birchanger

I have sites hosted in two places. I have a Digital Ocean droplet running Ubuntu server that I keep some stable old sites on and I have some WordPress sites hosted by Zen. For testing and general mucking about I have several instances of Ubuntu Server running under Virtualbox on an old Mac. The DO droplet being just a VM gives you full control, of course, but you also have full responsibility to maintain the server. The Zen one is a traditional control panel setup so you have a fair amount of control, including changing PHP versions, adding PEAR modules etc. but you have no command shell. You do, though, have an underlying server that is maintained for you. And, with Softaculous, it's not much more than a click to fire up new Wordpress instances. All have fixed IPs, but for the test ones they're internal IP addresses.

I thought Holborn was outstanding, so I'd encourage anyone with an interest in anything London, transport, trams or subterranean to get your booking in fast.

I'm on vDSL and get about 68/19, but I could upgrade to 300Mbs download here on Zen. This is over Openreach FTTC. I never find 68Mbps limiting. I was downloading Linux distros yesterday and found the time required perfectly acceptable. Gigaclear also operate in the village with FTTP at up to 1Gb, but I really don't want to spend £75/month or leave the comfort of Zen's great support. I think it unfair to blame BT, as well. They're a private company. If the Government wanted them to act as a charity and subsidise their competitors they shouldn't have sold them off. As it is anyone can put down their own infrastructure and have access to Openreach's resources in the exchange guaranteed by law, as Virgin, Gigaclear and others have done.

How are you using Windows Server Backup? On the hosts to back up the files containing the VMs? If so, you have no file-level restore and I would imagine there could be consistency issues. If you're using WSB to back up from inside the VMs then it will work but it's a very ponderous way to do things and doesn't benefit from the fact that VMs can be backed up much more efficiently as VMs rather than the file structures they contain. I don't know why you didn't get on with Veeam but it backs up at the VM level, so is fast, but still capable of recovering at the file or transaction level. Unless your VMs are very small then Veeam or something similar is what you need.

Use a backup system that backs up the VM as a VM, not a bunch of files. Veeam for example.

Just say GDPR to them. But seriously, if there is a SAR that may require a Governor's emails to be searched (e.g. it may related to another governor or a staff member) then it's much easier and less intrusive if the search scope is limited to the governor's school email account rather than his/her personal one.

I retired some while ago and can't remember all the details (e.g. my syntax below may be wrong) but I could easily do this sort of thing at one time. For most of our task sequences we used the MDT database, which is easy to set up and very, very powerful. Our main builds were based on make and model (to install the right drivers and so on), and also on assigned roles. So a machine might be designated a teacher's machine, a classroom PC, and in the maths faculty, so would receive the apps it needed such as maths courses, whiteboard apps and the 4-Matrix client. Some builds, those used for exams, were closer to what you needed. They didn't use the DB and just used customsettings.ini to target the specific machine, setting the machine name, what apps it gets, whether spellchecking was disabled and so on. We didn't use the MAC address but the serial number; the process is identical. You'll need to have MACADDRESS in the Priority statement at the top of cs.ini and the mac addresses you're targetting as sections lower down (i.e. in square brackets). In the section under the macadress have SkipTS = True, to avoid the machine asking which TS is to be selected, and TSID=. I'm sure someone will along in a minute with a more recent memory of the process!

Secondary About 1400/185 500mb on 1000mb bearer (no backup) Leased (from LGfL who use VMB but as we're off-network for VMB they subcontract further to BT) Don't know

We have a student in the same situation. We use Impero, so her iPad has the Impero client installed. Teachers then use the Impero console to broadcast to a group, which has a single member - the iPad. It works well, but clearly you wouldn't buy Impero just for this.

I've been out of the loop for almost two years and am now trying to set up OSD in Config Mgr. I've applied all in-console updates offered in Updates and Servicing, bringing me to CM 1702. I want to get to 1802 so that I can deploy Win 10 1803. I've upgraded both SQL Server and the OS to Server 2016 but am not seeing the later versions. This branches thing is a bit new-fangled for me, but am I right in thinking that the reason I'm not being offered the upgrade is that our version of SCCM was, once, 2012 R2, and I need to move to current branch? And does that really need to be a full side-by-side migration? Our licensing is OVS.

Not sure this adds much, but for some weeks I've been consistently seeing job postings from late 2017 in the ticker.

I'd have thought that MDT (with a database if necessary) is a far easier path for a primary. Yes, SCCM allows for app deployment at any time, but is the complexity justified when compared with MDT and GPO deployment? If all you're looking for is OSD, then SCCM users tend to use MDTs task sequences in any case.

Depends on what you call a mild inconvenience. If it forces people in wheelchairs, invalid scooters and mothers with buggies to walk around the car in the road then the driver wants shooting. We get this in my village. The lane is quite narrow, but vehicles can pass each other, with care in the case of the bus. The pavement, on one side only, is even narrower. People park on the pavement because they say it's to avoid inconveniencing traffic, but if you park half on the pavement or fully in the road it makes no odds: vehicles can't pass each other at the place where you've parked. So pedestrians, including those heading for the village primary school, are forced to walk round the vehicle in a busy, narrow, road but other drivers derive no benefit. In any case why should a driver impose even mild inconvenience on pedestrians? The pavement is there for people who don't happen to be in vehicles - keep you car off it.

In Windows 10 I've just added an appropriate Install Roles and Features step to the task sequence. I saw no need to manually set up the WindowsSource variable. Mind you, I've retired now. Maybe I left the whole thing in a mess.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I do have a Digital Ocean droplet sitting out there gathering virtual rust, plus some spun-down AWS entities, and may use one of them. The downside is that if I want to host mailboxes I'll need to do it all myself, rather than using the typical control panel vendor's servers. Plus I tend to trust shared hosts' security features, rather than relying entirely on my own abilities: I'm no real Linux guru.

I'm looking for a hosting company for a new site I'm working on. My current provider doesn't support PHP 7, which I need as the site is based on Drupal 8. I'd also like command-line access to my virtual host. Any recommendations? I was with Gradwell for a long time, but left after receiving what they admitted was terrible support. But that's the type of company I think I'm looking for.

Well, the way I handled it was as follows: - Set up a deployment share for your reference image. Do not add any drivers, unless you find you must have a mass-storage or network driver for your virtualization environment - Perform a deploy and capture of the reference image on a VM - Import the captured image into a different deployment share - Import all drivers you need. Follow best practise by creating an organised driver folder structure, separating drivers by manufacturer and model - Use selection profiles, preferably with DriverGroups, to set up your deployment to use only the drivers required for the target hardware based on runtime detection of Make and Model. See Michel Niehaus's excellent tutorials, e.g. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/itpro/windows/deploy/deploy-a-windows-10-image-using-mdt Bob's your uncle. Only the necessary drivers will be installed on the machines you deploy to. Neihaus gives ideas for determining what drivers you'll need. My approach tends to be trial and error. You're almost certain that most drivers are in Windows anyway, so just try out a deployment to each distinct piece of hardware you have then see what's missing. Download and add those drivers that are missing, or that you really need to update for some reason, then try again. When using MDT I really can't recommend Johan Ardwidmark's Deployment Fundamental book series highly enough. They save a lot of time in the long run.

We replaced BE last year. We use Veeam now, backing up to a 27TB array on a dedicated backup server. The backups are then copied to tape. Our tape library (which was replaced when we bought Veeam) holds 48 LTO5 tapes and has two drives. Backup to disk with Veeam is fast, as it's done on a whole-VM basis (or just the changed blocks in the virtual disks, if an incremental) and because Veeam can access our SAN directly on the storage VM instead of using the general-purpose data network. Copying those backups to tape is also quick - don't know where you got the idea that tape is slow - it isn't really.

The Deployment Fundamentals books by Johan Ardwidmark and colleagues are indispensible, in my opinion. They're light on theory but great as practical how-tos. You need Volume 6 - Deploying Windows 10 using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit by Ardwidmark and Nystrom. We're deploying 1607, and have had no problems. Just created a simple build and capture reference image with just the OS and Office 2016, then a separate deployment share that deploys that image with applications depending on the target machine's role and/or model.

Just out of interest, what's the reason you're not doing a vanilla build and capture with MDT handling the sysprep?

@TechMonkey, We'll need the normal school autoattendant, as that's currently being supplied by on-premises Exchange (i.e. dial 1 for finance, 2 for absence ...), with working day and out-of-hours/holidays menu. Most teaching and nonteaching staff (about, what 175 people) will need voicemail deposits delivered as email, and we need a number of physical handsets, say 75, for offices. Although in theory I like the idea of users logging into a device, in practice few bother, so a fixed mapping of extension to user would be acceptable.

Hi - apologies for the delay in replying. We've about 200 users and 75 devices, with 'extension mobility' (users log on to phones with their AD credentials). I don't know how many ISDN channels we have, as that's managed by the finance manager. However I cannot see that we'd need more than , say, half a dozen concurrent calls in progress. I had considered using O365, although the lack of an autoattendant may prove a problem. I haven't really looked at it. What physical phones does it support? Any generic SIP device?

We've rolled out Office 365 but can't finish the job because our Cisco VoIP system uses the Unified Messaging services of our on-premises Exchange servers, meaing that affected mailboxes (almost all staff) cannot be migrated. I've just been quoted a big heap of cash to integrate our phones with O365, but as the telephony servers and handsets are over six years old I'm reluctant to spend a lot on them. Does anyone have any recommendations for a phone system that will provide UM with O365? Preferably hosted - I see gaps in the server rack as A Good Thing these days. Currently our network is VOIP internally but using conventional ISDN to the outside. I'm assuming that any replacement would route calls through our newly-boosted 500Mb data connection to an external gateway.

When we upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 1607 we moved printer deployment to user GPPs and item-level targetting based on the name of the computer. This works for us as the room a machine is in forms part of its name. This seems, so far, more reliable then the old deploy-to-device way. Driver install times haven't been a problem as almost all of our printers are using the same drivers (generic PCL5).

I agree with @robyholmes. We went Autodesk about three years ago as it's free to schools and students. Schools can get a network-installed version of just about all of the huge raft od Autodesk products, and students can download locally-licencsed copies for home. Quite a bit of it is now going to't Cloud, so that means that the management is getting harder, but not too bad so far.