Katy

I was going to knock something up in PHP, run it on an ipad within Kiosk Pro Lite on single app mode, in some sort of theft-proof stand. Instead the bursar said she's just going to find a paper book that's compliant (we currently have the paper book where you can see everyone who has come in and out etc).

I've just replaced some 2nd gen i3s with new PCs, but the old i3s got SSDs and new monitors and in turn replaced some 10 year old core 2 duos. The spec you've already got still have plenty of life in them once they've had SSDs installed.

Compared to how they used to be - huge box with huge bits of.. not blown polystyrene but some sort of black plasticy equivalent - every time we had a batch of Dell PCs arrived we filled 5 (of a total 10) of those huge bins, had to warn the site manager in advance and usually needed an additional collection organising. I've started including things like packaging as part of the decision process when buying new equipment - when we got enough PCs off Ergo (zoostorms) they were pallet shipped with the only plastic being the pallet wrap, Very PC they're cardboard boxes with cardboard inside holding the PC in place. Shame we still get a CD and book for each one although suppose that'd mean convincing the motherboard manufacturers to stop supplying every OEM board with that! One thing I've not managed to do yet though is get monitors sensibly packaged - if we could get monitors without the stands (as we have all-in-one style cases - the stands just go to the PC recyclers as there's no room to store them), and packaged with cardboard rather than blown polystyrene - that'd be brilliant. As has already been mentioned, network cables packaging is ridiculous - individually have those twist cable ties on them, individually bagged, then bagged in 10s. I also hate the "bagged air" packaging, so much waste where a smaller box could have been used, or some sort of paper based packaging. Another one is when you've bought some sort of meat at the supermarket - it's already on a plastic tray wrapped in plastic - and they insist on putting it in its own little plastic bag at the checkout.

Make sure you have tested it through whatever proxy/filtering you use, as a student/staff account first. I've found Edge to be the slowest most useless pile of rubbish through our filtering (but it's fine at home). For that reason we use Chrome instead (and IE for the sites that insist on IE)

I'm managed by a teacher (he's Assistant Head i/c data stuff and head of computing) but I'd reiterate what a lot of the other posts have said, if you've not been there that long find out what you can in a non confrontational way - it may be that all the things causing problems are stuck with third parties, or there might have been no IT budget for several years resulting in everything being creaky and held together with duct tape. I know at my school outside technical support, my line manager and finance everybody thinks we have a magic money tree to instantly buy replacements for anything that's going wrong. We're part of a trust and they do an "assurance visit" once a year which is sort of an audit, I think last time they used XMA but we've also had EE in doing it before. Get a report at the end of it with recommendations etc. No idea how much it cost as it's enforced by the trust rather than something I've gone out and organised.

Don't think I bothered looking at the clock in exams, besides A level computing when I was finishing 90 minute papers in 20 minutes, "How long left to sit here in silence doing nothing? 70 minutes..." Always used to just rely on the teachers going "15 minutes left" etc.

Find one that has a free reply envelope or other way of sending them stuff, send them all of the other junk mail

Our grey bin is usually only half full when it's time for its 2 weekly collection (although there's only 2 of us). The recycling bin for cans/bottles and the bag for paper/card are usually both overflowing though. Shame there's no widely available non-plastic equivalent for 2 litre drinks bottles.

Not sure... we keep the bus route they are on in iSAMS in a custom field (which is used with a custom report for generating bus passes), I think they print a list off from this but it's just a checklist to make sure they don't get people sneaking on without paying. I don't think they record who got on the bus on any given day back to iSAMS (you'd probably have to set up "bus" as a registration period for that)

We don't have anything (if they miss the bus, tough, we aren't going to go looking for them) however what you are after could probably be accomplished with a custom SSRS report in iSAMS. Wouldn't be an easy one to write though, try and get some free custom reports thrown in when (if) you buy it and get them to do the hard work!

I got the keys to my house in May... still get the occasional thing and I'm still scribbling RTS over the front and sticking it in the post box. Most exciting one I got was something I returned followed by a letter "to the occupier" from the same people, asking if I knew where they had moved to (or could provide the estate agent's details). Something about shares owned by the previous occupier! Would have thought he'd have told them he was moving if it was something like that! Not sure when I'll stop really, it's just as easy to chuck it in the post box on the way to the shop as it is to fill up my recycling bin.

Is this for physical card transactions (i.e. a card machine, not online payments)? We have two ingenico machines from the bank, nothing special needed setting up - they can either plug into a standard phone line or into the network. Didn't have to do anything besides set up a DHCP reservation for each device and turn off filtering for them, it connects and just works - didn't need to tell them public IP addresses or anything like that. They do wireless version which I think are bluetooth to the base station (which is then plugged into the phone or network), but we manage with the cabled ones - there's a customer pad similar to what you see on tills in supermarkets and the merchant pad which has all the connections, the receipt roll etc.

Just given this a go, spun up a new 2016 server core VM and stuck it on there on port 443. Opened https://server/ on any PC and logged in and it looks quite good

Groupcall Xporter can extract data from iSAMS using the API (we used to use it to feed data into Groupcall Messenger), but no idea on if you could then put that into another database.

Prices have tripled because they stopped making them, however the Promethean guy I was chatting to at a "technology showcase" last month said they have realised making them end of life was a mistake so they should be starting production again... hopefully. I always got ours from IDNS and the orange stripe ones were always around £10-£15 each (although they have no stock until promethean restart production)

Answer "nobody and they won't, you forgot to buy some wireless to go with that" Just remembered the reason for going biometric the sales guy was relying on - "they won't lose their thumb!"

I always felt the push for things like biometric catering/library etc was "this exists now and is shiny" rather than "we actually need this". When we've had people trying to sell us on it in the past they couldn't come up with a good enough reason compared to the alternatives.

On ours the printers were mapping 99% of the time probably, just the 1% had absolutely no pattern - random users, random computers, sometimes changing user on the same machine the printer appeared etc.

For the fibre you could stick a fibre connection box in the room and run some pre-terminated fibre from the box to the new cab location, miles cheaper than getting someone in. Only downside is you need roughly 30mm diameter holes to get through the walls with it. I've done this where I've had to extend fibre before - we measured for a run of pre-terminated to another building, got the cable, then the contractors decided the cab couldn't go in the original location so moved it 20m further from the duct... meaning our cable was too short. Something like this https://www.comms-express.com/products/tamper-resistant-wall-box-lc-connectors/ and for the pre-terminated: https://www.comms-express.com/products/custom-made-multicore-preterminated-fibre-cable/ Edit: Just noticed you're not in the UK but hopefully you've got suppliers doing that kind of thing over there?

While they are well within their rights to point you to the website for information which is already publicly available - pretty sure the one word response you were after would have been a lot quicker for them to type out than that!

I've found with Windows 10 it just does what it wants with printers - randomly ignores the mapping and the log claims the printer name is invalid, yet log off/back on and suddenly it is valid again. Random users, random computers. I'm currently using a powershell login script as it can be forced to keep trying to install the printer until the error goes away (usually the second run through the loop), and I've moved my printers onto a 2016 server as some were showing as "printer does not exist" on random users and random computers. I hope you find a solution in your specific case, but I've had these issues for over a year without any proper pattern or reason (or fix) and they happened on all version of win10 we've tried (LTSB 1511, 1609 Enterprise, 1703 Enterprise, 1709 Enterprise)

I'm fairly sure the local config cache on the ACU survives a powercycle, so in the event that it still can't talk to the server it'll be no worse off than before.

Be thankful you only have three to do - we've got 27 of them, and you have to open them up to disconnect/reconnect the battery as well as turning the supply off to powercycle them

Don't know, we've never had enough playing up at the same time for visiting the ACU to be a problem. Wouldn't like to have to go to every one though...

When we've had issues powercycling the net2 units and re-instating from the console usually fixes it. (Any existing cards will carry on working with the units offline as they cache the config locally, although no new ones will work until the units return online)