Tefters

Don't get me wrong, different strokes for different folks and all but if stacking is the only issue holding you back I would question how much time you are spending dealing with switches on a day to day basis. Mine is pretty much 30 mins a month if that after initial setup. I have cabinets with 4 48 port switches in and have them all linked together with DAC's, set a few link priorities, STP set and then 2 of the switches have fibre links to the core. Ok you could argue thats 2x 48 port switches down a 10GBit link but for desktops, phones and a few WiFi access point that's more then enough bandwidth and I've never seen the link maxed out. If a link goes down I am pushing 4 switches down 1 fibre but that's short term til I chuck a replacement switch in which I have a spare or 2 in the cupboard as they are so cheap. In terms of overall management, the web GUI is so simple it takes a few minutes to change configs anyways. I've used plenty of switch stacks in my day but having used Unifi I don't personally sit there going "man this is so much more work, I miss stacks". Hell, I do half the config on my mobile or iPad. The only real thing I don't like is their router/gateway offerings and use Sonicwall for that.

I love the stuff and even more, I love the speed and budget saving! Yes it has its quirks but the price comparison and no ongoing licensing is just too good to pass up.

JamF but I'm 1300 iPads [emoji34] so not shortcutting or wasting time.

Man after my own heart, clean installs while being the best option are not feasible sometimes due to time, numbers of servers etc... I've done plenty of in-place upgrades without issues and some with, however that's what good backup/restore solutions are for [emoji6]

This ^^^ Been running 3CX for 3 years now and brought a 5 year license after 2 years of single year purchase because we were that happy with it. Initially brought Fanvil phones due to their appealing price and mass purchase as we were migrating from Skype 4 Business and we have had a lot of failures, swapped to Yealink and no failures, definitely worth the extra few quid.

As promised... My little slice of heaven... and the bane of my life... Yes they are all broken... Need a spring clean and re-arrange soon for a third person, luckily we have a decent sized server room and another comm's room so storage is not really an issue for us.

Somewhere in MS' magical cloud land still within your tenant but outside your storage quota. Best guess physically, slower storage medium as its archive data and let's be honest waiting a few extra seconds for an email 2+ years old that is a rare activity is not really an issue. If I remember rightly archive mailboxes go up to 100gb and then start recycling or you can increase them more if required at extra cost.

If you have students that are breaching 100gb and you don't want to buy an A3 license then you can utilise SharePoint and/or Teams. Just my opinion, but if you have users legitimately pushing that amount of storage requirement then I would consider them an A3 user. If you are purchasing A3 faculty licenses properly through an OVS M365 licensing package or whatever they call it (I go through a chest agreement, speak with the likes of Pugh for help with this) then you just pay for FTE count and get students A3 for free. Also back to a technical note, email storage also now counts under a users personal storage allowance so if you haven't already, implement archive mailboxes asap as they don't count to the allowances and are free, simple to setup (1 click or PowerShell for bulk) and it simply gives the user a second mailbox and moves anything older than 2 years into the archive mailbox, only downside is that this can only be accessed by desktop or browser and not mobile device but we are a heavy mobile use school and it doesn't really effect anyone. Saved a huge chunk of storage through from Archive mailboxes.

Great, I love new server releases but expect software vendors like ESS to support this for Sims in 2097 [emoji849] Had to call them the other day to check my Sims DB for the first time in 10 years due to poor performance and turned out to be a cr@ppy patch they released but the consultant lectured me about their support roadmap and how they don't support server 2022 yet. Couldn't be bothered to tell him I've had it installed for nearly 3 years and faced 0 issues. Looking at their roadmap apparently they only support office 2016 still and are only just about to support office LTSC and have been forced to support office 365 due to so many clients having it. [emoji23]

Parking message as a reminder to take pics tomorrow.

I'm going to put this one out there because they are a manufacturer, sales outlet and support all in one! Dell. I first used Dell directly a few years back for a server solution quote and they did 2 phone calls in total, 1 for requirements and 1 for assisted install that's it. Afterwards my Dell sales rep / account manager set me up on their premier portal and applied an education discount, since then I just log into their portal, look at prices, create my own basket and checkout on PO, their prices are stupidly cheap and free delivery. This by far has been my best, most favoured and cheapest supplier of base units and monitors and I never hear a peep unless finance forgot to pay a PO on time [emoji849] or I call the AM for a large project quote. Obviously being an all in one supply chain makes things easier but also cheaper. Sub £400 ex vat for an i5 13th gen with 16gb ram and 512gb NVMe and £80 ex vat for a 24 inch zero bezel monitor all with 3 year warranty... It's a no brainer.

1. Don't email me unless required. 2. Give me best pricing the first time without needing to know my budget. 3. Don't waste my time with washy webinar invites on how things should be done and best practises. This is Education, nothing is done properly and best practice is a pipe dream.

Sounds like you have pretty much the same setup I used to have, ZL core switch with other HP edge switches which I slowly migrated over to Unifi edges and then made the jump and swapped out the ZL for 2x Unifi Aggregations for the core network throughput with 2x Unifi 48's to make up for the lose of RJ modules. I finally brought a Sonicwall NSA and moved all our routing onto it as I wasn't happy with the Unifi router offering and still think it's a bit lacking for mid level business. We have all of our Bodet along with the time clock on their own Vlan and everything works fine, this is full Unifi switching with 3rd party router as described above. Back when we were HP we did find anomalies like this and it drove me mad, never got to the bottom of sporadic bell issues then another project came up which forced me to replace all the switching for 10gb back bone and since ripping out all the old HP never had any issues. Not much help to you now I know but my advice would be to look at getting rid of the ZL and replacing it with some Aggy's and move your routing to a decent router appliance. The NSA range is very reasonably priced and they have a model for every throughput requirement.

iPad monitoring is just a complete flop and any solution I investigate struggles because of how Apple have designed the device and restrictions around what can and can't be done along with the mentality that "users should have full privacy and anominity" which obviously works against Education. Web filtering does the job of blocking the pages which is the best I can come up with but as for safeguarding and alerting, there is no product out there I would trust enough to say to a parent (myself included) "yes, we can alert on any safeguarding issues your child may encounter on their iPad at any location". I understand this is the case even with normal self owned devices and parent my children accordingly however as the school is supplying the device it's ultimately up to them to ensure the device is monitored properly. I've advised my SLT that I strongly believe we should have waivers with parents to advise that while we supply a device and do our upmost it is also their responsibility as a parent to monitor the device too when used at home. Better option would be for schools to stop buying into this Apple BS and just buy laptops where services can run properly as fully managed applications not dumb ass tablet OS pretending to be a computer. An iPad does not and cannot replace or even come close to a proper computer whether that be a PC or Mac. Kids are currently running amuck on our iPads by turning on Airplane mode to stop teacher controls, using focus modes to change backgrounds and all sorts all while I'm sat infront of JamF going "everything i can block is being blocked". I love iPads in secondary school so much! [emoji34]

The guy needs sacking to be honest. It's probably the same guy who was bitching at the end of the live webinar Microsoft did about how his Education institute was using Office 365 to store all their raw research data models and what not instead of using proper storage solution designed for that data. This whole mentality of Education should get everything for free is stupid and jumped on this to save himself money he probably wasted elsewhere. I have been spending the last 6 months slowly reigning in our storage usage through scripts, limits, archiving and some plain old cheeky deleting and I still have more work to do. Education institutes do have the money, they just waste it in all the wrong places *looks at pile of broken iPads and the 6+ online learning resources purchased that all overlap each other that no-one properly uses*.

Question for anyone out there on the forums that does custom XML and/or PLIST for IOS / MAC apps. How the frick do you do it? I nobbled together over a year ago a custom XML i deploy with Outlook for IOS through JamF school which auto adds the users account based on a wildcard read of the users email address in JamF and also block adding non enterprise accounts. Took a lot of googling and mashing together of several config files for other apps along with a lot of testing. I now want to deploy Edge to IOS devices because Safari is sh** and you cannot manage any of its settings but with Edge you can according to Microsoft. Microsoft Edge Mobile Policy Documentation | Microsoft Learn Now I could spend X amount of time winging my way through creating another XML / PLIST file with a lot of trial and error / guess work + testing but wondered if i'm missing a trick here and there is an easier way. Simply put, I want to deploy Edge to IOS and have the default search engine as Google not Bing, that's the goal here or even better understand an easier method of manipulating IOS apps if possible with XML code where allowed. Safari by default on our current IOS devices is opening all websites in desktop mode and is causing issues with a few sites as its not trying to get mobile mode by default. Yes you can manually change to desktop mode in the browser bar via the "Aa" symbol but this is high school kids and having them do another other than whatsapp, snapchat or instagram ends up in pure pain. Anything a normal end user has to do themselves ends up in pure pain.

This if you haven't already. I now 1300+ ipads using Radius MAC authentication via usernames/passwords as mac addresses of the devices.

*urgh* like many things nowadays, nothing is staying free or cheap and it's all about the money. While I personally didn't use this much I did recommend it a lot to students and to our ICT teachers, who never really used it with the kids up until a helpdesk ticket they raised this week wanting to start to use it but now I can close that with "too late, read this mail". Hopefully they can use the free version in standalone form without team management. ----- Dear Teachers, We are grateful to play a part in your journey to train the next generation of software creators. For the past few years, we’ve helped you achieve this goal through Teams for Edu, however, we will be changing our approach starting in the coming months. To focus on improving the Replit experience for all users, we have made the difficult decision to deprecate Teams for Edu.As of tomorrow, November 15, 2023, Teams for Edu will no longer receive new features or bug fixes, and we will suspend the creation of new Teams and Orgs. We will continue to invest in our free plan to ensure coding is accessible to builders of any level. We understand that these changes may cause significant disruption to your school year and will do our best to alleviate these concerns. We will be in touch about next steps and when product access will be removed. Our team will share resources and guidance to facilitate your next steps in the new calendar year. Should you have any questions or concerns, the best way to get help is by contacting us at a dedicated support email,[email protected], where our team of support experts will be able to assist you. Best, The Replit Team

Speak with Pugh or Insight and yes there is educational pricing.

Love me some John Savill and he just posted a video on this also

2nd this ^^^ People should not of setup full MAT's under 1 tenancy, each school is still its own entity just managed under 1 umbrella.

Not cheap however the best solution I could find on the market and killed 2 birds with 1 stone, Bodet speakers. Our school bells were on a very old electrical circuit which had been extended 2 or 3 times with extensions but on our last 2 extensions/makeovers we needed an easier solution so brought some and they worked great. They are a network speaker so was win win as a bell system, tanoy and emergency broadcast system. Ok yes its a lot of money upfront but will pay for itself over 10 to 20 years and ensures full box ticking on all fronts. Simple 4 button network box which sits in the head teachers office as it would be her or the deputy head to make the call as to whether the alarm should be sounded. Also, can't wait to play Christmas music down them come holiday time [emoji6] We did have NetSupport Notify but it was crap, clunky, no one wanted to learn how to use it so it would have been up to us to send a message based on the head or deputy calling us by which time 3/4 of the school would of been whats apping each other and what about people in public areas like halls, corridors, toilets etc... Like I said at the start, best solution to fit scenarios and tick all boxes + the more aggressive bell sound for lesson change, we have some nice beeps which took people 2 weeks to get used to (myself included) but are a lot more relaxing then a tinny bell.

Same as others have said, S2D all the way... We went for a new 2 node setup on NVMe for local storage and SSD for the CSV storage with 5 year warranty from Dell with 24k for assisted install (was £400 cheaper with assisted install, #shrug), that was 3 years ago now. We then overhauled our network to 10gb with POE at every cab with Ubiquiti Unifi switches for £60k including cabling costs and then another 10k for a WiFi replacement to WiFi 5 gen 2, that was last year. This year I replaced our 12 year old backup server and 2 NAS boxes with a Dell optiplex on NVMe local with 10k SAS disks and a 35tb Wasabi plan and veeam licensing for 15k all in, the licensing is 3 years on Veeam and Wasabi. We now have 4u worth of physical server on site, go back 5 years ago this was 2 full server racks of servers and sans. You have to spend money to save money. The energy consumption, carbon footprint, security, backup/restore RTO's and RPO's. During all of these I got to play with and learn all the new kit, install it, configure it and tweak it. I can drain a host, migrate vm's, patch the host and have everything moved back in less than 30 minutes during a live day with no impact. I also watched my backups tonight take 45 mins on-prem for 5tb of data and then offload it to the cloud within an hour, all happening at the same time so within an hour I have on-prem, off-site and immutable for 30 days with off-site archiving for 5 years. The way technology now is crazy, monitoring my network and servers from mobile apps at home on my iPad or phone while on the sofa and making changes with 3 taps. We then use Office365 for usual bits, teachers and SLT starting to see the investment in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams more to make their lives easier... Sims going the way of Nextgen in the next X years. Next step for me is looking to modernize the desktop infrastructure.

Sonicwall NSA series will do the job of your firewall, DHCP, vLans and VPN. Your ISP will provide the modem.

Yup I got the Adobe mail. So its storage on device or other cloud storage aka OneDrive. Its a shame because Adobe seemed reasonably priced for a few years with the user education licensing supplying local app installs, use on 3 concurrent devices, mobile device usage, browser apps and cloud storage but now they are removing that its lost quite a bit of value not to mention how will you be able to use the browser apps with no cloud storage?