Ashm

I think you may also need to enable the "Launching programs and unsafe files" setting in "Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Internet Explorer/Internet Control Panel/Security Page/Intranet Zone"

I think if you add the SIMS server UNC path to the IE Intranet zone that should prevent the popups from occurring.

We have Staff as standard domain users & still using SOLUS 2 they are able to update SIMS successfully themselves. Give Staff modify rights on the following: %ProgramFiles%\SIMS\ %SystemRoot%\Sims.ini You can create a computer GPO to do this using the File System security setting.

You can also run the sp_who2 command in SQL Management Studio to see who is still connected.

Nice write up, are you able to let me know the approximate cost of the Parallels agent? Thanks.

The other option if looking to avoid purchasing a SAN is the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) which will give you HA. Think it comes as part of VMware Essentials Plus. You would need to have identical disk configs on each host though, I believe.

Same as @AngryTechnician, apc network management cards with temperature and humidity probes in our main server room and one of these PoE temperature web sensors for a different server room. All sensors are then checked by Nagios which sends the alerts.

I don't think so, not with Fog. But you may be able to deploy/run an ISO via PXE boot as an additional menu option on the Fog PXE menu as it just uses standard pxelinux.

Ah - I've only uploaded & downloaded Windows XP & 7 based images. I assume it's unable to detect the OS from the image maybe. The Raw image option might work as a work around?

What client OS are you uploading? Not sure if Fog detects if it's a Windows OS and you've chosen linux for example?

Yep, and try some of the different ones such as the PS & kitchensink. I remember having to use one of them for our Dell 740 desktops as nothing else would work with them. We have the kernel specifically set for those machines and everything else uses the default newer kernel.

Might be worth trying a different kernel.

You should be able to change it, but you may need a patch. We needed to run a patch to change our DfE number when we became an academy. In case it helps the patch number was 15913, but this was back in September so it may have changed for the later releases.

SOLUS 2 support has been extended to include the Spring 2014 release as per the SIMS Technical Roadmap (resource ID 17910). We're currently on SOLUS 2 and have very few issues, in fact I don't think we had any issues with SIMS not updating correctly on any clients for the Spring 2013 update. So I'm not in any rush to upgrade.

I'm playing with SCCM 2012 OS deployment at the moment, currently using Fog for image deployment. While I like the simplicity of Fog, it is still a manual task for updating the images although this is still pretty painless when done on a VM. This can all be automated in SCCM with the Build and Capture task sequences which I think is cleaner and has less margin for error IMO. SCCM does seem much more flexible and powerful when using the task sequences etc and should save us having to run manual scripts for setting up things like Bitlocker on staff laptops.

How many other VMs do you have running on the host? Could it be that you've allocated too many resources to the VM and there is contention, especially with 16 vCPU's being allocated to one VM? I know VMware best practice has always been to allocate as few resources as possible initially and then monitor performance and then increase resources if necessary.

One thing you may want to consider is getting laptops with TPM in case you wanted the option of using Bitlocker for full disk encryption.

Looks like it is supported: VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 Release Notes VMware ESXi 5.1 Update 1 Release Notes

We're currently migrating from Sophos to Microsoft System Centre Endpoint Protection and all seems to be going well. The Microsoft client does seem to be a bit lighter than Sophos on resources, especially on some of our older computers. This will save us a fair whack as we're already licensed through the Desktop Pack on our EES agreement. Well worth a look if you're already licensed for it. Would just need to factor in the SCCM server licences (and time to set it up!) which is hardly anything through EES.

Could try using psexec to run gpupdate on all computers using a list.

This looks really interesting and I look forward to trying it out. Will definitely make our BYOD offering a bit less painful with the login process. @robk are you using your smoothie as the radius server for you main wireless network as well or just your BYOD network?

You most likely need to use the Zone Brodging option in Smoothwall to provide access to the relevant interface and ports for each of the hosted systems.

Nearly forgot to put this on here... Bookings for the Network Northants meeting taking place on 25th March are open, please use the link below: NetworkNorthants - March 2013 - Eventbrite If you are planning to come along, please make sure you register so we have an idea of numbers. Schools outside of Northants are welcome, but please choose the visitor ticket option. Many thanks to Wrenn School for hosting.

StartSSL is another free one that could be used. We use it for both Ruckus & Smoothwall. Ruckus is fairly easy to do through the web interface but you have to get your hands dirty with Smoothwall as you need to run a number of commands and edit files etc. There's some good info in this thread - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/smoothwall-direct-support/106121-intermediate-ssl-certificates.html

If you're using IE on the XP laptop it won't support transparent HTTPS connections if HTTPS filtering is turned on for the web proxy auth method. Try using Firefox/Chrome etc and https google/gmail should work. Have a look at the web filter logs, if it says something along the lines of "Transparent HTTPS connection not supported by web client" then that's the issue.