Primus

I doubt you have really narrowed your skill. Networking is networking. A little bit of training on whichever new kit you go for and you'll be fine - you probably know far more than you give yourself credit for. If you really don't like using the CLI then most stuff now has a decent enough GUI.

I notice someone earlier said about a plumber - we had a member of staff we did all sorts for as he seemed a good guy etc. Numerous additional things for his personal IT stuff etc etc. Off he goes out of teaching and into full time work as a sparkie (he'd been training on the evenings). 1 team member asked him for a quote for some electrical work at home - huge quote, way way bigger than any of the other quotes he got. I asked him to quote me for some work and he couldn't even be bothered to do that or give me a quick ring and say what a ballpark figure would be. In summary we're now massively wary of doing anything as a favour as we find people quickly forget and don't ever do favours for us - a shame but the truth.

Force will work but you have to get them to use AD the first time (or the time after any forced change).

If you use Salamander you can get them to set unique passwords - eg. SchoolInitialsDOB - so if your school was called Edugeek Academy and the kid was born on September 1st 2007 it would set their password to Ea010907 and then it's a bit more unique even if they don't change it.

Agreed, data recovery isn't cheap.

Just to add if you really want to force them they can log on using AD creds instead of Google ones if this is Windows we're talking about - they choose sign on options and then hit the key icon. This will present a normal AD log on box. They'll then be forced to change their password and all subsequent log ons can be done using the Google log on.

This happens only if you force a password change. If you change their password without forcing them to change it on next log on it should work and they can then change it once they're logged on in the normal way.

And we definitely couldn't find security breaches for any of the other manufacturers could we? The incident was very disappointing and the attempted "cover-up" even more so, however we don't connect our controller to the remote connection servers. How you set something up is as important as what you buy.

We wouldn't do it using a portal, we use RADIUS fully so we use guest AD accounts and just track usage of them/reset passwords once they're no longer needed etc. It's very easy to manage since you can do it directly in AD or delegate a sub-OU to an admin team to manage for example. Then we pass the RADIUS log on information on to our Smoothwall UTM so all users are correctly filtered based on the groups they're in etc without having to log into the filtering separately etc etc.

We put our Unifi WiFi in, it has taken no upkeep other than firmware updates which you should do for any implementation. We've had no issues where we've had high density due to 1:1 and BYOD etc. At one of our other sites we've got a full stack Cisco implementation - honestly the Unifi is more reliable!

We're a similar size deployment with Unifi, we installed it all ourselves about 3 years ago now and we've had zero issues.

Did you migrate your teamed connections to the new method? Or are you not using teamed NICs?

It's years away - I'd have said 2024 at the earliest.

Is anyone running it on a failover cluster? I'm setting up a new one and I'm tempted to start with 2022 rather than 2019 but in the past I always waited a while before deploying a new server OS on something like a cluster as there's sometimes weird issues with clusters for example.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/whats-new-in-windows-server-2022

2022: Listing Mainstream End Date: Oct 13, 2026 Extended End Date: Oct 14, 2031 2019: Listing Mainstream End Date: Jan 9, 2024 Extended End Date: Jan 9, 2029 2022 has the later support end date as you would expect.

I believe 2022 is based on W10 from what I've seen - makes sense since 2022 is out now and W11 isn't finished yet.

2022 is the successor to 2019 - it's the LTSC server branch. In fact they're not releasing anymore Server SAC versions - only LTSC from now on.

I will be very very upset if this is the case, we use it extensively with students.

Are you using mechanical hard drives? How much RAM have you got? What other programs are open at the same time? Is it possible you have exhausted physical memory and are using virtual memory?

With respect, people are telling you it's a bad idea because it is. If you *have* to press ahead you need to document your concerns to SLT and get an acknowledgement from them to cover yourself. I can't speak for others but I wouldn't be helping another school implement something risky.

I sympathise but that's still no reason to introduce something that is going to open up security issues and isn't developed any more and hasn't been for some time. I'd be avoiding it.

That link gives a 404 error for me.

Is this still the nightmare it was - has anyone managed to get it sorted recently that has contact details for the person who handled it please?

100% archive old classes.