Roberto

That’s good of your local solicitor, but unfortunately that service wasn’t available when I went looking for quotes. I was given a set of requirements based on SLT and external auditors recommendations to our governors audit committee and I made the best effort I could to find cost effective ways of meeting their requirements.

£1500 is the quote I had for off-site storage of data tapes in a vault iirc. The replacement rate is based on a reasonable wastage figure plus the need to archive data, so it’s not a standard rotation. LSFC has a lot of servers, and the arcserve quote was competitive with the alternative. Not sure what else to say, the quotes had a lot of scrutiny from slt, governors audit committee and they wanted it.

When I worked for LSFC I saved them something like £12k a year by moving backup to a cloud service (https://itsalwaysmyproblem.com/2018/08/26/backup-to-the-cloud/), and possibly something similar to deliver a redundant ADFS setup with load balanced Azure instances instead of an on-prem solution that offered equivalent redundancy and availability. Can’t discuss numbers sorry but where I work now is “cloud first”, and often using cloud-based XaaS to deploy some services because our requirements for redundancy and low RPO/RTO is often better met by cloud.

Work key ring? I have an ID card for each of the two offices I’m based in, local and city. They get me in, and wherever else I need to be. Actually was th same at the college. It’s been years since I’ve needed bunches of keys to work.

Presumably your browsers all open to a standard intranet page? Put the info on there. I'm going to say that 99% of people will open their browser at least once during any computer session. And the users who "don't read emails" will continue not to read them there by the way. Or anywhere else you put them, assuming that getting it tattooed to the foreheads of the ones who go out of their way to avoid noticing signs isn't allowed, so your management will need to accept that reality too.

Ok, unless your idea of “well over” is at least double, that’s a fraction of my budget just for operational expenses (e.g. software, toners, misc odds and ends) at my old employer, a 6th form college. As of right now, comparisons are unfair because it’s a different field entirely, but I think I committed us to spending that on one minor project during a 30 min Skype call this morning. No wonder things are fraught, I’m sure you’re doing the best you can to secure that funding but it’s unlikely to be enough for your IT team’s needs.

SLAs actually have the potential to be a rod to beat IT teams with, which might explain the reluctance of the IT staff to engage with them, however, if a SLA is constructed with sympathy to both the resources available and the needs of the organisation then they can be useful to both sides; if we establish a SLA of 1 day for provisioning an account, for example, then while this might mean people asking questions of IT if it takes more than one day to create an account, it equally provides a shield for the IT team from people expecting this to be done instantly. Equally, the IT people can say “well if you want a guaranteed fix for a broken iPad in *that* timeframe, you will need to fund a replacement stock of 10% sitting in the cupboard ready to go,and it will take *x* long to set up a replacement so we need *y* staff time available to meet that which means hiring *z* staff...” which might well focus the minds of people asking for a rolls Royce on a Lada budget.

To be honest, mixing roles between file server and DC bothers me far more than in-place upgrades on otherwise perfectly working DCs (not that this is ideal...), but you play the cards you’ve got in your hand. Anyway, backup first, obviously, and when you upgrade to 2016 you may find the netlgon service isn’t running and will need to be set to automatic start before things settle down. This is obviously going to stop the DCs functioning correctly until it’s fixed, so only do one at a time unless you enjoy nothing working at all on your network.

Second this. I use a very heavily cabled up thinkpad usb c dock at work, just one usb c cable to connect this to my laptop and everything works great like this. That’s the standard way of doing things and it delivers a consistent desktop experience wherever you are, which is not a bad idea for classroom use, I’d say.

This is my old job. The college is a good place that looks after its people. I do recommend it.

Same on Serverfault - we see so much snake-oil spam from pst/ost recovery spammers on any post related to Exchange recovery that it's unreal.

I believe you have my stapler?

That's exactly what Wiser gives us. I can set the temperature by zone (room), or by radiator if I have more than one in a room. Want it to be 19 degrees in the guest bedroom and 18.5 in my room from about 9.30 onwards? No worries. I think a few other people do the same kind of system too? (Hive?) It also means we can run the gas fire in the living room because it looks nice and gives an immediate hit of warms if we've just come in from the cold without worrying that we'll end up either sweltering in that room because the radiators kick in too, or freezing elsewhere because the thermostat (previous house owners had sited a nest in the living room) thought things were just swell because of the fire and didn't do anything for the rest of the house.

In terms of "smart home tech", we've had the Drayton Wiser system fitted and I'm really happy with it - and more importantly, my partner who feels the cold something dreadful is also happy. This uses a WiFi-joined boiler controller that lets you control heating and hot water via an app/scheduler/IFTTT and also has "smart" TRV valves on your radiators which are also thermostats, so can take accurate temperature in a room and control the heat in each room individually, again, via app, scheduler, etc. These TRV/Thermostats can also do things like detect drafts from open windows and change behaviour accordingly so you're not trying to heat the world outside. This works well if you've got a large family home that doesn't have the kids in it any more and you only need to heat the rooms you're using now. Using NetGear orbi for wifi in a larger house too, which works quite well. I would probably look at ubiquiti if I needed to do more with WiFi again tbh.

And given the volume of data to be processed by both the system and the people looking at the dashboard, there's better returns to be had in focusing tightly on those requirements directly instead of insisting that everything is "live" and somehow expecting the magic to happen.

We've had this with a mac technician in our media department who logged in to their mailbox on an old mac and didn't make the connection when we asked about leaving himself logged in on older devices. Also this particular person thinks Macs "never ever need a reboot" and won't do as he's asked by the helpdesk team so... well you can imagine.

This is what I'm getting at. There might be specific needs to protect some data or some services beyond the service offerings, but the idea that we need to back up these services in O365 because that's what we used to do when it was on-site isn't true in my opinion. There are very good tools for service availability and data protection and resilience built in to the service. But in fairness, it's a huge head-rush to truly start living that approach.

Luton Sixth Form College are looking for a Data Systems Developer (Full Time, Full Year). Working 37 hours per week Monday to Friday between the hours of 8.00am and 4.00pm, for the full year, a degree of flexibility is required. You will assist with the development and maintenance of our data systems, including the following responsibilities: • To maintain and develop in-house MS Access applications (Access front end, SQL Server back end). • To maintain and develop in-house SQL Server databases and SSRS reports. • To support SQL Server based 3rd party applications. We are looking for a candidate who ideally: • Has strong MS Access skills, including reports, forms, queries, macros, VBA. • Has a working knowledge of T-SQL, including creating tables, views and stored procedures. • Has a working knowledge of SSRS. • Has experience of related technologies e.g. HTML, .net programming Sixth Form Colleges’ Support Staff Pay Spine point 28 £22,490 rising to point 31 £24,651 with annual increments based on service and performance related criteria. My job (Infrastructure Manager) will be going up soon too, as I'm moving on out of education at the end of this month, but isn't quite ready yet. Keep an eye on the FE Jobs site if you're interested as I can't guarantee it will be posted here after I've left!

I'm not talking about tracking cases, sorry (though CPOMS is the right place to do this, we use it too), I'm talking about being able to validate questions over whether or not certain emails were sent or received from accounts under investigation. Currently with on-site email servers, if you get a question as to an inappropriate message being in mailbox x on date y you can restore a backup of that mailbox on that day and give a definitive answer about whether or not it was there.

I'd suggest that Microsoft's data protection and retention policies are targeted more at availability of the service in general and mailboxes in particular, and in the real world that's fine... but you need to make sure you understand the implications of that. We're not doing any additional backups, but you really do need to decide for yourself what the risks are you're worried about and how best to mitigate them. For example, we're using Mimecast as an archival service which means we can pretty much track sent/received emails for safeguarding purposes in the event of an incident, so that reason to have a snapshot of user mailboxes at a moment in time, which might be one reason to backup mailboxes, isn't there for us. In either case, I'm a little wary that lots of people who tell you that you need to back up Office 365 because "Microsoft don't back your data up" might be technically correct but are intentionally muddying the waters of how Microsoft / Google protect data because they have a product to sell.

I love my FireTV. That is the one techie product I think Amazon have got unequivocally "right". I like the Echo too, I always thought it was a great product and my partner got me a Product (Red) Echo for Christmas this year which looks lovely and supports a cause I support, but as much as I like the echo, there's some real concerns around that here and there :-\

Oh ye gods Yes! I have no idea if it counts as officially "traditional Christmas dinner" but that's how mum and dad served Christmas dinner to me when I was a wee bairn, and it's how Mrs Roberto's family always served it to her when she was little and it's what we have now, so that's traditional enough for me.

That's good news. I thought that SCEP for Mac practically was ESET anyway, so that's all good.

Direct Access has been deprecated. That doesn't mean it's going to turn into a pumpkin overnight for anyone already using it (we are) but it does mean that you'd be crazy to do a new deployment. Instead, as 3s-gtech suggests, the Microsoft route is Always-on VPN. Besides, Direct Access is not a panacea. It can (did?) work very well but was something of a pain to get going and get to proper reliability I find.

Yep. That's all mentioned in my write up at the link I included above. None of it is that difficult to set up either, though it's poorly documented by MS and some of the settings that SSPR from login uses conflict with some of the settings that we might typically set in education around login screen.