DavR

Shiny things win out versus a good value solution, once again!

We were in a similar position about a year back, after experimenting with various digital cameras - any digital camera under £100 seems to absolute garbage these days. No development of the tech at all in the last ten years, it would seem. We've got one Android phone on our system (WiFi only, no SIM) that only runs to take pictures, and communicate to parents with a specially authorised instance of WhatsApp, it seems to work out just fine. Didn't try Google MDM though, it's on Meraki. When it came to wider use, though, we thought with the kind of money we were spending, we might as well just buy iPads, so the teachers can take advantage of other features.

Because the official supported Microsoft route is dire, it doesn't scale well at all. A couple of dozen files and five users? Then sync'ing Sharepoint folder to the machine might work for you. As soon as you go much beyond that though, the One Drive client is syncing libraries constantly. Our main Sharepoint library is only a few hundred GB, but would take days to fully sync just the file structure to a users PC..... then they move somewhere else and have to sync it again. It's a nightmare, and generated tonnes of duplicate and conflicting files when we tried it. My advice is either have staff working directly to the Sharepoint share, by opening and closing files directly in Office client, or, use an intermediary tool like Cloud Drive Mapper or equivalent. Either way - work with the live files, don't bother with cached. +1 for Cloud Drive Mapper here. It has it's foibles occasionally, but 99% of the time works just fine, and even has a self-heal button when things go wrong. Be interesting to see what the long-promised V3 holds!

Sounds like it! That drive behaviour sounds pretty weird, and does point towards the drive backplane or multiple drives being a bit iffy. I'd be wary of setting up anything new on that, if different drive positions were liable to drop in and out during a reboot. Do you know what the warranty status is on that server? If it's under three years, might still be warrantied... but then, with how every else has been done with that server, it's hard to guess. I'd be putting in a warranty call about now, if I could. Other options could be, take each disk out and verify it with drive testing software on a PC. Then either recommend replacement disks / backplane. Or, salvage the disks and put them in a NAS box.

If position 4,5,7 are not available to add to the RAID config, that usually means they're still in use in another array. Are you sure you've deleted the old array from the config first? Haven't done this in a long while, but I think may need to commit the delete on the old array, before you can start creating the new one.

If the drive positions themselves are toast, then you're looking at a warranty call to replace the drive backplane. If it's not in warranty, then, ouch. Have you tried running all the available firmwares - iDRAC, backplane, raid card? The politest way I can think of describing that RAID setup is...... your CCTV guys have a very different approach to server configs than an IT installer would take. I'd be looking at the OS on two small, fast (ideally SSD), disks in RAID1, then the data array in big SATA disks on RAID5.

Sounds like the array has had it, then. I'm assuming that the OS is running either on a separate array, or, an SD card. I would start by re-seating drives 4,5,7 to see if you can bring them back online (are yours hot swap drives or not? If not a reboot may be required to detect them). There may be a force-online option in the GUI somewhere. If you can't, you may be looking at replacing those drives too. Then it would be a case of deleting the array, and creating a new one from scratch. Go for RAID5 at the very least, you'll lose some of the capacity, but, you won't lose the whole array next time something fails. You may also find there are important firmware updates for the controller and disks on the Dell support site. Sometimes this has been known to save disks presenting as failed or failing, might be worth a shot.

First thing I'd do, is install the Dell Server Administrator on the server. That will be able to tell you what the status of the array and all the drives is/are. Alternatively, if you've got the iDrac configured on the motherboard, that will be able to provide a GUI with a lot of that information on too. It's a lot easier than trying to interpret light info. Do you really mean RAID0 in the config? Cos one disk failure in RAID0 would be the end of the whole array, as there's no fault tolerance.

Our is Enterprise - English International - if that makes any difference. It shouldn't do, but you never know!

That's weird. Exact same build number here, I applied the September update, but still stuck with the rubbish log off option.

Semi-accurate is what I aim for Glad to hear you worked it out.

I did this once, as a lowly apprentice. I couldn't work out why a graphics card wouldn't fit in the slot (it was an incompatible AGP configuration, I think), but it did fit in the wrong way round. Connected everything up, powered on..... nice little plume of smoke as the graphic card burnt! Another member of staff came in, saw the smoke, and said they'd come back later... Not my proudest moment, really, but, every day's a school day.

Two questions..... How long did you leave after removing the license from the group, before checking on the license status of the users? Depending on the size of your tenant, this can take a little while. I'd leave at least an hour and then check back. Could the license be assigned by any other security group the user is a member of? Check each one in Azure to be sure. Are there any nested groups in play, which may mean the user is covered by an A1 license group, indirectly? End of the day, I don't think there's any negative effect of having users licensed for A1 and A3 simultaneously, A3 just outranks A1 in most things. But I, too, would try and tidy that up for the sake of neatness.

Not the Inventry app, but we tried to do something similar with the SignIn App evac process just for school visitors, and for various reasons it wouldn't work. If we tried it on an iPad, the WiFi was patchy outside of the school building, so you ran the risk of not being able to start the evac. When I suggested installing the app on personal mobiles, our office staff shot that one down quick as anything. Which is understandable, but, with a little goodwill it could have worked well. The only way we could have run it properly was with a dedicated iPad/smartphone with a data only mobile SIM contract, which is expensive just for visitor management. Now, they stop to print out the visitor list when we do fire drills....

I wasn't going to bother specifying users' pinned Start Menu items in Windows 11, especially now there's not a supported route to do it via Group Policy, but I ended up doing a rush job of one yesterday, just to make sure that all users have a very visible log off option in their Start Menu. Because of course, it's more important that users have a direct link into their account management settings when they go to log off.... rather than access to the sign out button!

Our office print out the Evac Report after registration is complete each morning, and manually mark children in and out as they move during the day. The Evac Report for our school would be far too long to print on demand, especially since we moved from Integris to Arbor, at which point the size of the report went up to something like 30 pages. Yes, it's a massive waste of paper, but what else can we do. More to the point, what can I do, against a) a valid H&S point and b) entrenched behaviours....

Which route were you using to customise your Start Menu layout, out of interest? I got as far finding the GPO setting for it, seeing I needed to change my Windows 10 XML to JSON for Windows 11, and deciding, actually, I didn't really need a custom Start Menu this time. But I might, to make logoff more visible, if this change is going to be permanent.

Thanks for flagging this, I've just seen it's popped up on our devices which have updated to the August patch. What a really annoying change, really unintuitive for users who are looking to log off, or lock their screen the long way round. We're just launching Windows 11 this September, I could really do without Microsoft introducing new GUI bugs at the last minute! I've got no answers from what I've read so far, but, same problem, following this thread for future feedback.

Update - reverting Policy Definitions to before today's update hasn't fixed the issue, so it seems unlikely that updating the ADMX with latest caused it. I suppose I could revert my entire SYSVOL Policies folder back to one from backup, but that feels a bit excessive....

Evening folks, I came on here tonight to ask the question about the exact same message at startup! I'm seeing it on all my Windows 11 devices. From what I've learnt so far, the GUID {F312195E-3D9D-447A-A3FS-08DFFA24735E} doesn't link to any policy. It relates back to a Device Guard reference, as others have said. I started seeing this behaviour on startup today, after I played with the policy setting Computer | Policies | Admin Templates | System | Device Guard > "Turn on Virtualisation Based Security". I was trying to get the Memory Integrity setting to turn ON for all devices and clear the nag in Windows Security, but it wasn't behaving, so I removed that setting in the end. Now, I have the "applying {F312195E-3D9D-447A-A3FS-08DFFA24735E}" message on my devices at startup, including devices that weren't even on when I was testing that policy. Have I permanently added some junk to my Group Policies? Is it something I can get rid of? Thinking about it, I also updated my admx files today, so it's possible that doing that has introduced this applying {F312195E-3D9D-447A-A3FS-08DFFA24735E} "feature" in policy. I suppose I could revert my Policy Definitions folder back to one from backup, see if that makes a difference. Any ideas?

Following on from my other post, we've also just removed our last Hitachi projectors, hurrah! We have the following spare new and unopened bulbs in stock, if anyone would like to take them off our hands. Free, just pay P&P. These are Original Inside - i.e., original lamps, in compatible housing. 1 x DT01381 (for Hitachi CP-A222WNM) 1 x DT01511 (for Hitachi CP-CX250 / CP-CX251N) 3 x DT01091 (for Hitachi CP-10 / ED-D11N) If you didn't see my other post, I've also got a stack of Hitachi remotes going spare - free to a good home.

Hi all, Please all raise a glass with me, for today we removed our final legacy whiteboards! Now, it's finally time to let go of my jealous hoard of Promethean Whiteboard Pens. I've got new and used ActivPen 3s, ActivPen 4s and ActivPen 50s (I think). I've also got a massive bag of spare nibs, that my predecessor blagged from somewhere. Happy to give these away free to a good home, if anyone still has ActivBoards running in their schools, just pay P&P. I've also got a stack of Hitachi projector remotes, if anyone is interested in those.

What do you mean, when you say "user based" apps and profiles? Are you trying to use these device in Shared iPad mode? We have iPad Air 32GB, and IIRC, when I looked into it they were considered inadequate for Shared iPad. Also it was slow as heck. We run them in device management mode only, no users. Checking on the specs, Air 2s are supported, but, minimum size recommendation is 32GB.

So, I added updated KB5040527 (Aug CU Preview) to my Windows 11 image, and, it works perfectly with ZTIWindowsUpdate now. Except, the reason is works perfectly well, it that there are no updates to download and install from WSUS in the first place - as KB5040527 is the most up to date update - so it can't error during the download Thus, I won't know if this fix works until there are new Windows Updates to install. Must admit I'm a bit wary about rolling out an image with a preview CU package installed. Might go back to my April image, which in theory shouldn't have the bug in it in the first place. That would resolve the bug during the Task Sequence. It may pick it up again through the next update, but at that point I don't mind, as I'm no longer trying to install updates via script, and can allow the usual mechanisms to take over.

Well spotted @locksat, that known error contains my error code exactly. KB5040527 looks to be a preview of August cumulative update? I'll have a play and let you know if I found out anything useful.