KK20

you can add multiple share names to a folder. simply add a new share name and remove the old one. Right click the folder, click properties, click sharing then advanced sharing, "add" a new share name (admin$ for example), then select the old share name and click remove. Remove will be greyed out until you add a new share.

100mb uplink into a server? yeuch I feel for you. We still have some venerable GS748TS stacked switches in various buildings, they are solid performers for us (and a lifetime guarantee!) the only bad part is the horrid interface that only seems to work in firefox...

I have a demo booked with Securly and Lightspeed.

Before I moved to a stretch cluster, I looked at S2D but discounted it as the hardware requirements were very strict. Ironically I would have had to run our 2x SAN in HBA anyway as S2D needs direct access. So far though, ive found the stretch cluster to work so I imagine S2D (when setup) should work just as well. For "piece of mind" I would have preferred to have S2D for "disaster resiliency" but have each node allowing local drive RAID. CAU is a clusterf*** though. I have never had that work. We are also still running our hosts on 2016DC I havent upgraded them to 2019 yet.

All the things you mention I have done, Im not new to teaching nor admin. It was simply a comment without all the details regarding not leaving powershell and command prompt open and accessible. We dont because of our school dynamics and particular challenges. Lunch "stay behind" would require staff to be on duty to cover such infractions - these are not available and the pupils know it. The labs would also be booked for break/lunch clubs. Taking the pupils out and sending them to disciplinary would work if it was one pupil, however once a trick is learnt then the teacher who is not quite as IT literate as the others will not pick up on "10 PCs running slow when little jimmy tells everyone of a new way to get out of doing the lesson". Low hanging fruit is simply to get IT to fix it. Of course the fundamental issue is education and getting the pupils to sit down, behave and get on with doing what they should be doing. There are always ways around it, such as a software suite that can track all inputs, then look at the logs, find the cuplrits and make examples of them. Or you can have monitoring software with suitable trained IT literate people looking at what the classes are doing in realtime. These are just non exhaustive examples but they all cost money, and money we dont have. We still have two IT suites of 2011 core2duo's running on the network (SSD and 4Gb RAM, but they run office 365 therefore are usable, even these oldies have a 45 second logon time which is good enough). Suitable £3k software per annum is great, but that to me is 20 refurbished i5 PCs. Ideal worlds are a dream for us i'm afraid and we work with what we have.

Not if they are applockered you cant. Macros are meaningless if the core is disabled, VBS, VS or powershell calls dont work if the subsystem is disabled - at least one redeeming feature of windows! Word macros were another source of initial pain, pupils would make their own file browsers in word etc and it was fairly trivial to go browsing and double clicking. Shortcuts are a non starter if you cannot run the destination. It has taken years of cat and mouse unfortunately but we need to lock down the computer and the data. As I said though, there are labs in the school that have different GPOs that allow more leeway, the general booking ICT suites are locked down heavily. 6th Formers have their own assigned laptops, these have a much lighter touch on them but also are individually assigned.

I assume your pupils dont like to run random tasks from the command shell then? Such as triggering updates, scans, anything that will make the PC appear to be malfunctioning so they dont have to do work? "Its not me Miss, its the computer" - especially when 15 of them start to do the same thing half way through a spanish IT lesson.... Ours also found out that you dont need elevated permissions to start compression etc That was fun on the network drives. All of it gets locked down for us. We lock down the data AND the computer. There are exceptions in the ICT labs, those have competent teachers that know more, plus can monitor them closely. These have VSCode, python IDLE etc.

bring back nested folders. That is our most common complaint.

there is a very good MS walkthrough that steps you through the google side. For chrome devices using SAML https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6060880 Azure AD SAML https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/saas-apps/google-apps-tutorial

With BYOD becoming more on an issue and a potential decision to bring in school leased devices for pupils, our onsite filter is looking antiquated in the changing environment. I know of lightspeed and securly. I have asked lightspeed and Securly for a quote already, however I know resellers often get better pricing. I dont want to be spammed to death with phonecalls after shotgunning quote requests to resellers. Does anyone have a preferred reseller then use? Small school 500 users/100 staff. Other than those two, can anyone else recommend a web filter? We dont need classroom management etc.

dont forget to block DNS over TLS in your firewall or your little cherubs will happily use private DNS on android devices to bypass DNS filtering.

Easy enough. DD going through now. I need to use a CC for initial transfer but they are happy to remove CC when DD is in place.

Looks like I have a winner, DD is fine. I'll look into getting that one set up now.

We use DNSmadeeasy as our DNS admin (and DNS failover via our backup internet line). I am looking at our domain name registration company- we need to add a credit card (currently mine) and I dont want to do this. School doesnt have a credit card. Before I simply go to our Bursar/SLT and advise that im going to remove my personal credit card I am wondering if anyone uses a company that accepts invoice payments/pay for credits up front etc that do not involve credit card or keeping credit card on file? Basically I only need the ability for them to register and renew domain names, the DNS admin side is done elsewhere. We have about 5 domain names - im talking .net .co.uk .com etc NOT our .sch.uk (that one is already "free" and on a very long renewal with TSOhost, they want a credit card on file for non .sch.uk so I cannot simply move to them)

Unfortunately I just "do" rather than say what is to be taught on or with. I am not a fan of Adobe.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/deploy-enterprise-licenses This would suggest they are covered. It is also suggested to deploy AD locally and use AD connect rather than pure Azure AD.

We have 25 annual CC SDL currently, this is for our photography lab only. ICT have asked if it is possible for dreamweaver only licensing. Is this possible any more or is it CC or nothing? It wouldnt be feasible for either FTE or per user for us as we wouldnt need anywhere near 500 minimum user licenses.

I wonder if this is where the info has come from https://www.netwifiworks.com/Ubiquiti-EOL.asp this states that the SKU UAP-AC-PRO is EOL but replaced by UAP-AC-PRO-E-US - the same hardware but no PoE injector?

TBH this is a good thing. The main reason is that you can justify all those expensive audits, filters, AV, firewalls etc. It is always better to have a non-salesman telling the SLT how it is and how much they should be doing as a minimum.

I rather like their APs as they are cheap and simply work, we also use quite a few of their point to point APs too - they only get rebooted when I update the firmware, they never need power cycling otherwise and work flawlessly. We couldnt afford to use someone like ruckus. I have never liked their cloud offerings though and wouldnt use them.

Ours had a hike last year when we went to a new 3 year deal. For a potential cost saving, we found it cheaper to switch to per core model 2x 2core SQL server licence and drop the cals (7NQ-00051) - your mileage may vary and we only run a 4 core VM for our SQL server.

we looked at pure "office 365" licensing but in the end it was cheaper for us to licence the old style desktop pack with office 2019 and leverage the additional Microsoft 365 Apps for Students/Faculty that goes with it (plus the free A1 basics of course). We licence 95 staff.

the main problem for us is the "lag" between changing a setting in 365 and it taking effect. It can be annoying, especially when staff dont understand why you cant just "flick a switch" to do something (like we used to)

enabled for us with sanctions for misuse.

This proved to be fun. Yammer created the all company group. This was easy to remove as it wasnt needed. The community was a little different, this was created by the now defunct "Microsoft Office 365 video". This shut down on 1st March so there was no portal and seemingly no way to remove it. The GUI hides all the site collection sites so I needed to resort to powershell to get rid of that one.