Oaktech

This ^^ One of my Charities fell for a well crafted, automated phishing scheme which captured username, password and a 30 second OTP from an auth token. I assume it was fully automated because the login attempt was recorded at microsoft less than 5 seconds after the firewall logged the phishing page. Fortunately all they did was use it to send a bunch more phishing emails, and it was noticed within minutes and the account blocked and secured.

I've got about 6 members of staff using the Google auth app just fine with our school MS services. They were all using it to auth things like FB, Amazon etc. and just added the school service to it without a problem.

Authenticator app for all staff, OTP C200 generators for Y6 and the 3 members of staff who don't have smartphones, conditional access set up for school.

I've had 4 or 5 recently, clearly an off-shore call centre. All the same number (now blocked) but each time a different mobile provider name... "Good day Sir, I'm *insert generic english name* and I'm calling from *insert phone company* we would like to inform you that we can certainly save you money on your phone contract..." They never get further than that because I know full well there is not a cheaper contract on the market unless I move away from using the EE network, which I'm currently not prepared to do. Another fun one I've had recently was originally to one of the small charities that I support; they, as they've been instructed to, said that they didn't understand what the guy was talking about and told him to call me. Now, they get about 3 of these fake tech support calls a week, but usually as soon as they say, "You'll need to call our support guy..." the callers hang up, but one last week hung on and took the esim number I use for private work stuff, so I got a call about 5 minutes later... "Hi, Good morning sir, this is Craig from Microsoft, we're calling today because your computers systems have been identified as being part of a criminal botnet and we need to get them cleaned up... Now, if you could you just go ahead and download Teamviewer" I played with him for about 5 minutes, pretending to try to get a remote session going while I was in fact walking to the shop to get lunch before I said, "Oh dear, it's just not working, I'll need to drive to site. If you can just give me a case reference and a number to call back on..." At which point he started yelling at me for wasting his time and I hung up laughing.

Just to add to this - we did eventually find a USB network adapter that would PXE boot - the option doesn't even show until a capable adapter is connected. It took us a looooot of different adapters from around the trust until we found one from Fujitsu that would PXE. @georgeescott is also correct you can slipstream the drivers in, but we never bothered, I like a good tab key interface!

That would certainly cause you the issue you're seeing - none of our schools are on anything less than 80/40 and that includes our similarly sized infant school. Seems unlikely it's the switch. It would still be worth a check of your internal links though - perhaps it's old cabling? I've got a link being retired shortly that negotiates at a gig but then if you try and transfer down it the switches start to show massive packet loss and you can't actually get more than about 60mbps of sustained transer out of it.

I install updates by GPO as you describe, but I do the restarts by scheduled task (shutdown.exe /r) so that I can stagger the restarts to ensure there is always a DC up as we've had an issue where all 3 dcs were restarted for updates simultaneously and a whole load of other stuff messed up because DNS resolution, DHCP and AD were all unavailable at the same time.

Are you using the audio from the 3.5mm jack or the display audio out from the DP connector? We've noticed the 3.5mm audio out is quieter than the display audio out?

Just a thought... Do the laptops support DP Alt Mode and is it turned on? Have you tried setting the displays lower resolution - say 1440x900 and seeing if the behaviour is different?

Your individual APs in itself is unlikely to be the bottleneck, however it's uplinks might be? Sticking it on a 10 or 100mb uplink might cause this. Is it a 100mb switch? I had a school buy a refurb switch cheap because it had loads of POE ports but it turned out to be 100mb and the individual links were slowing the APs down. If they are on different access points and your the experience improves I would certainly look into the uplink - I've also had an issue where a tech unknowingly switched an AP onto a 100mb only POE injector that was previously supplying a phone, thus limiting the uplink of the AP and it looked verrrry similar.

I have DirectAccess set up, because legacy, and on-prem, however the way the wind is blowing you might need to consider cloud 'stuff'.

We're using these - 90w delivery with a DP - VGA dongle? Close enough? Refurbished they're 60 quid. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lenovo-Option-Mobile-ThinkPad-USB-C/dp/B07RWPJLQ1

We have some Startech docks that do exactly the same. Startech have come back and said it's 'a feature'.

+1 for Lehmann. If you have one it is sometimes worth trying to see if it will come to life on a mains adapter?

Definitely enabled in BIOS?

I buy job lots off ebay and claim them back - currently running Lenovo Essential Wired - they're quite hard to pick the keys off of, even if you use a spoon! I bought almost 200 of them for 50p each on an Auction. Previously we've used Logitech K120, Dell QuietKey.

The hub we used isn't available any more from Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cadyce-7-Port-Power-Adapter-CA-U7H/dp/B00STB1DGW but something like it might be from other channels - it was less than £20 and we selected specially because it has a flat base for velcro!

We've done this once before for a sit-stand desk - we used the 5m Amazon Basics active USB 3 extension and then a basic powered hub sticky velcro'd to the back of the monitor

We had a similar issue. We turned off BSS transition and fast roaming, updated everything to latest, forgot all clients and restarted whole estate and the problems have not re-occurred.

Rubrik was more more expensive against Syncro but it is really very good to use! N-Able very similar in price

Our MAT provides N-Able for onsite devices and Rubrik for cloud. Both are excellent, Rubrik is a bit over-spec for the job we ask it to do to be honest.

Can confirm that they are tricky to get hold of and tricky to repair, as someone who used to do exactly this! I appreciate it's at the other end of the country but if they can get the faders CPS in Christchurch have the facilities to fix it. https://www.cpsgroup.co.uk/installations-servicing/service/

It just so happens that with Toob over City Fibre, the fastest also happens to be pretty much the cheapest at £25 a month for 900mbps. We don't have any copper into my house as Openreach took it away almost 15 years ago. My lodger at the time was paying the bill on it to have his own internet connection. I've always used a long range bridge to my parents half a mile away. He moved out and just stopped paying! Openreach quoted us over £3k to put it back in because they took it out in huff over payment so we never bothered reinstating it and waited for City Fibre to install!

If you have no onsite IT & you already have Unifi on site, then a cloud key seems like a good idea in the first place to simplify management and deal with updates before we even talk about the camera. Unifi Protect is a pretty seamless add on - total budget to implement: less than £400?

I believe you can open the MSI in Orca and specify all those parameters and then save the MSI again... Our MAT provides an MSI that doesn't ask questions prepared in this way.