jdell

Severn Vale School - IT Operations Manager

Hi, We are deploying Windows 10 Education to out site over this summer and have hit an issue with the start menu customisation, trying to get the start menu to look like; We have then exported the file to XML using powershell as suggested by MS. When we try to import the file onto another PC to test or try deploying by GPO the file is not applied. We are running build 1703. This is the layout file Please help! Thanks

I agree with FN-GM, if you lock down the network properly in the first place even if they have the IDE installed then CMD wont be able to do anything. We run Phyton and visual studio in our environment and we have never had any issues with students running code on the computer suites. I previously ran a large organisation that offered 16+ education and we never had issues there.

Can I ask a few questions? I dealt with a similar issue when I took over my current site and think I can help point you in the right direction with this. What OS are your Mac's running? Are both the iMac and Macbook's running the same version of the OS down to the release i.e 10.12.2 ? There is a known issue with x.x.1 . x.x.2 versions changing the set up of the keychain. What domain functional level are you running? What OS are your domain controllers running? Do you have Mac Server? Are the Mac's and Macbooks, Mac server bound to AD?

I have my team using Solarwinds WebHelpDesk, this is the 3rd establishment I have installed it for and the key behind its success for me is the level of flexibility you have with it, if you really want to customise the set up you can. Especially to suit working in an ITIL compliant way. Spiceworks is fine as a means of recording requests etc, but if you ever look to grow into a department with ITIL at its core then you will find Spiceworks cannot achieve this as its not set up in the right way. I am move than happy to show you the custom configuration we use to make SolwarWinds WHD a super tool for a very busy IT department.

We are looking for an Apprentice to join our fast paced IT Support Team, all the details can be found here. http://www.gloscol.ac.uk/apprenticeships/vacancies/severn-vale-school/?returnPage=4

Cheers just what I needed. James

Do you allow your students to use Pintrest? Thanks

Thanks, I have asked our LA as we are an academy they haven't been too forth coming at this point.

Hello, I am hoping someone on here can help! I am the IT Operations Manager for a school who prior to my engagement has suffered from being led by IT consultants and large IT firms down a particular path best aligned with their profit margins as apposed to using the best technology, standards or best practices to achieve the schools long and short term goals. With my introduction and the removal of an out sourced IT support team, I am looking to provide the school with a independent review/audit on the schools IT systems, processes, staff and procedures. This review would be benchmarked against industry standards, ITIL, ISO/IEC , Etc. and would provide the school a level of governance which is much needed to reinforce the support for the decision that are being made and will be made moving forward. I am keen to know what you do for this level of checking, do you even do anything? I have been in contact with a few independent IT consultancy firms but the issue always lies in that they are not truly independent they will have arrangements with suppliers , software vendors or other firms to recommend their platforms or solutions during any audit. What I am looking for is very close to what a business would receive in the form of a yearly financial audit. Many Thanks in advance.

UE-V would be the way to go, in terms of set up it will require you to invest more time in the background configured to support UE-V in your environment. Its also worth noting that you need to check you have the licences for UE-V from Microsoft as its not included in the basic campus agreement. I used UE-V in a large deployment 10,000 user deployment and it works really well if set up properly, we used in with Win 7 and 8.1

Hi Ben, when you say you are getting this error can you be more specific. Are you deploying via the PXE environment or Via Software Center. When you say you are installing 8.1 is this from a ISO or a custom capture? Is this a newly built task sequence or an updated one? Which version of SCCM are you running - (version number would be best.) If you are using PXE which version of the WINPE environment are you using? If you can give as much information as possible I will try to help out.

Davit2005 what licencing do you have for Veeam is its Veeam or Veeam Enterprise?

I have seen a similar issue elsewhere when moving from 2k13 to 2k16. What server OS are you running your KMS on? What KMS version are you running? How many unique machinces have you got running Office 2016 trying to activate?

SCCM is perfectly designed to support the deployment of such applications. The question is why are you deploying software updates weekly? Why are you not using GPO's to disable auto update on the applications and then choosing a stable version of the software and running with that for a set time frame. We generally run term to term with a single version then download, UAT and deploy the next version as a supersededance in SCCM so that we have a constant state of stable systems. With Java, Flash etc we usually run one back from the current version depending on the release notes etc. Proper software management is key, in any enterprise environment it is not a good idea to run the bleeding edge version of software.

Hi Chris, The reason it is taking so long for the software to appear is SCCM runs a check in cycle and that downloads the headers for the software in the available collection, this can be a little frustrating when you are testing the system, you can manually check you system back into SCCM to get the catalog quicker but it does not always work. As a side note, when was the SCCM set up and install done? was it done by someone who knew what they where doing with System Center ? If not I would look at starting again with it or paying for a Microsoft Partner or consultant to do it, something I have seen in the past at several educational establishments is really badly done SCCM installs which function but when put into production use fall over causing more work than you want. I am more than happy to give you some guidance if your not sure how good the set up is as its part of my bread and butter these days. All the best

Hi I am currently seeing an issue on workstaions where the C:\Windows\System32\WBEM\Repository folder becomes too large (2-7GB) causing the PC's to hang on the welcome screen and the please wait screen as the WMI service scans the repository. I have managed to produce a fix, which moves this folder to a 001 name and creates a new repository database. However this process is very hands on and only works if you know you have this issue. What I am hoping one you can help with is why I am seeing this, I have found articles on forums pointing towards a SCCM 2012 issue where the client was incorrectly set up and thus Microsoft patched the client to resolve. However this was with 2012 and we are running the 1602 release and before that we where running 2012 R2 full patched, the site has never had the 2012 version installed. I have found multiple people also pointing to a solution which requires a hotfix to be installed that prevents the scanning of this database, but this again is a work around and does not point me towards the root cause and why this is happening. It seems more prevalent as a issue on x86 Windows 7 PC's but has been a problem on x64 as well just not as much. If anyone can help I would very much appreciate that.

Does anyone know how you get the firmware updates for Fusion IO storage now that SanDisk own them. As when you go to their enterprise portal you cannot get updates for ioControl, which is the model we have. Any help would be great.

Abillybob, I saw a simular issue on a deployment from DS to a mix fleet of Mac's. This was with the latest DS version. The trick I found that solved the issue was to make the netboot image on a iMac with the newest hardware, but make the image using a Yosemite workstation as the changes to the underlying OS that have been made for El Capitain can cause major issue on boot for different hardware. You can still deploy a image of El Captiain from the Yosemite boot space with DS , it just seems to prevent these kernal dump errors on boot. Hope that helps

I am working on a 10.11 Build for our 21" iMac's and have found the following weirdness wondered if anyone has seen/resolved these issues; When users log in they do not get the default profile - however if you make a local user they do When a user logs in there download folder links to there Windows Home drive but the documents does not it crashes when you click on it. If anyone has any ideas please let me know. James

You can do it from the Exchange Management shell using; $CSV = Import-CSV C:\CSVPATH\csv.csv foreach ($u in $CSV) { Get-Mailbox -identity $u | Set-Mailbox -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true } To make this work you would need a CSV with all the users you want to affect, but if they are in a single OU you can do each OU with; Get-ADUser -SearchBase OU=OUNAME,DC=DOAMIN,DC=LOCAL' -Filter '*' | select -exp samaccountname,userprincipalname | Export-CSV C:\Destiantion\csv.csv -notypeinformation

We are about to deploy 60 laptops running BitLocker, do you use BitLocker? And if you do, do you allow users to change the pin? Thanks

We got a HP server for our test and Dev vMware enviroment the other month, it was a DL380 Gen9, 20 X 2.97 GHz Intel E5-2650 v3 CPU's with 256GB DDR4 RAM.Is a very nice unit, and I am looking at getting a couple more to grow the UAT enviroment. I have also bought Dell R730's which also are very good as VM Hosts. What Kind of load are you looking to pur on it? What system/servers are you running on it? What kinda of head room are you looking for over you current enviroment?

Have you worked out the contention ratio of the switches? Because if you are fully loading a 48 port switch which has a single Fibre link with a maximum connection speed of 1Gbps, then your limiting factor is going to be the share of both the uplink and the backplane of the switches in question. At best the switch would be giving 2.6MBps on full load and obviously if the switches are in anyway stacked or worse chained off each other then you are going to see even less, and this is not taking in to consideration the theoretical backplane of your HP switches. With iPerf its best to test comms from a pc to a pc both ways during low and high load periods and see the difference, I work to deliver 200 MBps to all workstations attached to any stack on full load as any real time applications will really suffer on a LAN that can’t offer this. Also what are you using to do your imaging? Is in multicast enabled? and are the switches? Out of intrest do you have; A toplogy diagram for your network HP procurve manaager or Solarwinds Orion or simular?

My Workstation is a Dell Mobile Workstation. Dell Precision M3800 Intel® Core™ i7-4712HQ (Quad Core 2.30GHz, 3.3GHz Turbo, 6MB 37W, w/HD Graphics 4600) (T) Windows 8.1 Enterprise 15.6" UltraSharp IGZO UHD Touch Display (3840x2160) 4K2K Wide View AG LED-backlit with Premium Panel 16GB DDR3L at 1600MHz 512GB Solid State Drive Full Mini Card Nvidia® Quadro ® K1100M, w/ 2GB GDDR5 Weighting just 4.15 lbs When I am my desk I connect it up to 2 x Acer 27" HD Screens and a Microsoft Sculpt Desktop kit via a HP USB Replicator.