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I use open DNS for now. The kids are both under 10 and it’s been fine so far. Although it’s been used in conjunction with a Mac and parental controls. But for us, blocking YouTube is the main thing. So we supervise access or they have a ‘kids safe’ app on their iPad. It wouldn’t be long before my eldest figures some workarounds though. Or just downright hacks [emoji3]

As @RLR said, excellent guide. Prepare and supervise in AC2. I only leave location setting to enable. Deploying the WiFi profile to force and internet connection means it will then pull down your confidence from MDM

I’d agree with that. Internally at work we’ve recently moved from google to office 365. There are a LOT of features included (so much that sometimes it feels like the designers have just thrown everything at a page). I think the big thing for the schools we look after is the ‘continuity’. Teachers know word, excel, PowerPoint and so it removes the need for a lot of re training there. Plus the gave locally installed versions most of the time. I find e mail search is better on google - but everyone thing else I prefer Office.

Apart from the cost of buying equipment. Luckily schools are rolling in money.

I was going say they’ll bring back ceefax after brexit - but I’d love that!

Would love one in the north (Sheffield please).

Indeed. Hopefully the head is open minded and arbor, bromcom etc can show how much things have moved on.

Sims is dead. It might be a slow one but they haven’t / cant adapt - and their legacy software is creaking.

Sounds brilliant. I’d concentrate on the damp issues / it really got me down in our old terrace. Run as many cat6 sockets as you can. I’d do every wall in the living room and at least a couple per bedroom / office. I’d try and find place for a full width cab and switch / for any further expansion.

Another +1 for enviro electronics. We use them too for the office and recommend to our schools.

I would imagine if they are bitlocker encrypted it wouldn’t really matter which software you use to manage them. As long as you can access recovery keys. In terms of practice, if your clients have a TPM chip they won’t need a password/pin at boot (unless you specify you want one). In our school settings we just use the TPM where possible.

+1 for this. Great utility. A whole since I used it but it was just check the search parameters you wanted then click rename !

I would also agree installer has his wires crossed (pun intended) and he means he’ll install version 6 of Net2 I will say however the Paxton support team are brilliant and respond very quickly and helpfully on my (limited) experience.

Much easier and quicker than I expected. Mine you tend to only have 2 DC’s at most.

Mid 30’s here in south York’s. I spent the morning on the home office which a window open all night. Once the sun came around it was Into the office to make best use of the air con. It will be cold tomorrow - I bought a floor fan due to arrive tomorrow

I did mine approx 3-4 years ago. Went cat6a. For minimal cost I wanted to add in some degree of future proof however small. I expect we’ll all be content with fast wireless eventually. The rigidity if cat6+ can actually help a little when fishing through. A good set of rods and a long drill bit always helps. A couple of places I could go externally as it was hidden from view. Much easier!

I’d be tempted to go raid 10 on the mechanical drives. Depends how much storage you need. Primary or secondary. For our primary schools we’ll use ssd for VM’s (include sims DB) but mechanical for user data.

Yep I’ve installed ssd’s in 2008 iMacs that my kids use. Perfectly usable for now. Don’t bother with sshd. No performance gain.

We have about 30 school primary sites with unifi (and a cloud controller we run). Never had any issues. In fact just recently we had a fibre connection fail between buildings. Managed to get a wireless link between two AP’s to limp along for a short period. It wasn’t quick but it worked!

Personally I’d go unifi all the way. The Meraki web management was nice - but unless you have some specific need of specific features, Unifi is the best value for money IMO.

Trello is a good shout. Used that with good effect I’m a smaller team before. We’re embracing 365 now so day to day I have Microsoft to do. Might try OneNote for the summer list between us.

Mechanical drives? We try to use ssd / nvme for the drives the VM’s run on. Going to back to the mechanical hosts is horrible after that. 32gb seems a lot for a DC to me too - but how’s it depends on load and users etc.

Ah I see. Yep M3 and iSumsoft were what I immediately found but they’re not free.

Macs have had disk encryption built In for a while now. All in the system prefs

This is what web filter monitoring is for imo. Would be more consistent than someone just checking occasionally and less intrusive. If the logs / monitoring flag something, it may be justified.