NokiX

I will be on-site this Friday if anyone interested wants to collect any hardware.

Main post has been updated however additional systems are now available as well. Let me know if anyone is interested or needs any additional details.

Hey all, I had one PM about this which I’ve only just gotten back to as we’ve been busy retiring the servers, we’ve still got plenty available if anyone is interested!

Hey All, We are currently retiring a large number of our older systems which are 9 of our QCT T41S-2U multi-node systems which contain 4 blades each with dual E5-2420 V4 CPU's and 9 of our QCT D51B-1U systems with dual E5-2640 V4 CPU's both with at least 128GB of DDR4 memory. Some of these systems do have minor faults however as they're being retired we just want to donate them to anyone who would find a use for these systems however if we don't have any interest we will be looking to recycle the hardware instead. Ideally I'd be looking for anyone interested in at least 4-5 systems at once as collection would need to be from our data centre in central London. Most of these 4 blade systems will either need a new RAID card or the BBU replacing (mostly the BBU, I checked them all recently) however the 1U systems are in great working order bar one or two fans needing replacement. These are also configured for 2.5" disks, more detail can be found on the QCT website: https://www.qct.io/product/index/Server/rackmount-server/Multi-node-Server/QuantaPlex-T41S-2U-4Node#specifications https://www.qct.io/product/index/Server/rackmount-server/1U-Rackmount-Server/QuantaGrid-D51B-1U#specifications These systems are now retired and can be collected relatively quickly! Kind Regards, Chris.

To be fair WordPress is made even more insecure by the thousands of themes and plugins people end up installing, some of which never get updated. You can absolutely improve things by having a decent mod security ruleset which most hosts include by default (either paid rulesets from places such as atomic or the rules included with Imunify as an example), there's also systems such as bitninja (and imunify) which are pretty good at detecting and blocking malicious activity. Honestly though, you are right that WordPress is easily hacked in most cases, that's always going to come with being a popular CMS as it ends up being heavily targeted. IMO something like Ghost offers a more secure "blog" style website although it is more complex to setup for most users given it uses node.js.

Same problems here, we've had switches on order for a few months and don't expect them until mid next year. Often we've ended up receiving new servers before the switches we need to actually get them racked.

Just bumping this post as we've got some extra R420's available and have given away some already.

I’m also getting this problem today, MacOS using Chrome.

To add, we may be able to provide some Dell blades as well (M520, M620) if anyone is able to make use of them however we don't have a spare chassis for them unfortunately.

We currently have some old hardware that we're retiring as such I wondered if any schools would benefit from this at all. There may be more that becomes available throughout this year however below are some of what we have available: 11x Dell R420 4-Bay (3.5") 2x Dell R420 8-Bay (2.5") The R420's have mixed CPU's but all systems are dual CPU, some I don't have the CPU details for currently as they're not powered on for me to check the idrac's but a few are below: 4x E5-2430 2x E5-2440 1x E5-2470 The R420's will have 32GB of DDR3 memory however more may be available depending on the requirements. No drives will be provided however we should be able to provide some caddies. If you need 2.5" adapters for the 3.5" bays let me know. I appreciate the above hardware is old by today's standard however I thought I'd put them up here anyway as I'd prefer a school get some use out of the hardware instead of it being binned! Happy to provide extra detail if required. This would be collection only in London in the Bermondsey area. PM if interested.

Hey All, Sorry if this is the wrong section but I was hoping to gather some feedback from as many people in education as possible on what they feel they wish their existing hosting, domain & DNS providers could do better. I don't want this to turn into a "X provider is terrible, use this one" type of thread but it's more to get an idea of what everyone feels is currently lacking in the hosting industry that would be a benefit to those in education. For example, I know some providers make it more difficult than it should be to support a .sch.uk domain name and also it seems finding a provider that offers an easy solution for everything (hosting, domain & DNS) near enough impossible. Personally I feel there's a lack of suitable solutions available and I'm interested if others have same opinion or not as I've been out of education for quite a while now!

Horizon is an amazing game, first game I've ever purchased the collectors edition for (on forbidden west), I have played zero dawn on PC as well and I agree I think that type of game is certainly easier to enjoy with a mouse and keyboard setup. I'm looking forward to the next God of War release, that'll be my next time sink.

I started to get pains in my wrist and arm however I quickly made the decision to try alternative mice to see which one helped best. I initially tried the Logitech M570 Trackman however I ended up with pains in my thumb (I'm sure I would have gotten over it in time) and now I daily drive a Logitech MX Vertical. I've had it for about 2 years now and haven't had any pain in my wrist or arm since switching to it full time so I suspect you'll see a huge difference if you make the change! There's other vertical mice you can get which operate more like a joystick which are also supposed to be quite good however I've got no complaints over the MX Vertical so that'd be my recommendation. Edit: Just to note, I've never had a diagnosis and I doubt mine was tennis elbow but I'd hope that a vertical or ergo mouse would help with some of the pain.

Well this would certainly give me an excuse not to go down the AMD route I'd finally be able to look at playing cyberpunk though!

I can't speak for every situation however an old colleague of mine moved into the network engineer side of a hospital a number of years ago and from what I understand they can never get approval for any downtime so systems basically end up being run into the ground. A good example is the stacks of "new" switches they had in a storage room which were never deployed simply because they needed a small amount of downtime to actually tidy up the mess that is the existing setup so they end up having to simply maintain what's there and replace units only when and if they fail. Honestly it'd drive me insane so I'm glad I never went down the route of IT in the NHS! Edit: Also remembered, you can bet there's a tonne of proprietary software that has to be considered which also delays any upgrades.

Link: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22712250/twitch-hack-leak-data-streamer-revenue-steam-competitor Seems to be genuine, It wasn't hard to find the torrent link which is worrying to think who will get their hands on the data. Recommended that all twitch users change their passwords as a precaution though.

I've started playing New World, actually pretty good if you don't mind a bit of a grind (especially as resources are not easily available from other players yet) although there's some interesting bugs at the moment!

The main problem with .school domains is they just don't sell in large quantities so smaller hosts are unlikely to offer them as a result. I can tell you that manually maintaining hundreds of domain extensions and the pricing that can change at any time isn't easy, often you'll typically only find hosts that offer those type of TLD's if they're a domain registrar themselves. I could go on about the finer details about domain pricing but that's a pretty dull topic

You mentioned .school before which Netistrar do support, if it's .sch.uk then Krystal do support them but you have to request the transfer (once the tag is changed) via a support request as there's no way to automate those transfers due to the unique nature of that specific domain extension.

Krystal won't support the domain for renewals but they'll support it on the hosting side. Krystal use netistrar for domains so one option is you could just move the domain directly to netistrar to cut out the middle man: https://netistrar.com/prices/domain-names/ Netistrar deal directly with the registries so you won't be dealing with a reseller going down that route.

Was that an optional move or a scheduled "upgrade" they had to do? In terms of Krystal, make sure that if your school is a registered charity that you provide your charity number as Krystal provide a free Amethyst package for registered UK charities or a 50% discount on other hosting products.

I watched a video recently about iOS 15 being available on older devices which showed some promise about continuing to use them, in that case they tested an iPad Air 2 and they were very much usable so if you're able to reset them and they're around the same age and spec as an iPad Air 2 you'll be able to squeeze some additional useage out of them. ( )

Yep I can confirm, a few of my colleagues were affected and are now able to connect to affected services again.

The Krystal discount only applies if the school is also a registered charity, you can either get a free Amethyst package or 50% discount on hosting products.

IMO you have two options, you either want to move to a provider that provides free DNS and the option for other services should you need them in future -or- move the domain directly to Nominet and manage DNS using a service such as cloudflare. The first option would be easier if you wanted everything in a single location but if you don't mind splitting things up, Nominet & Cloudflare would work well. I can also confirm Krystal does have a free DNS service.