truebluesteve

I don't what the day rate is but this is a breakdown of the quote Design & Planning £700.00 Project Completion £6,360.00 Post Project Consultancy Visit (optional) £650.00 Enhanced Implementation Package (optional) £595.00 Documentation £700.00 Project Management £650.00 I think they are used to dealing with corporate customers who almost expect these sort of charges - but I have no idea what you get in terms of documentation for £700. Answers on a postcard please (older geekers will get that reference!)

Yes recommendations are good They aren't a huge company but deal in a few different markets - some of which obviously have deeper pockets than the education sector! Having said that, they sent me a case study of a college they did exactly the same work for. Anyway suffice to say we won't be using them!

There are about 300 accounts to migrate and I have no idea why their price is so high. I was expecting a price somewhere around £1500 to you can imagine my surprise when I got the quote. I would do it myself but I really don't have the time as there are a number of other things happening now and over the summer so I don't really want to overload myself with work.

Well it was a shade under £10,000 - although there were a couple of optional items which would knock about £1100 off that. Bargain eh!

We had a company in to provide a quote to do the work and their technical people suggested that it would be easier to manage because the domains are different and we won't be syncing the passwords for students - well not just yet anyway. From the responses to my post I'm still not sure which way to go so I may give CPL a call! PS I had the quote from the company today and I'm still trying to relocate my jaw:eek:

The sync part happens when they are in school (it uses active sync I think) and should sync when they log off. When they come back into school the sync will run again so that work they have done at home will appear on their network folder The sync doesn't happen while they are at home but the My documents folders appears to them as if it would as if they were in school Can your users log on at home with the same credentials as they do at school?

I have seen this a few times before and it was the profiles folder. If you go to the network drive where the profiles are stored for that group of users, you will see there are 2 folders for each user e.g jbloggs.v1 and jbloggs.v2 The V2 folder is the one that is used if you are using Win 7 or Vista but isn't the one that's displayed (afaik) when you click on the profile button in the RMMC. Check this folder to see if there are any large files hanging around.

I think I am about to get the OK to move from our onsite Exchange Server to O365 however I have a quick question.... We currently have a 365 account for our students - domain is school.org; however our staff email domain is school.org.uk. Student email accounts and passwords are created manually at the moment but we will be using dirsync for the staff domain. Although I understand we can add another domain to our existing tenancy, we have been advised that it will be easier to manage if we create a new one for staff. Any thoughts on this from the experts? 😄

Do you mean folders and files in their network home folders? If so you can go to the folder you want - My Documents for example, then right click on it and select "always available offline". It then syncs all the files etc in that folder - which can take a while, and when they get home they will have an "N" drive where the synchronised My Documents folder will be. I should say that the above works with Windows 7 but I can't comment on other versions. We use it quite a lot to sync the My Settings folder as some programs like Adobe Reader won't work at home if we don't.

In the orange for me.... I read somewhere recently that it's an acronym if it forms a word - lol for example, otherwise it's just initialism Just saying!

I agree, however I knew the servers were unaffected and clean otherwise I would certainly considered that option. The nature of Zeus (from what I've read) is that it doesn't gather data from across a network, rather personal data that would be used for banking and so on, from a single computer. Still a nasty piece of code though

Yes I did but it seems that the infected PCs don't always use them directly as was proved when I found the infected machine!

Yep, after all nobody really needs access to the network! I think I may have found the offending device now - a staff laptop, surprise surprise. It has been a real pain to find though and some of the info supplied by the CBL page doesn't really help. Neither the IP address or port provided by them has been used by any devices on the network according to the Smoothwall logs however one piece of useful advice was to turn on DNS logging and look for requests to strange domains like "zlmfxgwgqdieahvsgtfylrcgufy.com" I did this and bingo I found this address "ZDEYMFMVJRTQCTNZGUUSPLWSNZ.BIZ " and doing a whois on it brought back an IP address identified as a C & C server for GameOver Zeus. The other things worth noting are that it doesn't do anything until someone logs onto the computer, and it has been estimated that even up to date AV is only 23% effective against it. Another learning curve completed

Hi Ben Yes I did, and I may use that although it doesnt help that I dont know the destination IP address. It hasnt appeared since yesterday so I suspect the rogue PC is turned off. I am going to try and turn a few on and see what happens over the weekend, starting with the Bursars office who have previous for this sort of thing. With 800 PCs it might take a while simply because the blocklist isn't updated that frequently Steve

Hi Folks We've had our external IP address added to the CBL blocklist and I am really struggling to find the source of the problem. The activity is fairly infrequent and seems to come from a different port each time. It appears the infection is a Gameover Zeus bot The lastest list from 1700 GMT yesterday shows the source port as 57770 to a destination port of 80. It gives no destination IP I have searched the Smoothwall logs for activity on that port at that time plus or minus a couple of hours and there is nothing. There is also no activity to any of the sinkhole IP addresses that are listed. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to resolve this particularly in relation to searching the Smoothwall logs or port blocking. Actually any suggestions really! Cheers Steve

Hi All After a bit of deliberation and weighing up the pros and cons of upgrading our on-prem Exchange Server (300 + staff only) against migrating to Exchange via O365 I have pretty much decided on the latter. I do have a couple of questions to ask before I make that final decision and I'm sure people on here will have the answers.... 1. Does the migration take across all the shared mailboxes, distribution groups etc. that exist on our on-prem server? 2. We already have our students on 365 which is on a different email domain to our staff. I assume adding an additional domain to the O365 account isn't going to cause any problems and that they are effectively isolated from each other? 3. I plan to use RM Unify to sync the accounts with AD - any issues with this or with the fact that I would like to also sync the student accounts (we currently import them via CSV in September) even though they are using different email addresses. Apologies if the questions have been asked before but I couldn't find any suitable answers! Cheers Steve

We have had a password change policy for a few years now and initially it did sometimes change through the holidays - which stopped them getting email (Exchange 2007 doesn't support password changes). Since then I have done it manually and sent our several reminders before hand. If they forget to change it then we can override it of course and force them to change it after the holiday. As for laptops - they will still work until they connect it to the network next, when they will prompted to change it.

I take the point about Exchange being memory hungry - our 2007 server seems to run happily on 8GB RAM although I don't know whether this changes drastically depending on the number of mailboxes. We only host staff on Exchange so have around 300 mailboxes at the moment. Anything that employs SQL server seems to eat all the memory you give it without any noticeable performance benefits - SIMS is a prime example!

I can see the pro's for hosted Exchange servers, and for commercial organisations or schools without the funds or expertise to set up Exchange its probably a no-brainer. However given our existing setup it doesn't have the same appeal although I haven't discounted the option completely. We have the spare capacity on our VM hardware to do the virtualisation, but I wondered if others had encountered any issues that were worth sharing

Hello Folks Our existing Exchange Server 2007 is coming to the end of its useful life in its current roll due to age. It would seem an ideal opportunity to move up to Exchange 2013 and in a virtualised environment. So my questions are - 1. Any issues with the above proposed setup? 2. Thoughts on Exchange 2013 as a whole? I had considered migrating the whole thing to O365 but if I can virtualise it, then in terms of cost (which isn't a deciding factor anyway) there isn't an awful lot in it, and I'm like the control and speed of internal email that we have currently. I would also need some good reasons to convince SLT to have it hosted. Thanks in advance Steve

We use Symantec Mail Security for Exchange with the Premium Anti-Spam add on. I have to say it works pretty well for us and the amount of spam that does get through is very small. Steve

I'm having issues getting the test player to connect to the admin server. I'm sure I had the same issue last year when I set it up but I'm buggered if I can remember what the issue was. Anyone got any suggestions? Thanks

I have been putting this off until next week but I'm a bit concerned about requiring a new version of Visual C++. The only saving grace is that we only have it on a few PC's so a manual install wont take very long. Online testing was supposed to be the way forward but having experienced several different flavours of it now, I'm firmly in favour of pen and paper!

We use IP Monitor from Solar Winds Despite the name it doesn't just ping devices - it will monitor the status of services, disk space, memory usage and so on. It also has a specific set of monitors for applications like Exchange and SQL Server. Its not free but the support is good and it gets updated regularly

Thanks for this - the pens are certainly not an issue but the fact they are harder wearing is important!