on our fairly large college campus, and we've got outdoor areas covered too with their rugged APs. We have a support contract with Xirrus themselves and they've always been fantastic at picking up the phone or getting replacement parts out next day. As has been mentioned, you do need to be careful with the positioning of them in order to maximise coverage and client density, but if you're going through one of their authorised resellers they should do a site visit and map everything out for you. One of the nice things the arrays offer is the ability to upgrade in future, we're currently looking at AC wireless and rather than buy and install all new arrays we can just buy new radio modules to fit inside them, which is much cheaper and easier. You can also add additional radios to an array if you need more capacity later on (assuming it has some free slots). Gary

Hi everyone, I just want to get a quick feel for the sort of hardware that people are running Sophos UTM 9 on (if you are running it, that is). The reason I ask is because we have a pair of SG450 appliances and they don't seem too reliable, software corrupting, databases hanging up stopping and web filtering etc, which isn't great considering they're less than a year old. So, I'd be grateful to know whether anyones running the official SG series appliances, a virtual appliance or bare-metal install on a proper server, and whether or not you have any of these types of issues. Thanks in advance, Gary

Count me on on this @VeryPC !