DavR

Yup! Not sure which brand you've seen, we've been using Lock N Charge. The basket-ised storage concept though has been a game changer for us. One person can now easily and safely carry at least ten devices, rather than kids walking around with teetering stacks of laptops.

Our trolleys mostly stay where they are, and teachers come and collect devices as required. Most of our trolleys have removable baskets, which carry up to five devices, so these are a convenient carry option for staff or designated children. Chargers are contained within the trolleys and cannot be removed, so, devices have to be returned for charging. On the whole, they are. I can relate pretty hard to this. On the whole, I leave it up to staff to make sure devices are returned at end of day, but I do check and then lock devices up during the school holidays. Which usually means I spend the first half day of the holidays hunting round the building for strays, muttering increasingly rude words!

There is I think an option for exclude from census in there somewhere, but that's not really been our problem. Ours is more that we don't have time to set up single-day supply teachers before they need to take the register at 8.45am. I suppose we could use a dummy account in there to create a generic supply account, excluded from census to avoid mucking up our numbers. Maybe I'll consider that next time the question arises.

Is replication between the 2 x DCs on each site working OK? I wonder what would happen if you pointed NIC DNS from a DC on site 1 to point to a DC on site 2, and vice versa, to try and force a zone replication between the two? Although is sounds like potentially your replication situation is already beyond that trick :/

The fact that you can't resolve names of some of the servers suggests there's definitely a DNS problem. Without DNS working, there is no AD replication. Can you ping DC1 > DC2 by name, and vice versa? What DNS server is each DC looking at? I've always had each DC as a DNS server, with the NIC settings pointing first to itself, to ensure a reliable DNS connection. In your DNS zone, both DCs should be name servers, and be listed name > IP in the zone.

Same, FWIW. Don't know if that makes a difference. [color=#333333]SourcePath="D:\Software\MS_Office\office setup files"[/color] Can the client access this source path when installing Office? D:\Software almost looks like a path on a server, that network clients wouldn't be able to access without a UNC.

Our MIS (RM Integris) doesn't allow us to create generic supply accounts, and will only (as far as I'm aware) allow accounts to be created if they're attached to a current staff personnel record. When I've asked support I've always been told to revert to paper registers. Obviously, this doesn't happen. Another teacher in the vicinity logs in and I see and hear nothing

This is a known issue with ActivInspire 2.24, particularly with text boxes. See discussion on Promethean forum - https://support.prometheanworld.com/s/question/0D56f00008Y8ApcCAF/when-typingediting-text-in-activinspire-the-cursor-jumps-to-elsewhere-on-the-page?language=en_US

[color=#333333]setup.exe /configure configuration.xml[/color] with the following in configuration.xml Does the silent install for us. There's other stuff in our XML like choosing which apps to install / exclude, autoactivate Y/N, etc but I think those are just our preferences I think. Have you run through the Office Configuration Tool to create a bespoke configuration.xml, or are you using a default/downloaded one?

Not just us, then. I'm no prude, far from it, but that just seems inappropriate for general consumption.

I had a call from my head this morning where he started talking about monitoring website traffic.... before he asked the question I said "you've read that article about Ofsted early warning, haven't you?" We are "due" Ofsted, but I think I've put him off the idea. I was greatly amused though

Sadly not. Although that could be a useful method if it could be replicated outside of Smoothwall.

Brill, I'll search for that thread and look into it If that was a targeted ad, I dread to think what the rest of the teacher's search history and behaviour is.... I was just surprised that YouTube were allowing semi-obscene content in their ads I guess. I've been using Adblock Plus for so long I have to admit to being pretty naive and inexperienced on that score.

Had an interesting call this morning from a teacher who got a very adult advert on in the middle of a fairly innocent YouTube video she was showing her class - a cartoon character simulating masturbation to a pretty girl, I'm told. To date, we've taken the position of leaving YouTube on the loosest filtering setting, for staff use only, on the logic that we trust our staff to vet their content before showing it to a class. Historically we've found the various restricted modes too restrictive. But that's the videos themselves, I don't think we ever considered the ads would become a threat. What have other schools experiences been on this? Have you gone to moderate safe search for staff, or, are we recommending Ad blockers? I use Adblock Plus for personal use, does anyone have a blocker they recommend for general usage?

In theory you should be relying on the BIOS-embedded Windows 10 license key for reinstalling machines. Anecdotally though, I know people have had success getting a limited MAK key from Microsoft support to cover those devices which didn't come with a BIOS license. Not sure if they'll go as far as KMS keys, but probably depends on how hard you argue.

We were too small for EES, so had the option of a new OVS, or buying into M365 as a separate item, which wouldn't have covered our servers.

Depending on how confidential the PDF, you could upload these to web storage somewhere, and include in your data source a column with the unique links in, per recipient. In Word Mail Merge, you'd then pick name, email and link fields from the data source.

I'd skip the tape drive and move to cloud backup storage, myself. That would tick the same box for offsite storage with minimal intervention, and fewer moving parts to go wrong. 1+3 should then be achievable with a beefy server with lots of storage.

Bear in mind if you go for M365 A3, that won't cover any onsite servers. We were weighing up OVS vs A3 for our recent renewal, and stuck with OVS, adding AAD P1 as an extra for things like conditional MFA and password writeback. It was the server licensing that swung it for us, as those were licensed through the existing OVS and would have cost a lot to buy out.

If you're installing the Office 365 local apps, these are licensed by your users being assigned A3/A5 licenses on the portal. There is something called shared computer activation, which deals with activations on shared devices (eg laptop trolleys and IT suites), but that has been problematic in the past. We're O365, but still have access to KMS activation, so continued to use the Office 2019 non-365 version of the local software. It works fine, but doesn't necessarily connect to O365 as neatly as O365 apps.

Not had this with MDT as such, but historically, if the network boot fails it's due to network card (or occasionally storage) drivers. May be worth adding these to your MDT boot image as a test? If other devices boot OK from that VLAN, then it's unlikely to be IP helpers etc. CSM = Legacy BIOS boot. If you press F12 to confirm the network boot, it's legacy BIOS. If you press Enter to confirm your network boot, you're using EFI.

And as we all know, if IT can't see the problem, it doesn't exist Especially non-specific slowness. That's a pain to diagnose even if it is working.

I wonder if anyone else reading has successfully used Virgin and Cisco together without error, or if there's any discussion online about the interaction between the two. You'd think if such a popular product was having trouble with a major provider, there'd be some chatter about it. If not, I'd be inclined to wonder if it isn't something in how her firm has configured the Cisco VPN, that's throttling connections coming in off the Virgin network.

Not really a fix, but contributory information. I use Cisco AnyConnect to connect to our VPN here, over a Virgin Media home line. Never had any performance issues to speak of - day or night. If you switch to another Internet provider (eg, hotspot a mobile phone and connect through the 4G) does the problem go away?

Where did you buy a set of these in 2023?! I have a copy of the software c. 2009 (V2.101.0) if you'd like it, PM me.