jthompson

I watched the recent 3-part BBC doc about Musk, and found that really interesting. One quote of his that sticks out is him describing how being the US President is like being the captain of a really big ship, but with a tiny rudder. His preference, on the other hand, was to have an organisation be as small and lean as it can be whilst still achiving its aims. Also, he views everyone in an organisation as being a vector, and if any of those vectors aren't perfectly aligned with the organisation as a whole, then they're out. Any kind of negativity or contrary attitude in a meeting, for instance, and they'd be out. Interesting stuff.

If your PDC Emulator DC is a Hyper-V VM and it has the "Time synchronisation" integration service enabled in its Hyper-V settings, then the host's clock will be determining the DC's time, even if the DC is configured to use an Internet time source. If the host drifts out by a few minutes, so will the whole network. AIUI, the advantage of using the integration service is that if the VM is stopped for a period of time, it'll immediatley jump to roughtly the correct time when it starts again, rather than being however long behind and causing Kerberos probs until things are brought back into tolerance.

Not wanting to share much of my PowerShell stuff because a decent amount of it is going to be speecific to how things are structured here, but here's how you would have a script take either a CSV file as input or individual values from the command line. [CmdletBinding(DefaultParameterSetName = 'Manual')] param( [Parameter(Mandatory, ParameterSetName = 'CSV')] [string] $InputFile, [Parameter(Mandatory, ParameterSetName = 'Manual')] [string] $FirstName, [Parameter(Mandatory, ParameterSetName = 'Manual')] [string] $LastName, [Parameter(Mandatory, ParameterSetName = 'Manual')] [string] $YearGroup ) if ($PSCmdlet.ParameterSetName -eq 'CSV') { # CSV file provided by command line argument, with column headings of e.g. forename, surname, yeargroup. $Users = Import-CSV $InputFile foreach ($User in $Users) { # Create a user account based on $User.forename $User.surname and $User.yeargroup } } else { # Values are being provided directly from command line. # Create a user account based on $FirstName $LastName and $YearGroup } So you would run either "MyScript.PS1 -InputFile somestudents.csv" or run it without any parameters and be prompted for a first name, last name and year group to make a single user.

I recently did this, cobbling together enough PowerShell to automate the provisioning (and deprovisioning) of our student accounts. It was a really interesting and rewarding learning curve. My advice would be to start by looking at the New-ADUser cmdlet and working out which parameters you're going to need for a creating a student account, and then build out step by step from there. Learn about creating functions that use parameter sets (good info here), so that you can have a function to, say, generate a username according to whatever username convention you use. Creating user folders is easy (New-Item cmdlet), but I discovered that updating its permissions was surprisingly fiddly.

Maybe Musk's plan is to reduce Twitter in size enough for it to fit on a rocket that can be fired into the Sun?

Still have a copy of that dll so PM me if you need. IIRC that dll is only required for setting user area permissions, so if you leave that part out, the spreadsheet should still work for everything else. You'd obviously then have to set user area permissions some other way. A useful goto tool for doing that in bulk via GUI is NTFSFix. Again, that's quite an old tool but can be made to work. .NET 2.0 is required to run NTFSFix (enable .NET 3.5 in Windows to get support for 2.0). The original installer requires .NET 1.1 so can no longer be run. However, if you extract the program's executable from the MSI and run that using dot NET 2.0, without any installation, you're good. msiexec /a c:\setup.msi /qb TARGETDIR=c:\temp\test Run NTFSFix as an admin to avoid crashes when applying permissions.

Seemingly so, although the company contacted DfE, not ICO (I'm sure that was just a typo).

Does it say anywhere in that article which lawyers the DfE used in this matter? It's just that I've been selling access to data to a predatory industry, and I totally don't wanna go to jail.

+1 for Bulk Rename Utility.

Yes, can recommend preventing users from changing the passwords. You might need to set the passwords to never expire, depending on passwords policies in your environment. If staff are signing the accounts in ahead of the session, it might be worth applying a GPO to the relevant computers that sets a suitably long sleep timeout (i.e. several hours), so that staff aren't needing to unlock machines for people.

I'm pretty sure I know that one right away, but I won't spoil the game for others. That plastic moulding made for satisfying stacking, but I don't really understand why the designers thought people would ever have a more than one to begin with!

If you're using M365, the Planner app on that is similar to Trello, so might be worth a look as well.

FreshDesk will do both, but tbh email based tickets are probably going to be the main way of doing things. Once you've added your various agents and put them into your various teams (IT, MIS, Facilities, etc.), tickets can then be assigned/reassigned to teams or agents. You can add ticket processing rules to help automate that. The free tier has some basic features available on that front, but the paid tiers add progressively more powerful automation features. From memory, it does a slick job of onboarding you and introducing its various features.

Do your end users really need to sign in with an account to log a ticket, or will email-based ticketing suffice? IME end users far prefer firing off an email to a helpdesk address rather than filling in a form (especially if the form is behind a sign-in). FreshDesk is really good, and will give you a trial of paid features for 28 days or something. There is a free tier, but since that limits you to just a single monitored email address, that may not be sufficient for you.

You'd be able to move the database to a new instance of SQL Server and have direct access to the tables just as with any db, but I don't know that you'd be able to use it in any meanginful way without the SIMS software also being installed. If you're not in contract with it anymore, you'll struggle to get a copy of the ISO containing the required server software.

We just provision numbered exam accounts (e.g. exam0000, exam0001, etc.), and limit the availability of those the just the CA sessions. A list of student names and exam account credentials is shared with staff as required. They generally do some kind of merge or printout so that each student is provided with their assigned exam account credentials somehow. Unique, generated passwords for each account, with the accounts set to not allow the user to change the password. The accounts get disabled after the end of a session.

Intel NetportExpress print server!!

You need to reassure your OH that it won't impact her lifestyle anything like as much as she might be thinking. Daleks don't need to be walked every day, you don't have to pick up their poo and they're relatively happy to be left at home if she absolutely doesn't want you bringing it along with you on holidays, trips to the in-laws, days out, etc.

Hmm. Those edges and colours are giving off IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad vibes.

I don't know that groups will get automatically added to other contacts in that same way as users will, but I might be wrong. If you hover over a suggestion in Gmail, a user in the directory will display an option to add it to your contacts, whereas a group will not give that option. Do you still get the old group name being suggested if you use an incognito window?

I think I've found what this one is. If I'm right, this will be an action shot of it...

At the very least you could add an OU to hold the admin user(s) and set that to over 18. In fact, even if you end up with separate staff an student OUs, it's a good idea to keep a separate admins OU as well for other little bits of differentiation.

It's worth double-checking which LDAP attribute GCDS is using for the group display name (GCDS > Groups > Search Rules > properties of relevant search rule > Group Display Name Attribute). Then check the current name of the group in groups.google.com > group > Group settings > General > Group name. Is salamander renaming an existing group or deleting/creating anew? If it's the latter, you might be looking at two different Google Groups.

Riaow de Janero Mião Paulo Mognor Regis

You could half-achieve this by using the built-in scheduled send feature of Gmail. The sender(s) would need to schedule each message, so it wouldn't satisfy the recurrence part of your problem. They could create themselves some message templates as required, though, to minimise the work required to queue up each new message.