Norphy

ESR requires an Azure AD Premium license, plus it needs the computers to be Azure AD joined. And it dumps everything into Azure which might not be what OP wants.

For me: If you're using a laptop, a docking station and a spare power adapter A decent monitor, or two. Preferably 1440p resolution or higher. Noise cancelling headphones A lockable door, to which general staff don't have the key or access rights to A whiteboard and/or pinboard Sentry tower and machine gun nest* Comfortable chair. This is a must. *may be not be entirely serious

This is mine at the moment. I’m using the dinner table, it’s not ideal…

Because it was coming on for 40 years ago and the facilities and/or techniques required for it didn't exist back then? Not to mention, weaker environmental protection laws as well.

I raised a ticket on the 24th May. The first I heard from an engineer was on the 10th June. The only contact I had from Smoothwall in the three weeks between was an automated email from them saying "Sorry, we'll assign an engineer to you as soon as possible". I was this --><-- close to emailing my account manager to have a good whinge but I got an email from an engineer just as I was doing so, who in fairness was very good once he was looking at the issue. I don't think there's an issue with the quality of the care that Smoothwall technical support provides once they get around to you but there sure are problems with response times. Three weeks to get a response is downright unacceptable.

Sorry @ibpalle, do you mean that I'm right or that Techmonkey is right? Thanks

No, don't do that! We could at least send them to a recycling facility to harvest what useful components and materials they have.

Where are people getting the 11 technical preview? Are there any legit ways of getting it outside of MSDN or similar, or are people resorting to more nefarious ways of getting it?

Well, get an SE or 12 Mini then. The 12 Mini is smaller than an Eight, the SE is an iPhone 11 in a iPhone 8 shell. You do have options.

So a centre aligned task bar, a slightly redesigned/even more ruined start menu, some redesigned icons and rounded corners? Be still my beating heart.

My work phone is an XR, my personal one is a 7. I carry both about and to be honest, the XR isn't noticeably bigger in my pocket than the 7. I do prefer the size of the 7, to be honest so if I were going to buy a new phone today it would be a 12 Mini

Nedi is a good visualisation tool which has some basic monitoring built into it. It's free: https://nedi.ch WhatsUp Gold is a commercial monitoring system which is also good but fairly expensive. If management is more your thing than monitoring, looking at HP's own tools might be worth considering too. IMC or Airwave. If you're really masochistic, there's also Nagios and its various derivatives but every time I look at Nagios, I end up turning the air blue and various sized children run away in fear so maybe keep away from that one.

Another vote for PRTG. It’s very good value compared to a lot of the other commercial monitoring tools I’ve looked at. If you’ve already got a System Center license for DPM or whatever, SCOM is worth a look but is pretty weak at monitoring switches.

So, the situation is that the clocks on our network are two minutes slow. This isn't causing any problems with the computers but the two kilos of grey matter inbetween our user's ears is causing issues. Our domain controllers are all virtual, and the overall consensus of opinion is that virtual DCs should not be getting their time from their hosts. So instead, I've got them syncing against one of our Smoothwalls with the NTP Service enabled. However, this Smoothwall is two minutes slow which would explain why the clients are also two minutes slow. I've read this article: https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002967259-Setting-the-Network-Time-Protocol-NTP-Best-Practice Which seems to imply to me that a Smoothwall can be an NTP Client or an NTP server but not both at the same time. Am I reading that right?

Uh, no. Modern versions of Windows run on the NT kernel, which was a brand new kernel developed by MS in the early 90s. The fact that NT based operating systems have a command prompt with commands which have a similar syntax to old DOS commands does not make Windows NT 3/3.5/4 and Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7/8/10 based on DOS. The last MS-DOS based version of Windows was Windows ME.

Even with nested virtualisation, it's not going to give a crap about running running Linux on there, even if you're running linux on Hyper-V on ESXi. As has already been said, the simplest way to license your virtual hosts if you're running Windows on them is to buy enough Windows licenses to cover the CPU cores on each host. Once you're running more than four or five Windows VMs on a host, Datacenter is usually the more cost effective way to go.

I wouldn't worry too much about the Cat5e cable you've got. Cat5e is still good for gigabit speeds up to distances of 100m so unless you've got areas which are particularly electrically noisy or are looking to use 10GbaseT over longer distances, it's fine.

Those are ST connections - to use an SFP module in a switch you will need an ST to LC patch cable. Yellow sometimes means it's single mode fibre but I doubt that's the case there. Look on the cable and see if there's any printing - something like "50/125 OM3" or similar

In my experience, the colour guides are unhelpful at best when it comes to identifying fibre. Guides like that are accurate until they aren't, if you see what I mean. I have OM3 patch leads which are orange and a sort of blue/cyan colour but I've never seen a green one before. The only real way to be sure is to look at the covering on the fibre and see if the fibre type is printed on it.

Yes, you just need an SFP or SFP+ module, depending on the speed of your uplink. Depending on the type of termination your fibre has, you may also need a new patch lead as SFP modules use LC connections and ST and SC terminations on patch panels aren't that unusual. https://www.cablemonkey.co.uk/366-lc-fibre-connectors-adapters

As the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies and statistics…

The 5400R is a fine switch, I’ve got loads dotted around my MAT. The only thing to bear in mind is that it’s a relatively old model and it might not have much life left on the roadmap. I think if I was considering a new deployment, I’d look hard at the CX series. It will be supported for longer.

IIRC, the APC 3kva UPS I’ve got in one of my smaller server rooms has a 16amp commando feeding it and it’s perfectly happy. That will be more than enough to run that small amount of equipment

The kerning. It hurts.

Royal Blindfolded (do you get a choice of which Royal?) and Boycotting Cheese followed by Friday for me I think Out of curiosity, does anyone here read Arabic? If so, can you give a translation of some of the more choice examples and see just how the hell machine translation fouled up so badly?