MartinT

You will need to perform a proper demotion of the old DC so that it cleanly removes itself from the AD.

I had a very odd one last night on my mobile: angry sounding chap saying that my number was used for a takeaway order and I needed to collect it. I told him I had placed no such order. He repeated it even more angrily with strange reference to my number but no name given, contents of order etc. I told him again I had not placed an order and to go away. Is this some kind of new scam? To what end - trying to get me to pay?

Don't you guys block the number each time you get a spam call? I do mine with a flourish and extreme prejudice.

I'd hardly call a Surface 'rubbish' as a Pro 7 i7 is my daily workhorse. Where would you propose they make RAM upgradeable in such a thin case design? Typically, all tightly packaged tablets and many laptops these days have soldered in RAM and SSDs because there is no space to include socket-mounted components. They also come with a spec that makes future upgrades unlikely within their lifespan. Things have moved on.

It's going to be an epic. After Blade Runner 2049, I have high hopes for Villeneuve.

That fails the intelligence test for me, and in no way relieves them of being scammers or criminals.

Dual or triple screens a must. A big TV on the wall for information alerts. Coffee machine. A comprehensive set of tools that are NEVER LOANED TO ANYONE!

We evaluated both last year and went - at first - with Clevertouch. However, we made the mistake of allowing teaching staff to do the 'evaluation' and they ended up using the Clevertouch features without doing the thing they fundamentally use most of the time, which is to mirror their iPad. We ordered 16 for the first tranch and then the problems began. Very big lag between the iPad and Clevertouch, making writing fall behind and YouTube videos almost unwatchable with lipsync and general judderiness. It turns out that both the Clevertouch app and native Airplay don't like the screens being on a different SSID and VLAN from the iPad (a necessary security). This year, we worked with Clevertouch to develop a firmware fix but reached the decision point before a fix could be found, so decided to order 17 Iiyamas. They work quite happily across SSIDs and VLANs with barely perceptible lag. Pricing between the two is similar so it came down to functionality. We will be buying Iiyama in future.

We use Cloud Design Box with Salamander to rollover and recreate the new Teams from all the timetabled classes. The old Teams are archived but still accessible. Permanent resources are kept in the departmental Teams which do not expire.

Alan Bulmer has been good in the past. I think Tom is still working for them but we haven't spoken since BETT 2019. The engineer today, Tao Liu, was very helpful.

Well, that seemed to work. After e-mailing the CEO we got an immediate response and an engineer from the US remoted into our Smoothwall within minutes. We have a failed HD. They are sending a replacement and will then rebuild the software RAID once we've replaced the drive.

We have an unstable UTM1000 with the red light constantly on. I raised a ticket on 17 June with no response yet. Despite promises of a call from our account manager, we've never heard from her. I have now written to Georg Ell in a desperate attempt at some action. The Smoothwall is our single point of failure and it's becoming a real pain and causing a lot of upset among the staff.

Agreed, if you have 40 VMs as we do (not all servers, our wireless controllers and telephone system are virtual) then a SAN is superb. The tiered storage is wonderfully automated - it moves VMs around to put the most heavily used (usually SQL servers) into the SSD storage automatically.

Our new 50TB Dell ME4024 SAN cost £27k, for comparison.

Some of it is cool but why did they have to make it look like MacOS? Even to the dots under running applications. Grrr. Running Android apps looks good but did you notice it's from the Amazon Store? Microsoft and Google obviously not on speaking terms.

You'll still need a SAN for your VMs - we recently upgraded to a Dell ME4024 to take care of our future needs. For all files/documents, we are fully 365 cloud now. It's the best place for them.

He certainly instigated his own downfall. Sad story, though.

My Synergistic Research Orange fuses cost more than that. Yes, they do make the hi-fi system sound better.

Is there a decent PO application or cloud service that can replace our Excel with macros setup? All we need is to generate a PO to e-mail to a select few individuals with selectable cost centre, supplier etc. Nothing complex. Does such a thing exist without buying an expensive behemoth?

Sorry, typed that in a rush. Staff and Students get an A3 Office 365 licence with an A5 Security licence. Governors and visiting teachers get an A1 licence.

The 365 A5 Security licence is what you need for all staff. Very effective at scanning all attachments and URLs within messages. Enrol all machines into it and you can start using the Security Admin portal a lot more effectively. It does indeed warn of malicious content and pulls it before you've even taken a look.

Sadly I have to agree about Smoothwall support, and I am a long time Smoothwall user going back 15 years. We've had some issues recently and remote support always takes several days to initiate. I spoke to Tim Larsen about upgrading to a VM version on 24 May and was promised a call by our account manager Holly Williams. No contact so far. The thing is, Smoothwall is still the best for safeguarding reporting and that's important for a school. I don't want to move to another solution that needs add-ins to fulfil the functions we need, but support is deteriorating.

On Meraki, I always found the functionality good but the licencing is expensive, as has been reported, and upgrading to later standards by replacing APs is expensive, too. Ruckus are possibly even better performance-wise, the controller is good if less well laid out than Meraki, the licences are less expensive. If you're installing a new wi-fi system, don't look at anything that doesn't handle Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). You'll be building in rapid obsolescence.

I can recommend Ruckus with their virtual controller, supplied and installed by Net-Ctrl. The performance is leagues better than our previous Meru setup.

We had to cancel a live event earlier. Seems ok now.