DavePa

Thanks both, looking promising so far

We use both on-premise AD and Office365 and at the moment there is no syncronisation between them. At present we do not give students email addresses so it's purely staff and when new users start we create an AD account (for all users) and then, as a separate step, create an O365 account usung the same password if the user is a staff member. Although this is duplication of effort it's easily manageable but I've finally got to the point of wanting to do something about it. The obviousl answer is Azure AD Connect but I want to be comfortable that it's not going to cause issues or incur costs - neither of which is necessarily a problem long term but would need to be factored into any plans. As far as I am aware all passwords are synced - we sync them and prevent users changing their AD passwords although some could have theoretically have changed their O365 passwords. I assume that running Azure AD connect would sync all passwords to Office365 with the AD password taking priority if it is different? Not all users within AD have an O365 account and likewise not all O365 users have an AD account, I wouldn't expect this to be an issue but it's something I need to plan for. Looking further down the line, with an OVS/ES agreement are there different levels of Azure AD (Not the connect part, the full Azure AD) such as free (but limited) and full (but expensive)? Enabling Azure AD connect would make it easy to give students email accounts - at least I think it would - but the problem is that student accounts have passwords that do not meet the complexity criteria. Would I need to change the passwords on all student accounts or would they sync anyway? I know passwords should meet complexity criteria but it has never been an issue as it has only ever been internal AD logons, no O365 has been involved until (potentially) now. We have a steady stream of students unable to remember their numeric passwords so adding in uppercase, lowercase and special characters would be way too complex for many of them. Allowing them to set their own passwords would likely result in some of them using the same password that they use for their banking (we are FE, our students are post 16 and the majority of them have bank accounts). I guess the answer is to allow them self-service password reset of some description and that's certainly something I would need to consider if we are to go with Azure AD Has anybody been in a similar situation but made the plunge? If so, how did you find it? It's early days for us at the moment but I would be interested to hear any experiences (both good and bad) from people who have made, or are considering making, the change. Thanks in advance

RIP Rick Parfitt I read somewhere that although the 1st few months of 2016 were bad the year overall was not that much worse than previous years. I wonder if it's a case as as we get older (speaking for myself here of course) we know of more people - my children (26/24) have heard of David Bowie and know some of both his, and Status Quo's, music but Leonard Cohen, Greg Lake, Zsa-Zsa Gabor, Pete Burns, Ronnie Corbett and many of the others are a complete mystery to them.

Yes, yes it is. Good to have that confirmed How about Down For Everyone Or Just Me -> Check if your website is down or up?

I think I may be able to - brain is a little fried at the moment and I was looking in secpol rather than gpedit! Hopefully on the home straight now, thanks!

We have that option but the problem with using 'download but let me choose' is that updates will never be installed - nobody is going to kick them off during the day and IT support is 08:00 to 17:15 whereas there are staff here from 07:00 until quite often 21:00 or thereabouts. I can do it remotely but would rather not have to worry about rebooting hyperv hosts at 22:00 on a weekday evening when I have far better things to do - like sleep! Weekends are an option but again, that's my time not company time! I'd love to be able to set the servers to update on Sundays at 3am like we could in 2003/2008

We've got a couple of HyperV servers that are NOT domain joined - this is historic as we were advised some years back to set things up that way and although I believe it's no longer recommended we're stuck with it for the moment. Problem is that these servers (hosting our entire virtual estate, naturally) have the default 'Download and install updates' setting which means that if somebody logs off rather than closes the session the updates happen 15 minutes later and the server reboots...not good. In previous versions of Windows server you could set the maintenance window to both a time and a day - 3am on Sunday was always popular but with Server 2012 this was removed. For domain joined servers this is not a problem as it can be controlled by WSUS/SCCM but I can't figure out where to set this for a standalone server despite having spent best part of an hour googling it - I can find lots of advice but mostly refering to domain joined servers and any registry modifications that I find for standalone device refer to keys not present on my servers - I''m not brave enough to try them 'blind' so wondered f anybody else had had this as an issue?

Actualy I had a brain misfire...I haven't used it for ages on my PCs at home or at work but it is however still used on the domain PCs that the students use - I had totally forgotten about thse ones! I posted it as I had just logged into my PC and by habit gone for the ctrl-alt-del combo

Hopefully not already suggested,,, Use CTRL-ALT-DEL to login (I actually still catch myself doing that at times)

Is there a thread for those little snippets of information that we use that others may not know about? If not, maybe this could be the beginning of one. Here's a couple for starters When doing a ping -t you can use ctrl-pause to get running stats without stopping the ping When using explorer to navigate around a disc you can type cmd into the addres bar to open a command prompt within that folder

Which side would you like your parting? (Another 57 year old male here, do people even have partings these days?)

Thanks @pcstru that worked like a dream! Mind you, I'm not sure I really needed to know the answers: In 2014 I worked an average of 61 minutes a day unpaid In 2015 this was 57 minutes a day In 2016 it has dropped to 50 minutes a day overall - but taking just the last 3 months it has been 75 minutes All of these are calculated using 8.5hrs as the day length (7.5hrs plus an hour for lunch) and I'm not even going to consider the number of short lunch breaks I take!

In a similar vein: Has anybody got any blank zip discs?

Slightly off topic but I just installed a piece of software that included the instruction: If you are using a modem (dial up) please connect to the Internet before continuing

If there is no or minimal cost then I'd say VLANs a worth looking at for exactly the reasons you give. We separate: Wired devices (although printers/servers/devices all share the same VLAN)), BYOD devices, Infrastructure (Switches, APs) and Telephnes. Problems one one VLAN don't affect the others.

@pcstru - Thanks, I'll give that a go @TechMonkey - I want to find the min/max for each date - that's the poblem!

I appreciate that this is asking a lot but I would really appreciate some advice- even if its that what I am trying to do is not possible I'm trying to extract information from an Excel spreadsheet without having to go through it by hand. The sheet in question has dates/times on it and I'm trying to establish the earliet/latest on each individual date. The data looks like this: [TABLE=width: 294] [TR] [TD]02/01/2014[/TD] [TD]07:44:40[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]02/01/2014[/TD] [TD]12:22:30[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]02/01/2014[/TD] [TD]12:47:01[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]02/01/2014[/TD] [TD]14:17:33[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]02/01/2014[/TD] [TD]17:21:55[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]03/01/2014[/TD] [TD]07:51:44[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]03/01/2014[/TD] [TD]12:13:16[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]03/01/2014[/TD] [TD]13:09:20[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]03/01/2014[/TD] [TD]16:45:28 [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] There are a couple of problems that I'm coming up against, the 1st is that the data is actually numbers formated as dates so both columns in the 1st row are identical when formated as numbers: [TABLE=width: 294] [TR] [TD]41641.3226876968[/TD] [TD]41641.3226876968[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] I believe that 41641 represents the date and 3226876968 the time. I've not yet looked at it but would be confident I could split that into date and time if necessary. The 2nd problem is that the data is inconsistent, somedays there is only a single entry, other days there may be multiple entries so I'm not looking for the difference between 1 & 2, it could be 1 & 4 or 16 & 22. On days where there is only a single entry it won't be anything at all! The data represents my clocking in and out times, I'm trying to calculate how much unpaid overtime I have done since 2014 - if I can't do it programatically I'll need to go through it manually but in that case I will only go back over the last few months. I'm happy to use Access or Excel to try and work through it but want to end up with data that looks like: Date In Out Time 02/01/14 07:44 17:21 9:37 03/01/14 07:51 16:45 8:54 . . 09/01/14 07:39 07:39 0:00 (Where only a sinlge time exists for a day) Is this even possible without having to take a reporting/data manipulation course? I have very limited knowledge of Excel/Access but can copy/paste like a boss

We've now got our Veeam software and licences so ready to go. Step 1 is to read the quickstart guide...oh wait, there doesn;t seem to be one, only a 952 page manual! Gah, better not print that out! Oh well, looks like I'm about to find out how intuitive it is

Thanks all for the feedback, how about this then... Member of staff in own time, using own device at own home access a dating ste where there are pictures of naked people then comes to work with that image on their device thus making us aware of it Member of staff in own time reads '50 shades of grey' then comes to work and tells other members of staff about it thus making us aware of it One has pictures that can be seen on TV after 9pm, the other describes (at least the little I read) some fairly hardcore acts. Why is one an issue and the other not? Or are they both issues?

There are 7 'hits' to the site across the space of 2 seconds and it's the 1st traffic recorded for the device which is why I think it's been done elsewhere and recorded here when they connected to our BYOD. I've done it myself (with a job search site, not an adult site!) when opening my phone browser and realising I hadn't closed it down so there is my job search...since then I don't use the BYOD and stick to my own 4g instead!

What would you do in this situation: Staff member uses a personally owned device at home to connect to an adult site and then comes to work and connects to the BYOD which immedialty tries to update therefore triggering Smoothwall alerts. There is no suggestion that they actvely opened the web page whilst at work and I would be confident that it's something they have looked at when at home and have left the page open in the browser. On the one hand they didn't reach the site as Smoothwall blocked it but on the other there are now Smoothwall alerts with their name on them. Do you block their device from BYOD? Have a quiet word with them? Report it to senior management? What if it was a student? I'm not talking about anything illegal but certainly objectionable - but who defines what is and is not objectionable? There is a vast amount of material on Youtube that could not be shown on TV before 9pm and a fair amount that should be restricted to seedy theatres in out of the way places. Sure, you need to sign in to see it but anybody can sign up to Youtube and claim to be 18 For information, we are an FE college offering apprenticeships so no students under 16 and the majority are 18+ Please feel free to move to behind the red door, I was 50/50 about where to put this

Ours is set to 8hrs but we obviously don't have the number of users you do. You could try it at 4hrs but is people tend to be there for the day all that will happen is you'll generate extra traffic. If on the other hand people are only there for a few hours it might make a difference.

Reduce lease time?

@Steve21 I did consider essentials but we are already at the max and there is no upgrade path to the 'full fat' (full cost more like!) product so as my costings on the backup and retention were approved that's the way we are going @mikkydoos It's currently a 30mb link - not brilliant. I've asked about migrating to a 100mb link but the cost means it may not happen I'm planning on putting backup server1 and hyperv1 in the same rack on site1 and doing the initial backup before moving backup server1 to site2 in order to do the incremental backups. Same idea with backup server2 and hyperv2 at site2 - do the initial backup locally and then move the server to the other site. The only park I'm not sure on is whether to make the backup server3 a copy of the others or a fresh backup. I suspect that it where the 'replication' part will come in

This has probably been asked a hundred times before but I'm not wanting to hijack somebody else's thread or resurrect an old one. We are about to implement VEEAM and all of my costings have been based around the following: 2 sites 3 servers being backed up. These are dual CPU HyperV hosts so I am buying 6 licences 3 servers being used for backup - these are dedicated for backup and not used for anything else. 2 are at the larger site with the other at the smaller site Site 1 backup goes to site 2 Site 2 backup goes to site 1 The 3rd backup server holds a copy of all backups and is in a different part of site 1 as far away from the other backup server as possible! By doing this I have each site backed up to the other and an additional copy of both sets of data on another server that is 100yds from the other copy No NAS being used, all storage is HDD storage on the servers themselves, these are relatively slow HDD (I think 7.2k from memory) but each server has 10tb of space. I'm hoping to 'seed' the backups by taking the backup servers to the sites they will be backing up and doing an initial backup before moving them to their eventual locations. Questions: Does this make sense Is it feasible to do this with VEEAM Have I missed anything (other than the sheer amount of work that will be required to do it!) Once I've actually purchaed the licences I can speak to VEEAM but I'm hesitant to ask them until that point - if it won't work then I may end up going with a different solution. I'm not looking for a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this, only trying to establish that it can be done and makes sense