JordanT91

Guidance says you don't need to, unless you do lettings etc.

It's looking like that's what I'll need to do... Won't work unfortunately, the County PCs are locked down and can't run executables.

Still haven't received the laptops some of our pupils' social workers ordered for them.

My job role is changing so I'll be spending a lot less time on IT. I'm looking into buying in some IT support a couple of times a week, but I need the office staff to be able to reset pupils' AD passwords and check usernames when the support is not on site. The tricky part is that the office staff all use county council PCs, not school PCs. They are unable to run any applications, so cjwdev isn't possible unfortunately (it looked perfect), and neither is a cut down MMC. It would need to be some sort of web portal. The obvious solution is Office 365 AD writeback, but this isn't possible with our A1 Plus subscription. Has anyone got any idea how I can do this with little or no cost?

Our pupils were back yesterday. All-age SEN school so practically zero social distancing. Masks not required but may be worn if they want to, a couple of vulnerable staff are. Due to the nature of the school there's a decent amount of cross-bubble activity necessary to deliver the curriculum and therapies. One of the only things we could really do was have hand sanitiser everywhere, and have separate zones for break and lunch times. Other than that, it's pretty much business as normal. Things will get interesting if we have a local lockdown, because the government has said SEN schools will not close, but if we have 15 or more staff absences then we wouldn't have much choice but to close as the staffing levels would not be safe.

Right I'm going to get something off my chest, and it likely won't be a very popular opinion. Sorry in advance if you are offended, it's really not my intention. I have just returned from 2 weeks in Italy, and, literally, nearly everyone was wearing a mask/face covering. The amount of non-children I saw not wearing masks in shops and on public transport, in 2 weeks, was certainly less than 10. If you don't wear a mask, you don't get on the bus and you are marched out of shops. I spent half of my holiday in a very popular (with Italians) town in Sicily. The main street is narrow, and there were 10s of thousands of Italians on holiday in this town. I'd say around 3 quarters of people were wearing a mask, outdoors, on this 3/4 mile long street. One thing I noticed is that on most of the signage, there is no mention of exemptions. Now compare that to the UK. I went into Primark a couple of days ago, and within 10 seconds I came across 10 people without a mask/covering. The difference was startling. The government has come up with the list of exemptions, but to be honest I wish they hadn't. The exemption list should be much smaller and not include things like anxiety and asthma. Asthma UK, on their website, states: "Most people with asthma, even if it’s severe, can manage to wear a face mask for a short period of time, and shouldn't worry if they need to wear one. Wearing a mask does not reduce a person’s oxygen supply or cause a build-up of carbon dioxide. You may have read stories that say that it can, but this isn’t true." Every bit of signage mentions something about exemptions. I'm sorry but why should I be put at risk because people with anxiety and asthma and some other exemptions aren't wearing a mask. It's selfish. If they can't wear one, they need to keep trying until they find one they are comfortable in. If they still feel they can't, they shouldn't be out and about mixing with the general public. My wife's grandparents hate wearing masks. I totally understand why - they have spent their entire life, much longer than mine, never needing to wear a mask. So it's not as easy for them. However, rather than inflicting themselves on other people, they just don't go out as much. And when they do go out, they always (as much as they hate it!) wear their masks. Of course, there are some genuine reasons for not wearing a mask/covering. There are some obvious physical disabilities, and then there's the whole barrier to lip reading thing. There aren't many ways some of these obstacles can be overcome, I totally understand that. But be honest, of all the people you'll see today not wearing a mask where it is required, what percentage have a valid reason, and what percentage are lazy, selfish, doing it to prove a point etc. I try not to be judgemental, and generally I'm not, but the amount of selfishness in this country has staggered me over the last few months. If you give people a list of exemptions to get out of doing something they don't like doing, of course they're going to try their very best to make sure they match one of the exemptions...

I used it quite a lot back in April and May. I found it very easy to set up and use.

Our BM was worried about the last raise, nevermind this one. It's got to come out of the school's budget. We employ 80 teaching assistants plus the usual admin and facilities staff. Cuts will likely have to be made somewhere.

The laptops the social workers ordered for our pupils (against our wishes) still haven't arrived. Tomorrow is far too late to arrange for them to be collected, we break up at 2.30!

We didn't request any laptops because the Head didn't want to (for various valid reasons I won't go in to). We found out last week, though, that the social workers of 20 of our pupils have requested them on their behalf. We know for a fact most of these children have internet connections and laptops at home but hey-ho. So we've received all the paperwork, I've sorted it into named envelopes and crossed out the bit where it says to contact school for support. The other option was their social worker so that's who they'll need to contact. However, the laptops haven't turned up yet. We break up on Friday. There's no way they're going out before September now, we've all got far too much on this week. What a mess.

There's not really an awful lot of difference between 2019 and 2016, or even 2012R2 to be honest.

I'm hoping to, finally, migrate my SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online by the end of the year. I have some data protection concerns though. The idea is that staff will be able to work on documents at home rather than needing to be in school. This would be on personal devices for the vast majority of users. My fear is that if a documents gets downloaded onto the personal device, it is no longer controlled and anything could happen to it - resulting in a possible data breach! I've asked our DPO for advice and they said that our ICT acceptable use agreement will act as a disclaimer, so that it is their responsibility to keep the device, and all the info stored on it, safe and secure at all times. I asked if this would stand up as a defence and received no response. I know about the various access control features on SharePoint Online: Unmanaged devices restrictions isn't do-able because I don't have the required license and I need unmanaged devices to be able to access SharePoint. Idle session sign-out I have set to log users out after 1 hour. Network location (specific IP addresses) again I can't use this because staff will be using their home/hotel/conference/McDonalds/Starbucks connections etc. There's also the O365-wide MFA option which I intent to enable, but isn't really relevant. How does everyone else do this? I suppose really there is no difference than if staff download documents from their school email or encrypted USB sticks onto their personal devices.

Hi all. I'm after some advice on PoE. I currently don't have PoE switches (other than two old ones) but I'm in a situation now where we are purchasing a large amount of IP phones and CCTV cameras to be dotted around school in various buildings. I have been using midspan PoE injectors in my main cabinets and inline PoE injectors (one or two per smaller cabinet) but this is now not enough. My switches are mainly HP 2920s and 2530s, non-PoE. Of course had I known 5 years ago what I know now, I would have spent the extra on PoE versions. I've been trying to purchase extra midspans for my smaller cabinets but I've been told they aren't really a thing anymore, and I can't seem to find them for sale anywhere. Apparently this is because PoE switches are now so much cheaper. My issue is, though, adding more switches into my network isn't really ideal. I can pick up 8 port PoE Ubiquiti or Netgear switches for a couple of hundred quid, but it's just introducing a difference set of protocols and ultimately it would be making my network more complex. What do you think I should do? Network diagram

There is more than enough at present. Production has ramped up massively and there is now a surplus. All our suppliers now have plenty of stock, though the prices are still inflated. If it comes to it, the school can send someone to Home Bargains! There's no longer a need to close the school due to lack of hand sanitiser.

Wow, I thought I was way under. Thank you for the congratulations everyone. I've never won anything before, so this is a nice treat. I've provided my home address, but I promise the staff and what few pupils are in school will get some eggs when I next pop in. EDIT: I also volunteer for my local Blood Bikes group so you can be sure I'll put a few boxes into the snack box at our stand-down location next time I'm on shift. As a group we're working hard at the minute to help our local NHS trusts with the pandemic.

Everyone else seems to be guessing way above me, but I'll say 189.

I've just bought a few more encrypted USB sticks for the teachers who don't have one. I've also sent an email out to all staff about being able to use Office 365 on their personal devices free of charge as part of our school licence. I hadn't routinely shared this information previously because it would have resulted in loads of requests for help. Every little helps.

It was the only subject I was really interested in at school, other than history. The natural progression was to go to college to do IT. I never wanted to go to uni, but I didn't really have a choice because companies were laying staff off rather than taking them on. Applied on deadline day, got in, did a 4 year (including placement) course and finished that in 2014. I needed a job, so applied for the position of IT Technician at this school. Nearly 6 years later, I'm still here, though I no longer have an 'interest' in IT and it's a relatively small part of my job now.

They are not okay for anything, even very short journeys on rural branch lines. They do not comply with the Disability Discrimination Act.

Same. We aren't a customer of Capita, but our County Council are. We never get emails directly from Capita.

Us too. Lots of email addresses visible by the looks of it. Amateurs. Have they just breached the Data Protection Act in the process of telling us that they've already had a data breach?

I'm running 12 VMs in total. The file server (1TB storage) is on the T320. The T430 is running a SharePoint VM. I would like to migrate to SharePoint Online in the next year or two. I'm thinking that I could purchase more SSDs for the T430, and use this alongside the T320. I'm just just concerned that the T320 isn't massively powerful, and it's getting on itself. I have two NASs, one in the server room and one in a separate building. They are used for Veeam backups.

Okay the SAN idea is out. The idea of putting all my VMs on one host, even if there is another redundant one readily available, makes me feel uneasy. It seems to be the thing to do though! So lets say I purchase a new server with a large amount of RAM and SSD storage. I get rid of the T420. I move all the VMs over to the new server. I'm left with a not very powerful but loads of storage T320, and a quite-powerful T430. I suppose I could use the T320 as a backup server (I currently have Veeam on a VM) and get some SSD storage for the T430 and make that the redundant server. Just thinking out loud here.

I would love to consider a cloud-based solution. It's the future. However, at present, our broadband connection is not suitable. The most we get is 30 down 6 up, and we have been told there is no chance of Openreach changing the route our phone lines take back to the cabinet (100m line of site, over 1km in reality) In addition, our connection is provided by the LA and we often have drop-outs lasting up to a few hours. In short, our connection isn't suitable for cloud storage.

I'm after a bit of advice regarding servers. At present I have 3 Dell tower servers, all Hyper-V hosts: PowerEdge T420 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2430 64GB RAM 6 x 600GB SAS drives (RAID 10) Purchased March 2013 Warranty expired years ago [*]PowerEdge T320 1 x Intel Xeon E5-2430 64GB RAM 4 x 600GB SAS drives 4 x 500GB SATA drives (all in RAID 10) Purchased January 2015 Warranty expired January 2018 [*]PowerEdge T430 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2660 v4 64GB RAM 4 x 400GB SSD (RAID 10) Purchased July 2016 Warranty expires July 2021 I'm getting concerned about the T420, it's already had multiple drive failures but at nearly 7 years old I'm concerned other, more serious, failures might occur soon. It's a lot noisier than it used to be, despite being cleaned a couple of times a year. Due to the large drive capacity on the T320, this server hosts my file server. But it's also the least powerful server of the lot. The T430 is fine for now. I've been looking at replacing the T420 with a rack server, and then any new servers in the future would also be rack-mounted. This will save a lot of space in the very cramped server room. Initially I was looking at getting one with lots of SSD storage, but then I thought what about getting a SAN and having minimal storage on each future server? Has anyone else done it this way? It seems SANs are very expensive though. As a minimum I want two servers for redundancy etc. I was also thinking I could buy some more SSDs for the T430 to match the capacity of the T320, then that would satisfy my redundancy requirements wouldn't it? What do you think?