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.

In summer the school we currently provide managed services at changed caterers. I removed the school PC that the previous suppliers had been using as frankly they had been taking absolute liberties demanding administrative access to install software, asking constantly for support from us when they couldn’t get their food labels to print, wanted a school email address and were generally a P.I.A The new incoming team were told, you get a staff filtered Internet connection on your own VLAN that’s it. They had to supply their own laptop, printer, software and support! Haven’t heard from them in 4 months...

This fantastic news! My own Fax number is xxxx 300300 Everyday I get faxes full of GDPR protected data delivered to my email from local NHS departments who don’t know how to use a fax machine so I get all sorts of private data the ICO would love to know about delivered to my inbox. I’ve tried to escalate it through NHS IT but nobody cares, so I too have given up. This should finally put an end to it...

You might find this of use.. http://www.sopto.com/learningcenter/ Whilst VCSEL might have dropped the cost of laser module production nothing can really offset the hidden attenuation factors of 1990s Fibre and ye olde hand finished terminations. One only has to look at the Hubble telescope and the repair missions it needed to rectify the effects of poorly finished optics [emoji23] Keep on learning though. ps. 803.bt will be the next big thing in networking, mark my words.

There’s a lot of mis-information in this thread. This explanation however is the best answer by far. I work with both MM and SM both Data and Video (Broadcast) in all sorts of environments and have seen almost every conceivable type of fail. What needs to be understood is that when OM1 (circa 1989) was introduced everything was powered by expensive laser modules. The Purity of the optical Fibre wasn’t anywhere as good as it is now. Over the years data speed requirements have risen and demand has driven technical innovation to reduce the costs of providing it. Everything is relative. Factors like the quality and purity of the Fibre, Output of the light source, sensitivity of the receiver, Bend radius, Insertion Losses and joint/termination quality and alignment factors will all affect the ability of a pair of transceivers to hold a conversation over a given distance. Only by validation using calibrated test equipment will you be certain that your link is satisfactory. Anything else is guesswork. Just because it works today doesn’t mean it will still be working when the temperature drops by 20 degrees or the cheap Chinese SFP you bought suddenly drops its output by 6db after 3 months use or some clown uses a 62.5/125 patch cord on a 50/125 link. A 3db attenuation loss can half your effective transmission distance. Whist whacking a pair of modules at each end of an OM1 might work (initially) and score you a few brownie points with the bursar, you are at that point just another cowboy leaving a legacy of pain for somebody else to have to troubleshoot and fix. If your going to do such a job, get it validated and make sure you document it fully, I’ve wasted too many hours of my life having to track down bizarre network issues caused by F.I.D installs.

The prices and SKU’s all changed on 01/10 for Server and Office 2019 As all new M$ sales/renewals will be based upon these new products moving forwards the 10% sounds about right.

Excellent, recently diagnosed as T2 myself so good cause. Anyone else need any I have plenty left.

10GBe - is that going to be Copper or Fibre? You want to make it as easy and as compatible as possible. So what switches will be at the other end? A DL380 to an HP Switch SFP+ by DAC is always best served with a genuine HPE adapter with a genuine HPE DAC cable. We have however also used the Intel X520 DA2 in HPE Servers to all kinds of other switches with great success using DAC however with 10GBase T becoming so common now and copper so easy to manage in the rack this is my personal medium of choice now. So work out what you have at each end and to connect and see what issues you might have to overcome as DAC (Twinax) cables are not cheap and adapters can be very fussy.

Posted you 4 of them today by Royal Mail You can pay me the £3 postage it cost by putting it in the next charity box you see

Exactly right. Not just Ubnt products though. Distributors are cutting back on locally held stock and all Vendors are moving towards central EU warehousing drawing off as needed. The cost of delivery next day from Holland or CZ now is getting cheaper (at least until brexit bites). Warehouse space costs are increasing daily. It makes more sense to follow the Tesco/Amazon style model and only stock what can be sold within the week.

I’ve been a SonicWall Advocate for many years and to be honest where they have been installed I’ve never had a security issue however, When they were swallowed up and re-branded by Dell they suffered immensely in that they never really kept up with the trends. AD integration was flakey and the management and reporting tools were poor so much so had to resort to 3rd party reporting to get any usable activity reports. So when Dell gave up and they went back to being SonicWall again things began to improve again. Trouble is they seem to have lost a lot of ground whilst floating around in the Firewall doldrums and making a comeback isn’t easy. So recently we switched allegiances to Sophos XG. Ticks all the boxes and on pricing they seem to be prepared to beat almost any vendor especially in the Edu sector at the moment. Yes, SonicWall have responded with new models and features but it seems like they are having to fight the likes of a Sophos for every single deal at the moment so I guess that says something. Whatever you think you might need, I would strongly advise you go and get a quote for an equivalent Sophos XG as an alternative option. You can get a demo as a Virtual appliance and even a free version for home use from the Sophos website.