DavR

Usually your password policy will be in your Default Domain Policy, unless you've severely customised your network. Open this up in GPMC, and the settings are under Computer Settings | Windows Settings | Security Settings | Account Policies/Password Policy. You should have a load of different options around password age, length and complexity here. You may also want to check if the teacher accounts have "Password never expires" checked in AD.  

I'm using the proper GP settings wherever possible, with Search Providers pushed out by GPP registry settings. GPP IE settings are far more flexible, but as they are only preferences, can be changed (until the next policy refresh).

I have seen that video before, but yeah, quite useful I'm not pursuing Apple Classroom any further, but @Katalyst may find it helpful...

Not a very helpful response Brimstone! Meraki has done most of the things I've asked it to do (and for my usage, free), it's just this Classroom business that has been fairly rubbish. Worth noting it is still officially still a Beta feature in Meraki.

Hi @Katalyst, No, sorry - this was as far as I got, and abandoned the project. At most all I wanted was to give teachers remote control functionality over an iPad class, frankly it wasn't worth dumping any more time into. Best of luck with your deployment, I don't know if there is anyone else on here with a success story, hopefully if there is someone will pop up!

Bump! Hi guys, I'm being bothered by teachers to shift this redundant Lapsafe, anyone interested? Happy to reduce price to say £300 to clear, or make me an offer.

"Hide entry points for Fast User Switching" under Computer Policy | System | Logon has always done it for me. Definitely got it as a computer policy, applying to the PCs you want, with no conflicting policies? Does RSOP say it's applied?

Have you tried running Windows 7 with nothing but the NIC drivers for a while? This might tell you whether it's hardware or drivers, although would give you a horrible desktop experience for a while. Or perhaps try it with Windows 8 / 10 see if the problem persists, purely for testing.

Is it one device, or the whole batch? If just one, potential hardware fault, run the onboard diagnostics. If it's the whole batch, I'd be inclined towards either dodgy BIOS or graphics driver. Have you updated everything to the latest from the Dell support site? You may also find a more up to date driver on the graphics vendors site, eg Intel. What have Dell support said?

We use Tucasi for payments, and Groupcall for letters out. We're down to almost zero parents with no email access now. When it comes to consent, we use blanket presumed consent. If you don't tell us at the beginning of the year you don't want us to take kids out, consent is presumed for all trips.

So, with the last few days of the summer break, I thought I'd have another bash at configuring Apple Classroom app through Meraki. Still no joy, but as it's not documented properly anywhere, I thought I'd share what I have learnt. 1. You will need to update your Deployment Program to Apple School Manager 2. In Apple School Manager, you need to define classes with teacher and student users 3. In Meraki, these users need to be imported under Systems Manager | Configure | Owners > Sync ASM 4. The teacher device for your class would appear to need to be assigned to its teacher owner under the Owners tab 5. Create a profile for your Classroom, or amend an existing profile 6. Add setting > More iOS > Education (Beta) 7. In your Education profile: a. Tick ASM to get users imported from ASM b. Import groups from ASM to get your classes c. Device Groups and Departments are optional 8. Using whatever distribution method, deploy Apple Classroom to necessary devices 9. Bluetooth should be turned on for all devices And that's as far as I got with it. The Education profile installed on my student devices, but failed to install on my teacher device with the error "A user with the identifier “(teacher's Apple ID)" could not be found". Might be because I was using generic "A Teacher" and "A Student" logons in my class, I don't know. This is the only documentation I have found so far - https://documentation.meraki.com/SM/Profiles_and_Settings/Configuring_an_Education_Payload_for_Apple_Classroom. I'm giving up on this one for now, might come back to it another time, but just thought I'd share as far as I got for anyone else trying to puzzle this out.

Hi all, I'm in the process of upgrading our wireless, so I now have the following wireless kit going spare. Prices a guide, or make me an offer. 6 x Cisco Aironet 1140 AP (802.11g/n) - £30 each 12 x Cisco Aironet 1130AG AP (802.11a/g) - £10 each 2 x Cisco Catalyst 8 Port PoE switches (10/100) - £50 each

@Liam86 - there's always one little bug isn't there! Glad you've got something functional, best of luck getting it perfect.

Wake On LAN is what you want, only snag is that most tools will need you to know the mac address of the machine you want to turn on. Some good ones I've used are Solar Winds and Depicus, although be warned there will be a lot of messing about with BIOS and NIC settings to get WoL working reliably. I seem to remember NetOp had WoL built into the interface way back when, it was a nice GUI with all devices listed in groups, you could right click and turn a suite on in one go. Pity the rest of the product was a bunch of a*se really.

This happened to me today, downloading XLS files from the LGfL / Atomwide support page. I had to call them and find out what was going on! I just turned off Protected View for Internet files under my settings, but I'm reluctant to do this for everyone....

If you can't find a completely silent install with the command line switches, you could always pipe a "Y" to the command, ie; echo y | android update sdk --etc I've used that once or twice on troublesome install scripts.

Hi all, Can anyone recommend a cabling contractor in London / SE area? We're having a couple of old store rooms refurbed over the summer, and we need to get data points and electric run. My go-to for data cabling always used to be Custom Cable, but they're usually really busy over the summer. Cheers!

FileOptimizer is nice, but it does murder images and doesn't give much in a way of quality options. I'd like a GUI if possible, so will leave ImageMagick and Ghostscript for another day....

@Arthur - just trying that now, thanks! @pete, interesting point. At the moment its for me, as people come to me when it doesn't work and I fix the files. May be worth investigating why the files are so big in the first place, or passing this on to the office team! When we've had this issue so far, the files have been supplied by teachers though, so limited in how much we can expect at the creation stage. Thanks for some more names to try

Does anyone know of any decent free tools to compress PDFs in bulk? We're moving towards sending more stuff home to parents via email, but Groupcall which the office uses has a 2MB attachment limit. Ad hoc I use https://online2pdf.com/pdf-reduce-size which is very good, but we're in dangerous data protection territory uploading things to an unknown third party server. I've tried a few things, but they've all been restricted or watermark the document in some way. Any suggestions gratefully received!

I'm using SCCM also, but only doing updates for Flash or Java every six months or so, as I get the time or when something particular demands it. I do find SCCM unreliable for uninstalling old versions (possibly because I have software install in my Task Sequence, as well as Deployed), so I have to write a uninstall old / reinstall new script for each update, which isn't ideal.

Mentioned on the other thread, but if WSUS removal doesn't do it for you, the command line to uninstall this update is wusa /uninstall /kb:3170455 /quiet /norestart. I've currently got that in a startup script.

I've declined the update in WSUS (for Win 7, Win7 64 and Server 2012 in my environment). I'm uninstalling the update by script, this command line works: wusa /uninstall /kb:3170455 /quiet /norestart

This has just hit me for all four of our main photocopiers, which is all the teachers can see to print from. I'm using Ricoh copiers and I've edited the drivers using their tool to make them prompt for print codes etc, and I can't go back from that. I guess this KB is seeing my edited driver as untrustworthy. Luckily, most teachers have a cached profile on their machine with printers in, but its screwing new logons. Glad I found this thread to know I'm not going mad! Reckon I'll be looking at removing this update, unless anyone comes up with a way to permit drivers you trust.

Are you still looking for the TTS Logbox packages? I made MSIs of the program and driver a while back which you're welcome to, although I can't vouch for how up to date they are.