MartinT

Oh, BMS, I do remember having one of those. We had to give Facilities remote capability to that server as they seemingly needed to tweak it at all hours of the day and night. Our own Derek was at a previous school. A box running Linux and goodness knows what (some kind of POP and SMTP for mail) that needed to be kept running or else e-mail into a single secretary would stop working. I finally got rid of it by moving to an Exchange Server a couple of years later.

PE staff are the worst for technology and for writing prowess. I used to help out with report reading and the PE ones were shockers.

My opinion is that the illustrations are a minor part of the enjoyment of the books. It would not bother me in the slightest if they were in monochrome.

When we finally got rid of Firefly, there were few tears shed as uptake had always been patchy. The problem with all intranets is that they wither and die if they are not kept up to date and relevant. You want them to become the source of all information but some departments just would not partake. The result was inevitable, and it was a budget burner.

I didn't realise Mr Pemberton would reappear in greater detail in Book 2! As for the BYOD fiasco, you have brought back memories I had buried deep down about the amount of support just the Sixth Form required for BYOD. Not just implementing the authentication system so that our Smoothwall could continue logging their activities for safeguarding purposes, but the number of hand-me-downs from parents and older siblings. Old Windows versions going back to XP, ancient iPads well out of warranty, Android tablets, Chromebooks, MacBooks out of support, and a notorious laptop running Linux that must have been a failed Daddy experiment. Almost none were up to date, nothing had working anti-virus (lots of expired trials, though). All were walking dangers to the network. An utter support nightmare. Sadly, our introduction was not revoked, we just had to live with it.

I had to laugh out loud at the arrogant new teacher Mr Pemberton bringing his MacBook and expecting it to be connected to the network. I had exactly that same scenario a good few years ago. Always astonished me how little Apple users understand their own devices. My response was negative, too. He ended up with a perfectly good Windows laptop and still tried to do his work on the MacBook. He then tried to get our help by issuing constant tickets about it. By that time, I knew he was a bit of an arse generally and shut the conversations down completely.

I shuddered every time the Head or SMT went to conferences. They always returned with "We need Firefly..." or some other fad that time proved to be just that, a fad. Yes, Firefly was one of the better ones but development fizzled out and Sharepoint killed it. It was the effort involved, the total lack of budget, the expectation to "just make it work" which became soul destroying when you just knew, deep down, that this was not the software to save the school.

I found myself nodding throughout book 1. It's like a string of similar incidents I had but with the names changed! You walked into a dysfunctional network, I walked into a school with an e-mail address and an old RM server with a bunch of useless old Macs. There are many parallels. Thanks for the laughs. On to book 2.

Both paperbacks ordered - thanks! It'll be fun to read of other people's woes in IT!

Some decent ones but some cr4p, too.

You should be able to get all the product keys from the school's 365 Admin portal. My old school had exactly the same licence setup and we deployed Defender via Group Policy except for Macs that required a script.

I picked up a TP-Link NX210 5G router for use at home on Amazon's Black Friday price. This router replaces our older MR600 that was 4G+. The new one has taken our speed up from around 80Mbps to 245Mbps on Three unlimited, and gets 100% signal strength, something we never achieved before. Really nice tower design, you can see the status lights clearly, it has a fully configurable GUI and nanny settings. I wanted QoS and it does that really well, giving priorities where you want it. TP-Link Archer NX210 AX1800Mbps Wi-Fi 6 5G Router With Sim Slot, Up To 4.67Gbps Download Speeds, Dual-Band WiFi Router, Gigabit LAN/WAN Port, SIM Card Plug & Play, EasyMesh-Compatible WiFi Booster : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

I visited a school once that issued Microsoft Surface tablets to every teacher and installed a full dock in each classroom, connected to the display. Superb, elegant, solution but it must have cost them a packet. St Swithuns, Winchester, I seem to remember.

No, I never had to adapt DP as I only ever bought Lenovo mini PCs with HDMI ports. I can't remember the USB to ethernet adapters we used, but they were good and we stuck with them. Others, as you say, tended to be flaky or just stop working. I'll try and find out what they were.

We used USB to ethernet transceivers as it was the USB (touch) signal that suffered from the long runs. Otherwise, HDMI runs up to 10m seemed to work well for nearly all the classrooms. Training the teachers about Win-P to either extend or duplicate the displays took an inordinate amount of reminding. Don't get me started on Macs, the bloody things just decided on the day whether they were going to drive the display or not. As for keeping the displays young, a rolling replacement schedule saw us ramping up to replacing roughly a fifth on a five-year plan. If you let them all age together, you'll be in a world of pain eventually.

Removing that '+' must have cost them millions in market research! Luckily, none of it is my money as I get it free via my Barclays Premier account.

I had large power drain with my previous phone, an Oppo Find X3. The new phone, a OnePlus 13R, is much more power efficient and retains full charge while plugged into the car's standard USB port while running wireless Android Auto via an Ottocast dongle. So it's partially down to the phone.

It used to be my job to filter the requests in Microsoft Purview, and then output to PDF(s) for redaction in Adobe Acrobat. After that, the Compliance Officer who was in charge of data protection, would sit and perform the redactions. I preferred my job to hers!

Yes, that's a possibility as they have school -provided iPads. Still, it's not my problem any more.

I know all about Conditional Access Policies. Our problem was trying to provide a foolproof MFA system for 7-11 year olds. Not easy without an awful lot of errors, lost security fobs and support issues.

We put in Ruckus Cloudpath to take care of all BYOD issues for staff and sixth formers (lower age children not allowed to bring devices to school). That worked well. The big showstopper for us going with Cyber Essentials Plus was the requirement for MFA for all children, including the primary school pupils using school tablets. It just wasn't worth it, the support overhead would be monstrous. So I advised my school seniors that we would have to pull out of CE+.

Certificate expired?

Was sad to hear about this. I first saw Sabbath in 1975 and, while never being a metal head, they have always had a place in my heart. Ozzy was a force of nature.

I've enjoyed Invasion S1 and am part way through S2 at the moment. I like the different storylines and perspectives. Both Golshifteh Farahani and Shioli Kutsuna are excellent actors.

Our Toro petrol mower does recycling (mulching) and it's a godsend for a big garden not having to empty the cuttings every two rows. It still takes me an hour.