jthompson

All the adverts on speedtest.net give me the ick, but I guess it's still functionally useful. Whilst I've never used it, speedtest.net does appear to offer a CLI client that I suppose you could use to script regular tests or integrate into a monitoring platform somehow. https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

I think the key terminology there is IE11 desktop application, which I think is distinct from the underlying dll's and whatever else needed for IE mode in Edge to continue working beyond June.

Way more useful than coded hostnames for me is having a good asset inventory system (Snipe, GLPI) that you can query quickly and easily from anywhere, so that punching in an asset tag, room name or staff member name is trivial. Lots of flexibility to allow for things like staff with more than one device or office, temporary loans or computers with a storied maintenance history. The asset tag convention also extends beyond things with a hostname here. Projectors and the like. All tagged and listed in the same asset inventory.

Also, maybe put subtitles on your video, in case the sound doesn't work, and have the audio produced such that it can be made sense of when listened to without any working pictures.

For thousands of years, burying stuff in the ground was just about the best way to preserve things for the future. That paradign seems to be broken now. Unless we're talking about pairs of trainers, which will probably all still be here long after humanity has left on its Great Galactic Crusade. Back on topic, I wonder if digging the thing up every 10 years and reformatting things as necessary might not be a bad idea. It'll spoil the sense of mystery somewhat, but will vastly imporve the odds of your information reaching the minds of children in 50 years' time. You never know, they might decide that they're happy to rebury it all on a shiny new laser cube for the children of the 2080's, 2090's and 2100's to marvel at via their space consoles.

Our exams officer has had about a dozen different online submission systems to work with this year (bit of an exaggeration). All of which are new, different and with their own idiosyncracies, but it's nice to finally see the work being put in by exam boards. Only a few subjects now where we're posting off USB drives. I suspect the last few years since GDPR became such a hot topic has seen the exam boards getting totally fed up of trying to coordinate everybody to successfully encrypt and decrypt files on physical media.

Never used it but NextCloud seems like a good place to start. There are mobile and desktop clients available.

Can recommend Pockethernet, too. One of its functions is a TDR test (i.e. cable length) which ought to help you to determine is a cable has damaged wires somewhere along its length. Other features of it that I've found useful are error rate tests across a cable, port light blinking, DHCP service and PoE availability. I don't know if it's still on the market, but avoid the Fluke Intellitone Pro 200 - I suspect it's a rebadged effort. The price was more like £100 IIRC. It has the Fluke name on it but it's garbage. We've had two of them in the past end up with the same game-breaking problems that were reported by others online: dodgy RJ45 socket on the main tester and battery drain in the probe unit even when it's turned off.

That's a good point, actually. If you're using Google or O365 for your email, inbound emails will still all be being checked against SPF, DKIM and DMARC and processed accordingly (or near enough), as part of the email filtering that those platforms are already providing, regardless of whether you've configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your own email domain name(s) or not. You set up DMARC as much to prevent people you have no absolutely no connection with from receiving emails that are spoofing your domain, as much as you do it to protect your own users. If you're using O365, say, then having DMARC set up well will mean that random Gmail, Yahoo or AOL users in other parts of the world won't be receiving any spam that's pretending to be from your domain. The reporting aspect of DMARC gives you some visibility on the amount of those emails that are being sent around the world, that you otherwise would be completely oblivious to.

So, probably not worth trying JUDGE or COURT tomorrow, then?

None are legal requirements, but you'd need SPF and DKIM set up before you can make use of DMARC, since they're prerequisistes for it.

Serial numbers wouldn't necessarily give you a consistent format for hostnames like an asset tag can. Different brands, etc. Also, the level of information they're designed for is going to far exceed your needs, where a 5 or 6 digit number is going to be far less cumbersome to transmit via verbal communication, Post-It note or mental recall.

In your Org Unit search rules, you've got on that searching for name=Intake*. Since "sch/hinchleyw/InterJigsaw/HWS Students/Users/Student_Leavers/Leavers_to_2019/Student_Leavers/Intake_2013" is matching that pattern, GCDS will be creating the OU structure shown there, which is why it's creating student leavers OUs for you.

Yes, if you have laptops that are being set aside exclusively for use in exams, in a GPO targeted at those computers, add your student security group(s) as needed to Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> User Rights Assignment -> Deny log on locally. If that doesn't quite suit, then you could possibly look at using that same GPO option but with a new security group, and a scheduled task to script the adding and removing of users to and from that new group. If a user is in the group, they're prevented from signing in to the computers under the scope of the GPO, but if they're not in that group, they can use the computer as normal. That will allow those students to still be able to use their accounts on computers elsewhere if you happen to mess up the timing. As for disabling all of the various proofing tools in MS Office apps, that can be done entirely by using GPOs targeted as users. The GPO options needed are sprayed all of ther the place a bit though - there isn't one master switch, so to speak. I did have a list somewhere that we used for Office 2016, but I can't find it now. We've been using ExamWritePad successfully for a few years, so haven't needed the Office lockdown policy. Definitely one to investigate for the future.

True, but I guess Google Forms was already right there and representing a lot of convenience for them.

Machines can be provisioned ahead of their eventual deployment, with no renaming needed at any point. Everything else after that is going to be based on AD moves and GPO. Machines can also be swapped in/out/around to allow for office moves, repairs, room name changes!!!, change of personnel etc. without any machine renaming needed as a followup. It also means you don't have to work out what to name a machine, especially useful if it's in line for a "not culturally neutral" name (e.g. P00HEAD). Use an inventory system or the AD Description field to store info like whether it's Annie Admin's office PC, or whether it's in the Finance Office, Room 12B, or the lefthand booth of the Gregson Performing Arts Centre mezzanine learning zone study pod 2 (or whatever other wacky location names your school has invented this year).

It might be that affected clients have downloaded updates from WSUS but the updates files have become corrupted somehow. On the client, you can stop the 'Windows Update' and 'Background Intelligent Transfer Service' services and then delete all of the contents of C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution, restart the two services again and finally recheck for updates. The files and folders that were within C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution will be recreated automatically as it checks for updates.

We just use asset tags, with a prefix to indicate device type: PC, LT (Windows laptop) or CB (Chromebook). Computers then have the same hostname throughout their lifetime. Anything needing to target computer rooms in AD or Group Policy is then done through the use of OUs and/or security groups. If your inventory system is good, you should be able to avoid the burden of including locations, purchase dates, etc. in device hostames.

If a particular Google Form is set to limit people to one response only, then it requires the respondant to be signed in to a Google account in order to submit the form. The council could, if they wanted, allow people to submit without being signed into Google, but that would allow people to make multiple submissions, which might be something they have chosen to avoid.

I'd want to swap it over with a known good machine and see if the problem network point and/or switch port is a determining factor.

IME, there are always students who prefer to sit quite far back and play around with the keyboard on their lap. That, combined with the normal background levels of pratting around, might explain the phenomenon.

Off the back of so many FreshDesk recommendations in this thread, we trying that out on the free tier. I'm liking it so far, particularly the mobile app. We've used self-hosted osTicket quite a bit in the past, but the lack of a decent mobile interface was a real downfall. One feature of it that I'm liking a lot is that when a ticket is forwarded to the helpdesk (because we always seem to have people emailing the entire IT team instead of the helpdesk), it automatically sets the original sender as the ticket requester. Neato.

If you can generate a list of all the folder (and file?) IDs you could then feed GAM a CSV file of all those to do in bulk.

You could make a nuisance of yourself and put in a pair of 3D glasses as well, and amuse yourself at the thought of people in 50 years time having successfully got an MKV file to play on their space tellies, but tearing their hair out trying to work out how to get it in 3D.

Our Windows laptop trolleys have always disappointed, mainly because Windows updates can put grit in the gears, which can then lead to keys being picked off, etc. if students get bored and frustrated. One department had much more success than the rest of the school, for some reason. I suspect it was a combination of them getting a goldilocks amount of use (enough to avoid updates piling up, but not so much to end up with low batteries) and the layout of the department being more conducive to staff taking care of them. The trolleys were stored in the department office, rather than in the cupboard of one particular classroom, and all department members seemed to use them about the same amount, which perhaps fostered a culture of shared responsibility that was missing in other areas of the school. We've had noticeably more success with Chromebook trolleys around school though, due to better battery life, more compact designs and faster start-up.