Norphy

Good point, well made

Maybe so but if you do run into a problem and go to Capita for support, they may well laugh and say "Sucks to be you!". Something not being supported isn't the same as something not working.

All of our PCs are on Windows 10 but we still have a few VMs running Windows 2008 R2. It’s in my todo list to evaluate what’s needed to get them upgraded or replaced

How mobile is mobile? How often will you be lugging this laptop from one building to another? In my opinion, the days of the oversized "Desktop Replacement" laptop are well and truly over. CPUs and RAM in laptops perform at much the same level as their desktop equivalents and storage is as fast, if not faster with SSDs. That said, "workstation" class laptops are worth a look because they generally are able to take more RAM and can sometimes get more storage in them too. I also think that the amount of expansion ports on laptops isn't as important as it was as USB C/Thunderbolt C docking stations are becoming more commonplace and better quality and they can charge your laptop and provide all of the external connectivity through a single cable. I work in a MAT, the majority of our staff have a Dell Latitude 7390 laptop. They have quad core CPUs, 8GB of RAM (can be expanded, they use standard SO-DIMMs), PCIe SSDs and a 1080p 13" screen. Most of our desks have Thunderbolt docking stations with wired network connections and two monitors attached so someone can rock up to any desk and work with their own machine. I personally have a Dell Precision laptop, a 5530. I chose this one as it can take two storage devices (a SATA drive and a PCIe SSD) and it has a 15" screen which I prefer as I can use it at 1080p without having to use display scaling. Yes, it doesn't have an internal NIC but that doesn't matter as it spends most of its time attached to a docking station. It's based on the same chassis as the Dell XPS 15; my particular model doesn't have an external GPU (you need the Xeon model for that) but I don't need it. The RAM also can be expanded, unlike the XPS. The only thing I don't like about it is that its chassis is a bugger for attracting greasy fingerprints.

It isn’t difficult. Ideally you should get publicly trusted SSL certificates, especially if the service that’s using it is an external one but you might be able to get away with certificates issued by an internal CA if your only going to use internal services and if that service trusts your root CA. Once you’ve got your cert, it’s recommended to put it into the DC’s NTDS personal certificate store. You can put it into the computers if you prefer but it’s better in the NTDS one. One thing, if you’re going to use a public cert, you will needs domain name that uses a routable domain name as most public CAs won’t issue cert’s to .internal, .local and the like any more.

Have you got HTTPS inspection turned on at your firewall? If so, have you tried putting in an exception for that site?

This website runs on Vbulletin which, admittedly, runs on open source platforms such as PHP, Apache or Nginx and MySQL but is itself a commercial closed source BBS. You can’t run anything on absolutes. If you restrict yourself to open or closed source software, you’re losing out on a lot of excellent software either way.

We've just opened a new school in Borough. At the moment, until we can get something more permanent in, we're using a Vodafone 5G internet connection to connect the school to the internet and to the rest of the MAT's network via a VPN tunnel. It's not bad, all things considered. They're getting about 200mbps down, 20mbps up which is OK for the amount of students that the school has at the moment. That said, the Smoothwall at the school doesn't seem to happy to be behind the ISP provided router, people there get a lot of "connection reset" errors.

Officially, yes but I've found that most Macs will run newer versions of Windows than what Apple say works.

My googling suggests that it's a Core 2 Duo based iMac built into one of the very old white polycarbonate cases. Snow Leopard is all you're going to be able to get onto it. You might be able to Bootcamp it and get a newer version of Windows on there if you expand its RAM but other than that, you're probably stuck with a Linux distribution if you want to run something more modern. You might also be able to use Neverware to turn it into a ChromeBook.

PowerShell is your friend get-aduser -Server your.dc.name.here -SearchBase "ou=DN,dc=of,dc=an,dc=OU,dc=here" -filter * | select samaccountname, userprincipalname, givenname, surname | convertto-csv -NoTypeInformation | out-file users.csv You will RSAT installed on whatever you run that on with the AD PowerShell module. Or run it on a domain controller.

Probably a long shot, this but worth asking anyway... We have several networked Hitachi projectors. They can be interrogated via SNMP so I'm going to have them be monitored by our monitoring system Helpfully, a MIB is embedded into the projector's firmware so getting out lamp and filter times is easy enough. However, there is another field which has the potential to be useful, if only I could find a bit more information about it. The field is called "fpj2-Status-Error". It's an integer field and unfortunately, what Hitachi haven't done is document what all the possible codes mean. So far, I've seen two possible values out of it: 0 - OK 8 - Filter Error Which begs the question, what are statuses 1-7? Anyone know? Ta

FWIW, I've got it running on a G7 with no issues. The iLO drivers all installed and the server is ticking away nicely. It's not a virtualisation host though.

If the storage controller supports the disks in HBA mode rather than in RAID, I’d see about setting up storage spaces and seeing if you can take advantage of automated storage tiering. That way, you can have one big volume and have the OS automatically put stuff where it’s best going.

I don’t think there are many people who would call Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic particularly brilliant books. The premise was interesting but it took Pterry about half a dozen books to write a really good one. I would say the the first really good Discworld novel was probably Guards Guards. After that, he really got into his stride. IMO.

I've read them all before but at the moment, I'm going through the Omega Force books by Joshua Dalzelle. It's not high literature by any stretch of the imagination but they're very entertaining.

Which is great until they all start wearing out at once and suddenly the entire estate needs replacing. If you do a bit of planning and decide that a %device% has a n year life span, you can at least only replace 1/n of the devices a year rather than the whole lot at once.

In a nutshell, as far as I can see: Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education are, by and large, the same product with some branding differences Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Pro Education are, by and large, the same product with some branding differences So the differences between Enterprise and Pro apply to Education and Pro Education. Not that's confusing or anything.

One of the primary schools in our MAT is connected to its secondary using one of these WiFi backhaul bridges from Ubiquiti. There are around 3/4 of a mile apart and the throughput between the schools is around 150mbit/sec or thereabouts. The school has around 50-60 staff and about 300 students maybe. The link is OK and we don’t get much in the way of complaints but I would be more comfortable with a proper wired P2P connection. However, I think for the distances that you’re using it at and the amount of users you have, it’ll be fine.

The first episode of the new season of The Good Place is on Netflix!

We use Censornet for our email filtering. It supports ingress and egress filtering. It will support cloud email and on premise. They give you unlimited student filtering if you license all of your staff. The filter is cloud based, situated on their servers. You need to change your MX record to point at their servers and use them as a smart host for outgoing. They will support as many domains as you have. I find it to be good, for the most part it sits out of the way doing its thing without very much input from me which is exactly what you want from it. Support has been universally excellent when I’ve contacted them and the company is British so you get local support from them too. Our last quote for renewal was in the region of £19k for 800 users for three years. In the past, I’ve used Mimecast which, hand on heart, is a better product but a lot more expensive.

It probably has a 250w PSU in it. I’ve used that thing for full blown servers before and it usually says that they draw the region of 700w, despite them never coming close to that in reality. The servers generally have 700w PSUs in them though

Been watching Friday Night Dinner while I’m in sick leave. I couldn’t watch it after my hernia op because it made me laugh so much, it actually hurt. This time around, I’m laughing as much but not so much pain

Stan and Ollie Really liked it. A nicely paced film, well written and acted. Not overly maudlin and not overlong.

Does the device have a built in NIC or are you using a USB one? What are you using for imaging?