EddyAllen

While guest and filtered WiFi is great, to my mind its not stopping the greatest risk factor for kids which is taking unauthorised photos. The only real way I can see getting around this is by providing school devices with a limited range of apps. You need not necessarily prevent taking photos but you need to limit how they can be exfiltrated. I would personally disable any iCloud / Google Photos uploading and only allow photos to be uploaded to OneDrive / Sharepoint / Google Drive by whitelisting those apps. Also disable any USB functionality to prevent just downloading them on to a PC / Laptop. While you can still get around these measures you at least have a trail of evidence should you need to fall back on and you will be seen to be taking due diligence at preventing any e-safety issues.

I suppose if you're going to have war museums, a silicon hell for anything RM doesn't seem too much of a stretch

Branch office printing lets you print directly to each printer rather than sending the print data to the server. There is still some traffic which I'm trying to narrow down as to why its appearing but other than that it works absolutely flawlessly.

Cloud, without question. As a school you will have unlimited sharepoint storage which I have yet to run in to performance issues on. Having files in sharepoint libraries instead of network shares opens up so many possibilities for accessing and sharing your files. The only reason I would not go for this option would be if you can't get a decent speed leased line.

FreePBX and a SIP trunk will be the most cost effective solution. You are looking at around £8 per SIP line per month and FreePBX is, as it says, free. However if you are using a Microsoft Ecosystem and you want to keep things consistent, I think there is quite a lot of value from having a simple system of which you will be paying £9 (using the promo) per month per user. Teams as PBX does have limited features but that cuts down on the time you are going to be spending configuring the thing. FreePBX isn't exactly intuitive and has its quirks but is incredibly flexible and rock solid. In my personal opinion don't even both with the locked down rubbish that BT sell you (Avaya), its about as user-friendly as a space shuttle and costs a similar amount!

I would assume that's definitely a network issue. I would check the ports that Teams is set to use in your Teams Admin Center, by default it will try high port numbers in the range of UDP 50000 - 59999 and if it can't use those it it will go to UDP 3478-3481. Depending on your firewall you might also have a preset application filter in place as I've seen in SophosXG which you might need to enable. It might also be that you are running out of ports if you are having lots of people in a meeting at once, again you can increase the range of this in the Admin Center of Teams on Office365.com. I would probably give a port each to the maximum number of concurrent users and then overprovision by 50%.

Honestly, I'd just DIY. Buy all the parts from fs.com and save a fortune, if you get pre-terminated cables you don't have to invest in splicers and the cost is only about 2-3x what you'd be paying to do the same runs with copper.

I'm not paid by NetSupport but I'm really going to have to give them a shout out here, the software really is fantastic. It's not an official solution as far as I can tell but what I've done is the following; Set up NetSupport on an Azure VM with a public IP (VM costs around £8 a month) Install the client on machines configured with the public IP of the NetSupport VM instead of a local one This way the devices are always talking to the cloud VM that doesn't require any on-prem gumph. The official solution is to install gateway servers but I felt this was a more complex solution at greater cost and for not much benefit. You can then set the NetSupport installation to sync with their own cloud service so you can view all the information from a web portal. The software itself provides all the functionality you require and more. The only caveat with my solution is that remote control of a device wont work off-site as NetSupport takes the local IP address of the client to route VNC. However, everything else works; cheap, simple and highly effective.

If you are using single mode fibre they usually use a wavelength of 1310-1550nm which you wont be able to see and some cameras wont pick up especially given the core size of Single Mode cables. However you are most likely using MMF which operates around 850nm which IS infrared but most people will still be able to see it (if you've ever used night vision equipment this is the wavelength most IR lamps use and you can see a faint red glow on them). The transceivers you are going to be using on a single site are going to be in the 1-3 watt range which really isn't going to any damage to your eye from a quick glance (you get far more energy dumped on your eye from inadvertently glancing at the sun or even some strong lightbulbs such as in a security light). Most people will be able to comfortably see the 50 micron dot at half a meter and by the time it reaches the eye in the air, the signal will have attenuated and dispersed even further.

As stated in the post above, it sounds to me like quorum is your main issue here. You can deploy a cloud witness to maintain quorum if one of your servers goes down, an overview can be found at Deploy a cloud witness for a Failover Cluster | Microsoft Docs. Honestly I don't understand why Microsoft even offer S2D on two servers, to my mind 3 would be a bare minimum. On a tangent, I honestly think that hyperconverged computing for anything smaller than Enterprise is on the way out. It's easier and often cheaper when you look at total cost just to move things to platforms like Azure or AWS. For me it has increased reliability, scalability and ease of use by migrating all workloads over to Azure. A necessary prerequisite is going to be a decent leased line but after that your set to go. Most servers cost around £300 a year in electricity costs alone and by switching them off, you've already put £600 towards your VM's.

Yeah I'll admit stas isn't terribly reliable and the login / logoff detection isn't great. I've had users signed in where its still got restrictions based on the previous user. RADIUS I've found to be much more reliable.

That is absolutely brilliant

Honestly I'd avoid RAID5 like the plague when it comes to CCTV. The amount of parity writes your going to have to be doing on continuous or even motion detection recording will be absolutely horrific, possibly even to the point of significantly reducing the lifespan of the array. To my mind CCTV is something that when you need to use it in anger it HAS to be reliable. For that reason I would always RAID1 / RAID 10 a CCTV system. A lot of insurance companies quote based on the fact that you have operational CCTV and you don't want to be in a situation where you find you've got inaccessible footage due to a dodgy array. What CCTV Software are you using as this will have an impact on your stripe size. Some software just continuously writes to a single active file and then starts on a new one every 500MB or so. Others store them in smaller chunks.

You could pass the login credentials to RADIUS and use that for SSO. Its not pretty but its proved pretty solid for mobile devices; user logs in using normal credentials to the WiFi SSID which gets sent to Windows NPAS sitting on a DC which then uses the SophosXG as the accounting server.

I thought so too until I found fs! They are about £10 for SFP+ modules and the patch leads are pretty cheap too. Agreed though, having seen what kids can do to headphone leads I can online imagine the rate of attrition on LC's!

Glad to hear you got a solution! Compliance search will continue to show deleted emails for a while (2 years I believe and indefinitely if you have litigation hold on) Just make sure you have it logged somewhere like your GDPR incidents / e-Safety incidents to protect yourself and the organisation as its pretty unconventional to delegate access that way and could, in itself, be considered a data breach unless you are doing it to actively try prevent a more serious data breach!

Can't wait until just running fibre trunk cables everywhere is the done thing and we can do away with copper! Just need to get workstations to adopt LC connectors instead of RJ45 and we will be laughing! Imagine rooms with these instead of RJ45's LC 25x50 Angled Fibre Module, White - Tuk | CPC UK (farnell.com) /dreamon

Well I didn't expect to see RS232 here! I have a client who uses RS232 for some older CNC machines and you **can** get RS232 to RJ45 adapters. Its possible to set an ethernet port to run in COM port mode and accept RS232 but I think the chances of it actually working are quite unlikely. Your best bet would probably be something like this USB to Serial Cable 1.5M, BENFEI USB to RS-232: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics just make sure its converting the correct way as RS232 -> USB wont be the same as USB->RS232

Are you able to check if 1433 is accessible to devices on your network? Might sound daft but that's probably a good starting point just to make sure its not an over-zealous firewall stopping 1433 traffic.

If its to prevent a data breach I would say you could probably justify delegating full access to the mailbox to yourself, going to outlook and in the top right under your username click "open another mailbox". Open the mailbox and delete the email. Just make sure you have logged it and remove your delegated access afterwards to show what you've done. If its political then you're probably going to have to go through the hard-purge route.

For anyone interested if you want to upgrade an LTSC Installation to current branch without having to completely re-image the machine you can do so with the .iso and running setup.exe with the /pkey {product key here} switch. setup.exe /pkey {product key here}

Azure backup for cloud VM's. Quick and easy and keeps everything in one ecosystem

Id head on over to Appliances Direct, Multi-split SmartApp WIFI Inverter Wall Air Conditioner with two 12000 BTU indoor units to a single outdoor iQool-2MS12K12K | Appliances Direct Seems to fit your spec quite nicely

What types of monitoring do you want to do? If you've got a static IP or a firewall that allows you to whitelist based on domain name you can sign up for a free dynamic DNS name and RDP in to a server to get you on the network that way.

In all honesty, those hybrid tablets are good for one thing; converting to Chromebooks. I *might* consider putting 10X on one as a trial but we've pretty much written them off. I've also tried changing the serial number and drawn a blank, it just wasn't economical to spend the time on them.