rom1984

Are the laptops in a lockable trolley? I can kind of see both sides, you have an onus to protect the assets that you manage and if you felt there was a chance they could have been stolen then imo you are well within your rights to remove them. But... I suppose the right thing would have then been to notify middle management / SLT to tell them. From the heads point of view students have been put at a disadvantage of not having the resources available that the school have paid for because of a communication problem between staff that could have been prevented.

lol Amazing!

I backup some VMs but not the DC's, because they replicate between each other I always just did a system state backup instead of backing up the VM. I'm going to update my disaster recovery documentation and put that we will do a seizure to DC02 and then a meta data clean up of the old DC. I think for our setup that's looking at the best fit. Fingers crossed it never actually happens! Thanks for the replies people

I'm doing some disaster recovery planning and not sure about this and wanted to see if I could get some advise.. We have 2 Physical Servers running hyper-v Server 2012. We have various VMs including DC01 on 1 physical server and DC02 on the 2nd physical server. DC01 holds all the FMSO roles. We do a daily system state backup of DC01. I'm planning on what would happen to the FMSO roles if a disaster struck that took out the physical server that hosted DC01. Lets says multiple HDD failures that meant the disks need replacing and no data could be recovered. The 2 options I'm thinking off are... 1) Seizure of the FMSO roles and put on DC02. OR 2) Create a new VM on the 2nd physical machine and do a AD restore onto that VM. Can anyone think of any pitfalls of this or even better ways? Anyone experience this actually happen to them? Cheers RP

If you run netdom query fsmo on the Win 8 machine does it pick up that one of your servers has the Global Cat? Try running some dcdiag cmds on your DNS server to see if that gives you any ideas? dcdiag /test:dns is a good place to start to rule out any potential DNS issues

lol I love that the only google results from the "let me google that for you" are back to this original post! Sorry bud I've no idea

They were judged as Outstanding in 2011. One of the main reasons I was brought on board was to look at safeguarding in IT which is one of the jobs I've been doing so there defiantly at the correct levels (hopefully outstanding!), although there is still work to be done. Anyway enough about the school that's not really relevant to the post. I was pointing out that the difference I noticed between primary & secondary was that at secondary the teachers seemed to understand the rational behind a secure network with little training. At primary (or atleast the one's I'm at) they needed a lot more training, explaining and reinforcing of why things are done in a certain way. I imagine the reason was that previously IT security was lacking.

The last Ofsted result was Outstanding. I'd be very surprised if they didn't retain that on the next inspection.

Very True elsiegee40. The whole culture of the school when it comes to IT is very lax. They had an IT tech who did it as a bit of a hobby, employed him once a week. As IT grew year on year they increased his time but it got to much for him and hence they employed me. A big part of my job so far has been changing the culture towards IT as they've never known it any different. For example they had servers with AD installed but the tech just then set up the desktops to log in locally with a local "staff" account. When you switch from that to a more robust secure network it has some repercussions especially among staff who aren't IT literate.

I've gone from secondary school to primary recently and the big thing I noticed is that the staff at the primary schools are confident BUT they can't understand why there computer/laptop can't be the same at home. By that I mean they can't understand why they need to log in when at home it automatically comes on and "that is much easier for me". They can't understand why they need to save on the network and not the local device, they can't understand why staff need to have internet filtering etc.

We tend to get a better turn out if we call them "drop in sessions" and don't really set an agenda. I try to do them every 2-3 weeks and just basically say I'm in the IT Suite between 2-4 if you need help with anything, questions, how to's etc then just pop in. Sometimes no one turns up other times 2-3 people.

I worked for Tameside Council and some of their servers were named after budget supermarkets! All software installers were stored on Lidl, technical staff shares on Aldi, helpdesk on Kwik-save etc.

I feel your pain Blu4 its a nightmare when they put the burden of bad classroom management onto the IT Dept! If you check it in the morning, at the end of the day and then maybe a dinner time check then if there is any damage you can narrow it down to a lesson or two. Mixed that with booking the rooms out and you should be closer to finding out which lesson it happened in and bill that department. Obviously you'd need the backing of senior leadership to do that. Maybe put to SLT that if a teacher books a room out, its there responsibility to do a quick 30 second look around the room for any damage before any students enter the room. If you think CCTV is the only way the only thing you can do is put a business case to SLT. Factor in damaged costs, the costs of your time, the fact that you can't be as responsive to problems because you are constantly interpreted. I'd desperately try to get away from you needing to check the room after every lesson though. Put to SLT that the caretaker doesn't check every chair, table, windows etc after every lesson because that's the teachers responsibility. If a chair etc is damaged, the teacher is responsibility because they didn't have proper controller over their class. Likewise with IT. It drives me mad that we need to babysit everything lol

I know this does not really help but it sounds like a classroom management issue that needs resolving rather than an ICT issue. From the schools business perspective as well they'd need to look at how much CCTV was compared to how much a damaged keyboard/mouse etc would cost per year and see if there was a case for it that way. If you think the damage costs more than the CCTV then the head might listen? What about you try and put the responsibility back onto the teachers, if students are at any other work station than there own then that is not good classroom management. Maybe put to the head that the responsibility lies with the teacher and if an item is damaged during a lesson because of poor classroom management then it comes out of their budget and not yours.

BBC News ok here too. Also been streaming the snooker for the last hour and that's fine too.

I did most of my Office configuration via the customisation wizard, disabled first run etc then deployed it. For anything that I didn't do on the customisation wizard I downloaded the admx templates, created a GP central store and did little bits of customisation via the GP template.

Does the machine pick up that it should have applied a GP - if you open a command and do gpresult /scope computer /v does it report that GP has been allocated. I had a similar problem with Server 2012 R2 & win8 machines. Would be really hit and miss, tried gpupdate /force and rebooted 4-5 times tried it over a space of 2-3 days but never got it to consistently apply them. Then a week later it all seemed to kick in so never really got to the bottom of it!

Do you have a backup solution in place? We use Redstore Backup and I installed the Redstore client on our new file server and just did a "restore" to the new file server. In the options of the restore we can select to keep the security permissions that same which is that way I did it. That way everything was restored with the same permissions.

Primary school here - 600+ students. All teaching staff get 2 x Desktop PC in their room, one connected to interactive TV. Then teaching staff also get a laptop & iPad. Some support staff also get a staff laptop. No remote access yet, some staff use Google Drive as a "work around". I don't really see staff using their own iPad apart from pictures of Christmas time, birthdays etc. The laptops in fairness do get used for actual work.

Hi, If the DC is going to be serving DNS request then just need to add the IP to DHCP? I've just introduced a Server 2012 R2 into my 2008 domain and it went through with no problems. I used the Server Manager Add roles feature, added the Active Directory Domain Service Role, let 2012 install it then used the option to promote the server to a DC through there. All went through with no problems (so far).

Just purchased some 70" C-Touch boards to replace Smartboards/Projectors. Walked into the classroom last week to see there using them as a display board with bluetac everywhere! Was literally gobsmacked.

Not sure about the disposing of the NT licences. I suppose if you have the XP licence and then the upgrade invoice from XP to Win 7 then the NT licence wouldn't be needed - I'm guessing! In terms of who does the audit, we received some info from the link below which says they are working with Microsoft to target organisations inc schools as part of a "fair play campaign 2014" http://www.bsa.org/anti-piracy/eufairplaycampaign Might be worth directing your questions to them to see if they can offer guidance.

Cheers for the info psydii.. Got a reply from Meru for anyone that comes across this in the future. If we upgrade our controller to 1550 then the older AP320 will still work so the AP320 & new AP822e can be on the same controller. However as psydii said you can't have them in the same location as they do not work seamlessly between old and new APs. That happens to be fine for my situation as the wing is external from the main school with its own iPads / laptops so should be fine for us. Thanks

Hi People, Long term lurker first time poster here! Just after some advice. I am the Network Manager for a primary school and we have installed a Meru 1500 controller with 13 x AP320. They work fine and the school is happy with the performance. They have built a new wing and now want to add some additional AP's so I had a couple of questions... 1) Can you still buy licence for the MC1500 for additional access points? 2) Can you still buy compatible internal and external access points for the controller? If so what model APs are compatible with the 1500 controller. If not and we upgraded the controller to MC1550 with some new AP822e access points, does anyone know would the older AP320 access points still work? Thanks all (I've logged the call with Meru but not heard from them, will update if they do)