Roberto

We do full backups weekly over the weekend and incremental throughout the week. The ideal schedule is one that you as the technical authority feel confident you can recover from and one the organisation feels it can accept the risk of. We back up some SQL databases to disk on their SQL server several times a day, for example, and use volume shadow to provide interim recovery of data throughout the day because that's what the college needs.

We use Printer Installer. Used it for Windows 7, using it for Windows 10. The closest thing I have to a printer deployment issue since getting it is having to repeat "No, really, it is that easy" over and over to new IT team members who have been used to all the other methods. Though, it can't fix bad drivers if that's your issue here.

IIRC Google are quite fussy about SSL inspection/interception of their traffic. Probably rightly so in my opinion. I'd see if there were any other URLs besides mail.google.com that got used for gapps email and exclude the lot.

So very much this. If Senior Leadership think that backups are expensive, they should see the cost of losing all their data. Veeam endpoint rightly gets a lot of love. I think if they have MS campus then Azure backup can do backup to disks on a local server for free, too. Open source backup programs such as Amanda are also a thing. But backups will still have a cost unless the technician managing them agrees to work for free.

We've just switched to JIRA service desk. Good value (but not free) and very nice to use. Simple enough to set up, good mobile apps, good web app.

We're not. For us, letting the cloud provider worry about that was one of the reasons we decided to move email to the cloud.

It certainly amused me to essentially see the topic drift around "Macs are shiny and shiny is bad use of taxpaye's money so get them something else shiny like a HP Spectre". I think there may be some point in saying that someone who works remotely more than others might need a device that's better geared around remote work (which might include better battery life than normal, lighter) than the normal el-cheapo laptops we buy in bulk, so I wouldn't necessarily deride as "shiny" the need for someone in a unique role in the organisation to have unique equipment. However (and speaking as a huge mac fan in my personal life, as @Norphy can verify) I wouldn't be keen to buy something so far out of the normal range of the school's functionality and supportability for just one person. Actually the HP Spectre might not be a bad shout... but for other reasons besides "because it's shiny, but not a Mac". I can show you several Mac laptops with original chargers, none of which are newer than 3 years old and all of which are more or less 'like new'.

I know I'm drifting it slightly away from the main topic but is anyone else here a fan of the serious eats website? Kenji Lopez Alt has a good series on preparing and cooking burgers at home, including deconstructions and recipes for building your own improved versions of commercial burgers (for example, his article on making your own improved Big Mac is interesting). My partner can't eat beef so I never have anything with beef at home very often at all, but we are getting quite good at lamb burgers and other alternatives.

Hi all, We're currently looking at moving from on-premises ADFS to hosting ADFS in Azure. I was wondering if anyone else had made that move recently and had any thoughts/advice. We're looking to improve our business continuity so will also move a DC or two into Azure to support this. Is it worthwhile? Does anyone have two ADFS farms, one on-site for local auth and one in the cloud for remote auth? Any thoughts welcomed.

If I had to guess, I'd suggest long range/Active RFID tag Active RFID vs. Passive RFID: What's the Difference?

Our ADFS setup currently uses a DV certificate from JISC. Cheap. Works fine.

Ok, i wouldn't be happy with that. It's your data, you own it, you're responsible for its use. I would want visibility myself, and that's one of the good things about what we're doing, it runs on _our_ servers.

We're doing something similar to O365 as a new customer of Salamander and it works well enough. I think you're right to show concern and want to do due diligence of the process any supplier would use, I certainly wouldn't have been keen to do something with a new supplier that I had never heard of as we have potentially given Salamander a high level of access to data and services. However, they have a good reputation here and behaved with the utmost professionalism in how they approached rolling out their service with us. I would suggest if you use another supplier for a sync service that you do the same: fine one with a pedigree you can trust and ensure that they can demonstrate good working practice. Do not share credentials with them, so that if there are issues you can check which actions were taken by the 3rd party's staff and/or service.

In what sense? Our macs are domain members and ADFS auth seems to work just fine, certainly just logged me in to the Office 365 website using the logged-in user's credentials in Safari.

First things first, are you sure that you're being correctly authenticated on that computer? Are you sure the Sonicwall is seeing the right attempts to access sites itself? If the Sonicwall is not managing to authenticate you then it can't tie your usage in that session to your account. I think this would be where I'd look (sonicwall auth and/or logging) rather than Fastvue - Fastvue just reports what it is sent, if it isn't sent good logs it can't generate good data.

We've done a big exercise here on web filtering/firewall and the two finalists were Sonicwall and Smoothwall for us. We went for Sonicwall as there were a number of reasons why that edged it for us which wouldn't necessarily apply to others, but I'd say both of them are good products.

Cheers Norphy. @kirbster73 We were very doubtful about the native reporting in Sonicwall. It's probably ok for a business but totally unsuited to education needs imo. However, as you know, Sonicwall is one of the systems that the fastvue reporting server can talk to, and the reporting in fastvue is superb in my opinon. We've handed our safeguarding team their own logins to our fastvue box and (with support if necessary) leaving them to get on with things because it's easy for non-technical people to use, and they're very happy with the per user reporting. Not sure what you mean exactly by "user by user" but we can generate detailed reports of user activity on request or on a schedule. I love it. Given the focus on Safeguarding by inspectors (rightly so imho) and the poor features inbuilt in Sonicwall, I'm sure @Norphy will remember and back me up on how we were very dubious at the prospect of inspectors coming and focusing on that area but now myself and the safeguarding team are feeling quite confident about this. Bring it on!

I had one of these. You can actually get a (very old) build of Android running on it.

It strikes me as either from the very first Dr Who and the Daleks, or the films with Peter Cushing as Dr Who? I think the idea was that was how the daleks got power at one point.

I'm not convinced there's such a think as reliable and cheap in that market right now. The Fitbit flex (and a few very similar competitors) are the closest I can think of, but even there you're using "cheap" as a very relative term. If these are shared devices then the fitbit flex has the advantage that you can have lots of straps and change the active device between straps when a strap becomes damaged or dirty.

I'm doing somewhat better in my picture... there's one of me with my Borg backpack next to you later on!

When you say "make it easier", what part of the current system are you finding difficult? To be backed up properly, e.g. in a way that maintains database integrity; gives you a guarantee (as much as anything can be said to be a guarantee anyway) of a successful backup you can recover from in the event of a disaster; and prevents log files growing uncontrollably you need a product that will carry out an Exchange-aware backup which is an online database backup. There's a number of products that will do this but they're all much of a muchness in the Exchange backup part. If we're talking about just Exchange backup then actually the Exchange Aware plugin for Windows Server Backup probably is one of the easiest to work with in a lot of ways. Failing that, it should be rolled into whatever overall backup strategy you have and I'd say any reputable backup system will include agents to backup Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint and the like these days, but there may be an additional cost for those over the normal price. DPM is free and includes an agent but DPM doesn't tickle my tastebuds when it comes to something that works "easily".

Just to re-hash a similar post I made to a recent, similar thread: We've recently completed an exercise in renewing or replacing our firewall and filtering solution. We've chosen to renew our Sonicwall solution for another three years; there were several options that "ticked the boxes" for us but renewing the Sonicwall appeared to be the most cost-effective solution for us this time round. I will say that I thought Smoothwall were both very good in terms of the quality of the solution and also very competitive on price. I also found Watchguard and the Sophos UTM to be quite interesting options alongside the Sonic and Smooth walls, and I daresay I'd have been happy with any of those four from a technical perspective as well as price. I do think the solutions can be quite costly overall but this is a cost of functioning as an educational institute in today's online world. I certainly thing the cost of even the most expensive solution we looked at (and I'm talking about ones I've not mentioned here that quickly moved out of the running due to price) are considerably less than the cost of being the victim of data theft or many of the other security or safeguarding pitfalls these things help protect against.

Can't remember if it was a stroke or some kind of accident but I think something happened that left him with a disability of some kind?

Very true, but if you're running enough Windows Servers to need it then you're paying that anyway regardless of what virtual host you use. I know you know that @localzuk but its the kind of thing that cannot be overstated in a 'getting started with virtual server' thread.