Katy

We've got a room of similar sized towers where the kids have smashed through the drive bay covers... half expecting them to all be a similar state to that inside

I've tried every possible method (besides manually installing them as IP printers on every PC, not an option) and they still randomly disappear or don't map. Our "fix" is "Try rebooting your PC and they might come back", works 90% of the time. It's random users and random PCs so no pattern to it.

We used to use Groupcall Messenger, only had 5 logins though (not sure why, or if it would have cost to have extra) so we just made everyone except sport go via the school office to send things out. Also meant fewer people to train. We only moved when we changed MIS and our new MIS had the capability built-in.

We've gone 1 per room in a new build with the Pro ACs, don't notice any channel based problems and didn't have to do anything manually? So either it does it automatically or we were lucky. (We went 1 per room as although it's a new build, the internal walls are that thick chalky board stuff covered in tin foil with about 18 sheets of plasterboard either side, we found with our HP APs which were alternate rooms that the signal doesn't go through the walls very well)

This then brings the question... what do you do when there are four DCs? Point 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 1 (with secondaries as 127.0.0.1 on all)?

No, but almost did. We have replaced the entire junior school (which is far enough away from the rest to not interfere) so far - 21 Unifi AC Pros. We are hoping to replace the other building (60 APs) at some point in the future however it means spending money, and we don't really do enough wireless to justify it in the seniors. Enterprisey features such as 802.1X work fine, the "gotcha" is that the APs themselves talk directly to RADIUS so you need to add their management subnet (or individually add them all) to RADIUS. Compared with our old system (HP) where the controller does the talking to RADIUS. Only problem we have is the 4 SSID limit (claims to be 8 on the AC Pro but it means you get 4 on 2.4G and 4 on 5G) so we've had to be clever about how we arrange our 5 networks on them. Compared to our HP MSM460s, they are amazing. Speed test from my mobile on the Unifi gets 60Mbps during the day (on a 100Mbps line), the same test ran through the HP kit gets 13Mbps. (HP kit is running "n" band so no way it should be that slow really). We've gone from multiple daily complaints about class sets of laptops to the occasional one where it's either doing a huge update or it's user error (turned the wifi off on the laptop).

Presumably this is "incase they email the staff member and then we get a SAR or deletion request", by the same logic you could say "pupils are not allowed to write anything down on paper and leave it in the building"

This is going to be.... interesting... if the junior school teachers keep breaking/losing them at their usual rate. Their entire building is the old style active board! (Luckily about 90% of the seniors is the newer style)

- What speed is your network between core and edge switching(1gbps, 10gbps)? 10Gbps from core to 3 of the remote cabs, the rest are 2 x 1Gb - From the size of your network, do you think that 10gbps is needed in your environment(between core and edge)? Yes and no, some of our 10Gb cabs could run fine on 4 x 1Gbps but there wasn't enough fibre to do that, the other remote cab houses our backup server and 10Gbps means I can run backups over the network at any time (which usually hit about 1.6Gbps) without impacting on the student devices in any way. - What kind of network speeds do you have between server and storage area network? 2 x fibre channel per server, not sure if it's 2 x 4Gbps or 2 x 8Gbps however it's 6 years old. - Are all cabs fibred between core and edge? All except one, which hangs off a 10Gb cab connected by copper (and although it serves 60 points it's only got a couple of wireless points and 1 PC connected) - Do you have redundant up-links between core and edge switches? No on 10Gb, yes on 1Gb. Not decided what to do for the 10Gb ones yet, might be adding a backup 1Gb to them when I get time. - Are most cabs connected by spf or spf+ transceivers? 1Gb are SPF, 10Gb are SPF+, except the single cab that's on copper - Would you agree / disagree in how important it is to invest and maintain your fibre infrastructure? Yes, with crap fibre your entire network will be flaky. We replaced all fibre (and actually all cat5e as that was a mess too) in 2012 so we can run 10Gb down any of our fibre now. - Do any schools in the area have a secondary server unit or cloud solution for vm replication, in case of hardware failure? We backup to a remote building on our campus but we don't have any sort of secondary server or cloud thing for bringing VMs back online, if all three of our hosts blow up we'd have to wait for new kit to arrive before restoring the VMs onto them.

I settled with a half-way solution, I copied the default Default User profile in the normal way and renamed ntuser.dat to ntuser.man, gave everyone read only permissions on the server, then set this as the pupil profiles. All the customisation is done with GPOs. This way they get the same as if I'd let them have local profiles but without being able to save changes to the local PC (or to anywhere). I gave up in trying to make a mandatory profile with changes in the normal way.

I thought it was like one of those "Here's something from a year ago" things like Facebook does

If you go silent mid sentence they will reply with "Hello?" a few times, followed by them hanging up and then just remember the number and don't answer when they call back. Although sometimes they eventually try again from a mobile in which case goto 10 and repeat. Shame that saying "No" at the start and not answering calls isn't enough of a hint to GO AWAY with some of them.

I'd love to see someone try and force one of those huge cheques into the cheque paying in machine

We used to have fun with BACS payment here, when we'd expanded a bit and added a few more staff we went over the daily BACS payment limit on our account so had to split the wages into two days. Unfortunately it was random which day you got.

I'd love to get a few of these, shame we never do. As we're an Independent the reply to FOI is "Go away" or

I can pay in to my personal HSBC accounts at the post office, not sure if the same applies to business accounts though.

Last cheque was for the installation of the new windows in my house last June, for some reason because I wasn't getting them on finance I had to pay the window company for the windows and the installer for the installation (if it's on finance you pay the window company and they pay the installer). Paid for the windows on card, installer says "cash or cheque only" (and looked very disappointed when I got a cheque out). Made out a single cheque for the full amount but they wanted one each for 50% of the amount... which I refused to do as "oh it's my last cheque". (I was expecting to pay the company name on the installation invoice, in the end it was payable to one of the installers who then had to go get cash out to pay the other )

Ours are all Firstname.Lastname@domain, shown as "Firstname Lastname" in the address list, the staff first names are also included in the staff list published on the website (along with all the email addresses)

I don't understand it, surely there is already 1:1 communication in the form of the pupils are allowed to speak to the teachers or write them a note (I hope? Can't imagine a school where you're not allowed to speak to the teachers!) Although our leadership have a few daft ideas too so nothing new there then!

We do this too. I don't see a need to monitor it in any way as, if a student sends a dodgy email to a staff member, the staff member can see who it came from and deal with it themselves.

1. We're Nursery to 6th form, i.e. age 2-18. 2. About 450 3. 0 dedicated to desktop support, we have me (Systems Manager) and a Senior IT Technician and both work across servers/networking/end user devices. In the past we had 2 sites and about 1000 devices, with 4 of us, 2 dedicated to the end user devices and 2 working a mixture of everything. We don't particularly struggle with just 2 of us as since replacing most of the desktops in the last 5 years with PCs with SSDs we find there's a lot less goes wrong than used to.

My importing users ticket from November 2016 is probably still open on their helpdesk, we ran as fast as we could in May 2017 though.

I've no idea, I didn't question it as the order form and invoice stated Windows licences included which was good enough for me. I think it was something about lower spec PCs... @VeryPC_Colin_M might know (how do you tag people in this??) Edit: For the first time ever it has actually tagged/hyperlinked, making my previous comment look stupid

We used to get i5 equivalent from Dell (ages ago before they were called i3/i5/i7), then that scaled back to i5 Zoostorm, then further scaled back to i3 Zoostorm. Our last batch we got from Very PC and they suggested that we drop down from i3-7100 to Pentium G4600 as the performance is basically the same (same core count etc too) - in benchmarks I looked at there was a 1% difference in them. Dropping down to the Pentium also meant we got cheaper Windows licences, so we've basically cut our desktop cost in half since the Dell days. The G4600s with 4GB RAM and SSD are perfectly fast enough for driving the IWBs or general student use.

Looking on mine the thing at the top of the calendar just controls the weather forecast shown rather than the time zone on anything. Not sure how you set it globally though, mine shows Blackpool and New York. Guessing New York was the default and I've probably added Blackpool myself a few years ago....