Oaktech

Seen a lot of them in real life... Utterly terrifying.

I buy stuff on ebay all the time - so far the worst experience I had was a set of 5 netgear managed APs I bought for a project didn't come with the advertised POE injectors and I had to send them an email threatening trading standards before they sent them to me. Personally I've not had good experiences with range extenders, I've always either bought more APs and cabled them, or bought external antennas to improve the range. I've used powerline adapters with reasonable success, but never as good as advertised!

When I got to this place they were running office 2013 in the office and on the 'new' laptops, but 2010 on everything else and it was a disaster, people wanted features that one had and not the other, and the kids couldn't get their head around there being 2 sets of program groups in the start menu - one of which didn't work depending on which was installed. Personally I wouldn't.

Literally, my image contains the OS, Office, updates, and one legacy application that historically didn't play nice with deployment tech (TBF i've not tried it with SCCM, but it won't GPO)

Also, a lot of machines will only WOL with the full manufacturers version of the NIC driver installed, that is certainly the case with our Lenovos. Unless you install the full Intel driver package it doesn't work.

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here... I believe best practice no-longer requires a physical DC, although I prefer to have one too. I believe the OP is suggesting he has 2 hosts with DCs running as VMs on top of them, leaving the hosts as dedicated which isn't too much of a problem I wouldn't have thought? OP: If you are short of hardware a DC can be run on a moderately specced PC, although an HP Microserver is absolutely ideal!

Your secondary DC should have DNS on it too, and DHCP failover. Do you have Impero or similar? You might want to create a server for that. Have you considering remote working? if so you might want to bring up another server for RDS or DirectAccess or VPN. I assume the servers have DAS and therefore you can't create a Cluster? If you've got enough storage on the new server you might want to investigate allowing replication of the VMs on the older server to the new server to provide a bit more insurance against the old server failing. I'm using built in windows server backups and, at the moment, rsync to replicate backups. I decided Veeam was a complication I didn't need.

As @witch mentioned I joined a senior school as a lowly 14k tech and left it 5 years later as a 23k senior tech when they refused to change my job title to NM despite the fact that was what I was doing. As a lowly tech I basically got all the grubby jobs. Not the most mundane ones, we had a very competent helpdesk lady for the user issues, but all the running network cables and installing projectors and sorting out backups. It gave me a very good grounding, because I made sure I was exposed to all the higher level stuff even if it wasn't my hands on the keyboard. I also chose to go from the Senior school to the Junior school when my son was born as it was a term time contract. I was immediately doing way more than term time and I have now had my contract extended to term time + 5 any time days + 10 days summer working to stop me from claiming so much overtime/TOiL. The Junior school is a very different environment. This school asks way less of it's IT in terms of techincal usage, BUT it demands a lot more reliability. Lessons are short and intensive so not having something working for half a day, which was a minor inconvenience in senior school, puts the whole curriculum out in a Junior. Also, it wasn't a problem in a senior school if it took 2 minutes for a workstation to log in because it was a bit elderly. At Junior 30 second logins are a lifetime as the kids don't have the patience and the teachers don't have the time. I have a lot more time at junior to make sure things are fine tuned, I've got it now that any 1 work station processes a maximum of 8 GPOs, down from the 20+ when I got here, and only the Windows tablets which are going next year have more than a 30 second login even when a whole class is hung off a single access point. I've been able to add multiple ethernet trunks between cabinets which means ping times are always sub 1ms and file transfers between wired machines are up in the 100s of Mbits from the 10s they were when I arrived. I've also been able to implement a working backup routine and we haven't had (touches wood...) any data loss while I've been here despite 3 major hard disk crashes. I feel much more respected at the junior school and I integrate more fully with the life of the school. For the most part, as long as I keep ahead of the curve and remind everyone to keep me informed about their plans it's a lot less stressful. I've also been able to use a Junior school as a springboard to actual NM-ship. I was employed as the ICT Systems Manager, but I have just officially taken over our federated school and it's technician, and from the start of September I will be the ICT Network Manager for the federation (other than the exec head I'm the only person officially working across all schools in the federation. We are also looking to join a MAT shortly and their Head if IT is happy enough with the way I do things to have promised only to get involved if asked. Hope this helps in some way, anything you want to ask, PM me.

*anything* will be totally different. You can't stick with what you've got, 2010 is out of date and gives no real advantage for the upheaval of moving to something new, 2013 and 2016 are your only real options, and there is little day to day difference in the UI from 13 to 16, so go for 16!

2016. No reason not to

That's the description... The hardware ID loks something like this PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_34687470&REV_06 and is in the properties drop down of the details tab. You can google that and it will give you a much better idea of what you are looking for.

Maybe something like an iBoss appliance? It's still a bit of a sledgehammer, but it's a necessary one.

Bear in mind that DA cannot co-exist on a machine with DC roles installed whereas VPN can. This may be a consideration to you. If a second server (virtual or otherwise) is available to you I would install DA and VPN together which is a checkbox in the wizard. Point the remote classrooms down the VPN and the individual clients at Direct Access. Bear in mind also that the DA target cannot share a public IP with any other port 443 services. Force tunneling is the option you need to select in the DA wizard which makes all browsing go via the main site ISP.

Whats the hardware ID in device manager?

That's exactly what I'm seeing. I'm sure WOL has something to do with it, and I'm sure that OS timeout has something to do with it. The OS timeout is under 'advanced', 'ASF Features' 'OS Timeout' I increase the timeout to 60 and it seems to improve matters.

Interesting... My m58s are doing that. The only way I've found to fix it is to allow keyboardless operation (the keyboard and mouse are plugged into the hub in the monitor and if the kids turn off the monitor it definitely won't boot) I've also adjusted something in the bios which gives an OS timeout of 60 seconds, can't remember where it is exactly right now, but I'll have a look when I'm by them Out of interest are you WOLing them?

Comms express are good. I'm also pleasantly suprised at how good toolstation's network cables are if you're in a hurry!

File server migration toolkit https://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/114259-migrate-file-server-using-the-file-server-migration-toolkit-within-server-2012-r2 or Robocopy and export/import the lanman registry key containing the shares...

yeah, as above. install hyperv, create a cluster, configure a highly available file serve on the cluster. I'm managing about 6TB total, of which 3TB is just one server. I thought about DFS but as the single server is HA with seperate VHDs for each type of thing it does and changing everything to another server takes about 30 minutes of GPO editing, I felt it was just overcomplicating things.

I'm using the HP OfficeConnect 1910 series POE+ for edge devices and the HP Aruba 2920 series in various roles. They've been in about 6 months and so far they've been great.

Unifi is good - Ligowave is excellent (but there's a price premium) Deliberant uses a lot of the same tech as Ligo but is a cut down version so is cheaper. If you arent using it for anything intensive I'd look at the deliberant propellor 5 @ £63 each. I've had a pair running half a kilometre at 33mbps for the last 18 months without a reboot! http://www.wifigear.co.uk/deliberant-apc-propeller-5

My FIL has just given me his hifi stuff as they are downsizing. That means my mid 90's AKAI separates is going on ebay to be replaced by an early 70's Linn Sonndeck LP12 a Naim NAP 250 and a NAC 32 pre. Unfortunately his Acoustic Research speakers have perished so I need to replace them.

Working for me now, but the midday change didn't happen until about 1315 for me.

I'm happy with my xperia z series. I've got a z3 compact. There isn't too much bloat if you buy the phone outright or get it from carphone warehouse. Sony are also one of the most proactive manufacturers when it comes to security updates. I'd get a oneplus 3, but I find it too big to operate with one hand.