Davit2005

Our team was on a rota system about 2 weeks or so before lockdown started and that will be the plan if any site presence is needed at all for the foreseeable maybe even till 2021. I've been in once since late March and a few of the team have also been in one day only.

Could be worse, XXXX .

First couple of weeks I was enjoying working from home, was on a project and it suited me as I could start at 7am get my head down and bang out the work and finish at 3pm with a small 1hour break for lunch. I've actually arrived at work for 7am for the last 10+ years and that has meant getting up at 4:30 when I was commuting by train. Last few weeks I am struggling to motivate my self to start at 9am, seems the most productive part of the day has gone for me, always been an early starter even my first jobs were 6-8am starts. Most Sundays I am running at 6:30 and Saturdays up by 7am pre-lockdown as was ParkRun day (either running or volunteering) and that is a go at the moment :-(

That is not too bad price wise. What is business support like, but I guess that depends on the engineer/day? The one issue I had so far with BT in 4 years was a dodgy external connection which they found pretty quick. I pay £68 a month all in for FTTC, 5 IP addresses, cloud VOIP, 4G backup, 46Mb down/16Mb up. I may review the Cloud Voice at renewal as already running a 3cx system and have a few phones and a trunk set up and all working, calls are even cheaper too. As I have an extensive home network with multiple subnets and with multiple IPv6 networks I don't really want to change though. BT gave me a /56 which I was really happy about although I had to workout all the IPv6 IP addressing to get the Internet working myself, the router they supplied wasn't capable of routing IPv6 networks to my seperate firewall so I used a trusty DrayTek.

Twice left VM because of lousy support. I was originally with Cable and Wireless, then NTL and it got so much worse when Virgin Media took over. They also ran the local grid which was used at the school I worked at for IT going back a few years, the support was even worse. 3 months to get them to open up ports for Exchange and Blackberry, on going email issues with office attachments for 6 months till they admitted a fault with the router. Also having cloud backups at home the upload speed is dreadful with VM, I don't need the download speed so much. On BT Business FTTC with Cloud Voice and have a backup of 4G.

It very much depends where you want to go as @HPlum78 mentioned. PowerShell is a good call as it is used in not only Microsoft but Veeam, vCenter and a few others the syntax changes a but the basic format is cross platform and many basic commands are built in and transferable. I did a CCNA in 2003 at a local college but then done a self study MCP in Server 2005. I just scraped thru the MCP because I jumped chapters thinking I'd learn't enough thru experience. What ever you decide to do make sure you top up what you have learned with home labs etc and keep up to date with tech developments.

I think you are on right track with the equipment you have. But I'd probably agree to less daisy chain. Even consider in main cabinet taking each switch back to switch 1. You may be limited by the SFP+ ports on switch 1 but if you have remote comms cabinets with only fibre connectivity this will be limiting. Don't be tempted into using Media converters/transceivers to convert the fibre back to copper. In future you could look at getting a 10Gb core, cheap options would be Unifi US-16-XG although I'd prefer the ES-16-XG due to the more features routing. This will give you enough ports to double up on the remote comms cabinets with some spare capacity. The ES-16-XG cannot be managed by the Unifi controller but I consider the extra features and possible cheaper cost may out weigh that slight inconvenience. I had a few ES-16-XG switches at home and although they do not have enterprise features they were OK, the firmware did not seem to support IPv6 routing however and I had to restart one of them a few times.

And I'd just changed from Admiral this year fed up with their continued increases year on year for 4 years, :-( . Hopefully other big insurers will follow suit.

I'd normally be filling my car up every 6-7 days. I put in half a tank on Thursday last week, that was first fuel stop since before lockdown and not used car since.

This one is a bit old but should do the trick.

When I was on Virgin I always used Modem only mode and connected a Virtual firewall direct to the VM box. Now I am on VDSL I use a DrayTek direct on the VDSL connection and have done so for the last 2 years without any issue apart from an external cable fault a few months back. As I have multiple public IPs these are passed thru to the same virtual firewall which handles all the NAT etc. I cannot fault DrayTek as a router, I was a field engineer in my first IT role and we had easily 500+ DrayTek 2600s and 2800s at customer sites I replaced like 3 of them in 4 years. Used Unifi WiFi for a few years now and before that I had LinkSys APs so not used the WiFi on the ISPs supplied units for about 8 years now.

Other considerations worth thinking about are where you are going to have the gateway of the guest network, personally I'd put it on the firewall. This will make it easy to control what services guests will be able to access, if any on your internal network. As you should be either able to control it via ACLs on a Zone or Interface of the firewall. Do you have a layer 3 core switch capable of doing the routing for your internal traffic? VOIP should always be on it's own vlan, it is susceptible to interference from noisy devices. I seen where a phone has been put on same vlan as printers/desktops etc and it was unusable due to network noisy devices.

I could surprise you. We have about 700 switches and about 25% are 100Mb. I cannot fault HP/Aruba warranty, we have 100+ ProCurve 2650's and a few 2810's and these are still being replaced within a few days if faulty. Touch wood, we have not had to replace any HP/Aruba switches that we have installed in the last 3 years and we have installed easily 200+ in 3 new builds and 2 Major refurbs.

Firewalls frequently have this functionality builtin, it would be first place I'd look.

As well as testing with a fresh user is there anything showing in event logs on the server? I have seen profiles in excess of 20Gb before now.

User Profiles? Can you create a test user and see what the experience is?

Just need one to all support staff now, lol.

If the Citrix desktops are in a specific OU Loopback processing is your friend with this. There are 2 different settings in there just determine which one is right for your setup.

You should not need to do that, an entry on the DNS servers for the A record and make sure the VPN clients when they connect get the correct DNS servers set and the search domain is correct. That could be why the mapped drives are not working unless being connected on site first.

Are you trying the server by IP address or server name? When you ping by name is the IP address been resolved the IP address of the VM you are trying to RDP to?

If you are using HP Servers they have a memory configuration tool https://memoryconfigurator.hpe.com/ddr4memoryconfig/home/legal

APC does have either a Virtual Appliance or Software you install on Windows both free to manage UPS devices. Think it is PCNS (PowerChute Network Shutdown), but you do have to have network management cards in the UPS. I've had better results with the PCNS installed on Windows OS rather that the appliance. If you tie it in to VMWare it can even shutdown hosts/VMs gracefully before battery runs out. https://www.apc.com/shop/uk/en/tools/software-firmware/N-8jkjh8Z1ctsszz

I just love the update manager in ESXi compared with MS update, makes patching and upgrading ESXi hosts a breeze. You have to keep an eye on VMWare compatibility list before upgrades though Personally Never got on with Hyper-V, but both have some negatives and positives

Likewise, revealed I had created a website, got asked to look at the companies website due to a few issues then got asked to help the IT Manager with issues on the servers and network, lol.

I'm guessing you have tried logging in as an admin on the PC and doing a %logonserver% in the run window to see if you can actually see the logon script in the netlogon folder?