NB9457

Catering by any chance? If so, have you checked whether they're XP POS 2009? If they are, they're still in extended support until next year. I wouldn't worry too much, we have a few domain joined legacy XP machines that operate old equipment and I can't see the immediate threat, the AV is still supported and they aren't heavily used for anything other than operating equipment.

Just blacklist the MAC address? You can do this both in DHCP and the wireless controller. It's what we do when needed. It will ask to join the WiFi, but all requests will then be denied.

If you don't want to use Remote Desktop or apps for whatever reason, Foldr is a good shout. Very user friendly, supports drag and drop, very lightweight install and support is pretty good.

The tricky thing with supplying your own HDDs with things like SANs is it could affect your warranty and big name manufacturers tend to have'certified' drives. I'm sure some companies limit features too if you don't buy their 'special' drives. Plus when spending that much on something, you'd want it to be complete, working and guaranteed.

I've not driven this for over 18 months now, I do miss driving it

I'd say completely different as the credits point to different developers.

I used the old IPs and have had no issues. Just did on DC at a time, so took the old one offline, built the new one, brought it online, transferred roles, killed the old ones and then added a secondary. 6 months on, still ticking away. I went from Server 2008 to 2012 R2

I stopped going to meets and shows because the attitude changed from laid back and chatting about cars, to just willy waving festivals with 'clique' groups who look down their noses at anyone. Still like cars though and have met some life long friends through cars, I just don't really show my cars off much, just make them how I like then drive them

Yup, WMI filtering is the way. Nice and easy, I do it here.

It's a tricky one. With the management, I'd assume you'd get the iPads from a reseller so they can be added to DEP/Apple School Manager out of the box, then you add your MDM such as lightspeed. Both can be removed remotely and easily, but I find it's always best to get the iPad back, perform a factory reset, clear the asset tags and give it a once over. With regards to the locking down and not belonging to the school, I'd still lock them down, especially if the scheme is through the school and they're intended for lessons, there's still liability to safeguard the children, especially primary school children as they could easily stumble across or download something they shouldn't if they were just clicking away.

No problem Post back and let us know how you get on

Pretty much. I'm guessing there's not much in the way of VLANs or routing and it's a flat network? In which case I'd say just change the IPs over for your servers and printers and see how you get on. I've had to this this in the past when I worked for a managed service and the schools had broadband with the LA so had to be set certain scopes.

Yeah, you'll need to change all the servers static IP settings to match the new scope. I'd leave the fourth block of the IP the same and just update the rest and subnet mask on each. I'm guessing you'll also have to do all your printers too and anything else with a satic IP. Guessing it's a primary school?

Can't knock Salamander, support so far has been spot on. Don't really need to change settings, a quick email to support and my query is usually resolved within an hour. Plus Salamander as a company are very flexible, I've asked for things I either thought were daft, minor or difficult and every time they've come through. It is a lot of script based tasks though, tailored to your school, so maybe software here isn't necessarily the answer. Will be interesting to see their pricing and what their overall support and product is like though.

And I'm guessing you've given all your servers new IPs?

Have you added a new Scope completely? DHCP server authorised and scope activated? What's the new Scope? Everything on the same range/subnet? Updated server IP Addresses if necessary? What's the old range and what is the new one?

We bought some Duracell CR2032 batteries off eBay, like 10 for £5. Really easy to do, pop the lid and you'll see a little battery in a holder, just pops out and new battery goes in.

eBay? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/COOMBER-3320-CD-PLAYER-The-CD-iPad-Listening-Centre-Excellent-Condition/112712334918?epid=2097458535&hash=item1a3e2dbe46:g:qRYAAOSwh1paNqdU There's also a few listed with faulty drives for £20, could always have a punt and try fix it as it seems they just use a normal PC disc drive.

Is it disk intensive? What's the server spec? How many users? What is the RAM/CPU/HDD usage when running?

With Parallels, you can pin a SIMS icon to the dock and it will run in its own window and appear to the end user as a Mac App. May be worth downloading the trial and having a play.

Was just planning on running local storage, around 8 VMs per host. The failover features aren't essential to us, file servers will be replicated and we will have VM backup, so the way we planned it, lose a host, fail back file services to replica and we live without some none core services for a day and copy the VHDs from the core services to another host if they're needed. I just want to keep it as simple as possible and I keep everything as well documented as I can, so if something happens to me, long or short term, somebody could walk in and get a handle on things pretty quick. I've worked at quite a few High Schools now, one had several SANs and over 20 servers, 10Gb switching, it was hugely overkill and was even configured as optimally as it could be, in fact, whilst the backend was all singing and dancing, the clients were P4s and Pentium Duals predating 2010 and this was only going back last year. So £££s spent on the backend, yet the client machines were as slow as anything, how they got away with that, I'll never know. Personally, the way I see it, the money saved not buying a SAN can be spent on bettering the end users device and experience. If all your clients don't have SSDs, that's where the money should be going. I often see threads like this pop up and as stated by myself and @AButters on many other threads, it's overkill, technically a single point of failure and may not even provide the best performance. As I said, documentation and planning is key. SSDs I was looking at were the Kingston DC400 (DC Standing for Data centre)

Nope. My next Server setup is looking like 3x beefy hosts with local storage, DPM backup and one of our old servers as a Replica for file services. The setup will be incredibly simple and comes in at either £13.5k with mech drives or £19k with SSDs. And that's 128GB DDR4 RAM, 2x8 Core Xeons, Minimum 8TB Storage per host. We have a SAN and blade system currently, it cost a lot to buy, it costs a lot for warranty, it's pretty complex for what it actually does and it's gone wrong badly at least once. Personally, a SAN for a school isn't really necessary, what is necessary though, is having documentation, good backup and plans.

You may as well not bother having a web filter IMO as the amount of stuff you could probably get on get around without decryption will be huge. With appliances like Smoothwall and Lightspeed, you need the inspect and decrypt installed to properly monitor and safeguard students and fully inspect the page, pretty sure the real-time/smart filter won't work on SSL sites without this. Never noticed a drain on resources using this method either, our computers are very old, but still perform well enough.

I also forgot to mention Salamander. This does a lot of automation between AD and SIMS. It also ties in with our 365 and GSuite tenancies. Couldn't be without it.

Having worked on Vanilla and RM systems, I couldn't really go back to RM, separate systems seem to work better, catered exactly to the school and there's a big saving usually. One thing I will give RM and their by the book rule, is if that anything happened to the network, or one of the time, an RM tech could come in and know the setup and fault in no time. With that, make sure you document everything, I know my network inside out, but I still document everything incase anything happens to me or maybe the day comes and I forget, all categorised and so on, again, seen so many schools that haven't and it will cause problems one day. Software recommendations: Server OS: Hyper-V Data centre 2016, this allows unlimited VMs on your hosts. Print Management: Paper Cut, bargain, works great and has a lot of functionality Imaging: WDS and MDT. Keep it simple for now and use a 'fat' image, whilst no longer best practice, in your current position, it'll help you get going quicker, thenyou can come back and look to using something like SCCM as this can just be added to a live network whenever. Classroom Management: Net Support DNA. They usually having some good offers and Al is very helpful. It covers safeguarding, software deployment, classroom monitoring and more. In fact, I'm sure RM Tutor is repackaged Net Support. Software Deployment: A mix of NetSupport, GPO and PDQ Deploy. PDQ Deploy is like black magic, in most cases it can deploy exe files silently and best bit is it's only around £200 for a licence. Antivirus: This is an each to their own. Whenever we renew we shop about, last time Avast! came in cheapest for us, around £4k for 1000 devices for 38 months. Again, you can use Windows Defender, but you'd need to setup SCCM for a full solution. But as I said, shop around and read reviews. Backup: DPM if you're on a budget, it is good, never really had an issue with it, but if you have a better budget than us, I'd recommend veeam, it's simple to use and literally does the job.