Gongalong

Hi folks, Just curious what Internet speed your school has, specifically the fastest speed on whatever your primary connection is for the pedants. Edit: this is a poll btw, so click the relevant option. (I appreciate it's going to be proportional to pupils, but as it's not possible to do more complex polls...) TIA

Hi All, Currently we mark all items on our asset register with postcode and the school name, but to comply with LA recommendations we have been asked to invisibly mark as well (with both postcode and school name). We are audited on this every 2 years, and the invisible marking might have to survive several sets of audits. I'm not sure a standard UV felt pen is going to work that well as inevitably there's lots of plastic/metal shiny surfaces and we've got several hundred items to mark, aside from whether the written text from a felt pen would survive several years. Anyone found a good solution? TIA

The AD config sounds like one of those trivial details, but I can see it having major repercussions in terms of staff finding other staff accounts, and also not accidentally sending emails to students.

Another question, more out of curiosity: how have others setup their AD with respect to the federation of accounts into O365? The issue we have is that our OUs are discrete but all our usernames are in the same format. This means that the Address Book ("People" in O365) is going to contain an unclear mix of staff and students.

pcstru: We're likely to switch to Unify, which takes AD accounts and then creates Office 365 accounts. The problem is our AD accounts are all, staff included, firstname lastname. The Office 365 address book seems to default to sorting by display name, so bizarrely it's actually sorting by firstname (being that display name is a concatenation of firstname surname). The difficulty this causes is that students and staff will all be mixed together, aside from the issue of showing staff first names, so we need a method of differentiating them. We currently have Office 365 with our LA, and the way they've done it is to prefix the student names with (YEAR OF START IN EDUCATION) e.g. (Y2002). Even better would be for staff to show first, then students, but I can't think of a great way of doing this offhand. Prefixing all graduation years with "zz" seems a bit naff! - - - Updated - - - (I've asked this question of RM, but they say no other school has raised it)

Hi folks, I need to change the First Name field for AD user accounts in several OUs by prefixing the first name field with graduation date. I need to do this across 5 different student years, hence 5 different graduation dates. More than happy to run this as 5 individual processes as it should be a one off requirement. What's an easy way to do this? Note I know next to nothing about power shell. TIA

Apologies for the lack of follow up. We had a (Buffalo) TeraStation III iSCSI Rackmount TS RIXL. Fortuitously or not it failed, with what appears to be a common fault, so we switched to an HP Storeeasy with lots more space. I can't recommend the Buffalo because it failed less than 2 years from purchase.

It was autodiscover. I hadn't completed the DNS setup under Office 365 > Admin > Domains.

I've tried connecting using the Outlook wizard on both our filtered school connection and a secondary unfiltered BT connection. Both times the Outlook wizard cannot find the mailbox. This is currently a test deployment of Unify, but it's functional and I can send/receive emails to the mailbox. I've used the address the mailbox is registered to for Outlook to search. Am I missing anything obvious?

Should we be able to connect Outlook to a federated Unify O365 account? Using the Outlook wizard it's not finding the mailbox from its address. Do I need to pick some details from O365 when in Unify?

No. We have the new SBM680 boards, and were told we needed the latest drivers. Confusingly the USB download link is broken (it allows you to download the whole software package) but the IT Admin download link is working. It describes the latest download as Feb 2014, but the file that downloads is marked Dec 2013. More confusion! It doesn't seem to matter too much though as whatever's installed it does update it to a point where it will work - I tested with another SMB680 board and that's fine, so the problem is with the board hardware. - - - Updated - - - No. We have the new SBM680 boards, and were told we needed the latest drivers. Confusingly the USB download link is broken (it allows you to download the whole software package) but the IT Admin download link is working. It describes the latest download as Feb 2014, but the file that downloads is marked Dec 2013. More confusion! It doesn't seem to matter too much though as whatever's installed it does update it to a point where it will work - I tested with another SMB680 board and that's fine, so the problem is with the board hardware.

Hi folks, Smarttech's download site appears to be down. By chance does anyone have a copy of the smartesi2014web.exe software (the USB install of their latest 11.5 Windows software) and can upload it somewhere? (We need to test with the very latest SBM680 board, and need the latest drivers. We stupidly threw away the install CD...) TIA

Hi folks, Using DPM 2012 SP1. A teacher has requested that two specific students have their folders backup up with a retention of 18 months - the problem is that they regularly delete work (photography course) that they might need at a future date, and they're only 6 months into the course. I have setup protection groups before and not had an issue, and in this case the whole drive for this server is protected already, albeit on a 60 day retention. I am trying to create a new protection group for these two folders, and at the "Select Group Members" stage DPM is saying I need to "select the check boxes in the Available members section." I have expanded both the shares, or more usefully the All Volumes section, but there are no checkboxes. I'm seeing the checkboxes for only one or two servers, which may well be servers that are only backed up at a VM level. Am I unable to select these servers because they're already being backed up in a different protection group, albeit with different retention? If so, is there any way can I use DPM to backup these two folders with 18 months retention? TIA

We can, and it still happened. Turned out it was the LA's Internet connection, although I'm still waiting to hear what the exact problem is.

Hi All, We’re getting some peculiar Internet behaviour, but I’m at a bit of a loss to explain what’s causing it. For example, Kaleidos (our VLE) is dumping users back to the login page or pages are failing to load. Another example, I’m trying to download audio files from an exam site and the download starts then just falters. Our Internet is provided by the LA. We have a secondary BT Internet connection, and the sites are fine on this. We changed our switches over half term from 100Mb aged 3Com’s to Gb HP, but the consultancy that did that said it can’t be related. We’re investigating with Smoothwall whether this could also be the cause. I’m checking this first ahead of speaking to the LA, although I’ve not seen any mention of Internet problems on a county related group. Anyone got any ideas? TIA

The manual install of 150 apps takes about 3 weeks for one PC, and they definitely need to all be in the image (to avoid the 3 week thing).

datar: essentially because Ghost was in place when I joined 2.5 years ago, and I haven't had a moment since to even contemplate setting up SCCM. As above we have a large number of applications that need to go on our student PCs at least (and there's a lot of old apps, so they won't all be neatly packaged MSIs). Would CM cope with them all, or at least the bulk of them? If not it won't be much use.

Our thirdline consultant has said pretty much the same thing, it's a waste of time with a simple setup as the hosts can do most of it. I think I'll scrap it and use the resources for something more useful.

Running on Server 2012 (R1) - not sure what exact version that makes it.

Hi folks, Our cluster is right at the limit of resources, and I'd like to create a Config Manager server. The ideal candidate server to delete would be our SCVMM server. I never use it, and seem to be able to do everything on the hosts. So in short, is it worth keeping? TIA

I know that Spanning Tree caused some problems when the edge switches were installed as we didn't upgrade our core (3Com) fibre switch (it's already Gb). There was a version conflict apparently which caused ports to shutdown, so an earlier version of Spanning Tree was forced on the HP switches. We're relying on a thirdline consultant for this as switches are beyond my skillset.

(Presumably this would apply for HP switches also?)

Ah yes, Google turns up lots on this! I'll speak to our switch guys... thanks!

We have a scope of about 1,000 addresses, and this is half term, so it seems unlikely they're all used up. The problem seems to be that some machines are slow to get an address. I've rebooted the DHCP server, just in case. My guess is that it's the switches, as that's the other major change in the last 2-3 days. DHCP server log seems OK, well about as OK as servers ever are. The server is a VM, so uses a virtual NIC. I'll check to see if integration services have updated. We did have a problem with STP, so it was reduced to a compatible version with our older core switch.

Hi folks, We've done two bits of work this week. Replacing our edge switches (old 3Com 100Mb switches to new HP Gb switches) and (Windows) updating all our servers. Since yesterday I've noticed that DHCP is behaving peculiarly. When running a Ghost session yesterday all the clients had APIPA addresses. IPCONFIG /RENEW got a correct address. Again today I've spotted some PCs with APIPA addresses, yet other PCs are fine (perhaps because they were left long enough to get an address). There are a couple of errors on the DHCP server (Win 2012) re. contacting Active Directory, but there are one or two of those dating back to November as well. Any ideas where to start trying to troubleshoot this? Could a Windows Update have triggered this? Could it be our new edge switches? (I've logged this issue with the consultant that installed the switches) TIA