Roberto

True but its going to be difficult in the extreme to deliver a standard curriculum using standard apps (which lets face it, is what 99.9% of teachers will want to do) without using something like VDI in order to ensure that the students have a standardised working environment. And in any case this raises another issue with people saying "lets switch to BYOD" - they get halfway down the rabbit hole before anyone thinks to say "Hold on a moment, lets define exactly what we mean by that..."

Last time we asked for quotes on a bunch of PCs without optical drives, suppliers who wanted to push HP desktops were quoting us a standard HP model that shipped with an optical drive and quoting £20 per machine to remove the drive and replace it with a blanking plate. This kind of thing is not uncommon with the really large suppliers. I'm inclined to agree with Arthur here - must be a slow news day for el reg to bang on about this because Dell, at least, are being up front about this rather than just charging you extra and trying to bury it in the quote when you try and place an order with these options.

We have 8 virtual hosts with about 60-odd virtual servers on them. I can't imagine not virtualising a large part of the server workload these days. They're fairly meaty servers, but then we're virtualising SQL servers, and Exchange servers that support 1000s of mailboxes.

We have a suite of Mac Minis running final cut pro perfectly adequately for video editing and it's what we (I work with @Norphy) will be specifying here for running logic goes ahead. We can get a Mac Mini plus a good quality Dell monitor for quite a bit less than an imac with the same size display.

Have you logged into the exchange server itself and used the management tools? It doesn't sound like you have and all these features are available via that. It's been so long since I've seen Exchange 2003 that I can't even remember how to load the coal into it, let alone much else, without looking at the managment console for a bit.

Well there's a number of different issues here: "Onboarding": the fancy name for enrolling guest devices. You need to have a mechanism in place that allows you to associate a user with their device to stop random people just connecting to an unprotected guest network. Ideally you want this to involve actually enrolling their device (e.g. using something like a device profile with an authentication certificate) and if the students are old enough to make this a useful exercise, making sure they agree to an additional AUP before they sign up, which means you can't really just set up a wireless hotspot or two with a shared passwords, as students will just share passwords with their friends. You might of course decide that actually you're happy to let this happen because you don't need anything fancier than a simple wireless hotspot, and that's fine, but its good to know that its a choice you can make. In any case, I would suggest this is a part of safeguarding - being able to see who has accessed dangerous material is obviously better than just knowing someone has. Safeguarding/Security: You would probably want internet access to be filtered. We use a sonicwall system here to filter all our users, both wired & wireless devices we own and guest devices, but there are plenty of other alternatives out there. Smoothwall is one example that's well supported on Edugeek. There's also the question of what the devices can see on your LAN. If you're just plugging wireless access points into your current network on an ad-hoc basis then you need to think about if you want the students using personal devices to be able to see what's on your internal LAN, or if you want to keep guest wireless traffic separate from your LAN and only route traffic out onto the web so they can only access your external services, google apps and the like. It goes without saying of course that the cost of a project will start to skyrocket if you need to buy in a lot of new devices and consultancy. I work for a college where we budget quite a lot of money for delivery of wireless services and I'm still not entirely happy with what we've got at the moment.

I'd actually probably go with this. Just like the other magic words du jour right now, "virtualisation" and "cloud", nothing magical happened because someone said "BYOD" in a meeting. Universities, for example, have been allowing students to plug into parts of their network (even if only a DMZ with a route to the internet) for years. Also "BYOD" means different things to different people. If you define exactly what your expectations are you can usually quickly see what you need (or at least get more useful help from suppliers); there's a big difference between going to a supplier and saying "I want to BYOD ALL THE THINGS" and "I need a price to implement the following Aruba Clearpass modules, in a nice joined up manner, to onboard the personal devices of my users".

Surely it doesn't matter if they're unionised or not. There doesn't have to be some big noble thing here, people should be able to treat others how they would like to be treated. Equally, if that's not happening you may need to stand up for that too.

Absolutely this. I actually disagree with their strike in this case... but I support the right of any union/worker to strike.

Have to agree that its the hard drive on the way out. Failing that, could be a thermal or power issue causing the CPU to be very heavily throttled.

Hmm... It looks like you have a smarthost. (extendcp.co.uk?) in front of your exchange server. I suspect that, as norphy says, they are not relaying outgoing email for SMTP addresses they are unaware of, which is good practice really.

Good to know there's a happy ending to this. As much as I personally love my macs at home and support their use in business/education where appropriate, your issue was always a case of someone going 'oooh shiny... *drool*' and its nice to see public funds not get wasted because someone is easily distracted.

Countless people can do it for you, including RM themselves by the way. Once you strip back the fancy RM front end there is nothing special about a Windows network running connect, so a conversion to a "vanilla network" is really rather trivial. I'm not saying this to be snide but rather to say that (assuming you're not doing anything that fancy on top of things, don't let any consultants bill you like you're asking them to do brain surgery in boxing gloves and a blindfold.

CD/DVD library stores. Hold 160 (?) discs each. We don't even use them any more, we had 6 full of CDs & DVDs until @Norphy and I sorted them out and threw away the stuff we didn't use any more or which we could now download from the manufacturer without any real drama and ended up keeping about 15 discs. And two of those were Windows NT 4 and 98 discs we kept for sentimental reasons rather any expectation that we'd want to use them.

This is the network management + helpdesk/support parts of our office. Just out of camera range is the dev side of the office. Also @Norphy, who didn't fancy being in the picture.

You won't break anything in AD & standard windows/mac client operation by moving objects like this, but yes anything that looks for the full distinguished name of an object in an LDAP query will want updating.

Got stuck behind some idiot in a merc this morning with no lights on. A nice silver merc, so blended in really well with the thick fog here. When I got in front of them I found out that it was worse than that: They had their front spotlights/foglights on so they could see where they were going, but no other lights on at all. It takes a stunning level of stupidity to do that.

I honestly don't get what is so annoying about it. The students already know that your computers have a local hard drive installed with files on it. If they can change things you don't want them to change then the problem is that your permissions are set incorrectly, not that the students can see something they already know is there.

My thought is that this is a losing game. Even if you lock this down all it takes is one of the apps you have to run to use a non-standard browsing tool to allow people to see the c:\ drive. Secure the c:\ drive properly using NTFS permissions (users only need to be able to write to their own user area), remember that there are (or should not be) any state secrets on there anyway, and get on with your day. That's what we do here and we've not had any problems.

I'd also suggest going for Windows 2012r2 - if money and time are limited then why not spend the money on something with a good, long shelf life which will be supported for longer, which should hopefully save you time on just having to upgrade it later. As much as I detest the start menu on 2012/8, its easy enough to live with/work around on a server OS.

I can connect just fine with Connect-MSolService -credential $cred If it still fails with that, have you looked at "Connect-MsolService: Exception of type was thrown" error when you use the connect-MSOLService cmdlet to connect to Office 365, Windows Azure, or Windows Intune

We implement RADIUS so we don't have any "the password" issues and make it available to all staff and students.

This isn't a x is the right number of vlans type of thing. It very much depends on your infrastructure, design philosophy, and goals. We have quite a few vlans defined (and they're defined on each switch too) but then we're a college with a large number of workstations, a complex set of requirements and 44 managed switches to look after, plus the usual assortment of extra dumb ones tucked here and there. Do you require separation of a group of network devices for security reasons? Then (while a VLAN isn't exactly a hard security boundary) they probably need to be in their own vlan. Do you need to route traffic around a large network? Do you need to provide alternate routes for site interlinks? Do you need to keep Ethernet broadcast domains to a manageable size? These are all questions that a VLAN might be at least part of the answer to. Have you considered getting Procurve Manager Plus? This makes managing a number of HP switches much easier.

Fair enough. You're essentially laying down a £4 bet rather than investing £100s like some people have done. I think we all know which one of those scenarios is most likely to end in tears.

So-called "digital currency" is at best a bubble and at worst a scam. Somehow your financial future is more secure if you entrust it to some guy who says his digital magic beans are somehow more valuable than everyone else's magic beans. If you're lucky and get in at the right level you might strike it lucky. You know, if you bet on the right brand of snake-oil. I mean there are people out there who 'made' money on bitcoins and managed to turn it back into real money during a high, right? On the other hand, it reminds me greatly of the old saying: "if you can't tell who the sucker at the card table is..." Yeah, I'll get right on that.