andyt57

That's not a bad idea. I already have a MicroServer at home running NAS4Free. The new Gen 10 boxes are over £300 from HP (with £50 back) but the Gen 8 boxes are a bit cheaper online and I have a couple of spare 3Tb Seagate drives which would do the trick. Andy

Thanks very much. I'll download the ISO and try that next week. It's a Primary School so the children go home at 3 and I'm there until 4:30 so taking the server down is not a problem as long as the teachers are warned beforehand. Andy

Unfortunately the warranty ran out in May. Sod's law. Andy

One of the schools that I support is out in the sticks and often has power dropouts. It goes through UPS batteries at a great rate. Looking in the logs the server ran throughout the summer but a power outage caused it to fall over in the first week in September. Ever since then I have had problems with the server, which logs up under load (i.e. when a full class try to log in on their laptops). It has locked up 20 times over the last month. The server is a Dell PowerEdge T620 with an Intel Xeon E5-2637 @ 3GHz and 16Gb RAM. The C: drive is a 265Gb SSD and the data is on a RAID array running on a Dell PERC H310 RAID controller. All the drives are good. The are about 90 client devices, all running Windows 7 Professional 32-bit. I first tried making sure that all updates were installed on the server and ran chkdsk on the SSD which found not errors but that did not resolve the issue. I then tried taking an image on the C: drive and restoring it onto another SSD. The server booted without any issues but continued to lockup under load. My thoughts tended towards believing that the system outage had corrupted the 2008 R2 installation somehow so, since the school has a Server 2012 R2 licence, I decided to try an in place upgrade. This seemed to go smoothly until one of the server reboots into 2012 R2 (blue screen with circling dots) when it reported an error and that is was reverting to Server 2008 R2. Back in Server 2008 R2 the log reported a number of "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR2" and "The default transaction resource manager on volume Svr2012R2 encountered an error while starting and its metadata was reset. The data contains the error code." This lead me to believe that the server firmware needed updating so I downloaded the latest BIOS from the Dell site along with the latest PERC H310 driver for 2008 R2 Sp1 (SAS-RAID_Driver_CFHFJ_WN64_6.805.03.00_A09). The BIOS updated without any problems, but when I tried to update the PERC H310 drivers I got "This Update package is not compatible with your system configuration"!, even though it is compatible with PERC H310 and Server 2008 R2. I am now at a loss. I am only at the school for 3 hours each week and the other problems I have to sort out don't leave me with much time to work on the server. I do not have time to rebuild the server during term time and I am loathe to install server 2012 R2 if it won't work. Does anyone have any suggestions? Andy

Seconded. A primary school I support bought 30 Dell Chromebook 11s last September and were so impressed they bought another 30 just before Easter. The only proviso is that there is a one-off cost of £299 and £19 for each device to manage them online. But at least you don't have to buy a ProBook or Mac Mini as you would with iPads. Andy

I use the free version of Cisco Meraki and follow this procedure: In Managed Apps select the app to be updated. View the app in the iTunes catalogue to confirm that a new version exists. On the Apps page select "Re-push to all". A bit long-winded if you have a number of apps to update but that works for me with a mixture of iPad2, iPad Air and iPad Air 2. Andy

Koldov, I got an invoice from the local authority listing all the serial numbers and uploaded to Apple. Finders crossed. Andy

Kol, Many thanks. The local authority supplied them so I'll have to see if they can get an invoice from the supplier. Does the invoice need to list all the serial numbers? Andy

One of my school has bought 16 iPad Air 2s to supplement its iPad 2s and iPad Airs. They are all initially supervised using Apple Configurator 2 on an iMac and then using Cisco Meraki. I was please to see that the new iPad Air 2s had the full iWorks, iMovie and GarageBand installed. Until I supervised the first one and it wiped the iPad. Does anyone know how I get all the apps back? Andy

I have just replaced an old school wi-fi system with 7 UAP-AC-PRO and installed the Unifi Controller software on a client PC. All seemed to go well and I have updated the APs, named them and given them reservations in the Server 2008 R2 Domain Controller DHCP. On setting the wi-fi details I connected my Android phone and the school's Chromebooks and connected through the proxy to the internet with no problems. My problem is with laptop clients running Windows 7 Pro 32-bit. When connected to the new wi-fi the Network and Sharing Centre shows an Unidentified network with no Internet access and they can't connect to any network shared drives. I went in to Manage wireless networks on the laptop, deleted all wireless networks and reconnected to no avail. I removed one laptop from the domain, to see if that was the problem, but cannot get it to join again as it cannot find the server. This is despite ipconfig /all showing that that the laptops are getting a valid IP address from the server (and I can see them in the address leases on the server), along with the DHCP server and DNS server IP addresses and the Default Gateway Address. I thought it might be a DNS issue so I ran dcdiag on the server and fixed a couple of issues that it found, but without any luck. So then I removed the DNS role from the server, rebooted (twice) and reinstalled and it still doesn't work. All wired clients still work as normal so I am somewhat confused. Has anyone come across this issue before?

Following the update to IOS 8.1.2 of the 16 iPad 2s in one of my schools I am having wi-fi issues. Firstly the iPads now forget the wi-fi password whenever they go into hibernation or are turned off. Secondly, when I do enter the wi-fi password and get connected, then select the wi-fi details I get the DHCP, BootP and Static tabs, but the Proxy tab is no longer there. Since the school accesses the Internet through a proxy they have been unable to go online since the update. Has anyone else come across this issue and is there a resolution. Andy