Roberto

Yes, that's certainly a statistically useful sample. OTOH @Norphy and I were talking about the iphone4s I sold to him for his partner the other day - I got it on the release date so it's a bit more than 3 years old, and its only just started losing a bit of battery life. This is a problem that plagues all the manufacturers - the batteries have a limited shelf life. Of course, if you know you intend to keep the device past two or three years then you should look for a device with a user-replaceable battery to take this into account, but the strides being made in mobile tech mean that the devices are probably due for replacement in that timeframe however you slice it.

I've got one personally and while I think its a bargain for what it is, the wireless being poor is just one of the reasons I wouldn't allow it within 10 miles of being used as a classroom device. Lovely idea for a budget personal device mind you, but totally unsuitable for professional use of any kind imo.

There are all kinds of reasons why this may be happening, as Michael's reply alludes to, but I will say that swapping out netgear because it isn't up to the job and replacing it with d-link is like saying "I needed a ford transit, so I replaced my smart car with a fiat panda."

I think that's entirely reasonable. I'm lucky that I get to play with all the platforms quite a bit so I get that itch scratched... I think you might find the Android stuff to be most suitable from what you're saying - providing you find a phone that runs a more 'pure' strain of Android as others have hinted here. There's also a website that I used to be active on called XDA developers that has a very active community for modding and supporting and playing around with Android. If you want to get under the bonnet a bit you may find that interesting.

I'm an iPhone fan myself but I think I'm open minded enough to contribute something: I think the question you should ask yourself is why are you disillusioned with the iPhone? Not so you can post it here and myself and other Apple fans can make jerks of ourselves by explaining why you're wrong ;-) but because it informs your choices for a new kind of phone. Microsoft, for example, lock down the Windows app store in a similar way to Apple so if this is part of your issue with the iPhone then a Windows Phone may not be for you. Despite their weak market position though, there are some nice pieces of kit out there and they may make a good choice if the app-store gets a few more key apps in it. Saying "I want to try Android" doesn't really do much for you - An Android phone from Samsung might be a very different proposition to an Android phone from HTC or LG,- not just in terms of hardware but in terms of philosophy around how extras work, how well the phone is supported/updated, etc. I know some people who love their Windows Phones and some who love their Android phones of various ilks just as much as I love my iPhone - and none of us are wrong but we are interested in different things. I will say I think the Ubuntu phone will crater as anything other than a curio and possibly a very low cost option for phones in 'less mature territories' (I think that's actually where the Ubuntu phone is intended to be positioned)...

You know, this is the sort of stuff that people said about the macbook air, which now looks like an entirely reasonable platform for the age we're in now. Apple might well have some things wrong here and there(*) but they're basically predicting where they think the market will go and are trying to get ahead of the curve. As for the extras/adapters - if you need an adapter plugged in all the time because you need whatever feature then Apple would doubtless suggest that you should be looking at the MB Air or MB Pro instead. It's almost like they're trying to sell a range of laptops at different levels to meet the requirements of different groups of people. Stupid Apple - such a thing will never catch on. (* I certainly think they should have added another USB 3 port, but the issue here may be that they're waiting for Thunderbolt 3 to be ready, which it isn't quite yet)

I'm a little unclear as to why switching to rack mounted servers precludes the use of tape. It's still a viable solution imo, we back all our severs up to tape, and they certainly all sit in a rack.

Yes, in fairness I should have explained what @Norphy just did - our space is big because we have a team of support people and a team of programmers all working in that space.

RADIUS was a piece of cake for us but then we've been using it for various things on and off for years and have a good understanding of how to implement it. There's no reason it has to be complex, certainly, and as for cost, if you're running a Windows network then its part of the server licence you've already paid for, assuming you have servers with capacity to run it, it's essentially free, aside from your time. If you wish to use *nix based systems then open source/free is the way to go, and again have the capacity already then its essentially free.

This is our office, view from my desk (there's another 'pod' of desks to my right, just out of shot)

It shouldn't be something you have to put up with - this is an argument in favour of implementing something like 802.11x/Radius authentication so that device connections can be authenticated by their user where appropriate, and passwords can certainly be centrally controlled and managed to lessen the blow of a change, and prevent passwords from "getting out there" where they can not.

We've got considerably more than 19 classrooms (think about 100) and still think we've got a very competitive quote from AB tutor for a site licence. I'm not going to name various companies and throw numbers around because that's unfair and improper but ABtutor's quote beats the common alternatives, who were considerably more expensive, some by a factor of 4.

What model of Sonicwall? Have you tried updating the firmware?

This is absolutely appalling - Staff need to appreciate that they have access to sensitive information about both the organisation and, more importantly, all kinds of personal information about students, some of which may well be vulnerable. I'm not sure why "don't have phones to call IT with" is relevant? It's perfectly 'workable' to have a password policy - we enforce a minimum of six letters, a change time of 120 days, and a 10 password history. Ok, some of these I would regard as a little stringent for some of the more computer-phobic people out there. What is the precise business requirement that is being served by using these choices instead of the ones I said are used at my place? (Not that I'm saying "I'm right and you're wrong" - our settings are the result of compromises between what I'd like to do and what staff can reliably handle, and I'm wondering if you've turned on all the features because you can, and a slight softening of your approach may take most of the sting out of the criticisms of your staff).

Whoever told you that? They're either flat-out wrong or talking about an option that was not offered to us, doesn't appear to be mentioned in the documentation, and isn't available on my.sonicwall.com. Sonicwall Auth works by talking to authentication servers, either/and LDAP or RADIUS. If you use LDAP then you need to install agents on the servers you are using. The issues we have appear to be a specific bug with the implementation of authentication requests when using LDAPS on our current combination of firewall and firmware version. We've been talking to their top-level support people, the ones who have access to the developers, and we're currently trialling a fix but it has taken several months to get to this point, which is why I have pause in recommending this as a solution to education right now (To be fair, I still consider it to be overall a pretty good solution and I'd have no issues suggesting it for a business whose requirements placed less of a strain on this part of their system). We're a college, not a school. We've trialled some of the other solutions mentioned in this thread in the past, but our traffic throughput and filtering needs tended to leave even their higher capacity systems crying to themselves in a darkened corner of the server room. The Sonicwalls keep up with our traffic throughput very well and have considerable headroom for growth... though you'd damn well hope so with clustered 5600s right? Having said that, I agree with your comments about the filtering not being ideal, I'd prefer to use the sonicwalls alongside something like websense for filtering, but budgets must and all that.

We use a cluster of NSA 5600s. I'm honestly not sure I can recommend the sonicwall solution at the moment, due to what appears to be a massive flaw in how it handles authentication of users to the box, which is (arguably) required in order to monitor connections for safeguarding, and also for filtering different groups of users.

What do you mean? We use a little utility that stops drive letters clashing with network drives but other than that, we really don't care too much.

It sounds a lot like you're trying to create mail.newdomain.com as a record in the oldschool.county.com zone. That simply will not work. You need to create a new DNS zone for the new domain name if you haven't already. Have you, or someone else, done that? Once you've done that you can create a new A record for the IP address of the mail server, and then a MX record pointing to that address.

You can do similar with Exchange Online too, but I wouldn't really class this as a reliable backup in the case of either provider. You couldn't count on a user having done this in a DR scenario and you could hardly use this backup as a reliable basis for investigating the user's email usage, for example. Journalling might be adequate and is a supported scenario for Exchange Online, but still wouldn't give me the warm and fuzzy "backed up" feeling.

That's a name I've not seen in a while. Trying to think how long ago it was that she worked here...

IIRC you need a "supported device" See https://support.google.com/edu/android/answer/3402682 and https://support.google.com/edu/android/answer/3434383?hl=en&ref_topic=3309012 - unclear if this is just for the management tablet or if all devices need to be supported. I suspect the latter. Not sure about the licence - I get the impression that you need to purchase a "supported device" and can't just rock up with a random tablet you found down the back of Mr Tesco's cereal aisle but at no point does it actually say that plainly :-(... but this would also fit in with "supported devices only". It might not be quite what you're looking for but I'm sure the tablets could be managed to some degree via solutions like Meraki?

I can only suggest reading this. If you want a local backup (in the traditional sense) of the exchange server hosting your emails in O365 then cloud email might not be for you. There are options out there. A couple that spring to mind are using journaling to "backup" messages, tools that connect to the mailbox as if they were clients and back up the mailbox contents that way, tools like cloudfinder can all be made to work to some extent... however, you're engaging a service, not renting a server and this obviously limits what you can do somewhat. If you have business requirements that cannot be met without having your own "proper" backups then I would say Office 365 (and any other cloud solution) are not for you.

We migrated to Windows 7 in 2012, and will be migrating again to Windows 10 in summer 2016. XP is both impossible to secure and difficult to support, and keeping it on the network would be a huge risk and a false economy in my opinion.

{...} Those two statements don't really go together. As others have said, you should give them delegated access to whatever it is they need via remote admin tools on their machine. Don't allow people who are not domain admins and who you don't want to be domain admins to log into a DC interactively.

Likewise. We use GPPs to construct the start menu and the same settings work equally (and very) well on Win 7, 8.x & 10.