pete

"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.

What wireless nics? We had some Realteks (if I recall correctly) on HP kit that required us to find newer drivers and then faff around with power saving* settings in order to get a stable connection. I'd give more details, but it's one of those "fix, adjust deployment method so it doesn't happen again, move on" problems that only cropped up once.

Just as a data point, I've just used Namecheap and from buy it > install cert was under ten minutes. That's a new record.

It's not quite full-blown site outage, but definitely fulfills the "disaster" and "recovery" components.... A few years ago (I probably mentioned it on here*) approximately half our site flooded. Then, while assessing the situation reception got a call from my neighbour of "tell Pete his house has flooded". So factor in that if your IT people live locally and you're affected by flooding, they may actually be doing N+1 disaster recovery plans and will be tired and annoyed. * yup. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/97493-ive-not-seen-rain-like-2.html#post847131 http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/97493-ive-not-seen-rain-like-3.html#post847177 http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/97493-ive-not-seen-rain-like-3.html#post847244

It's the time of the year where we poke existing providers (especially if they've been incumbent for a while) to ensure we're still getting the best deal. So, with that in mind - who're you using for your landlines and calls at work and are you happy with the service and pricing? We've currently got: 1x 8 channels on an ISDN30 over fibre for voice on the main number (our sweetspot of "enough lines to always get an outside line when we need one"). 1x standalone line as a backup line for the burglar alarm. 1x standalone line for "we've had no power for N+30* minutes and need to call buses + parents in the middle of winter". *usually means a multiple-hour outage.

Canaries I just approach the people who like shiny things and ask them if they want to be a guinea pig. SLT often fall victim to the "leading by example" ploy.

Thanks all. I don't have a budget as such - it's at the "How much do I need to make this worth doing?" stage.

Historically, attempting to push PICAXE out using their MSI using SCCM falls over during packaging with path depth errors due to Rev Ed's love of deep paths. But calling the executable with picaxeeditor6.exe /S /v/qn (that missing space isn't a typo) and then using the MSI method for detection should work, but it falls over with a 653 error when pushing to test clients. That implies a problem with the installer package, but the same file triggered manually works fine. Wrapping it in a script has the same problem. Using the same command at the CLI works without issue. Has anyone managed to push PICAXE Editor 6 out using SCCM?

^ I plan to, but I'd like an idea of what other people are using before I go talk to them.

I know, "Rent them you fool!". We do currently but: a) the arrangement we have is a faff b) they're not readily available (it's a "mates rates" service, not a commercial provider) c) the capacity for forward planning leaves a lot to be desired. Currently we've got: 3x Trantec lapel microphones + receivers which are ~10+ yrs old and a bit abused. 2x Shure receivers which seem OK (provided the one that might have been killed yesterday has just been messed about with) 1x working Shure handheld microphone, possibly enough parts to make a working 2nd one. Mixer with 2x Microphone inputs. So, if my Head of Music had a wishlist of: 5x singing* wireless microphones (handheld) + associated receivers 1x Mixer that can handle 5 microphone inputs and then 3-4 line inputs. What should I be looking at? I'm poking through the studio spares catalogue but I don't really have a good idea about brands** or what I should roughly be paying. *I'm assured there's a difference that becomes noticable in a lack of distortion as someone works through their vocal range. **I've bought Sennheiser kit before for me personally and the Shure kit we have is more robustly made than the Trantec, but that's about it.

I tend to just use Photorec (PhotoRec - Digital Picture and File Recovery).

it@ is an internal distribution list (that also includes the ticket system) - it rejects external emails. sysadmin@ or petebett20XX are my "I have to give you an email address but I don't really want to talk to you until I buy something and you prove you're not twerps". Then there's the real email address for people I (usually) want to talk to.

I'd lean towards teaching them to use 7-Zip properly because your OP implies this may spread to other file types. I suspect there's a moderately expensive add-on (or maybe built-in) encryption option for your photocopiers so that a piece of paper is scanned and encrypted in one go, but you'd have to talk to your copier company.

So my (and no doubt FSM knows how many other schools') nagging finally paid off. No longer will I have to resurrect long-retired user accounts just to delete the 93rd variation of "Geography Report Y10".

LLDP is in Windows 10, 2012 and 8, but it's not terribly useful from a "what computer is connected to port E1" perspective. See for an example. LDWin (https://github.com/chall32/LDWin) will tell a client PC the switchport it's plugged into.

If I reset the password of the test user back to what it was in local AD Users and Computers, it then pushes the "correct" password back to Azure. So it's fixable, I just wasn't expecting it to allow me to change it in the first place from within Office 365.

Circumstances: Local AD > Azure AD Connect > Office 365. Password sync enabled, password writeback not enabled. Affected users (pupils) not getting "hey change your password" prompts when logging into school network. Affected users are getting a "you need to change your password" prompt in Office 365. Using an unaffected test account, I can force a password reset in Office 365 for an AD-synced user. Said account has the password changed in Office 365, but not in Local AD (no write-back). I was expecting it to say "you can't do that, it's an AD-synced account without writeback" when I attempted to reset the password in Office 365 Admin center. Instead it lets me reset the user password for Office 365, my AD-synced user has to change their password and then they're (apparently) scuppered because the *real* password from AD isn't then synced back to Azure/Office 365. The local AD password is unchanged (writeback disabled). Has this behaviour changed recently? I'm expecting local AD to be treated as the single source of truth and Azure to reject password changes not initiated by Azure AD Connect, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Looking in the sync logs, I can see things appear to be going across fine.

Bought Life is Strange (Square Enix discount week on Steam) and I like it so far, though did spend some time wondering what earth-shattering revelation* would occur if I over-watered my plant. *Premise is that the protagonist can rewind time and you get a "the decision you make here will have consequences" notifier (in the form of a chaos butterfly) when you choose certain paths so you can (if you wish) rewind time to play out other options then choose with 20-20 hindsight. Plant care apparently has far-reaching consequences.

If they're functioning as a teacher (GTP/NQT) they get teacher permissions. If they're just in for a couple of weeks and they'll be shadowing someone, they don't get SIMS access.

From here (you need the prerequisites, maximum of 200 at a time (and leave it a while in-between runs): https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn800987.aspx $loadInfo1 = [system.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Client") $loadInfo2 = [system.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime") [system.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.UserProfiles") #Must be SharePoint Administrator URL $webUrl = "https://domain-admin.sharepoint.com" $ctx = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext($webUrl) $web = $ctx.Web $username = "[email protected]" write-host "Please enter your password" $password = read-host -AsSecureString $ctx.Credentials = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($username,$password ) $ctx.Load($web) $ctx.ExecuteQuery() $loader =[Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.UserProfiles.ProfileLoader]::GetProfileLoader($ctx) #To Get Profile $profile = $loader.GetUserProfile() $ctx.Load($profile) $ctx.ExecuteQuery() $profile #To enqueue Profile $loader.CreatePersonalSiteEnqueueBulk(@("[email protected]","[email protected]","[email protected]")) $loader.Context.ExecuteQuery() Write-Host "COMPLETED"

Forever-forward incrementals is the default, with full backups as an option.

Poke @Oaktech or @witch, they've used the company behind it (SchoolCare) in the past. But the site does appear to be something of a knock-off. edit, that'll teach me to leave random tabs open.

^ Nope. I'm running them on a wired network connection though (we specify running 2* network drops to new projectors), so that will make a difference. *one for an Apple TV/whatever, one for the increasing amount of projectors with network ports.

Hmm, we're using the "if it looks like storage, block it, if it's a peripheral allow it" options. Will have a poke about to see if I can amalgamate the two.