TwistedHelixis

Hi, One of my schools is federating with another school and they would like to create a few shared team drives between the schools. Both schools have G Suite but we have disabled the option to share outside the domain for team drive areas at my school. Is it possible to keep the no sharing with outside domains enabled but still share with an outside domain. I know that sounds a bit odd but thought I had better check first :0)

We stopped having issues when we removed most of the GPOs that controlled them, like Roaming Profiles etc. They now get dished out almost as the initial setup with some very basic policies and they work very well in that context.

Over the weekend I will shutdown the VMS and switch them over to Shutdown mode. cheers

I have not needed them recently but they were always phone based for a school, has this changed?

Single primary school server host with 2 VMs, VM1=DC /// VM2=data, SQL, SIMS FMS etc. Just wondered what others have the Automatic Stop Action set to in the VM settings, save machine state or shut down guest? Normally I have this set to shut down, but our LA have all there schools set to save machine state so I am now questioning my logic. Thanks :0)

Hi, I recently took on a new primary school and have noticed that on the hyper- v host, the schools Sims & FMS VM server has a number of checkpoints listed. I am wondering if it will be OK to merge these back together, as it has the SQL database on that server? Are there any settings I need to check in the VM settings / checkpoints page first? Any advice?

How long is the hdmi cable? have you thought about changing the teacher :0P

I have a digital only business banking account so if I pay money digitally there is no cost, if i pay in a cheque they take about £7

I get charged if I pay in to my business account by cheque. Most of by schools pay me electronically but I have one that still insists on paying me by cheque, I then have to actually make a journey to go and pay it in, I HATE CHEQUES

Another vote for MS built in backup. Its actually really good for backing up VMs. Another vote for going virtual and creating a VM. If you dont do this you will regret it at some point. As for your initial question - Also make sure to use more than one network cable and team them together for faster throughput.

Our LA is also o365 but most of the schools in the area are Google.

If you are referring to Spanning then yes its very different. It backs up email, drive, team drive, calendar, sites. You can restore those files from any point in time and even if google went poof and vanished. If all our files got encrypted or corrupted I can get those all restored with just a couple of clicks.

Spanning backup lets you browse emails from a date, at least it does for G Suite accounts which is when I needed that function.

You could look at Spanning - https://spanning.com/ - If you are a school make sure you mention you are in education as the discount is well worth it. We would not be able to use them if it was not for the education discounts as their business prices are too much for us. Also, not being able to afford backup is not really an excuse, all the primary schools I look after all have cloud based backup from either office 365 or G Suite, just backup less accounts or something.

The out buildings are for children that may need to be protected from injuring themselves (padded walls etc) and as such the adults may need to call for assistance, having some kind of hands free device would be beneficial for them in this case.

The head at one of my primary schools has asked if we can get 3 or 4 Alexa dot devices to use as an intercom between a couple of our out buildings and the offices. I have never used any kind of home assistant before so would like some advice. We are also a G Suite school, hence adding Google home in my title as I assume we would already have an account for this, which is one less password to remember. Has anyone used both devices and which would you recommend getting, or is this a bad idea for a school? Do they both work with a proxy? Our LA require us to install a Smoothwall cert on our devices for them to connect to the internet, although I know that some phone apps (not all) still work without the certificate installed, would this be an issue?

and that is if the merge works. I have had a few that corrupted while merging lots snapshots in the past. One for the holidays

Good question. I am the type of person that will not sleep knowing one of my schools is not up to scratch, so will keep looking and adding to my jobs list.

Well it gets worse, just noticed the servers have not had ANY windows updates since last April, and also noticed the VM snapshots go back many many years and have never been merged. This place is like an onion, you peel back a layer and find another issue.

Just taken over a small primary school from the LA and they have almost all the GPOs listed under the Domain OU and not inside OUs further down the tree. At my other schools I have perhaps 3 listed under the domain OU but all the others are in specific OUs. I would say that 90% of the GPOs are under the domain and wondered how normal this is?

cheers

BUM that is what I thought

Recently took over a new primary school and just looking through the GPOs which are a mess. Lots of GPOs are redundant but still active so are still altering the local client and server policies. for example there is a WSUS policy that points to a WSUS server that is no longer in the school. With lots of these policies I would like to get all the defaults back but on the client / server and wondered if simply setting the GPO option with 'Not Configured' is enough to overwrite the current client /server settings with the original default settings or will it just keep using the last wrong setting that was set before. For example if I set the WSUS server location to 'Not Configured' will it then use the default MS servers? or do I actually now need to add in the MS server address. Really hoping the 'Not Configured' option will override the redundant policies as it will make everything much simpler

It was my understanding that large chucks of the Government had already moved to G Suite - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/05/hmrc_is_going_google/

Thanks In the Azure Dashboard it says 'Sync not enabled' Are there any other ways it can be linked to the onsite server?