Norphy

The whole class A/B/C thing is somewhat arbitrary when it comes to private networks. As long as you stick to a private range, it doesn’t really matter what you use. The only thing I’d say is if you want to use ranges larger than a /24, it’s worth use a range in the A or B ranges, rather than a C. I’ve found that sometimes when you try to combine C ranges, devices can be funny if they get allocated a 0 or 255 address

Probably at the end of 2021 when they switch to Vodafone https://www.virginmedia.com/corporate/media-centre/press-releases/virgin-media-and-vodafone-strike-new-mobile-deal

In terms of the bare hypervisor, there is very little to choose between them. If you're using the more advanced features then VMware has the edge but in terms on money, I have to disagree and say that Hyper-V is more cost effective as you get the entire feature set of Hyper-V as part of the Windows license (which you have to buy either way if you're running Windows VMs), whereas with VMware they have different tiers of licensing which enable different features. However, if you're just using the free version of either product, give them both a try and see which you prefer. In terms of ease of setup, I'd say that ESXi has the edge as, assuming your hardware is on the HCL, it's a matter of installing it, giving it an IP address then setting up the product through its web UI whereas the initial setup of a Hyper-V server is more complicated.

Seems to be the trend these days: 1) Take existing logo 2) Flatten it, take out gradients 3) ??? 4) Profit!

For some of them, quite a lot actually, maybe around 15% of the day. HOWEVER the switches that are regularly exceeding 1gbps on their uplinks are big chassis switches rather than 1U switches so there are anything up to 280 ports on a single switch, rather than 48. In that instance, a 10gbit backbone is justified. For smaller switches, maybe not.

Are the laptops running Windows 10? If so, have you looked into Always On VPN, built into Windows 10 and Windows Server? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-access/vpn/always-on-vpn/always-on-vpn-technology-overview

If I were you, I would create a new user with the required permissions and use that for your backup. On our SIMS servers at least, there is at least one service (SOLUS) that uses the SA password and I have no doubt that there are more.

You see, VMware Essentials just annoys me. It’s gimped almost to the point of uselessness. No Storage vMotion. No DRS. It will only manage one cluster if you want more than one cluster, you need as many vSphere instances as you have clusters. But if you want to go up to Standard to get said useful features, it’s extortionate. It was this kind of nickel and diming from VMware that drove me away from it the first place

I hope we'll be able to block it :\

That will only work when connected to a VM using the Virtual Machine Viewer. As soon as you disconnect, the USB drive will disappear. Yes, you could use this in a pinch but it isn’t the same as proper hardware redirection. Unfortunately, USB device redirection is not a feature that Hyper-V has, unlike ESXi so if this is a facility you need, you’ll need a third party price of software as mentioned on the previous post.

The main thing that I would say is that because SCCM clients don’t use WSUS to download their updates (they get them from a DP instead), WSUS doesn’t need to be set to store updates on the WSUS host. Therefore, if you’re still using WSUS outside of a software update point, I would have a separate installation of WSUS to manage the outliers. The other thing to say is that outside of setting things like the Application Pool recycling settings, WSUS should be left well alone and that any setting changes to it should be made through SCCM.

There’s the cost of doing business and there’s downright fleecing the customer. I can accept it might cost in the region of £20-£50 of an engineer’s time to do a firmware upgrade, depending on how long it takes and if they doing it on site, a call out charge for that as well. £400 though? That’s essentially half a day’s rate for a job that would take half an hour at most.

If there are drivers for all of its hardware, it possibly might be, assuming you don’t need to pay money for a new license. In my experience, Windows 10 performance is no worse than Windows 7 even on old hardware. However, if the thing is ten years old, it’s worth looking at replacing. Even a £300 piece of junk from Curry’s is going to be an improvement. Plus there is always the option of getting reconditioned kit from from the usual suspects as well.

Hard drives from all vendors fail. I’ve had failed hard drives from Seagate, WD, HGST, Samsung and many others that have been absorbed by the current duopoly. You get dud models from all manufacturers, I’ve seen some real stinkers from WD in the past and let’s not forget the notorious 75GXP and 60GXP from IBM, the forerunner of everyone’s current darlings at HGST. I’d also be careful any using Backblaze’s data when deciding which hard drive to buy. Yes, it is certainly interesting but unless you’re planning to build a data centre of your own and run them vast hard drive arrays 24/7, I’m not sure just how valid their observations are for the average user.

That’s not stacking, that’s creating a link aggregation group. Stacking switches is where you manage multiple switches from a single management interface. This means that how ever many switches that the model supports in a stack can need managed from a single IP address, rather than multiple ones. That said, in essence what you’ve said is correct. To connect switches together with multiple uplinks the switches need to be managed switches which support some kind of link aggregation technology. LACP is a commonly used one which is supported by all of the major switch vendors.

Got a switch replacement project in one of our schools over Easter so I’m going to spend at last a couple of days unpatching in the region of 2200 network ports that haven’t passed any data in the ten years that they’ve been installed. I’m all for flood-wiring a place but making every port active? That’s just madness. Won’t be doing that with the new kit.

USB C compatibility between vendors is a real ****show. Seriously, it's awful. Not to mention it's pretty damned hard to decipher just what exactly a USB C port is actually capable of. With Dell, the WD15 and TB16 docks could be used with laptops from other manufacturers but frequent, they wouldn't charge them because Dell used some kind of propitiatory mojo for that. The HP laptops that we've got which can charge from USB C are extremely fussy about what they charge from; they wouldn't even charge from plain power adapters from other manufacturers. At the moment, two of our schools have got Dell laptops and docking stations. They work well when they work but their cables are somewhat delicate, especially the TB16 with the minuscule Thunderbolt cable. The last thing I'd say is try to avoid docks which use DisplayLink chipsets (Such as the Dell D3100) if you can. Yes, they work but they don't work as well as docks which act as DisplayPort MST hubs. The DisplayLink docks that I've tried struggle to drive 1080p monitors and chew up CPU time on the laptops.

To be honest, no. For unknown devices, I put an empty collection variable on the Unknown PCs called OSDComputerName. When the PC is built, it then prompts you to enter the name. An alternative is to harvest their MAC addresses and prestage them with a CSV file. I can see the advantage in what you're trying to do though

Um, no.

PowerShell script? If the software is pushed out by an MSI, you can check the remote machine's WMI for the MSI code. Example: get-wmiobject -ComputerName My-PC -class Win32_Product -filter 'IdentifyingNumber="{01DBDFEA-A641-4F43-B709-70D76FFC24E1}"' That gets back the NetSupport DNA Client

It seems to use a similar or the same update mechanism as Chrome does. Mine updated itself to v80 this morning without any input from me or anything inside WSUS.

So what service is it on? Stop being obtuse.

Sounds very meta, especially with Wash and Captain Tightpants on it. What channel/service is that on?

Roberto works for an insurance company so something nefarious no doubt Speaking for myself, they run everything. Domain controllers. File servers. SIMS Servers (we have a lot of those). Infrastructure services like Clearpass and Airwave. Inventory systems. Access control systems. Printer servers. Papercut. SCCM. SCVMM. Smoothwall. Password manager. SMTP relay. RADIUS. Power management. Phone system components. Safeguarding stuff like NetSupport DNA. Various parts of our remote desktop system and much more besides.

Yes but you could use some Araldite or some other kind of epoxy to glue it to the Mac. It wouldn't be pretty, admittedly, but it might be worth a go.