Norphy

Can we report people for not closing tags? Save me a nice spot in the pond

I don’t think that’s quite right. The suite of products that Configuration Manager is in is being moved from System Center to Endpoint Manager. Endpoint Manger includes Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and Intune. The actual product itself hasn’t changed yet, it’s just the branding. I expect the two will be brought closer together but apart from the label on the box, nothing has changed yet

I’m in the process of writing a PowerShell script at the moment that takes a SIMS report and generates Teams from it. It creates a team per class, tutor group, year and year subject (e.g Year 7 English). It updates the Team if someone gets removed or added to a class. It’s fairly specific to our MAT and it relies on there being an anchor between SIMS and AD but once it’s complete, I’m willing to share it if people are interested.

Our childminder is driving my GF crazy with similar bat:censored: conspiracy theories about COVID19 and 5G. It really takes a special kind of ignorance to conflate the two

Crazy Frog? CRAZY FROG???? Stop the planet, I want to get off.

God help me, I’m actually looking forward to Saturday as that’s the day I’m going shopping at the moment.

I disagree. For a business that size, I'd look closer at a Microsoft 365 subscription which includes Intune. That way, you'd be able to join all of your Windows, iOS and Android devices to that and manage them from there. You'd have access to services like OneDrive and Office 365 groups to store and share stuff plus MS Office licenses would be included as well.

What problem are you looking to solve by putting in a server and installing a local AD?

In my opinion: VLEs can work well when: They are properly planned They are properly managed There are proper content manager(s) for them They are evangelised by a member of staff SLT gets behind it and ensures that people use them Students and staff are properly trained to use the thing When they're forced upon the school (Anyone remember Digital Brain) or when the school puts one in because they're expected to or fail to do one or all of the above, they stagnate and die. Now is not the time to put one in if you don't have one. These things need careful and thorough planning. Just bunging one in in a hurry will result in failure and a miserable experience for everyone.

PowerShell? Get-VpnConnection or Get-VpnConnection -AllUserConnection might help https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/vpnclient/get-vpnconnection?view=win10-ps

Given my recent experiences with multi participant meetings over Teams just recently, I disagree strongly with that point. Every bugger not using a headset got told to mute, otherwise the echoing was just unbearable.

Seriously, Microsoft just need to sack their entire marketing and branding division and start again. Even after 13 years, this still rings true:

I think companies like Microsoft, Google and others which help facilitate teleworking are coining it in at the moment as well. We’re spending a small fortune on Azure services because of this

Hustle Apart from a couple of minor differences and a minor tweak to the ending, this was pretty much a shot by shot remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, except with female con artists instead of male. Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson gave pretty good performances but the film felt fairly pointless to be honest. It was done just as well, if not better, 30 years so. Why remake it at all?

I don’t know that that’s a downside to be honest, more just a thing. At least with the LTSC version of Office, it’s going to remain consistent for the time that it’s in support whereas with the CB, it’s going to change at the whim of Microsoft. There are advantages to either.

We're up to 13 now. Will be interested to see what it is in the morning...

I think you're right, mine has gone up to the heady heights of 7 now. Thanks

I've just set up Always On VPN because of the fun we're having with schools closing etc. I'm looking at monitoring connections and I've found the Get-RemoteAccessConnectionStatisticsSummary PowerShell cmdlet. The output of it is as follows TotalConnections : 5 TotalDAConnections : 0 TotalVpnConnections : 5 TotalUniqueUsers : MaxConcurrentConnections : 6 TotalCumulativeConnections : 73 TotalBytesIn : 940063605 TotalBytesOut : 6420033923 TotalBytesInOut : 7360097528 The thing that's caught my notice is MaxConcurrentConnections : 6 Is that a limit of six concurrent connections or does that mean that 6 concurrent connections is the most it's seen so far?

Those switches can use v2 ZL modules, if I remember correctly. Those still seem to be available new. Any HPE partner should still be able to source them. I generally use European Electronique for this kind of thing. Of course, they’re not at all cheap so getting one second hand will save you a packet

I’ve also found out today that there’s an issue with browsers built on the latest version of Chromium where they sometimes refuse to connect to the farm. The workaround is to use a browser not based on chromium or to set some browser flags. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-virtual-desktop/wvd-web-client-connection-errors-in-google-chrome-and-microsoft/m-p/1233810

We’re using 19 Standard D4s v3 which are supposed to be capable of handling 300 concurrent users. I don’t really have an idea of how much it’s going to cost for the month as we’ve only been running it for a few days. The forecast is saying about £3k for the month at the mo but we’ll see.

This has been my life for the past few days. What with all of the COVID 19 nonsense going on, the schools in our MAT started telling all 600 members of staff that they could use our Remote Desktop system in the event of the schools shutting. Uh, no. That thing is designed for 30 people max, it’d keel over and die if more people than that used it. So I’ve been looking at WVD as well. It was pretty easy to deploy but it does require you to be reasonably comfortable with PowerShell. It’s very much a v1 product where not everything is doable in the Azure GUI right now. Other than that, it seems to work well. I’ve got my network connected to Azure via an IPSEC tunnel, I’m managing all of the WVD VMs using my on prem SCCM and it’s all working like you’d want it to. The HTML interface is identical to the one introduced with Server 2016 and you can use the standard RDP apps that come with windows or the ones that are available in the MS, Apple and Google app stores as well. When this crisis is over, I think there’s a good chance we’ll replace our on premise RDP farm with this, depending on how well it copes during the crisis. Now I just need to unleash it on my staff...

One of our schools is close to central London and has a sports field that isn't attached to the main building; it's about 1/4 of a mile away. We need to connect this sports hall to the rest of the MAT's network. It's a hilly area so there's no line of site which makes a wireless link impractical and there aren't enough people who work there to justify putting in a leased line or P2P connection. At the moment, it's using a xDSL connection to connect to the internet but that has its own issues. I therefore want to put in a FTTC internet connection and have a site-to-site VPN going back to the main office. What do you think would be best for implementing that? A hardware router with a built in IPSEC tunnel? A small PC running pfSense or something similar? Any recommendations for hardware? Thanks

That's not really a question that can be answered with the information you've put there. It would depend entirely on the role of the server. For example, for a backup server where the speed of the disks is less important than raw capacity, I'd be happy to put in large SATA drives. For a busy database server, I'd want SAS drives or even NVMe. It's one of those "how long is a piece of string?" questions.

Something like this? https://www.webspy.com/