jbailey

Hello, For anyone interested in an IT Support Officer role (AKA Technician) please see below. I am the IT Manager at the org, it's a National Charity and is a great place to work - but obviously i would say that If anyone has any questions about tech\IT Dept please PM me. The perks Dress code is relaxed, working is flexible and there will most likely be some occasional travel around the UK and overnight stays for projects work and to visit our data centers (Expenses covered). Possibility for training, MS certification costs to be covered and to gain a lot of experience with various systems etc. Laptop and phone provided. As a previous school IT Manager I know all the best techies are there... So if you fancy a change but don't want to be working for the man this could be for you! IT Support Officer, Hatfield, £20,492 per year, 35 hours a week, Permanent. The IT Support Officer will supporting staff across the organisation as part of an internal IT team of a National Charity. This will involve providing daily technical support to staff using Service Desk software to log issues and keep users up to date with progress and providing support face to face, over the phone and via remote control as required. Experience of working on an IT help desk or in a 1st or 2nd line support role, including frequent contact with users and others on IT issues. Experience of developing good relationships with other departments, providing customer focused IT support and communicating complex IT issues in a clear and understandable way to non-IT experts are essential. Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, good organisational skills, including the ability to prioritise work are also essential. We are looking for someone who has good experience and knowledge of PC desktop and some experience of server operating systems and services including Windows 7\8\10, Windows Server 2008\2012, Microsoft Office 2013\2016\365, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft DNS, DHCP etc. Any knowledge of database management, Microsoft SQL, Access and general coding knowledge would also be very helpful. The application from, job description and further details can be found on the website: Family support worker jobs and more from Family Lives Application forms for this post must be submitted by email using the Family Lives application form to [email protected] or sent to HR department, Family Lives, 15-17 The Broadway, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, AL9 5HZ (CVs will not be accepted).

Anyone seen this, used it or tried it?

Found this the other day but not had time to play yet: https://office365drivemap.codeplex.com/ Anyone had a look at this?

My understanding was that hp "stacking" was for Management only, I used to do this but don't bother now, similar question on hp site but for 2910. http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Switches-Hubs-Modems-Legacy-ITRC/stacking-2-HP-Procurve-2910al-switches/td-p/4792177#.U779Sdq9KK0

Have had new ranges assigned by lea's at a few schools. As long as you document and plan it's not such a hassle, I would ask them. I wouldn't want to rig something up to work around it myself, not if I can just move to a bigger range.

You may want to look into the following: admin - sp admin - user profiles - Manage User profiles Manage User permissions Profiles allows you to hide some settings, we have whittled down what information can be on a profile. Permissions allows you to customise who can see/do what - funnily enough... Not necessarily specific to your needs, but This may help you achieve some restrictions I that area.

no one has ever complained about it causing confusion tbh.

True, but I have have found lots of training can still lead to massive underuse of transformative technology

Some things i would be thinking are: Do you mean huge as in cash huge, if so how are you going to protect yourself and your hard work from getting handed over to the school while you get sent back to your day job? Who actually owns your code? If your doing this for your school, in school time, and getting paid for it then it all belongs to them no? How well documented/upgradeable etc will it be? Are you always planning to be there to keep it running and fix it, how are you going to manage at alongside your normal duties? Again, if it's huge as in cash huge, do you need to think about putting some protection on your ideas so you are acknowledged, intellectual copyright etc?

Oh, our actual tills are embedded so not doing Anything we with them. Just looking at the office machine.

Had a cost of 250 quid - essentially a one day engineer fee - from cunninghams to migrate canteen office machine to new hardware and windows 7, this was unofficial via email convo with cunninghams rep. Would be good to know I'm not getting the paddy pants down treatment if anyone else has any price info. The kit was purchased through our lea who will not be upgrading any machines as "there is no features benefit to moving to windows 7".

Oh yeah, sorry was thinking of the old live@edu password sync I had to remove. (cough) bedtime... (Cough)

Just to add, Using the latest dirsync and password sync doesn't require you to wait for the cycle for password to change, the password sync is a separate process you install to dc servers, and password changes are synced "instantly".

Sorry to bring this up again.... but yes that is how ling it has taken me do get my head around Powershell :$ I have a working script, a bit of both of those combined - thank you. I have a server that runs azure ad sync and If I manually, aka right click and run as administrator - the script runs and does what's required changing a test account to the correct licensing choices, super duper. So I have setup scheduled task to run this, I sued this guide: How to schedule a Powershell script using Scheduled tasks in Windows Server 2008 R2 | MicrosoftPro.nl However It appears that the schedule - set to run every hour, doesn't "kick in", but if I manually run the task, it does run BUT doesn't appear to actually run the PowerShell script, nothing much in event logs to go on from where I am looking, but scheduled tasks reports its fine and dandy and did start PowerShell, I have set the schedule to run as a domain admin, and its the same account I use when manually running the script. Just hoping someone may take pity on a poor old GUI tick box checker like me and get me over this final hurdle!

Thanks, Re price - yes, didn't really think about it tbh. That's an interesting article, I had not seen it set out like that where there is not a further level of hyper v nodes above the sofs nodes and with hyperv enabled on the sofs themselves. Would be interested I looking at building something like that to try this out, sofs/storage spaces does look fun, but didn't see much in the way of low cost boxes when I first looked on the list of supported kit for this kind of setup, I think the jbod in the article was the only on on it

I think your thinking of scofs in relation to option 2. http://www.petri.co.il/windows-server-2012-smb-3-scale-out-file-server.htm I looked at this when 2012 was released but just don't see what the advantages are. Seems to just be over complicating things and ultimately relying on less reliable storage than a San would provide.

yes, Remote Desktop Session Host Virtualization or whatever it is called this month :0 Re old servers, depends really we have used some as backup data\storage machines, sandbox vm hosts for testing, some techs have taken boxes home for test rigs, have used some as emergency "fail over" servers for junior schools we support, but when they are totally past it we pull the drives and recycle them with this company: PRM Green Technologies and the really the ones with wheels we keep for corridor racing in the summer of course...

There's has been an argument in schools about how to get the right kind of politicians, ones who have a conscience and an ounce of common sense to make decisions affecting "average working" people in this county, successive groups of voters have got this wrong by actually voting because the underlying problem of course is that most politicians are privileged toffs who come from public schools and know nothing about the real world, they only know about fiddling expenses, a lack of morals and getting back hander jobs as corporate advisors when they leave office. But what do I know, my underlying problem is I am a graduate and it worker so what do I know about politics, conversing with mice, building planets, quantum mechanics, astral projection or motorcycle maintenance...

we run RDS for internal thin clients and remote access. I see lots of schools get into tinkering with rds using old pcs, I tend to think this is a mistake as you still get all the hassle of old dying machines and users don't tend to see the advantage if the performance is not great - cot as well as using old desktops the it guys whip up some old\used\under spec server to give it a try with. We have about 100 thin clients, when I started I inherited a system and I hated it, but the server backend was under powered and the school used clunky old desktops as clients - I didn't see the benefit and people avoided them if they could. It was like putting in desktops "for effect" so the room didn't look empty... After we sussed out how it worked we improved the RDS server resources and invested in some proper thin client units - n-computing boxes, we are finishing a replacement of all old desktop thin clients this year with n computing units. we install software for them on to the rds servers, setup round robin connections on the clients, they boot in seconds, connect directly to the logon screen of the server ready for users to logon via a admin "connection" ad account and the servers provide a "near enough" user experience to windows 7. But it is compromise - no its not exactly the same as win 7 desktop - no aero for one, no its not as good as our it suite machines with i3 cpu, 4gb ram and ssd drives, no its no shiny and cool VDI etc, but it gives us 100 desktops for student use in the library and drop in rooms and for desktops for staff with low usage requirements - reception, site management team etc for a lower cost than fat desktop or VDI and it is easy to manage and generally works pretty well. We run 2 x hp servers, gen 6 series so not that wizzy, loads of ram, sas disks, quad nics and we run 8\10 vms on each server in hyperv and manually load balance desktops across these servers, if a physical server failed we would need to reboot the thin clients and they will round robin through a list of machines and connect to a available rds server, we use loop back gpo etc, there's no central management as such, we can connect to all thin clients from any of the rds servers with the n computing software installed to do any client config, firmware updates, tweaking etc. We can do remote support to the sessions on them if required. To be honest I am pretty happy with it, just a pain we have to migrate to new hardware this year as the warranty is up on the gen 6 servers, still I am looking forward to trying hyper v 2012 on the new boxes and I believe its still a cheaper system than vdi - which still confuses the heck out of me most days to be honest. What we have works, is simple and two of us understand it all in house - so that's all good in my book we looked at various VDI options last year and the school thought performance was good enough when compared to the costs of VDI and decided to stick with using the RDS servers for now. my 2 cents

Hello, Sorry to resurrect this but... I am in the same boat, and its something I have finally got round to looking at. Does anyone have an example script for this? looking to assign a licence to students and a different license to staff depending on an attribute in ad account or if belonging to an ad group if that's possible? thanks

Nested not cobbled.

Virtual box vm machine doesn't need a network card for access to folders/shares on the host, also you can lock down access to features of the vm like changing boot orders/ creating new machines etc and you can have a vm image set as "immutable", so on a reboot the machine reverts back the the image as it was - like rolling back a snapshot, so students cannot "break it". It works really well in my opinion and gives you zero security concerns to worry about.

thanks, we have used the hp micro servers at other sites for backups, but hand thought of using free nas \open filer on one - thanks. That would be a cheap option, but ideally I want something I can hassle someone to send a replacement for if it breaks, not get bounced between the box maker and the software maker etc. have used free nas before and liked it, like the idea of a supported box from them, have asked for a quote. I am certainly going to have a play tonight with free nas on my home hp micro server to see what its like as not used it for a number of years. Still think the Synology boxes look good and possibly stretching to the more advanced 5 bay would probably fit costs wise - at a push, what's all the crying about I wonder? will search. given me a bit to think about, thank you.

I have come across a few teachers that appear to be of the same vintage as the photos mentioned above... does that count?

Hello, I am looking for some help on suggestion for some NAS boxes for backup use. Currently I backup server and user data to servers on site in a separate location to server room, not what I want to be doing and ideally want to have something to go off site. Servers to backup are virtualised, I currently do file level and image based backups. I use Dpm 2012 and phd virtual backup systems for this. I am testing with Dpm to Azure off site backups to see what costs are like for sending user data to azure, but would want to backup server data\images to something I can take off site. have previously used tape loaders at other schools but don't really want a tape loader system if I can avoid it. SIMS\SMT\Finance data goes off site to Rbuss, but don't really want to pay LEA for more storage for that. So I am thinking of 2 identical NAS boxes (possibly a reserve diskless unit in store) and having one off site with a clone of all server images and having one on site getting updated with new images, then swapping them every week\month\half term etc to fit DR plan. This wouldn't replace the backups we are doing on-site\rbuss\azure but would be in addition to them to provide better DR options and I plane on cloning the server images to an offsite server to store for long term data retention\test\DR purposes. So, I don't have a lot experience with NAS boxes to be honest, I inherited some drobo boxes here but have replaced them with server based storage as I didn't like them much. I would need something "pro\enterprise" rather than "home\soho". Don't really want to go down the micro server type root, would prefer something witch embedded OS rather than a windows box. need some form of reliable raid for the boxes 1\5 and nested options ideally, need to take at least 4 x 2 or 4 tb drives, and hot swap components would be good. need to be able to carry it to my car so not a rack mount and reasonably robust. needs to be 1gb ISCSI plus usb 2\3 would be good as a fall back and work with a server > switch > nas type setup. other features like file server\networking\ftp etc. would be handy but not essential. Want to buy them driverless and add my own choice of drives. I see some people have used qnap and synology devices, but not sure what kind of performance \build quality these are? Have found the following unit, which looks suitable in features \price, qnap stuff seems a bit cheaper but more home user focused? http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS412-DiskStation-Diskless-Enclosure/dp/B007JLE84C open to suggestions thanks in advance