Norphy

I don't get on with Earpods, I can never get them to stay in my ears. And other cheap ear buds these days all seem to come with those god-awful silicone tips which I also don't get on with. I've seen those Sony headphones above for about £200 on the intarwebs, it's tempting...

LUN stands for Logical Unit Number. It's essentially the storage volume on the device itself, which your server attaches to via iSCSI, FC, FCoE or SAS. It's up to you how you set up your volumes. There is no reason to restrict yourself to 2TB LUNs; Windows will quite happily address multi terabyte volumes, as long as the volume is a GPT volume. There are advantages to either approach but on my Compellent SANs I have multiple smaller volumes on which I store either one VM or a group of related VMs.

We considered that approach, but we imaged them for a few major reasons: 1) Alway On VPN device tunnels require Windows Enterprise or Education. Windows Pro for Education only supports user tunnels. 2) These devices are supposed to be going to disadvantaged students. We can't guarantee that they've got a decent internet connection, or that it hasn't been capped. Enrolling them into Intune then stuffing Office down the line might use their data 3) If we image them beforehand, we can guarantee a consistent software loadout and configuration.

Quite. In the twelve-odd years I've been using SCCM to image machines, I have never come across a more awkward device. Even those god-awful Linx Windows 8 tablets that were in vogue a few years ago weren't this bad.

It’s stopped snowing, it was fairly heavy for a couple of hours and it’s settled. I suspect it’ll be gone by the end of the day.

Snow in SE Laaaaaaaandan!

https://www.codetwo.com/admins-blog/prevent-users-from-changing-profile-photos-microsoft-365/ Set an OWA Mailbox Policy We do this, it works

That’s a good idea

Well crap Too many from B5 have gone too soon

I watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks on Prime today. I actually liked it more than I thought I would. I like Discovery and Picard but this is going back to the more old fashioned story per week format, which is actually quite nice. Even the credit sequence and fonts hark back to TNG.

I've found that functionality stops working when the Teams client is out of date. Get them to sign in via the browser and see if the same happens.

If you're using SCCM, I've used that script to detect whether or not the driver is installed using Compliance Rules, or whatever they're calling DCM these days. I can post those, if anyone is interested? Our Geobooks are connected to our network by VPN so we can manage this sort of thing. Admittedly, the DCM snippets are much the same as what's above but people might find it useful.

I don't know if anyone has had the same problem, but we're finding that when we build these things from SCCM, some of the drivers aren't getting installed. I've written a PowerShell script which installs the drivers for you. #Force downloads via TLS1.2 [system.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [system.Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12; #Install Nuget Package provider $PP = Get-PackageProvider -ListAvailable -name Nuget if ($PP) { echo "Installed" } else { Install-PackageProvider -Name NuGet -MinimumVersion 2.8.5.201 -Force } #Set PSGallery to be trusted $Gallery = Get-PSRepository -Name PSGallery if ($Gallery.InstallationPolicy -ne "Trusted") { Set-PSRepository -Name PSGallery -InstallationPolicy Trusted } #Install DeviceManagement module $Module = get-module -Name DeviceManagement -ListAvailable if ($Module) { echo "Installed" } else { Install-Module -Name DeviceManagement -force } #Import DeviceManagement Module Import-Module DeviceManagement #Install Drivers #DSP Driver $DSP = Get-Device |Where-Object {$_.hardwareids -eq "INTELAUDIO\DSP_VEN_8086&DEV_0222&SUBSYS_00000022&REV_0001"} if ($DSP.HasProblem -eq $true) { Install-DeviceDriver -InfFilePath \\path\to\your\drivers\here\Geo\Drivers\intcoed.inf_amd64_4f836ecdb1f887ff\intcoed.inf } else {echo "Installed"} #Display Audio $HDMI = Get-Device |Where-Object {$_.hardwareids -eq "INTELAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_8086&DEV_280D&SUBSYS_80860101&REV_1000"} if ($HDMI.HasProblem -eq $true) { Install-DeviceDriver -InfFilePath \\path\to\your\drivers\here\Geo\Drivers\intcdaud.inf_amd64_6aef99a0fd5f7d29\intcdaud.inf } else {echo "Installed"} #Management Engine $PCISimple = Get-Device |Where-Object {$_.hardwareids -eq "PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_319A&SUBSYS_72708086&REV_06"} if ($PCISimple.HasProblem -eq $true) { Install-DeviceDriver -InfFilePath \\path\to\your\drivers\here\Geo\Drivers\txei.inf_amd64_129c9052fdd9eb45\txei.inf } else {echo "Installed"} #Realtek Audio $RealtekAudio = Get-Device |Where-Object {$_.hardwareids -eq "INTELAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0269&SUBSYS_27820204&REV_1002"} if ($RealtekAudio.HasProblem -eq $true) { Install-DeviceDriver -InfFilePath \\path\to\your\drivers\here\Geo\Drivers\hdxsstemdoor.inf_amd64_6ed8486222b5a576\HDXSSTEmdoor.inf } else {echo "Installed"} The script downloads the NuGet package provider, installs a PowerShell module which manages devices and installs the driver from a path. You'll have to change the path in the script.

I'll give it a go. Thankyou

These aren't SuperMicro devices, they're Cas-Well. I have a SuperMicro device which acts as our log collector, on which the BMC is working fine. Does the same apply to these Cas-Wells? Are they using SuperMicro motherboards?

I would post this in the Smoothwall forum, but I can't. It seems to have disabled new posts? Is this deliberate? Anyway, we've just received four S14 appliances, an HA pair for both of our internet breakouts. These devices are based on a Cas-Well CAR-6010 chassis. They have a management port on the front of them and a section in the BIOS to set up a BMC, or an iDRAC/iLO if you want to talk Dell/HPE. Has anyone managed to set up the BMC in one of these devices? I've tried but hit a brick wall; there's a section in the BIOS to enable it and give it an IP address (no default gateway though, oddly) but even from a server in the same network segment I can't access it. There is no manual for this device on the Cas-well website and the Smoothwall engineer setting them up hasn't set up the BMC on one of these things before. Does anyone know how/if it can be done? I want to monitor the hardware from my monitoring platform and doing it through the OS doesn't cut it. Thanks, Norphy

It took me a long time to work out what was wrong with that. I spent ages looking at the spelling thinking ‘that looks ok to me!’

Watched the first two episodes of WandaVision on Disney+. Odd, but in a good way. Hints of darker things to come.

What's that?

You rate Voyager above DS9? Voyager? Really? VOYAGER??? OK then. Ooo, that's good news. I wonder if someone over here has got the recent Short Treks yet?

It's one of my favourite books but despite the money that Amazon have thrown at it I'm not too sure it translated very well to the screen. I gave up about half way through the first season. I'm waiting Cobra Kai on Netflix at the moment. I'm liking it a lot.

"I don't want you to give money to this multi-billion dollar corporation with a near monopoly on certain products. I want to you to give money to THAT multi-billion dollar corporation with a near monopoly on certain products instead. Because REASONS"

It’s hard to gauge the suitability of the 2930M as a core switch without knowing more about your organisation. If you have a single site, you’re planning to terminate your VLANs at the core, if you’re not planning to do any internal network routing outside of that device, your use of 10gbit interfaces is going to be limited and if you don’t need more than four fibre ports then yes, I think it will be fine. If your school is part of an interconnected MAT or if you’re planning to push L3 to the edge or if any of the either criteria above aren’t met, I would suggest looking at a higher end switch, either a 3800 or a 5400R. Or one of the newer CX switches, but I don’t know enough about that range to make recommendations about those. The advantage of using something like a 5400R is that it’s easily expandable, should your requirements change later on. Need fibre ports? Buy a module. Need 10gig or NBaseT ports? Buy a module. A very flexible arrangement. My MAT has a few 2540 switches sitting on the edge in our older sites and they’re perfectly good L2 switches. They use the standard ProcurveOS (Now ArubaOS, badge engineering at its finest) and have a nice web interface if you don’t like the CLI. The only niggle I have with them is that they’re arbitrarily fussy about the kind of transceivers they accept; we bought some 10gbit LRM transceivers because our older sites still have old fibre and the 2540 doesn’t support those.

A GP said that some of his patients have turned down the Pfizer vaccine, in order to ‘wait for the English one’ Words fail me.

Unfortunately Hyper-V doesn't support USB redirection, like VMware does. The best you can do is to put the VM client into "Enhanced Mode", which is essentially connecting to the VM via RDP. Some USB devices can be redirected that way but not all. You will either have to choose another hypervisor which supports USB redirection (VMware Workstation Pro and Player do, not sure about others) or you will need to install 1709 on bare metal.