m25man

I’ve had similar reports but each one has been resolved through careful study. 1. Physical Mic hardware issues. - some built in Microphones were defective. Some of our Lenovo 11e laptops find and use the built in Mic but the audio is so low even with gain set to max they are barely heard. Increasing gain does raise the noise/amplification but not Audio so the microphones are defective. Possibly due to cleaning material entering the mic. We know many have been used for years with headphones not headsets. Damage may have occurred due to prolonged use of the wrong headwear! 2. Combo ports - Our Dells and Lenovo’s have combo Headset ports. These use the four segment 3.5mm plugs! Users are plugging in Headphones! Thee are just 3 segment stereo audio out only. The Mic input is shorted. 3. Audio devices are hijacked by other applications. We’ve seen users that have been in “other” video conferencing sessions using Zoom etc returning to Teams only to find Audio Input/Output still “In Use” by other applications. Non technical users in frustration reboot and of course all is fixed but too late for their “Urgent” meeting! Of course it’s all your fault..... We ended up recommending a cheap Headset from Amazon for those that couldn’t find one to use at home (how many pairs of Apple ear buds I’ve binned over the years!) This has solved many of our users issues.

Yet another Borked update.... https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4524244/security-update-for-windows-10-february-11-2020

FWIW, when my son rewired his extension and fitted all new sockets (he’s 18th Edition and Part P C&G) he too started having random circuit breaker issues! We eventually traced it to an LAP (Screwfix) dual Outlet with Dual USB ports.... The USB ports had the issue. Swapped the suspect outlet back to a standard one and it ran fine! My other son also began suffering MCB/RCD issues but his issue was eventually traced to a Sky installer that had fitted Sat dish years ago without a drip loop or sealing the cable route! Hidden behind a hedge water had been running down the cable and eventually through the wall into a back box causing a damp problem! Hole sealed, dried it out no more tripping. Just a couple of real world gems to be aware of!

The Dell Latitude 3400 14” i5 8GB 240SSD should be well in budget.

There’s some credibility to this response, VM extensively use GRE tunnelling to connect subscriber modems to public IP addresses and this breaks your own VPN tunnels. We have our own firewall at each end of an l2tp VPN, on the VM site we had to get them to switch the site back to using a sticky DHCP assigned and use a dyn dns service as their static IP modem mode wouldn’t pass VPN site to site traffic. This might explain it in more detail, https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Tech-Chatter/HITRON-ROUTER-AND-STATIC-IP/td-p/3543265/page/8 The VM Static IP routed service is fine for hosting your own services behind your own firewall JUST as long as it’s not a VPN !

Watch Von Nagy’s section in this webinar from the 5 min mark in this video... https://youtu.be/W90bVlzKfLo WiFi is client driven, not AP driven. To much money is spent on APs that never get used or are configured wrongly. The thing with Unifi is that it’s so cheap in comparison to some it’s hard to actually waste your money. Never the less, you can still set it up so badly there’s no advantage gained.

The main difference is the lack of secondary Port on the Nano. Functionally they are the same, the antenna layout is slightly different but no noticeable drop in performance. They call them HD and they will accommodate 250+ associations and I’ve seen 600+ clients connected to a single AP but the uplink is still just 1Gb so your more likely to run out of IP scope, exhaust your switches ARP tables or max out the uplink before the AP runs into trouble.

The DWL-6600AP is a Dual Band N AP - 300Mbps Max. Changing your Wi-Fi AP's may seem an easy solution on paper but are the AP's the real cause of your problems? Yep if 30 users are connected to One 300Mbps AP that is a problem, but what about the rest of the route? If your topology is flawed you could throw £000's at the issue and get nowhere. I've got customers with Home networks that have over 100 devices attached nowadays! Splitting hairs over a few quid and arguing over vendors wont help you much went you've spent all your money and things are still the same....

There are still strict regulations regarding the use of RF Repeaters in the uk. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/features-and-news/mobile-phone-repeaters Only the Carriers themselves have the authority and the licenses to operate true in building Distributed Antenna Systems DAS or Femtocells. https://www.taylored.com/blog/cell-phone-boosters-vs-das-which-is-right-for-your-business/ Just make sure your chosen solution is fully Ofcom Approved before parting with any money! There are a lot of dodgy imports out there which the good old EU has done nothing about!

Ours are all DEP and Meraki managed. If they attempt to wipe them they simply comeback online as “Property of xxxxxx” Once had an iPhone stolen in Croatia, for months we kept resetting and wiping it. Eventually we got an email from it’s new owner begging us to unlock it and let them keep it! We refused to comply and instead arranged to have it collected by UPS. If managed correctly these things can certainly have a zero resale value if stolen. Unfortunately there’s still a good market for them if broken for spares.

The only real problem for us was the Internet breakout. As Internet Traffic can be really erratic and unpredictable we also had VoIP and CCTV to deal with as well. Good QOS and traffic management, tweaking to make sure the MPLS is optimised for your requirements. It sounds like a great idea but does take some careful planning and detailed design to avoid issues later. We had 3 sites linked with MPLS with Internet breakout at site 1 with our own Firewall/Filtering. Each site had several routed VLANs It worked fine, however Internet use at any 1 site could often be affected by traffic conditions at the other 2 at specific times of day/week. Your Internet breakout needs to be carefully considered and the Firewall solution capable of meeting the demands of all sites simultaneously or individual site breakouts which means complex routing table maintenance and configurations. These can be extremely expensive and any ISP provided service proportionally so. So don’t over look that in your budgets. Your providers MPLS specialist should be able to do this for you but they need accurate and detailed topology information of your existing systems to do so. We now have dedicated Fibre Ethernet circuits linking sites with 2 x Gigabit Internet connections courtesy of BT.net

I’m in a school now where there was a huge box full of brand new and unused IEC 13a mains leads in a stacking crate... Each one appears to have recently been individually PAT tested and labelled! What a rip off!

CheckMK, built on Nagios excellent.

Ubiquiti Unifi is not really a Core switching solution. It has no Layer 3 functionality and no stacking capability. The warranty is woefully inadequate for enterprise use but, It’s cheap and intuitive to use and the management is easy peasy. Once they address these issues it might have a place in a distribution cabinet, until then keep it at the edge where it works well. I’ve got some smaller sites where the 16 port SFP is used as top of rack distribution and 24/48 ports service edge cabs it works well enough. There are some recent reports of these things burning out recently but all the evidence I’ve found points at overloaded 24v Passive APs running off them.

For broken and weakened hinge mounting areas I regularly used the epoxy putty sticks and a dremel to rebuild them. Sometimes it’s invisible, other times I’ll drill right through and fit nuts and bolts to secure the hinges. I would say I’ve only ever needed to do this on the cheaper consumer grade laptops. I personally can’t recall ever having to do serious hinge repairs on the “real” corporate laptops we’ve had! but that’s the buy cheap buy twice culture endemic in school IT.