pete

Deploy Blender with the /S switch for a silent install. Blender will (like all Windows apps) honour any permissions you've set. So long as your shares are appropriately secured, you shouldn't have any problems.

^ Current applications (people who'll be joining us in September/the X months). Historical applications are cleared out yearly because we have no reason to keep them and it helps stop contacts/SIMS becoming a mess.

If you don't already use it, try this: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/6f8cde49-5c52-4abd-9820-f1d270ddea61 (Works on SQL 2012 too). Clearing out superseded updates beforehand would help.

We use WSUS and WPP (SCCM-lite). Do you mean the WSUS server itself is slow or the delivery/checking for patches on the clients is slow? Have you given the WSUS database/WSUS itself any TLC recently?

TBH it depends what you want - someone who can use Puppet, Git & Munki to automate configs or just someone who knows a bit and can pick up the rest? I prefer open questions like: "You have a room of 20 Macs running Yosemite. Student video footage is worked on locally and may or may not also be backed up to $wherever_it_should_go. You need to upgrade to El Capitan for September. How would you go about checking footage was backed up, re-imaging the computers and ensuring all applications function as expected?" "How would you automate application updates across $devices? How could you report on progress/success/failure?"

We went down the AppleTV + AirParrot route. Airparrot was roughly £7-8/license per Windows PC. All our AppleTVs use a wired connection, which does help.

^ J: Where's my printing...? Office: Dunno, we were doing a report run..... *interlude* Parent: "Thanks for sending us Tom's report, we're a little confused about the love tokens - is that like a merit badge?"

Swiss army knife (bet there's a golfing version) - yup: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Victorinox-Golf-Tool/dp/B000MMWOZ0 Gerber Shard for impromptu dismantling/proggling things.

Lots of part-time techs also have a "plus X floating weeks in the hols" in their contracts, the exact timing of which are negotiated according to need.

I'd use a Windows Media Centre Edition - esque remote. You could also tie the PC directly into the projector (assuming the projector has a relay block). That way powering on the projector will turn on the PC. Stick an SSD in it and it'll be ready before the projector is.

Have a look at Lucidpress.com it's from the same people who do Lucidcharts.com and there's a "hey, you're a school - have it for free" option. https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/usecase/education https://www.lucidpress.com/pages/usecase/education

^ IIRC uppercase "/S" is required - it'll ignore "/s".

More interesting is that this appears to be based on code from eyeOS, which has been around for a few years. Then they got bought out by Telefonica and the open source license was replaced by a proprietary one. So I'm having problems believing the "100% Open Source" tagline.

Wouldn't building an Ikea Lack standing desk be cheaper and more robust? A standing desk for $22 A refinement would be to use adjustable perforated shelving strips so the keyboard tray could be adjusted. Or if you wanted to make something out of wood, something like this: Eiger Standing Desk?: The retrofit solution | iwantastandingdesk.com

Get a refurb/office clearance Steelcase Leap with the headrest.

I'd be talking to the people responsible for your outbound line after checking jitter/latency by looking at your phone system as mentioned up thread. I'd also try to narrow down to whether it's specific external numbers you have problems on. We have a few suppliers with incredibly shonky phone systems (the sales guys are always complaining about the phones) where call quality is awful. Internally we run managed switches for voice (I refuse to provide voice ports on dumb switches).

^ SIMS will (or used to*) allow invalid characters to be imported via CTF. When a real human goes into the record it should then mark it red until it's fixed. However, the "is this a real email address?" routine just looks for [email protected] so typos (binternet is the usual) will always slip through. *my life has been CTF free for the last couple of years and I like it that way. And yeah, I'm sure Phil's been nagged more than once on here about email validation.

We're kinda up, but it's still intermittent. KCOM said (at about 10:40) that they were waiting on information regarding the fix (whether it was temporary, permanent or what) and it might be an hour before they knew.

Assuming your lot do a lot of filming, our Media dept lend out: Boom and area microphones. Steadycam grips? Lighting to go on top of the tripods/stands? I liked the Fotodiox Flapjacks I spotted on tested.com the other week. Behind the Scenes: How We Light Our Videos! - Tested

The UniFi switches are annoying in that you can do (say) A,B,C and D at the switch CLI, but when managed from a controller only A and B are exposed. Oh, and the controller will overwrite the CLI config unless you do some jenga. They're nice devices (have an 8 port in the home lab for PoE) but they desperately need the CLI features to be included in the controller interface.

The problem I'm seeing is that it's not clear where the time is being spent because the bulk of the SQL load appears to happen in the first 30 seconds and the hardware looks as though it's sitting idle. As an additional data point: The interim report has 135 tags to query for each student, so 14,040 queries across the 104 students. The annual report had 144 tags to query for each student, so 14,976 queries across the 104 students, however the Name, Surname and Reg is pulled for each subject page and I'm assuming they're not being re-requested (and thus the report runs faster).

Preface: I'm aware this is highly variable based on how the reports are created and how much data is being pulled, but the problem I'm noticing is as follows: Testing hardware: Client device is a server with 12 physical cores, 72GB of RAM and SSD disks SIMS server is virtual with 4 cores allocated, 12GB of RAM and using SAN storage fronted by an SSD cache. Both client and server are connected to the same physical switch. Exported test files are being saved locally on the client. When I run a report to test speeds the following happens: Spike in SQL load of 15-32% for 16-30 seconds during the "extracting" message Practically zero load (CPU, RAM, network, disk queue) on the client, server or network for 7 minutes while the reports are generated No rhythm or reason as to why it takes 7 minutes because there's lots of capacity that could be used to speed it up Running an Interim assessment report (1-pager, all subjects) for 104 pupils in Year 9 takes 7mins 40 secs dumped to .xml file or 12 mins 41 secs dumped to PDF (to simulate printing). SIMS SQL load spikes up to 30% during extraction, but thereafter the server and client are idling. Running the Annual report for 104 pupils in Year 9 takes 6 minutes, 41 seconds (less tags) dumped to an .xml file or 12 mins 39 secs dumped to PDF (to simulate printing). SIMS SQL load spikes to 25% for 16 seconds during extraction, but thereafter the server and client are idling. What sort of times does it take at your school. Is anyone else seeing similar behaviour?

We're using WPP for .msi, .msp and .exe* deployment. As noted above, you do have to sign the packages you deploy. The PDF guide on the codeplex site will get you started: https://www.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=WsusPackagePublisher&DownloadId=499803 The short version is: Configure WSUS for SSL if you haven't already Obtain a code signing certificate via internal CA Unpack WPP, run elevated from an admin PC and point at the WSUS server's FQDN Check that WSUS versions match on Admin PC and WSUS server Set a proxy for WPP if it hasn't autodetected via IE (so it can download SCUP catalogue updates) Ensure WSUS is using the code signing certificate Create a test package, only deploy to HereBeDragons** until you're sure it works properly (and ideally, you test installing over an older version and installing from scratch). Then push to TestGroup. Then to other groups. Subscribe to the publicly available SCUP catalogues from Dell, HP & Adobe. *caveat, requires sane developers - YMMV. **our initial test group for patches.

"The O365 Admin Center is a GUI application that administrators can use to perform some of the most common O365 tasks." https://github.com/bwya77/O365-Administration-Center ...currently getting gold in /r/sysadmin.

^ What he said. Rolled out to a couple of non-critical canaries and waited a month for oddness to appear and then rolled out to the rest in stages. Provided you setup the AV exclusions (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/822158) and any for known-strange software you should be fine.