Roberto

The same. There were a few tricky questions in there, I thought.

Not that I know anything about CC4 but isn't smartclient something you just do to... well... clients? With CC3 at least, if you wanted a server to be a member of the domain then you just joined the domain with it in the conventional Microsoft manner and that was it, job done. As it wasn't hosting any RM components it didn't need any special RM stuff doing to it. I'd be shocked if that wasn't still the case, that would be a serious step backwards in functionality.

Yes - the first user created in your office 365 account is an admin and that account can (and should!) nominate other admins for different Office 365 areas and tasks. Once you're signed in to any part of the Office 365 suite you're signed into all of it, so its not all bad in that sense.

Office 365 can be used as a "standalone" system, where you import user details into it and it creates accounts for those users that are stored in the cloud. The advantage of this is that its real simple to set up, and it doesn't rely on access to your local AD to make sign-in to a user's office 365 stuff available. The disadvantage is that if you don't integrate with AD then it becomes yet another account that both users and yourself have to sign into and manage (you can of course tell your browser to remember your password for this site the same as any other, so its arguable how much of a problem this really is for someone using roaming profiles and/or sitting at the same machine all the time) It can also be integrated with AD. The advantage of this is that there's only one account to manage for both you and the user. The disadvantages are that its a tremendous pain in the hoop to set up and that if your local AD is unavailable (e.g. internet connection is down, you're working on the AD servers, etc) then no one can sign into Office 365. As to what you get with the free academic edition, this gives you Sharepoint/SkyDrive Pro, which gives each user about 7Gb of space and makes sharing between people very simple, both in terms of sharing documents in one's own space with others and in terms of setting up shared areas that are designed for "collaboration" from the start. You can set these shared areas up, which keeps them simple to use from the end user's point of view. You also get access to Exchange, Lync and the online version of office (the latter is useful for editing documents in skydrive pro from tablets and other devices that don't directly support office or have it installed at that moment, and you get all of these things configured to work with one another "out of the box". It's not a bad deal at all, but it does require some thought about how to implement it - both as a short term and long term proposition.

We use SCCM. It absolutely is over-complicated if all you want to do is deploy operating systems with it, but it's capable of so much more than that and we make heavy use of most of its features - we've even started to manage our macs through it, and we have an eye on its ability to link to Windows inTune to manage mobile devices if the situation with Meraki ever goes pear-shaped. And don't under-estimate the time and training savings you get from being able to manage everything through one interface. If you need to use a lot of its features, if you'd be doing these features with different tools otherwise or you'd be suffering from not having access to those features, then at the nearly give-away prices Microsoft charge education for it, I'd suggest it's worth considering it good value for a tool that lets you deploy OS and Applications via the same console (ask Dell for a quote for KACE tools and that'll put the price into context very rapidly) and you get a lot of other features "free" on top of that.

The point is that just about every sales person will tell you that their wireless access points, internet filtering, vpn or other networking product is "BYOD ready". That phrase is a buzzword we can use with non-technical managers but it's got no place in a technical discussion of what products to buy to ensure your new system works how you want. If you're expecting application and device level filtering you need to carefully specify not only that you want these items, but how you expect them to work. If its unacceptable to you that your wireless users mightneed to authenticate to connect to your wireless infrastructure then once again to access the internet then you need to design a solution and then specify appropriate tools that won't leave you in that position.

Please don't take this the wrong way, and I realise you might be well aware of this, but you keep talking about being hardware being "prepared for BYOD" and "BYOD ready" and I'd be careful with that term. You need to define with the people who are asking you to make this happen what exactly you're both talking about when you talk about "BYOD ready". Is there a standard spec for what a D that someone BYOs has to be able to do before you will support it? Is there a "service level agreement" that specifies how far you'll have to go to support devices? What happens if you spec a network to work with "Shiny v1" today and someone brings in a nice new "Shiny v2" the following month and it doesn't work. Is that your problem or their problem? What are the stakeholders hoping to achieve from this? In a lot of ways, as long as you stick to a reputable vendor, what make of WAP you buy is the least difficult and least interesting part of the project - you wouldn't focus too heavily on what brand of switch your desktops were wired into as part of a project to give everyone access to a new VLE from the desktop - you'd spend more time checking that the VLE worked with your standard browser and thinking about what content users should be able to get to and how they'd get to it. Same here...

We've just moved from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012 and we're happy with it, while its still resource hungry it seems easier to get along with than SCCM 2007. As for alternatives - you mention that you don't use all the facilites which is fair enough but what do you use it for? Which facilities would you be prepared to compromise on if all the alternatives out there only offered 80% of what you wanted? For example if you said that smooth OS and app management was key for you, I might mention KACE tools from Dell as a system and software deployment/management tool but you'll find that costs for tools like that far exceed what you've probably paid for SCCM 2007 under the MS educational licence deals, and despite costing a lot more than SCCM it doesn't do nearly as much (it is very good at what it does do, to be fair.

Glad you solved it Gongalong - you can log onto each switch via the command line and issue commands to configure any aspect of the switch, and that's what I was talking about - hostname and sysname are commands in that environment. You can send commands of this kind to one or more switch in ProCurve Manager by selecting the switch(es) via the devices list, and using the CLI menu option, or you can log onto the switch via a SSH or Telnet connection (one or both of these must have been configured or else PCM wouldn't work).

Good question. Have you set the switches host name and system name properties? Are the switches configured to use DNS for name resolution? Remember PCM is just a management front end to the switches themselves. If not, you can push out something like ip dns server-address to all the switches via PCM's Config Manager --> CLI wizard for DNS and, likewise with the hostname and sysname commands for those settings but obviously those will need to be on a 'per device' basis.

Yeah, and I for one wouldn't hold a hot (or cold) drink the way that woman did in the first place either, but my point is that equally it's not quite the trivial claim that people make it out to be, either. And the coffee could be brewed at the higher temp and served at a lower one, too. Yeah, that's crazy. Some people seem to relish their ignorance and don't want to think about "here's a picture of a chicken, this is the wing, this is the breast, this is leg, now show me which part is the 'mcnugget'". I can't understand that. I'm not a vegetarian myself and couldn't imagine becoming one (no problems here with people who have made that choice, though) but I do like to know where my food comes from to some degree. At least to being aware that the beef steak I'm eating came from a cow, and that the apple I'm eating is a certain type and was grown in the EU/UK.

That's fine, but you can't then complain if you end up eating horse or dog when you purchased beef. Or GM carrots that have been irradiated, when you thought you were buying organic.

Oh, the old "coffee is hot" chestnut. Might be worth reading this. There's hot, which we all expect our hot drinks to be, and there's "causes 3rd degree burns within just a couple of seconds". I've always thought that people should have more of an appreciation of how the food arrives at the supermarket. I had high hopes, once, that all these food "scandals" might encourage people to do that but now I realise that I could shout myself hoarse about this but some people don't want to know.

I wouldn't be too quick to send them away if you need *someone* to do it because you don't have any of your own resources and/or (as @seawolf mentions) you don't have any in-house skills. What if all the other quotes you get for the job are more expensive? If you really do need multiple, complex images building and there are complications with your current AD config then this quote might turn out to be more reasonable than it appears on first look... If you're after some training to go along with the configuration work then I could easily see this running to five days work, if not more.

If you're right then they're testing a "worse case" use scenario and they're doing so consistently. Not sure how that "taints" the report? Having said that, the "report" appears to be written by a bunch of amateurs or schoolkids anyway, so I'd pay it about as much regard as I would the opinions of the person in PC World who thinks I should rip out our aruba infrastructure and replace it with netgears from them.

I'd want to see a detailed proposal of what it is they're doing for this, for example, what precisely is meant by "AD integration" here? It's not difficult to join a mac to a Windows domain, it can be done as a step during a DeployStudio installation or easily from the desktop by a technician. If you have the user's home drive specified in AD then its easy to make that mount at login and additional shares are the matter of a very simple applescript running at login. Something like this would do it (in the example below, I'm mounting a share named "private" from a windows server named "fsshared" and a share named "dvds" from an apple server named "borehamwood"): try mount volume "smb://fsshared.internal.lutonsfc.ac.uk/private" mount volume "afp://borehamwood.internal.lutonsfc.ac.uk/dvds" end try Save the script as an application using the Script Editor and put it in System Preferences -> Accounts -> Startup Items to mount the drives when you log in.

I'm seeing this in Firefox for Windows. Pretty sure it's a fox or flash issue if we're all seeing it on this range of installs

It's not the way I'd run a system, but if I was forced to give people admin rights on "their" laptops, for example, I wouldn't hesitate to lock those people out of certain areas with GPOs. So local Admin account doesn't have to mean "should be allowed to do this".

Second what's been said so far. As for charging, I'd suggest hourly plus parts, with a minimum charge of x hours (even if x=1 in your case, it makes it clear that a 10 min fix doesn't mean they can pay 1/6th of your normal hourly fee). Fixed fee would mean that if a simple job turns more complex (if a simple 'service and rebuild my computer' goes pear-shaped due to the cables being a mess or the system being too buggy to run your pre-install backup in a reasonable time frame) then you'll be operating at a loss.

Another vote for Airserver. We thought that the apple TV would be a good solution to our problems - it wasn't. It's a consumer product, it's not really designed for enterprise use and this is painfully obvious from trying to set it up for any kind of "serious" use. Buy an Apple TV for home if you fancy it and as long as you're big into the Apple ecosystem you'll probably love it. But for the classroom, Airserver just works.

This is our approach. It works well but does require a lot of investment, time as well as money, to set up. We've used this approach to connect each edge and each core together with redundant routes.

Classes don't mean anything any more. They haven't been in use since 1993 or so. You can't make assumptions about the subnet allocated to an IP address based on the address "class". I really don't know how else to put it.

This was my first thought but as the OP would presumably know if they had more than one DHCP server on the network, we're both right to check but I suspect something more subtle is going on. (And if it was a rogue server issuing addresses from a different range then this would be obvious as some clients would start getting incorrect addresses) Classful networking hasn't been in use since about the mid-1990s. I'd say it was dangerous to make assumptions on how a network is laid out based on it.

Those silly strings might not be quite so silly - they may be inverted IP addresses in hex. e.g. 010fa8c0 -> 01 0f a8 c0 (hex) -> 01 15 168 192 (decimal) -> 192.168.15.01 (ip address). If it's confined to a narrow range, my first thought would be an overlapping/rogue DHCP server that's issuing those addresses (fundamentally, BAD_ADDRESS is reporting an IP address conflict). As you mention iPads, it might not be that simple. There's an article here from 2011 detailing an issue with iPads and DHCP which could produce the issue you're seeing but you'd like to think apple would have fixed that by now. It might be worth dropping your lease time then doing an ipconfig /release and an ipconfig /renew on all your systems, but I appreciate that's not a trivial exercise.

I think my first question would be: is this only affecting apple devices or are you only trying to get apple devices to work at the moment so that's the only thing you're seeing the error with? What happens if you connect a random Windows or Linux laptop to the network right now that's not been on there before? If "something" is trying to exhaust all the valid addresses then presumably your DHCP server is showing a lot of leases. Are the leases valid? E.G. do they point to mac addresses of devices that actually exist on your network? Has it *ever* worked?