mrhcarlin

Hi Adam, Thanks for your support yesterday - was really helpful! Just awaiting those documents etc via email, but otherwise all good. Cheers.

Sent you one back

The powers that be have decided that they want a way of sending pop-up messages to all teacher and staff PCs in the school in accordance with our new lock-down procedure. It somehow got agreed that LanSchool was our best bet for this (since we already have a v8 license), although I disagree. Anywho, I can get PCs to communicate with a Tech Console using an LCS with the student.msi install, but I can't get installs with the teacher.msi to appear in the Tech Console. According to this article (https://helpdesk.stone-ware.com/portal/kb/articles/tech-console-cannot-see-teacher-machines-through-the-lcs), although it first says it's not possible due to the architecture of the software, they mention a workaround. Unfortunately this workaround doesn't appear to be working. Any thoughts? I'll even take some alternative software recommendations because I'm not convinced that LanSchool is the right way forward. Thanks.

As long as Git won't open up the system to tampering because some whizkid finds out he can run PowerShell scripts with it, then I'm all for deploying it. It sounds like it's fine though. And thanks for the explanation.

I'm not at all familiar with Git. I don't know how it works, what it's really used for, or what damage it could potentially cause if deployed without implementing restrictions. I assume it is just an IDE with some workflow utilities. I read somewhere that you can integrate PowerShell into Git, which makes me very weary, although presumably with PowerShell blocked this would not work (one would hope!) Personally I'd rather just not deploy the thing. Our Head of Computing is, quite frankly, a pain in the ass as she even wants VirtualBox and Uniserver installed in her computer labs...But that's for another time. Anyone have experience with this? Did you or would you just put your foot down? Is it perhaps actually completely harmless and requires no work beyond simply installing it? Cheers!

I'd say it's natural to expect a good setup. Your current place sounds super flashy and I'm actually a bit envious , but I probably have it pretty good where I am too. We have Intel NUCs (to save space) with i7s and a couple of nice IPS panels each. Real sysadmins need powerful machines and the ability to multitask efficiently. I work with like four other guys and they all utilise the kit to its maximum as well, so it's not exactly unrealistic to expect an IT team to need better hardware than your average user.

Bumping because I experienced similar odd behaviour with Windows 10 after upgrading our fleet, albeit from Windows 7 instead of 1511 > 1607. --- Despite the power plan suggesting otherwise, everyone's monitors would go to sleep after 5 minutes and waking would show the logon screen. Initially I thought it was the Interactive logon: Machine inactivity limit computer policy, which was set to 300 seconds (hence me thinking it being the culprit), but changing it did nothing. In the end it was changing our screen saver policies that did the trick; but what I found odd is that the "On resume, display log-on screen" option was unticked and the screen saver itself was set to "None". I managed to successfully change the timeout to 10 minutes and have forced the logon screen/require password options. There might be something else going on or something else/better to change, but I'm satisfied with my results. (I reckon there are some legacy screen saver or power options conflicting that Windows 10 didn't like, but for love nor money I couldn't find anything in Group Policy, so I just created a new policy.)

Funnily enough SnipeIT was the first thing I came across this morning, but it didn't seem like they had a mobile app for scanning etc. It looks decent otherwise so I might just have a play anyway (the beauty of open source!)

Apologies for the hijack, but are there any barebones systems out there to keep track of hardware inventories with maybe a mobile scanning app or something? We just want a system that will tell us where a piece of kit is, who has it (if it's a laptop or tablet), how old it is, etc. No need for software inventories or license details. I want to scan a barcode of a piece of hardware and tell the system that it's in room 2B.

Codecademy looks great, but I just created myself an account and I can't seem to find blank templates. It just seems to be lessons and tutorials? If it has a blank slate where you can just write anything and not necessarily follow the instructions outlined, it would be perfect I think.

Sorry for the bump but I didn't see the point in creating my own thread..! Since we block students being able to run all potential nasties (such as PowerShell scripts, batch files, cmd, exe, reg, vbs), I presume the security risks of allowing Python to be run on domain machines are significantly reduced? (I have nigh on zero knowledge about Python!) Most people seem to like the sandboxed VM approached, but I only have the time to set all of that up if it's necessary.

Funnily enough we use their Parents Evening System product and the SIMS integration for that is pretty decent. I just need an answer and/or proof that MRBS imports must be done manually (or semi-manually) so I don't have to waste my time investigating it. Once I know exactly what I need to do to get a timetable on it, I can just work on doing that particular thing. Researching and experimenting with CSVs and scripts and exports and imports does not appeal to me.

Can anyone recommend a room booking system that features good SIMS integration? I was thinking it would be cool to have like a live timetable that syncs continuously with SIMS and lists all the free rooms, cover arrangements etc. A colleague pointed me toward MRBS (which I found out we had a barebones installation of), but I’m sceptical about the seamlessness of its functionality. Apparently there’s a script that can do some funky SIMS importing of some sort, but I glossed over it and—not being particularly adept at PHP—it kind of went over my head. I’ve seen freeperiod and Room Booking System mentioned before, but they are paid-for products (the latter being a fair bit more too). However, if I can prove that one of the paid options is the best way to get a seamless and integrated setup, then the cost isn’t an issue. Then again, if MRBS can do what I want it to, then I guess I’ll spend the time on it to get it working. Cheers!

Just a quick one because Google won't give me a definitive answer.. I'm going to ask BT to enable QoS for VoIP traffic on our router. I already have a VLAN for it, but do I need to tag the data with a DSCP policy and enable QoS on my switches? I presume not because our internal network is a small 1Gbps jobby and barely gets a sniff at full capacity (nothing to prioritise if there's plenty of room in the pipes). Cheers.

Thanks for the response. Internal connections are fine - should have mentioned that beforehand. E.g. I can get onto our on-premises OWA, connect to AirServer on numerous PCs, etc. I can even ping the problem devices. They're just not getting further. It wouldn't be a profile issue (assuming you're referring to AD linkage) because this particular WLAN is an open network with WPA2 encryption. Whack in the code and you're on. The network was originally designed for staff laptops where we pushed out the connection details via Group Policy. Staff don't know the code. On managed Windows devices we use a transparent proxy with NTLM authentication which works fine. Only non-managed devices that don't require the user to log in with their Windows credentials need the non-transparent proxy entered as we have allowed this proxy to not require authentication, and it's some of these devices that are exhibiting the described issue. We use a Ruckus ZoneDirector for our WLANs and only attached our wildcard cert because users were originally getting errors when authenticating on our BYOD network (we had it set up so you needed to log in via a web page). But our other WLANs work fine. I can't see anything on my ZD that would be restricting certain clients, especially when there is no variation in OS or hardware between one working device and one non-working device.