maark

or leave all your gadgets at home and relax on the beach :-)

Installed ours ourselves - just swapped over old cisco points. Do you have any existing wireless? Pretty easy to configure.

can you enter us, cheers

sims FMS supports TLS encryption now - there is a tick box in FMS email settings have got ours working with gmail

update - this works ok after updating to system center 2012 dpm service pack 1 - so obviously some issue with earlier version and server 2012 with dedup enabled.

I do have depup enabled - will check updates - though I had patched it up to latest but so hard to find a proper link to service packs and updates for dpm 2012 - keeps pointing you to cloud evaluation software site. Thanks for help.

Struggling with this one so appealing to edugeek. Setup:server 2008 R2 with system center dpm 2012 - everything patched up to latest versions. Using filestreamer as tape library in dpm. Have installed protection agent on server 2012 file server all ok and protecting several folders of staff/student/shared data with protection group. No errors in dpm or firestreamer and dpm say protection ok after i forced creation of protection point. However it only does about 25GB of backup when I have about 900GB of data in them folders. though reports completed ok. When I go to do a test recovery of a file it lists all the files on them folders and I can select a file to recover. I can recover a file to original location or a local location on dpm server and it reports recovery ok. When I go to open the file it won't open - e.g. a pdf says not supported filetype or damaged. Looking at recovered file - says file is 1.24MB but size on disk is only 4kb. Have tried recovering several files - they all have size on disk of 4KB and won't open. Can anyone give me a pointer to whats going on as no error messages there to give me a clue - dpm reports everything ok!

Had no replies to this but am posting to help others- got it working in the end by doing a custom image of a good machine and then disabling out of box drivers in task sequence. A driver somewhere was throwing it out but not had time to work out which one.

Hi looking for ideas to troubleshoot this. Have mdt working fine on loads of different hardware including some zotac mini PCs with celeron processors but I have problems with zotac ZBOXHD-ND22 model (AMD/nvidia) - these seem to image ok but then at the last stage after finalising settings and restart they will just keep looping round - windows crashes - get the screen where you have option for safe mode etc. - won't boot to safe mode either. Have tried: injecting different drivers from zotac site and installation cds into mdt a 32 bit image rather than 64 bit a custom image that was taken from a working zotac machine - (we used to use ghost) all give the same result pulled drive out after imaging and looked at all logs in minint and windows temp and smstasksequence folders using sms trace - no logs show any errors or give me a clue. running out of ideas now - can anyone help? thanks mark

tbh I don't think you need folders with names for your different hardware just do import drivers from the out-of-box drivers section and then scan from cd or folder where you have the drivers. I have all the drivers for different models in the main folder and it selects the right ones to use when imaging automatically.

I would use server 2012 and windows 7 - use group policy to lock things down and mdt or sccm to build computers/install software. I have used hyper v with no issues for virtual servers - though vmware is supposed to be good hyper v is very cheap if you have a Microsoft schools EES agreement. Most useful bit of extra software we have is impero - to monitor/control student machines and also lets you do remote installs etc. Also veeam is good for backing up hyper v though you can use dpm.

an interesting article in favour on the register PHWOAR! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, Prime Minister makes some good points.

Do you have a microsoft EES agreement for your school? - if so then you can save a lot of money by using server 2012 datacenter running hyper v for virtual machines, DPM for backups, forefront endpoint protection for anitvirus. Virtual servers can be backed up using dpm or veeam who offer a free version and this can be a lifesaver. Worth setting up vlans if you are a large network but depends on what you have now and what your switches are like - had no problems with hp procurves. We use clickview for videos but would not particularly recommend iit as I always seem to be fixing something on it.

I would recommend server 2012 and MDT. Server 2012 is stable and gives a lot of benefits. SCCM is too time consuming, breaks easily and not really needed for a secondary school.

cubase elements is pretty good for music for PC and not too expensive - we use that along with Sibelius.

thanks for help with mdt here. One more question - on my machine with office 2013 installed that is going to be a custom image ospprearm.exe does not exist - not in usual places and did a search of c drive. How can I rearm office or do I need to? - I have a KMS server running and previously have run this before uploading image.

Came across this MDT 2012 – Lite Touch Deployment Step by Step | Webbed Eye which was useful. Decided to make an image with office and updates on as there were 120 windows updates since win 7 SP1 and a lot of office 2013 updates.

regarding impero this was the last reply I got from impero: Ipads are sandboxed so we are restricted at the moment. However, we are working closely with Apple and they basically tell us what we can and can’t do. Unfortunately we have no permissions yet, but that’s not saying we will never get the go ahead. So it seems unlikely we can control ipads via impero which is a shame because it does a good job on keeping students on task.

You can still use bitlocker without tpm - use a flash drive as a key. Only problem is if staff lose/forget them then you have use recovery password to start the laptop. Advantage of bitlocker is that recovery keys are saved in active directory.

Have got 2 servers running 2012 datacenter server with hyper v with 2 more to upgrade. They have been running fine. Just setting up a new DC on server 2012 and testing a new MDT server. Hopefully get most upgraded over the summer - RDS servers and also our main file server so we can use de-duplication features.

My google apps sync decided to upgrade itself this morning - there is now a version that supports Outlook 2013 and windows 8 https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync Good news as I did not think they were going to continue developing it - staff are used to Outlook and I can upgrade machines now to Office 2013.

I did a domain rename - worked though a bit scary. We went from exchange to google apps so was not a problem. I think you can do it with Exchange 2003 but not later versions.

If you can get over the silly interface there are a lot of benefits: 15/20 percent more efficient better hyper-v features such as live migration de-duplication built-in direct access and RD gateway supposedly a lot easier to setup going to upgrade all our servers and learn powershell as that seems to be the way it is going - a lot of cmdlets available already

Hope you get it sorted. Surprised how many posts there are with SANs failing - makes me think that I will stay with separate dell R710 servers running datacenter edition rather than spending 20k or whatever on a SAN. If one server goes down I can restore the VMs to the others from veeam backups. Also went to an interesting seminar last week suggesting you can use server 2012 built in tools to create your own virtual SAN.

I am using Dell R710's but not clusters/shared volumes - they are stand-alone with datacenter 2008R2 running several hyper- v virtual servers on each. Would like to go to server 2012 after seeing benefits at seminar last week - efficiency and better hyper-v features e.g. vhdx. An in place upgrade should be possible rather than clean install - Upgrading to Windows Server 2012. Just wondering if anyone had done this with datacenter 2008 R2 with hyper v role installed and whether it worked ok?