Cazale

Agree with this. The primaries I work in have been beneficiary of this before (they were using Pentium 3s... in 2015!), got a bunch of Core 2 Duo's with 4gb in from a local school, upgraded the entire school from XP to Windows 7 with zero cost. One man's rubbish...

2 schools who work closely together (share staff, etc) have expressed an interest in having a shared folder, which staff at either school can access. As far as I can tell, it's mainly going to be used as a document store (no personal pupil stuff). I was thinking of keeping it as simple as possible. Maybe setting up a separate folder at each school and having them sync (with something like OneDrive or DropBox), rather than messing about with permissions or domain trusts. Anyone any thoughts on this? Anything to watch out for?

Yes, no choice really in primaries (pretty much everything they use is flash based, it really doesn't help when even sites like BBC history are still in flash!), but I'd really rather not!

Sounds like you've pretty much eliminated everything except the switch > port cable. My money would be on one or two of the strands being nicked or snapped (the WOL magic packet is just a series of frames with a 4 digit hex-code followed by the MAC address, it doesn't require two-way communication). Have you tested the cable with a cable tester? You're not using an Ethernet splitter anywhere are you? They cause all sorts of issues (won't work at all on gigabit or above, and drop 100mb down to half-duplex).

Aren't things like this entered in FMS? (I'm no expert in this, but one school I work at recently had a projector outage, had lost the paperwork and we needed to check the purchase date. I'm sure they found it in FMS?).

I was going to suggest they maybe left them because they knew iPads can be GPS tracked, but strange they took one and left the rest! Have you tried locating it? (either on Meraki (etc) or through the Apple account?).

Thanks for that. I'll give it a go next time I'm at that school.

They are on a domain, but the IEAK settings seam to overwrite group policy. Yes, the script sets up proxy via registry (so my guess would be the IEAK settings are being applied on each login after group policy, or perhaps that registry setting is just ignored if you've built from IEAK?).

Just got a Smoothwall installed at a school, but have an issue swapping over to proxy through it on a few computers in one room as they were installed with the proxy setting set in IEAK (long story!). Anyone know any way to overwrite the setting, or to delete it? The rest of the school pick it up through a script, which these computers should pick up if I can get rid of the IEAK settings.

Anyone having issues today? Just had a call from a school, they sent a message out and it was received by parents numerous times. So now the school's getting swamped by calls. Can't get through to support, so just wondering if it's maybe their end? (not really sure what can go wrong our end now it's web based? unless the SIMS import has somehow gone wrong?).

Fairly sure it's disabled by default? I tend to leave things as they are if they work, at least until I need to make a change.

> What are your experiences with BT? Terrible. I've had to deal with them professionally for years (working for an ISP), and personally twice when I was a customer (the first time for ADSL, they were awful and I said I'd never use them again. The second time for BT Sport, they lived up to the expectation of being awful again, billed me incorrectly for months, never fixed the billing error, and in trying to solve it created a second account under my name so I started getting billed double. After speaking to hundreds of people I just cancelled the direct debit and took the hit on my credit rating. It was honestly preferable to speaking to their customer services!). In all my dealings with BT, I've rarely spoken to anyone competent. You literally could not design a company to be as inefficient in customer services if you set out to do so! I would never use any service from BT again, in fact, I would pay any company double the amount so as not to have to deal with BT (if I had to). > Who do you think are a good reliable service? Or good prompt customer service at least? Zen Internet. Sky aren't too bad TBH, and you can generally get a large discount or even get broadband free for a year (and then ring back and get it free again the following year). > Has anyone managed to break their contract with their ISP because they cannot provide them with a reliable service that they are paying for? Go to Citizen's Advice before attempting to do so.

You can use WDS without a domain from Server 2008 R2 onward.

Thanks for posting this but that is useless. They literally suggest resetting your network connection (and if that doesn't work...), running the diag tool that's existed since this problem started (which has never worked for me) and then finally tell you to reinstall your system! Wow, thanks Microsoft, real insightful! Lets be honest, they don't have a Scooby why it's happening either!

Which switches are you using? You probably need to enable multicast across vlans. (whether you'd actually want to do that is another matter! It depends on your network, you can introduce a multicast storm). See here if you have Cisco kit: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/ipaddr_dns/configuration/xe-3s/dns-xe-3s-book/Service-Discovery-Gateway.html

If you suspect it isn't (or is!) this, install MRTG. It graphs bandwidth use (and pretty much anything else you want it to monitor): MRTG - The MRTG 2.17.4 Windows Installation Guide It should also give you pretty reliable historic data for throughput issues.

TBH, I suspect you changing the title will make a huge difference when it gets crawled again (my page tends to get crawled every few days, and takes a little while to update after that). If you want detailed stats on visits, most people use Google Analytics. I also suspect having these services pointing at your domain helps your ranking! A lot of SEO sites advise putting your business on Google Plus for that exact reason, although possibly not ideal for a school. https://analytics.google.com

Just a thought: you haven't got a robots.txt file in your root folder have you? (maybe added by a previous admin?). Google Webmaster Tools should tell you if anything else is wrong, they give you crawl error results.

You can force a crawl by registering with Google Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en edit: (remember to add a sitemap when you've registered, and make sure you have different/appropriate meta-tags on each page, or they'll be ignored. Also make sure you have valid alt tags on photographs, especially photographs of the school building). How long ago did you verify with Google Business btw? IIRC, it takes a few weeks for them to verify you.

I'd be tempted to put "Schoolname, location" (i.e. your town) on the homepage. The title is one of the most important aspects of ranking.

You need to add it to Google My Business. https://www.google.com/business/ Once you add your school and verify it, it will appear at the top of ranks locally, complete with contact details (etc), and also appear on Google Maps. Nobody uses Bing (except people who don't know how to change their default search provider in IE), but they have a similar thing: https://www.bingplaces.com/

As you mentioned this, has anyone found a way to use the "Block Macros" GPO but allow SIMs reporting to continue working?

Oh, they renamed it "Imagine" (rubbish name); https://imagine.microsoft.com/en-us/institutions/faq

Tried the SA u/p? If it works, permissions is your issue.

I think you might find it runs the fans at 100% constantly if you use non-HP drives as they won't report back thermal data (so it will be constantly very noisy!). BTW, you should be able to get a free version of Server 2012/2016 from dreamspark if you have a volume licensing account (or an academic e-mail address), as long as it's not used in a production environment.