Roberto

Probably compatible with Dos 1 and the Commodore VIC 20. Tried the computing musesum in Bletchley?

Raspberry Pi's time to shine. Again.

Hopefully now the end date is announced they will get moving. Any solution that relies upon basic auth in 2024 needs to get back in the sea.

I smiled at your "You need to have a frank sit down with your SLT and give it to them straight, they rely on IT for EVERYTHING nowadays." I remember having a conversation at LSFC like that with someone who said "we could still open the doors and teach if all the IT was down". We then moved into our new campus that had Salto locks on each door and that simply wasn't true - without IT you could barely get in to the campus and certainly not into any offices or classrooms - not without a big crowbar at least. Where I am now, all of our offices are protected with electronic locks as well as security on reception. People really do rely on IT for everything now and clearly the budget for IT equipment, consumables, staff recruitment, retention and training has not kept up with the pace of change into a culture that takes IT for granted in a lot of places. This is true in some businesses as well as edu/govt sector, though I think edu is probably about the worst I've seen because it's easy to underfund you guys and "get away with it". People won't die of being undereducated, after all :-(

So have you done the normal troubleshooting steps when a client can't connect to a network drive on a server? A "server may not exist" kind of error makes me think of Network settings, DNS or even some more basic infrastructure issue not quite being right. There isn't a magic "Mac go work now" button that you or they are forgetting to press.

This rather depends on the contract. Was a SLA defined? Does your org have access to legal advice - a complete lack of response could be argued that the contract has become frustrated but IANL of course?

Oh, I can think of a few.

It’s ‘good practice’ to set up an additional AD Connect server in staging mode but it is not essential. In both cases (second server or not), I’d say you want to export the config of the AD Connect server - there’s an option in the AD connect configuration wizard that makes this super easy. This export of the configuration will make it easier to recover whether you stick with just one AD Connect server, or ensure any additional servers have the same settings as the primary, because either way you import the backup/export config during setup… Secondary server needs to be in staging mode because this is a ‘read only’ mode that imports data from the directories and shows you what it would do without actually doing it; only one AD Connect server should be ‘live’ at any one time. So to make your change to include devices in the sync, run the AD Connect configuration wizard, export the current configuration, then you should be safe to make your change with a few options to roll back if it turns to custard. If I remember correctly (it’s been a while…), you can test device sync by choosing only to sync certain OUs during the wizard’s OU filtering step and placing test devices in that OU. I know this works for users and I think it works for devices too.

If you use Office 365 then it would be worth looking at Intune. Perfectly capable on both iOS and Android, and there’s some benefit to the integration of your MDM with the EntraID directory, security, etc you have for O365.

Good question. I don't love RDR2 and I'm not sure why. But it's easily got more than £20 worth of entertainment value imo.

Have you disabled the ability for people to create M365 groups, as this will also create a SPO site for the M365 group if its done in Teams? As per the box on that page:

Not recently but have been involved in implementing this for my current employer, so about 15k/20k people globally. This is all about having a single central management console for your wireless network and then each access point in each site is just one more access point in the same network whether you're in Newcastle or New Zealand. Easy. We follow the three SSID model you describe above. When I was in education, I implemented eduroam for my college which was an example of distributed roaming access from users whose authentication was managed by their "home" site but there was only one SSID and people could connect to it wherever they went. This was considerably more work than the first option (though it wasn't a huge amount of work tbh) but stealing Eduroam's model (or just joining them!) may be your best option if you have lots of disparate systems across the schools in the MAT and no ability to consolidate them.

Would rather one of the below for a data centre, thinking about servers and UPSes as well as switches. https://www.edpeurope.com/product-category/data-centre-peripherals/edp-server-lifters/ Does depend on how much use they get, but equally I wouldn’t risk mine or anyone else’s safety attempting server deadlifting these days. Figuring out the affordability of something like this or paying for installation services in a place that only requires occasional use is a health and safety question imo.

This is some of the best professional news I've had this week.

That's about 83p per person per day. If you can't recover value of at least £1 per person per day from the licence (which in business is trivially easy) then yes, Copilot for M365 may not be for you.

That's very true but we've had muggings where people have targetted a person dressed in business clothes walking around with a backpack because these days its obvious what you're doing. You're still right of course, but, yeah muggers are just pretty indiscriminate these days.

Absolutely. But the break glass accounts are meant to be just that. Kept under metephorical glass, which is only broken in the case of emergency. To ensure Confidentiality (because admin privs can be scoped to the need of the specific admin and Integrity (because actions can always be assigned to the person who took them), which is two-thirds of the cybersecurity CIA Triad, one should always use named admin accounts whenver possible. Microsoft Authenticator will support this. It is possible for one authenticator app to support MFA for many tenants, though this does preclude things like passwordless/passkeys, as this requires that the device is registered with one tenant.

Well I would certainly hope so, but it wasn't clear from the question and I thought Michael was running Hyper-V server and that it might need to be clarified as the distincition is quite important in terms of the effort required to update.

Microsoft have ended support for HyperV server 2019 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V#Microsoft_Ending_Support_of_Hyper-V_Server). They're moving to either using Windows Server Core or Azure Stack HCI (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/overview). It's one thing to keep a deprecated system running while considering your options but I'd be hesitant about upgrading to something that was already deprecated.

We avoid the term ‘post mortem’ as that suggests looking for faults, but we do carry out a change management process that includes a post-change review. It’s a great habit to build as it’s also good to capture what went especially well after a successful event, so you can do it again next time. The amount of extra work and time when an event was successful but unremarkable is negligible with our system, the payoff when things aren’t quite so smooth is fantastic.

Yup, a mature approach to incident management like this is to accept that the incident has happened and that the best course of action is to be honest about it and conduct a proper 'lessons learned' process and be honest about disclosing what went wrong and actions taken to ensure it can't happen again. The reputational damage from trying to wriggle out of it is always worse than the reputational damage from just holding your hands up and admitting to the problem.

I can't comment on this specifically but reading the thread, I wonder if their definition of a data breach is theft of data by a malicious third party.

WFH - 2x28" 4k monitor for desktop connected to Windows 365 desktop, OR 1x27" 2k Monitor, plus laptop screen for laptop. TBF, I only ever really use one set or the other at a time. There's only so much you can take in at once right? At the office 2x24" 1080p monitor plus laptop screen.

Not that Bett is my thing these days but perhaps Vendors should be booking to see you at your conveniance instead of the other way around. They're the ones who want to make the sale right? From your perspective it doesn't really matter if you're buying your Lenovo laptops from Crazy Vaclav's place of Laptops or Mumbly Joe Enterprises if they're both Lenovo Platinum partners or whatever... They could even book you through whatever calendar system you already have with whatever email system you use by sending an invite to your mailbox then all your appointments will be in one place. You could even manually add bits for lunch or meeting up with friends throughout the day. Talk about conveniant.

I have Drayton Wiser home heating, which is the standard 'smart' boiler control and 'smart' TRVs on all the radiators in our rooms. Not sure I'd buy Wiser again - nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't work with my Apple Home stuff and it doesn't seem to have taken off in quite the same way that Tado and Hive have. I thoroughly reccomend smart heating in general, especially if you're a bit older and maybe have a home that's sized for children but only have them here occasionally as grown up visitors now, so you don't need the heating on full blast in all your rooms all the time. Lets you manage your costs, lets you centrally see what temperature your rooms are at, and only heat the rooms that you need to heat.