Gongalong

I agree all, I think this is a staff (rathert than student) discipline issue. Just wanted to see if I was missing a really obvious app/feature though, as I've been asked the question.

Hi folks, We have a number of teachers that "forget" to go on duty. The suggestion has been to send them a recurring email when their duty is approaching, but Outlook has no facility to do this (short of visual basic). Anyone have any suggestions of a system that might do this, or an alternative way to remind the teachers? Thanks

Does WSUS serve O365 PP updates? I have this vague memory that they just don't exist as a product.

As feedback, we went with AMI in the end. It was a rather tortuous move, although I appreciate these sorts of moves are never easy, but their support has been good. Now everything is working fine.

Hi folks, Has anyone here got Jamf School (previously ZuluDesk) working with LDAPS? We've tried to set this up - have a public facing IP with port forward and firewall to our DC with LDAPS and a certification authority - and it just won't connect. I can see on the firewall log that the requests are coming in from Jamf on the correct port. Any ideas on what to troubleshoot? Thanks

It's gone from bad to worse as the server seemed to become unstable, so I restored from Veeam and the server is now even more unstable - services aren't running, and can't be started. Oddly I had this exact same issue with a different 2012 R2 server a few weeks back. I tried to restore that from Veeam as well, same problem, and eventually had to rebuild it. It's almost as if servers are corrupting, but I'm not sure if the Veeam restore is at fault. I'm trying a restore again from Veeam, from the oldest restore point, and will see how it goes. If the worst comes to the worst I'll have to rebuild it from scratch, and that will be the time to move WSUS over to SCCM, which I was partway through doing anyway. The frustrating bit is that our ESET server is also on the server, and I need the certificates from it to migrate... *fingers crossed*

Where is the paid script? Update Compliance presumably uses Azure? We still have local DCs. I have been looking to move over from a dedicated WSUS server to SCCM with WSUS, so this might accelerate it.

Hi folks, Our WSUS is misbehaving - slow, sometimes comes up with the "reset server node" message when trying to open, times out when displaying it last synchronised etc. I have used the Technet cleanup script (https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/WSUS-cleanup-script-7e019537), which removed a few hundred updates, but it is getting stuck deleting 10 updates e.g. 850293, as follows: Connecting to database SUSDB on MICROSOFT##WID Declining expired updates Declining superseded updates Reading obsolete update list. Found 10 updates that can be deleted. Deleting update 850923 (1 of 10) Error deleting update 850923: Exception calling "ExecuteNonQuery" with "0" argument(s): "Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding." Re-opening database connection Are there better cleanup scripts to run, or something else that can help with this issue? Thanks

Exams for us are in a huge hall, and it's difficult to make clocks visible to all. Ultimately the Exams Officer's decision anyway, and I thought the site was a great idea. Just trying to be helpful, for those who are interested anyway.

Hi folks, Our Exams Officer has just come across examscreen.co.uk For those of you already using a projector and a laptop to display a clock + exam info it's a really useful replacement.

Gave up with it and rebuilt :sad:

Thanks @Smokebomb, we were definitely affected by this. There are teachers in so I can't update all servers, but have done most and the CPU usage is markedly better apportioned.

Hi All, I'm after recommendations for companies, ideally that sell, setup, and then support a classroom of Apple hardware. We're probably going to need some Windows integration/MDM as wel e.g. JAMF. I'm aware of KRCS and Jigsaw24. Any other recommendations? Thanks

Restored to last Friday's backup - as far back as it goes - and the server is at least useable. Sort of. I can't seem to uninstall anything. The Windows Update service won't start. The only good new is that there's just one license server running on it, although it remains to be seen how easy it is to move that elsewhere.

Ha! I know as well. Our earlier cluster was built by a consultancy that set all the disks to dynamic. Bad idea! Definitely the latest firmware, as the hosts were updated recently to 2019, and that was done as part of the update. OS updates I can check this evening. I've contacted the consultancy that support it and they've said "server is having a lot of issues crashing when running explorer.exe. I have noticed that other software runs much better. My recommendation would be to restore the server back to a time it was working better or alternatively to rebuild the VM." So this evening I'll restore to a backup from a couple of days ago. The problem with rebuilding is that it runs a license server that will probably be very tedious to get a new key for, assuming we can get one at all (Sibelius software).

No, both the hosting volume, and the VM itself have plenty of disk space. Still trying to get to Resource Monitor. Can't even get Administrative Tools to open now...

I've managed to get Services to open after a few attempts, so will try Resource Monitor. Presumably connected, I can't get the Windows Update service to start.

@bald_pig + @Jcx500 This is one of around 20 VMs on a RAID'd SAN, and all the other VMs are fine. Never say never, but seems unlikely. VM. I've managed to get Task Manager to open, but can't get anything in Administrative Tools to open e.g. Services.

Noob question: what's meant by "shared Mac deployments"?

Hi All, One of our VMs is very (very!) slow, to the point where it's almost unresponsive. Task Manager doesn't show much if any CPU use though, and ditto for memory. This seemed to start yesterday when we had an issue with Veeam locking up one of the hosts. I have rebooted the hosts, and removed any checkpoints, rebooted the affected VM 3 times, but it still has the issue. What else can I do to try and troubleshoot? I'm assuming I might be able to get it into safe mode (the server itself is 2012 R2, but the hosts are 2019). Thanks

In theory they're for Music teaching, but I can see iMovie being used. You have found AD integration stable? The suggestion above is it's too unstable to use.

Reviews aren't great! https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.jigsaw24.com

Thanks all for the replies. Will jamf do things like map drives and integrate with AD? What's the approximate cost for say 30 machines?

Hi folks, Seemingly more for political reasons than good sense we may end up with a classroom of Macs. My Mac experience is limited to setting up one or two standalone machines. I've seen the pinned post, and also read about getting them to authenticate on a domain. Our current Windows setup uses drive scripts and group policy. I don't suppose there's a 3rd party software solution out there that can take this and do the necessary on the Mac? Mostly the drive scripts, but I would like to lock down student accounts as much as possible. Thanks

Is there a particularly recommended method? Google is bring up a PowerShell script, among other mentions.