mrbios

Completed rise of the tomb raider last night. Really good game, really good graphics. Genuinely feel like i got my monies worth, which makes a change from most games out there these days.

Nope, even had impero support test a few things out....weird thing is, if i shutdown one machine in the day, it will WOL back on perfectly fine, but first thing in the morning when the whole room needs to be woken up, nothing happens. WOL clearly works from both impero and other sources, but those specific machines just won't boot after a whole night of being off, and what's more frustrating is, it's an issue that started completely at random! the impero update to 5.1 is the only thing i can remember changing....

Thanks they're not something i've ever looked to replace before or ever considered until now. We've just replaced batteries when they've died in the past, but 3 large UPS's taking up a quarter of a rack which is pretty much full is frustrating now as I'm also nearly at the point of being able to remove one of two racks and give us a shed load more space in the server room. Obviously don't want to waste money just to reclaim a bit of space though, so it's a case of weighing up the cost vs benefit. They last about 15 minutes currently when we have a power cut. The oldest of the 3 x 3000s is over 10 years old Replaced that batteries in it twice, but we only replace batteries currently when they actually fail. Be interesting to hear others opinions on this one as i've never heard of people proactively replacing batteries on a 3 yearly basis before.

Anyone any good at calculating the size of UPS you need for specific equipment? I've tried messing with the APC calculator but i've no idea how accurate it'll be based on the equipment I'm using. In total I've got: 6 x 1U servers (all 2 x PSUs) 2 x 2U servers (all 2 x PSUs) 4 x SANs (all 2 x PSUs) 1 x modular switch (8206zl, 2 psus) 8 x other 1u regular switches 1 x smoothwall appliance 1 x tape autoloader 1 x wireless controller 37 total power connections UPS wise, most are quite old now and none of them have management cards in so they're just "dumb" currently, and i've got these models: APC Smart UPS 5000 + 6 port extension PDU thing 2 x APC Smart UPS 3000XL APC Smart UPS 3000 (a lot older than the other two) The 3000s run off 16amp feeds and the 5000 off a 32amp feed, if i remember correctly. Which is certainly enough in terms of capacity going by experience of them running after a power cut, but it's high time i actually plan it out and make it more intelligent (shut everything down when battery level is low!) as it's one area that i've never done anything about in all my time here. I was thinking of replacing the 3 x 3000s with another 5000 and putting a management card in both. Which would actually save me a bit of space as well. I'd like some recommendations from someone more experienced in this area though?

Cheers, that powershell command does the trick

Fantastic, thanks for the info I'll give that a go! A pity that you can't do this by user group rather than computer group though. If a student logs in to a teachers PC (which they shouldn't, and we tell them not to) they'll see the AUP? And if a teacher signs into a student PC prior to having logged into any staff PCs, they won't see the AUP?

Currently when each new member of staff joins, they sign the staff AUP, internally named "Staff Internet & Computer Use Policy" this gets updated every year (if required) but previously staff haven't signed the updated one when it has changed, and we also end up with a pile of paper stuffed in a box in the server room. Obviously we need to modernise that a bit, so is there any way of showing the AUP to a user on logon, but only once, then it stores something to say that they've accepted it. Then if we change it, it can be presented to them again to be read and signed again? Ideally it would then log them out and lock their account if they decline it, but that's not essential We've just made some large changes and additions relating to data protection, password requirements, password policies etc etc. and ideally we don't want to have to print off a load of sheets, find all the staff to sign them while keeping a list of who has and hasn't and then storing them. EDIT: We have Impero, but we don't want this to appear to students, this is purely for Staff. Is it possible to customise the Impero one to only display to Staff? Currently it looks to be an All or None option on that front.

I've run a full sync but that didn't fix it unfortunately. Only the username. I can't see the email in Office 365 users list itself because my users mailboxes aren't held within office 365, but i can go to the contact in exchange online and see that it's correctly seeing the username and email correctly......with the exception of that "SIP:[email protected]" item that only appears on the contact on exchange online and not on the actual mailbox on exchange on site.

Username, but the username and email match when looking at exchange and AD internally. They're all firstnamelastname for username with @school.net set as the upn suffix. Then their email is [email protected] for their primary address. They used to be in the bloggsj format of lastname and first letter of first name, but that change isn't picked up by office 365 it seems.....i hadn't noticed until today when the decision was made to start pushing this on staff and outlaw USB devices in school in favor of onedrive. Because my users are internal, they show up as contacts in exchange online...which also shows a SIP address, this one is showing incorrectly as [email protected] and i can't change it on exchange online (due to it being a synced contact) I don't have this option in my internal exchange, is this where the issue is per chance?

I've got a few users where initially their username was in this format: "bloggsj" so lastname and first letter of first name. They then got changed into this format: "joebloggs" so firstname lastname. Their email went the same way, but was initially imported into office 365 when it was the first way. Since changing it though office 365 hasn't updated with the change. How would i go about forcing that change through?

struggling to get this one to work. I'm using Smoothwall, as a filter only and all my devices in Meraki dashboard are just coming up as "iOS Device" ...well....all except one! One actually worked, but the rest are just sat there doing nothing. Each device says "Client synchronization is not yet complete" but that's been like that for an hour now. I've set ios.meraki.com to be unfiltered and the itunes group is unfiltered ot these devices, and https inspection for those catagories is turned off to the iPads (if that even matters...i've got the smoothwall certificate installed on the iPads so shouldn't matter) all the ports specified in the firewall help page are set, and have been for a long time prior to installing the smoothwall. Any ideas? EDIT: NEVERMIND FIXED IT! It was application control policies on the firewall blocking something, still unsure what exactly, but will hopefully determine that in a bit.

Ruckus do have a cloud solution for larger deployments beyond unleashed though, maybe take a look at that? I'm told it lacks one or two features the controller offers at the moment, but might still be worth a look.

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/166112-backups-who-how.html quite recent on the same subject, should be of help

Guess i'll just have to wait and see what happens in that case! We're the largest school in the district in terms of quantity of pupils as far as I'm aware, so i'd imagine we would be a likely candidate for a central location, but i guess it's all going to depend on who else is in the MAT. Are MATs generally made up of local schools close to each other, or can you get schools miles apart within the same MAT too?

I've not gone through the whole becoming an academy thing yet, so i don't really know what happens, but are the MATs mainly made up of one large and multiple small schools, or can they be any combination of secondaries and primaries? What generally happens to the IT teams in the larger schools? Taken over? Combine with others? Stay as they are and manage the smaller schools in addition to current work? I'm guessing it varies from MAT to MAT, but now that there's finally talk our end I'm getting concerned

I'm using the salamandar soft photoexport.exe utility and i get lots of photos exported but there's one specific photo the head is after of a student who left (and is about to leave again from a staff position) that we want to export. Anyone know if/how this is possible? EDIT: actually, the quality is shocking, so even if i can extract it it's going to be just as bad quality as a screenshot would be. Doing a bit of photoshop doctoring to improve that instead. Ignore

Cisco SG500XG-8F8T? I don't generally recommend the small business switches, but i was looking for something with a similar requirement last year and found these to be the best value based on my port requirements. I've got two in a stack for my iSCSI network, they do a fantastic job.

Personally not a fan of UTM. web traffic filtering and firewall security are two entities i like to keep separate. You'll often find one company does one aspect great, and the other aspect pretty poorly, so in many situations you're compromising on one to benefit the other. My philosophy on it is to have the best of both worlds. Smoothwall is a brilliant filter, but i wouldn't recommend it as a firewall, and i'd say the complete opposite for the fortinet. No experience of iboss or barracude, but another one to add to your list would be Sophos. Of course, i've not used/seen every product, so there may be one that does both great, but if there was I'm sure it'd be more popular. For example there's a reason Smoothwall is such a popular filter, and you hear about it and it's well known because of that fact. EDIT: Just to add: doing the same thing at the moment myself. I've opted for a Smoothwall for my filtering after previously being somewhat disappointed with lightspeed, very very happy with it. Still considering firewalls though, so will keep an eye on opinions in this thread would love a palo alto but probably a fair way out of my price range.

EDIT: old thread

Turns out our system only seems to pull in active "employed" people (they didn't say that for certain, but he wasn't sure and i suggested it) but by turning off the sims link it allows me to create people directly in the cashless catering system, so that did the job, then turned sims link back on

Interesting, I'm yet to see anyone speak of this as a cypto attack front yet though? Although i guess if something doesn't exist that uses those locations, it's only time before something does. Suggestions for locking these down? (Can they all even be locked down without causing problems!?) Might stick a VM on and test some policies later.

There are outstanding schools with computers, there are outstanding schools without computers. Computers aren't the issue or the solution, they're a tool, and it matters entirely on how you use a tool as to how good the end product is. Unfortunately when it comes to computers, much like any tool, there's a lot of 'wrong' ways to use them, which can degrade the outcome rather than improve it.

Just asked our sims admin to make me an account for a random cover staff. Presumably any member of staff would need to have a valid employment start date set in order to appear in the cashless system? There's a supply account in there at the moment but hat doesn't appear in our cashless system. The only reason i ask is because my sims admin got worried and said she wasn't sure if it effects the workforce census or something? Not sure if she's being overly cautious or if that's genuinely something to take into account?

How do you guys manage supply staff with your cashless catering systems? Management have given me a stack of mifare cards, but without an existing user in sims for the system to import i have no one to assign the card to?

Transparent proxy and AD group integration.