mrbios

"you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" ... That quote sums up my situation. NEARLY had senior management on board to switch this year, and then the head decided to leave, and we're due ofsted next year, so they wanted to avoid too much upheaval....fingers crossed next year we can count ourselves in the Arbor or Bromcom numbers.

Huh...... i actually had no idea that microsoft had their own translator. Just tinkering with that on my phone, looks like it maaaay be an option. Will test that avenue out and see how we get on.

We've got quite a large range of different EAL students who throughout the school year will use an iPad with Google Translate in order to translate their language to English, or vice versa. Come exams, the school wanted to use these in the exams rather than old paper copies of dictionaries. However it's proved difficult to achieve the exam conditions with them, we tried downloading offline language packs, forcing the devices to go offline during school lesson times in order to block the dictionary stuff and the "more translations" bit etc, but some language packs include the nouns verbs etc details as part of the language pack, which apparently isn't allowed. It feels like we're trying to hamfist a technical solution to replace paper when in actual fact paper dictionaries are just the best way to achieve exam conditions, however short of telling our EAL lead that, i wanted to see if anyone here has an alternative solution to translation and exams that's suitable for exam conditions we might look into? We've got one student that likes to actually write with her finger rather than using the on-screen keyboard, in Ukrainian and then have that transcribed into english...but that seems to be an online only feature. Doubt we can solve that one, but thoughts?

Effectively same here. Having unifi switches rather than expensive Aruba or Meraki ones etc means i have spares on hand in the event of power spikes blowing something too. Cheaper than maintaining UPS's everywhere. Only place i do have one is a cab near my reception...keeping two switches alive there = phones stay on for reception and main offices, as long as the server room is still powered by its UPS.

As it turns out, there's an issue with my SOLUS that was stopping a whole load of solus agents from updating, so they were on a really old version. I'm told the newer versions of solus won't have the problem i've seen above, so panic over. It's a me issue more than a wider issue

If you've been issued this patch already, DO NOT INSTALL IT YET. Your sims clients will all fail to install it, and you'll be left with users PCs constantly retrying the install unless you stop the solus agent on their PCs for the time being. SIMS have pushed this out with a bad path hard coded somewhere. You'll see errors in the logs along the lines of: TasksetRunner|Result was Failed for task 'Install Workstation Patch Files' with message 'Failed to patch as C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net\TargetGLFMSPlugIn.dll cannot be found'' The patch looks for the TargetGLFMSPlugin.dll and TargetGLCSVPlugIn.dll. However those aren't in the SIMS.net directory it's looking for above, they're in a subdir of plugins\fees. Manually copying these to the sims.net dir does resolve the patch install issue if you have already deployed though. ESS have been made aware, hopefully they'll replace it asap.

PacketFence is on my to-do list for looking into this (has been for a while now...). Only alternatives that are more streamlined is cloudPKI solutions i think, like those from SecureW2, but they're horrifically expensive in relation to the benefit they provide.

Not really a v6 thing, but more of an OCD thing for me.... is there any reason we keep legacy OS forums around rather than condensing them once the OS goes EOL? Server 2008, 2012. Windows 7, 8 and Vista etc. Could they not be condensed into a "Windows Server - EOL" and "Windows Desktop - EOL" pages for all things that are end of life like you've done with 2003/2008? Alternatively, is there any way that we could be given the ability to hide subforums that bare no interest to us individually? (Sponsored ones excluded for sponsor-y reasons)

Three virtual DCs here: DC1 + DC2 sit in a 2 node cluster, one per node. DC3 is on virtual host outside of that cluster.

Their own Android DS9CX devices. One TV has a HP Mini behind it though as it runs a script that we can do with Xibo.

Xibo cloud hosted and some DSCS9X devices from them. Think we pay for 7 TVs and it's £128/yr

Other: Sophos

I don't drive myself, but I do the home finances for me and my wife. We were in a similar position nearly 4 years ago, she had a Skoda Fabia 07 plate which she drove for many years till the cost of repairing became more of a burden than replacing it. Personally I'm not a fan of paying large amounts of money for an asset that will only keep depreciating in value. So we now just lease a car, we got a brand new (delivered with about 60 miles on the clock) Vauxhall Corsa 21 plate, we pay £166pm, with no deposit. There was no MOT needed for the first 3 years, and it was under warranty. We have to pay to service it each year, pay for tyres and wipers. Apart from that it's just fuel. We're coming to the end of our contract on it in August, one minor dent to fix before we hand it back but hopefully there's nothing else they'll be able to question or charge us for... Over 48 months we'll have paid £8k in total. If we had bought a car for £8k four years ago, it would still presumably be worth £3-5k now (pure guess work, as i say, cars aren't my area...i hate the things) and you can make it last longer but then repair costs go up over time, £8k also would have been an older vehicle that would have needed additional repairs and costs...... all in all it felt like a better investment having a brand new car that was reliable, than to have an older car with some residual value. Then rinse repeat every 4 years. Doesn't make sense for everyone, but after seeing it work well for my parents, we've been really happy with it as a solution. We'll probably get an electric one in August when our renewal comes around.

These make and host ours: https://www.greenhouseschoolwebsites.co.uk/school-website-cms/ Really easy to use, support is decent. I'd happily recommend them. I prefer them to our old website provider (e4education)

I've got YouFibre 1000 at home, paying £24.99pm for it. They paid me out of my previous plusnet contract so it didn't cost a penny to switch mid contract, install was quick. In over a year of using them i've only had one outage which lasted for ~2hrs and speeds have always been good. They provide an Eero router with it, but im not a fan of it. Doesn't have enough controls for my liking and the wifi is "fine" but not brilliant. I've since had a YouFibre Business line installed as our backup line at work, which again works fine but i obviously didn't bother using the Eero router at all as i've combined the lines in my Sophos box in an SD-WAN with my leased line.

I have my scheduled task set to run at 9am with the option "Delay task for up to (random delay)" set to 8 hours. In theory if i've understood that setting correctly, PCs should run the task at varying times of the day throughout the school day that way.... Must admit i've not delved into the logs to make sure that is the case lol but i imagine i'd have noticed internet usage spikes if they were all kicking off at once. I could also do with checking if the task still runs that day if the PC wasn't online at 9am i guess, not really certain how windows handles scheduled tasks in that sense.... Though my SIEM tool that used to flag up all kinds of Adobe security warnings hasn't given me anything to worry about since i set this up, so i think it's all good.

You could setup your own adobe update server, and point Adobe RUM at that, bare in mind that it needs ~200-300GB of storage space and the initial sync takes a long time though... but the benefit is that you end up with only one device on prem pulling those updates, saving your internet connection. Personally though i've got an Adobe RUM scheduled task set to pull them down, with a random delay set so that they don't kick off together: This only installs updates/patches which are minor versions, Major version changes need to be installed manually or via alternative deployment method.

Depends on the OS and service that's running. Generally as little as i can get away with without causing performance issues. Hosts: 2-host HCA setup, both hosts have 256GB ram. VMs start at 4GB for simple services. 8GB for servers that are a little more active. Things like papercut/print server has 12GB, SIMS has 42GB. Only thing i would say is that 18GB for DC sounds like a lot? unless you have your DC doing more than just logins/DNS/DHCP?

Probably no use to you right now due to the access requirements unless you're an active member already, but the Overclockers uk forums have a brilliant members market with some quite strict rules. Have to have a certain number of posts and/or have been a member for a minimum period of time, as well as 15 forum posts in the last 3 months in order to have access. I've bought and sold loads there over the last 20+ years.

MSCHAPv2 is user authentication based. It's generally been the way things were done for years but is now considered insecure, and the likes of Android (v14+) are starting to make it difficult to continue using. EAP-TLS is certificate based and the best way to do things moving forwards. For domain devices you can easily onboard certificates issued by your own PKI. For BYOD devices, well, there are expensive solutions that make it easy, or there are open source solutions that take a good deal of time to setup. (I think PacketFence might be able to do it) .... personally I'm still looking for a good solution to the latter.

MECM automatic deployment rule setup for monthly updates here with various servers staggered. I delay by a few days to identify any issue updates and remove them if need be...Done by setting a "Custom severity: none" on the rule that installs them, then if i need to negate an update i'll just apply a custom severity of low to it. (Might be a better way to do that, but i've been doing it this way for years) Personally in the process of setting up a lab environment to do Veeam restores into and do testing pre-deployment of things like updates, that's on my to-do list for 2025 anyway.

Unlimited snapshots with a 7 year retention iirc. There is an local storage option, though i've not personally used it. May also be of value to you to know that you can ask for any of your RedStor accounts to have deletion capability removed. So that the only way anything can be deleted, is by request to support. Also the way their deletions work, is that when you delete a backup, it goes from the dashboard, but it's retained in their second datacenter for X amount of time (I feel like this was 14 days, but i might be making that up) so support can restore it in that time if it's done maliciously or by accident.

Not really an IT task this but hopefully some of you have something you can recommend based on what your admin/governance staff utilise... Currently between governors, heads PA and clerk to the governors there is email attachments galore. Word docs made into PDFs, which get converted to docs again, formatting gets messed up, it takes the heads PA forever to get on top of it all....at the moment i've been dragged in to fix some formatting and i've realised how cumbersome the whole process is and i want to fix that. I've been dragged in because the heads PA is so busy with 100 different tasks, and it seems i can improve her role somewhat here... Bear in mind I'm aware i could set all this up in SharePoint/Teams but I'd rather something slightly more customised to the job to make it as easy and self-managable as possible by the staff involved, without us having to get involved with it. The most we ever do is upload the PDF of a policy to our website, but even then the heads PA knows how to do it and has specific acess rights to do so. So what we're after is: A system where by the policies are uploaded and then managed and edited entirely online. NO COPIES! (So many duplicates right now...) Review dates can be flagged and addressed easily (I notice one of these systems had a nice traffic light style system for this) Access rights for those responsible for each policy can be defined easily so that they can edit their own policy, and governors can review. From a quick googling i've found TheSchoolBus Policy Manager, and CompliancePod Policy Manager are two systems that might fit what we're after. Does anyone happen to know what these systems cost (Trying to avoid having to go through the sales pitch to at least get an idea of what they cost first...) or know of any alternatives that might fit with what we want?

I recently replaced my 8206zl with an Aruba CX 6300M 24-Port SFP+ JL658A just this summer. Going to add a second one next year and stack them. (EDIT: Should add, screw paying Arubas prices for gbics. Got a load from fs.com for peanuts instead, they work a treat.) All my edge switches are Unifi based ones, but i couldn't bring myself to go near Unifi for core responsibilities yet, though i know a few edugeekers have done or are doing it with their new fortress gateway devices. I've now got three 8206zl chassis, two populated, sat doing nothing..............just in case lol. can't bring myself to dispose of them.

A3 with the A5 Security Addon.