CHiLL

Yes, however the computer skills of our students is generally a lot lower than average due to the area we're based. Getting them to remember it's [email protected] has been a challenge for years, especially for remote learning.

Thanks for your reply. We are currently have it set to password hash authentication for everyone. If change it to pass-through authentication and check the SSO box, it asks me to authenticate agaisnt our local AD but doesn't show anything to select specific OUs. If I check "Customize synchronization options", I can see the synchronized OUs but there's no option to select pass-through authentication.

We have previously had Seamless SSO enabled, allowing users to log into the PC and then not having to enter credentials to access Office 365. However, we ended up disabling it as we encountered a lot of students not knowing their school email addresses, as they didn't need to type it in. I'd like to know if it's possible to enable Seamless SSO just for a select group of users, say "All Staff" and leave everyone else without it. From what I'm seeing, it's still enabled the same way via Azure AD Sync as a global setting, but I can't find any mention of being able to target specific users/groups.

It is complicated this year. I'm mostly ignoring all the extra stuff they want aside from doing the bare minimum. I'm not going with meetings in mind, I'm going for the same reasons I've been before. To wander round, see what's available and if I can chat with some people, then bonus. If not, I'll still have some ideas to bring back to school.

We have a NAS in another building, which has power on/off timers and a backup copy job configured in Veeam. So for example, it'll come on Friday 4pm and turn off Monday 5am and the backup copy job runs during that window. We also have 2x external 12TB HDDs (one each for me and my boss), which we connect on alternating months. Sicne we have a QNAP NAS as our backup repository, we use of it's built-in apps to copy all backup files from the QNAP to the external drive, which we then take home. None of that is ideal, but it's filling it's purpose for the moment at least.

Bromcom doesn't support Microsoft's more secure SMTP method, so you're stuck using either their built-in and free (limit of 3000 emails per month) SMTP service, or a third party one you specify.

We also use this company too, it's a much easier way for us to manage equipment to be recycled.

If you install the Veeam community edition on another server, you can use that to target the physical DC (this is how we backup our physical DC and two technician workstations). It works by installing an agent onto the machine and that runs the job, rather than the backup server itself. We also have a paid for Veeam license for our multiple VMs and we used the same NAS/repository for the community edition that we already use for our VM version, so at least all our backup files are stored together.

I don't actually know, I think it's just a standard Worcester-Bosch combi-boiler. The only temperature controls I have on the boiler itself are two dials with 1-6 on each, one for the central heating and one for the hot water. Is this the return flow control?

Yeah, I'd move it to another platform in a hearbeat...but our bursar conveniently didn't have time to look at alternatives before the end of this financial year and she won't do a migration mid-year.

Guess I'm changing it back when I get home later then! Out of interest, do you know what your target temperatures are for daytime while at work and overnight? When I Google it, everywhere says 18C for both comfortable living and good sleep.

Had a new portable thermostat installed by my landlord, so I can more accurately control the temperature of my flat, as the old thermostat was down the stairs where it's cold and I only had 3x scheduled times to control when the boiler was on. I've been playing about with the temperature controls of the new one and I don't know what to set it at. I initially had it set to 18C during the evening, and 13C overnight. I changed it yesterday to 18C 24/7, which appears to be more expensive to maintain (I was hoping that maintaining a target temperature with more frequent but shorter boiler burns would be better). What do other people have their target temperatures set to?

Sadly, if you're still an LEA school in Birmingham, the City Council have decided to make it extremely difficult to use their financial services if you use anything other than FMS. This is a pattern that has emerged over the years, because they want to lock schools into their expensive and poor solutions, such as Internet and other B2B services.

That's an idea, though I'm pretty sure our SQL licensing is still based on physical sockets and since we still require licenses for SCCM and Veeam, so I'm not sure if it'll affect our pricing. Though I can still detach the SIMS DB, right? Since it should be a different DB to FMS?

Thanks. Chances are that I'm not going to touch SIMS/SOLUS3 and just turn down the VM resources instead. I'm hoping that, even though the SIMS database and services will still be running...no demand will be put on it for reports, data entry, etc...so the performance will stay good enough on lower resources, just for FMS. I'm in a better posistion, where we are a small school, with a small finance department and hopefully less load.

We have moved from SIMS to Bromcom for our MIS, but are keeping FMS for our finance solution (don't ask why). Since our SIMS server is practically useless, aside from FMS, I want to reduce it's VM resources, since it no longer needs 4 vCPUs and 24GB of RAM. I'm considering dropping it down to 2 vCPUs and 8GB RAM. I'm just after advice as to whether those are acceptable resources, before I make any changes.

Yeah it is annoying. I don't need to know how many people have completed the profile section or whatever. I've done it, so maybe they should send those emails to only those who haven't done it yet.

Intune Admin Center - it has all the options you need. My boss went to an Intune conference recently and they confirmed that the education version is more for teachers. Think more along the lines of classroom management software, such as Impero, NetSupport, etc. Also - don't do as I did and use both. I learned the hard way that the settings that are applied in Intune Admin Center and Intune Education conflict with each other.

I guess it's a poor way of saying elidgible schools must either be in one of the listed areas, or if not in those areas, must be classed as inadequate by OFSTED. That's how I understand it anyway.

I have train tickets booked for Thursday 30th, so I've informed our bursar and she's going to see if she can get a refund on the tickets. I think they were super cheap advanced tickets, so a refund is doubtful, but I won't be going this year then! (Unless they cancel the strikes)

Apple are very restrictive and unless things have changed, the only way to monitor Internet usage on iOS is to install a browser from the monitoring solutions provider. For example, you'd need to deploy Smoothwall's browser to your iOS devices and restrict/remove all other browsers (Chrome/Edge/Safari, etc) from the iPads using your MDM. This is because the filtering only works on that specific browser and isn't system-wide.

We have 1 VM per job, with all of them scheduled to go at 10pm - but limited to 4 concurrent jobs at a time. We used to have them grouped and the reason we moved away from that is because we'd often get a job stuck in the group, which would delay the entire group. It also gives us the benefit of if we ever need to recover from a disaster and download the backups from the cloud - we can download each server individually and get the recovery process started earlier with the most critical server first, rather than waiting for the entire group to download.

If it's a computer policy, doesn't it run as SYSTEM? Is the installer located on a share that the local SYSTEM account can access? It might be worth setting up a basic temporary share somewhere, giving everyone read/execute access and copying the installer to there, then amend the batch file to pull the setup from this new temporary share.

$USB = gwmi win32_diskdrive | ?{$_.interfacetype -eq "USB"} | %{gwmi -Query "ASSOCIATORS OF {Win32_DiskDrive.DeviceID=`"$($_.DeviceID.replace('\','\\'))`"} WHERE AssocClass = Win32_DiskDriveToDiskPartition"} | %{gwmi -Query "ASSOCIATORS OF {Win32_DiskPartition.DeviceID=`"$($_.DeviceID)`"} WHERE AssocClass = Win32_LogicalDiskToPartition"} | %{$_.deviceid} Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10634396/get-the-drive-letter-of-usb-drive-in-powershell That'll return the drive letter of the connected removable device. However, if you have more than one removable device connected, it'll return both drive letters and your script would fail.

"Internet-exposed VMware ESXi servers" - does that mean the hosts were accessible over the Internet (e.g, remote management), or that guest VMs were accessible (e.g, VPN server)?