rich_tech

When your doing any work like this, Turn off any backup imaging programs like veeam that may be scheduled to run when your working on it, they use snapshots and can kick off a nasty issue where you have to use vi and edit disk files manually and their parent file entries as I found out recently

Aldi’s diet cola offering does that to me for some reason, think it’s brand is FreewAy, I also like Classic Cola and RC here which was at the same time of virgin cola

Studying for ccda here as my next platform/renewal

I wouldn't pay for that either, there are lots of free options with help desks and you can usually find one to suit after a bit of trial and error. I have used and trialled Spiceworks, ManageEngine Service Desk Plus, HESK, iTOP, OSTicket and Sysaid https://blog.capterra.com/the-7-best-free-help-desk-software-tools/

I think the class action will be telling there in the US, it has long been rumoured about the obsolescence, I noticed that this was an issue all the way through owning Apple products that I have had, my 4s slowed down hideously after I upgraded that way back

I’ll wait on the uk pricing for that then, my 6 plus is out of warranty and the battery has been struggling lately because of these updated, I’m now getting about 12-18 hours out of it and charging it in car on way to work

you have to be weary if your azure environment wasnt set up properly or done by a third party, the one I have inherited at my workplace was and it wasnt done particularly brilliantly, both servers were A2 for a simple DC/ADFS setup that didnt need to be made at all really given how office365 syncs, but they were done that way and it was made with that higher quality of server than needed with the A2s, to which I have toned them down. It was based in the classic environment, I have since setup the entirety of our operations within the Resource Manager side of Azure. I would say it takes a fairly decent amount of time to suss out Azure properly and the more you use it for different things the more it does indeed cost(I am no longer in education, so costs I see may not be comparable, I dont know if MS subsidises Azure for you guys in education these days). Veeam has already been mentioned and it is excellent as a tool, its an excellent tool for exporting VMs to azure also, I have used it for that successfully on two servers now and I am slowly migrating and archiving servers to the cloud for legacy holds rather than keeping aging hardware going. Company I work for has at the moment 11 VMs up the cloud with 8 on regularly(mostly A0/A1/A2, with a couple of D2s and an higher end E class server(the servers can be configured to switch off at times to save money which is a big help and saves big money for some of the high end stuff we use), file and server backups, static IPs and networking, databases and file storage and we are looking at around £800+ a month for our use at the moment.

you can get a free switch, AP and even a security appliance(small firewall), as others have said, they will ring you initially, especially when it was done as an evaluation for switching as we were doing a mass update, but we went with another provider in the end.

Hubic are cheaper and have been mentioned a few times before on here

I have used veeam as a conduit for transferring VMs up to azure as well, thats worked fine with their product in the backup suite they provide.

I have done this in the past, exported a VM off to a standalone computer to fix stuff and look at issues with applications on it then reimported it onto the domain again. Because an issue with a DB this product runs took down our whole sites main ERP system historically, so I had to check it all out offline in isolation before reimporting it again.

I started a trial of this today and it was a bit hit and miss installing to some computers on my network with AD I found

I wish I could settle on a single browser, but I have multiple things kicking off that require different formats, remarkably IE is still in the mix for a couple of things that are plugin dependent :/

If he's involved, its likely because it is firmware related (KM use their own versions of counter firmwares iirc for some reason), that server shouldn't have any issues with the software

Firmware on the mfds may need upgrading with the pCounter version, going by previous there, I would say check KM support the version too, if you upgrade it and they have known issues they might suggest a downgrade (that happened before there)

to be fair I did an exercise in Azure yesterday and today which has probably dropped about 300 a month off it from the costs which is good (some stuff was put in place by a 3rd party company when I started here, which I have improved and scaled back upon and there was a little bit of duplication in setups I found) To clarify, I am indeed putting our EOL infrastructure up there and migrating a lot of stuff from Citrix to VMWare to Azure(long story there, dont ask....), some of its going to be basically kept deallocated and isolated then when it is migrated and retained for our legal hold periods. Its good, lot of learning needed though prior to make sure you dont waste money and also I would say that it isnt the magic bullet either. Some stuff cant be done from their servers (DHCP is one such service) and also its a PITA when you hit the arbitrary limits and have to raise tickets to get things like vCPU amounts increased.

We are pay as you go here, not schools agreement, I am in the middle of a consolidation exercise here with it, our products account for a fair chunk of the cost

I am migrating our company to azure hosted services for a lot of stuff, I dont know if schools get discount from the pricing for VMs comparatively, but it is not cheap for that type of virtualisation hosting (though I gather its cheaper than some alternatives comparatively) and I would urge you to be weary looking at it, given the tight finances at schools. Storage and backups is fine with it as already pointed out by @localzuk, that is fairly inexpensive and decent enough to rig up easily, but regarding the VMs and using them as you would a normal server, be very weary of the costs, the first two tiers of the A0 and 1 Class servers are fairly pointless as they creak along slowly and painfully, so your looking at A2 minimum for the server not to creak and chug along. As a guidelin at the moment, ours is just over 1100 a month, we have 10 VMs up there (and I still have 7 more to add there), backups, 2 of these servers are higher end D2_V2_Promo, the rest is a mix of A2 and A1 for a couple of things where you can just leave a web app run and not care about speed. Its gone from 220 pcm when I started to this with two simple VMs on there, just by adding on servers and storage. Also - it is worth stating that if your late paying the invoice or CC bill, M$ will pull the plug on all your services immediately until you hastily pay (that happened to us before I worked here apparently)

I thought you always put more than you need to at that part, I tell mine 22000 miles, I do a little over 19/20,000 miles a year here (80 miles a day around trip to work), for some reason here, my insurance renewal is the week before christmas, so its extra painful

Dreamcast was an outstanding console, with straight arcade conversions, Soulcalibur2 on there and crazy taxi are in my top ten all time computer games list, it was marred by the inclusion of its 33.6k modem I felt, considering 56k was the norm at the time

Its not a surprise in this day and age sadly, hope the people can all find jobs elsewhere. I noticed where we work, even some of the major suppliers now have their own staff undercutting their "Gold Resellers" to have us deal with them directly on gear, its getting to the narrow end now that "Cloud Cloud Cloud" seems to be the mantra everywhere.

It can be hard to get motivated for them, especially if your doing the bulk of it outside of work like I was in my own time with my CCNA Depends how you learn too, I pick stuff up better from watching videos/lectures/apps and labs instead of reading the book. That being said, you need to read the books as well and make a conscious effort to do it as they tend to fill in the blanks outside of the topics of other study materials. Booking the exam is good motivation in itself as well, which I have seen you have done already there.

If he’s mentioned Citrix, I would take it as being xenserver

Can you look to clear up the stickies on this forum ? 13 is a lot of stickies for the top of the forum, some seem to be quite old and possibly not worthy of being stuck ? Thanks, Rich

Most Draytek routers support 4g failover, it only gets awkward when you want Vpns, we had to switch to cradle point routers for that as we had to do lan access Draytek and a dongle with a prepaid sim may be your easiest route to just web access