FishCustard

We're a special (SEN) school and we have a fair number of iPads here, although they're exclusively used for sensory apps, videos for the students and some other basic applications. Works well. Teachers also have one for taking photo and video evidence of students (we assess students differently to mainstream schools for obvious reasons).

Drill a couple of holes with a >=10 mm bit and you'll obliterate the platters - chance of recovery is infinitesimal.

I remember we used the official emulator from the SDK when we had CS students doing mobile development as part of their coursework. Worked perfectly well - just wrote a few scripts to give them a clean environment each time. I bet you could do something like this if you could get the APKs of the apps - set up a shortcut to run the emulator and load the APK.

True, but if all you have on you at the time is hand sanitiser... I always bugged the science techs for methanol or acetone. Works absolute wonders at dissolving ink (and with acetone, a fair few plastics too, so be careful). Make sure to open the windows when you're using it though - once got rather overcome with acetone vapour and nearly passed out!

Desktops in all classrooms, with robust remote access (e.g. RDWeb).

Still after the manuals? I might have some shoved in an archive box somewhere.

They're newer and shinier and allow people to talk about "enabling mobile working" and "transformative technology" even if the damn things sit on the same desk every day and never move an inch! We had the same problem here - before I started (i.e. before they had any in house IT) they were going to put laptops at front-of-class in every room. I asked whether the teachers would be taking them home, but no, they'd have separate laptops for that. Needless to say I shot that one out of the sky pretty quickly. Helps that the PC solution was cheaper and provably longer-lasting!

Must have missed that bit, mixed it in with the path in my mind!

The bold bit will be different for each installation, but there should only be the one folder in 'Clients'. It also seems to be cached and may take a few minutes to take effect. We did the same as Norphy - stick the school name in place of 'Sign in'. Wish we could mess with the styling.

PSF in general seems to be a recipe for disaster. Their local client install process involves about 40 steps, three programs, eye of newt and a goat skull...

I'd bet you a few Chromebooks this is exactly what he's doing. It's a "whole-school transformative project" line item for his CV. If he wants to use them in his own teaching, that's one thing - more power to him. But resist (or convince your SLT to resist) them being foisted on the whole school if people don't genuinely want them.

Haha point taken.

And what happens when Chromebook guy moves on - without whole-staff (or at least a decent proportion, including all of SLT) buy in they risk becoming expensive paperweights in a couple of years.

Hmm, fair enough there. Just don't be surprised when people are confused by it being a start-from-scratch rebuild rather than a web-based version of 7.x.

... then why does it have the same name with an incremented version number? If they want it to be treated as a separate thing, give it a separate name.

Open a PowerShell prompt on one of your DCs with the Azure Sync tool installed and run Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -Policy Initial That should get things cleaned up. You'll need to do that for each domain.

Fantastic - guess I'm reimaging everything to 1809 over Christmas now that I have an actual reason to!

Hmmm... excellent thought! I'll ask around.

Just wondering if anyone has come across this - it could be a PEBKAC issue, but I want to be sure. We use Always On VPN device tunnels for remote access. A few (as in 3-4) users have said that their laptops don't connect to the school network at home. The interesting part is that when I test their laptop on my phone's 4G connection, it works every time. I can log in as said user, or if the user is logged in, the drives appear within a few seconds, even on my crappy 4G signal here. So, naturally, there's something weird going on with their home internet, right? Maybe it's blocking IKEv2 or something? Can't imagine why, but it's possible. Thing is there's no ISP commonality, so that seems unlikely. Also, there are no relevant errors in the Event Viewer. I've double-triple checked that the users are actually connecting to their home network before trying to access things (had a couple of people who didn't and wondered why nothing worked...!). I might try provisioning a User Tunnel for the affected users, see if that works, but I thought I may as well consult the hive-brain as well.

Congratulations! That's nice of them, given how much work that can be depending on how many linked systems they have. We do the same thing, just change display names and add an alias.

Yup, I've done this before. As long as you have a reasonable mechanical brain you'll do fine.

We just redirect rds.school.com to the RDWeb page.

Spiceworks is brilliant. I wish we could use it, but we had Parago foisted upon us because the school is using it for asset management. Most crap-tacular helpdesk I've ever seen.

I use a Powershell script and the PSWindowsUpdate module to pull in all available updates when I'm good and ready (i.e. they've been tested!). I can exclude specific KBs if I want to as well. I flip a switch which wakes the script up at next boot, reboot machines with Impero after hours, and they patch away happily. Seems much faster than doing it with SCCM. Yes, I'm basically reimplementing WSUS with a script, but it's fast and does exactly what I want and nothing more.

We use this (link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-desktop-services/clients/remote-desktop-web-client-admin) and it works wonderfully. Staff love it, and the few who are a little more tech-aware view it as pure witchcraft compared to our old laptop-and-VPN system. The less techy just appreciate that it works every time!