jmak

I feel the need to leave this here: https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/3206552/dad-roomba-robotic-hoover-dog-poo-night/ But mostly I'm jealous because we can't have one as our house is old and random and has steps linking rooms.

At the risk of being unhelpful, if most of the tickets are going to be raised over O365 email, the helpdesk information will already be in the cloud.

I've been testing Windows deployment/management using Intune and have the basics working. Is it possible to deploy from one tenancy and have users login from a different tenancy? Our user base currently has a mix of local accounts, domain logins and there are multiple M365 tenancies. At the minute, no one uses the M365 accounts to login, but domains seem to be on their way out (in our organisation), so I think they might move towards logging into devices with M365 accounts. I'm just trying to put a list of issues together so that when someone comes back to me next year I can say I told you that's not possible but we went ahead anyway ...

I quite often let people cross on the approach to a roundabout - it's straightforward to control the speed of the traffic and create a gap in a queue. I have often considered letting people cross when leaving a roundabout, but either there's no one behind me, in which case there's no reason to stop and if there's a queue of traffic I have never yet found an opportunity when I've felt it safe to stop.

I might be being unimaginative, but I can't imagine anyone productising those requirements. Sounds like a tracking device that doesn't track you... If it's automated you can't control when it shares your location. Just my thoughts....

Be aware that candles are paraffin wax. For every litre you burn, you'll release about a litre of water, so you'll need to watch out for condensation on the cold walls (presumably if you're using candles to heat the room, the walls won't be roasting hot). It's not normally an issue if you burn a candle, but if you're burning enough to noticeably heat the room, it's a bit different. Also be aware that if you're burning things inside anywhere other than a fireplace with a chimney, all of the products of combustion will stay in the room for you to breathe in. (Even in a fireplace, quite a lot of pollution comes into the room). I know heating is becoming unaffordable, but burning stuff indoors isn't brilliant for your health.

It's when exiting a roundabout that I find it most difficult to give priority to pedestrians waiting to cross. I'm always worried about someone driving into the back of me.

We have a thermal printer to avoid issues with toners running out, print heads clogging etc on a printer that's only used rarely.

Not at work, but this is local to where I am currently: https://twitter.com/susie_mccabe/status/1547223755507785729?s=20&t=92Ipc5mhrPcTYLnK864VLg Heading further North next week, just in case....

I bought a Hozelock starter set for my parents when they asked me to water their garden while they went away for a month. An hour and a half per visit including travel time made it a very attractive option for me. They were a bit offended when they found out what is done, but it's been a complete success and in place for at least 5 years now. Much more efficient than watering even when you are there in terms of water use.

Storm...

The generation of chips appears to make quite a difference. The 12th gen i5s seen to outperform the 11th gen i7 in mine. 10th gen is there years old now - given how long we generally keep laptops in education, I always try and go for the most recent spec I can.

It'd also be helpful to try and find a quick win that improves something high profile or widely requested. At my last place I acquired a second hand wireless setup from another school that was upgrading. It was out of date, but at least it was an enterprise grade system and I put an AP in every classroom instead of one per three in the corridor. It made lessons work better. I also sorted out WSUS properly and set scheduled tasks so that the pupil machines updated overnight, which meant that they never started lessons to find 30 machines all trying to update over wi-fi before a lesson could get under way. Also find an advocate - possibly someone who moans a lot, but if you can get someone like that on side, they'll spread the message.

Fiddling below can get you in all kinds of trouble.... (Sorry, it's Friday)

I know the proper answer is get rid of roaming profiles and fully update the domain to something from this decade and that is an ongoing project, but.... I have (inherited) a Windows Server 2008R2 domain and a bunch of clients that have been in place updated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and a few users have reported issues with profiles. I've looked and most of them have username.v2 and username.v6 folders in the Profiles folder. I'm assuming the by profile was created when the client was updated to Windows 10. Can I just delete the v2 folder?

Don't let that secret out! We need people to think we're magicians!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/07/02/microsoft-declines-new-cloud-customers-promise-ukraine/

I think it's entirely reasonable to specify end of support dates based on launch date, but from my experience it's not very transparent and you need to know what you're looking for when you purchase. I'd expect an edu reseller to assist, but for the last Chromebook I purchased for personal use, the model on sale in John Lewis was one from 2019 with five year support (ie ending in 2025) but with a bit of hunting I found the latest model for about 10% more and supported until 2029. With the same model numbers across different years you have to check carefully on the Google support website to make sure you're ordering the right one.

I'm running it at work as my daily driver and haven't had any issues. I made the move as I kept visiting users who'd done an in place upgrade and I wanted to discover issues before users. It doesn't seem to like Office 2016 very much, but we're just moving people off that as soon as they report any issue for any reason. We don't want to support it any more either [emoji6]

Most stuff for most users opens quicker using OneDrive/SharePoint than it did from the file server. Most users open the same files repeatedly and that's stored locally.

I don't trust anything over 6 weeks. If it ain't on a boat from China, it probably doesn't exist yet.

Haven't been buying servers, but have been buying other stuff from Dell. I've been choosing from what's available for very quick delivery and where necessary adding components myself to match the specs I need. They seem short on memory and large SSDs at the minute... Edit: we also had a warranty claim on a monitor which was supposed to be advance replace (ie send out replacement before receiving faulty one). When I hadn't heard anything for a week I chased the account manager and they said it was a 2 month wait for an identical model, but we could have a silver one next day... Just reinforcing the point about checking what's in stock. Some stuff has been arriving next day, some almost identical kit is on back order.

My main aim at the time was to give me a better chance of a quick recovery in the event of hardware failure. As you say, hook up a recent VHD (I had daily snapshots) to a decent PC and you can get the school running in minutes rather than days. At the time I knew I didn't have the knowledge to quickly build a server and get an active directory domain going from scratch, but I could install a hypervisor and attach a VM. There were some benefits to splitting out roles; I could install software and updates with restarts without disrupting what was happening on other servers. It also felt less risky than an in place upgrade to a new version of server for domain controllers: create new VM, add to domain, DC promo then demote the original. There are probably better ways to do it, but it worked for me.

Shutdown on lid close can end in tears and tantrums. Much work has been lost that way IME.

I did a P2V of a "one server does everything" using Microsoft Disk2VHD. I did it over a half term weekend and saved the VHD to a USB HDD. I then booted the VHD from hyper-v on my PC which was sloooow, but enough to prove that everything functioned. I then took a brave pill and wiped the server and rebuilt as a hypervisor and added the VHD. Next stage was to create more VMs and move roles across. I never got rid of the original VHD altogether, just left it with things I was worried would stop working and moved other roles off. After the first virtualization it was straightforward to take snapshots before I made any changes, so it was always easy to revert if something didn't work out.