Katy

User phones up complaining, we say "Try logging off then back on again". It seems to only affect a few random office based staff but we've run out of things to try, nothing gets logged and we've spent ages messing with drivers etc. Sometimes affects teachers but they don't do that much printing* so it's just very bad luck if they pick the time with no printers attached to try any printing. We've tried VBS scripts, group policy preferences, kixtart scripts etc and it appears to work then the next day "I've no printers" so we settled on GPP and putting up with the issue in the hope that a windows update fixes it. *They do an insane amount of photocopying instead of printing

We find that printers randomly don't map on Win10 with no relation to when the user last logged on, if it's their first go etc. We also have printers randomly vanishing halfway through the day. Printers are split over a 2012R2 server (normal printers) and a 2008R2 server (followme copiers, can't move the software without expensive support renewal). They are mapped using GPO preferences. We've always had problems with Windows and printing since windows 8 but it's never been this bad.

We had no problems with our old boards (using pens with orange stripe) on both direct USB and also via USB -> cat5e adapters on both win 8.1 and win10, also no problems with our newer style (touch) boards on 8.1 and 10 over cat5 USB extenders. It's not something daft like your GPO settings are trying to install the 32 bit ActivDriver and your new OS is 64 bit? This caught us out when we moved from 7 (32 bit) to 8.1 (64 bit)

We have a problem where it goes back to "monitor only" after the powerpoint instead of going back to "clone", never seen it before running win 10 enterprise 1607 with office 2016 (problem didn't exist on win 10 LTSB 1511 with office 2016). If you have the office 2016 ADMX files on your group policy the only one I've managed to find is this: User\Policies\Admin Templates\Microsoft PowerPoint 2016\PowerPoint Options\Advanced\Do not allow PowerPoint to automatically extend display when presenting on a laptop or tablet which we set to "enable" and now it just stays cloned, even on a PC.

We get ours from IDNS, although we paid more than that promethean store price last time but we only got 5 rather than a 10 pack.

They look like Zoostorm cases. Zoostorm do "your-brand-here" PC build contracts in the UK but we've found through our usual supplier that they aren't interested in smaller orders any more, never tried to just get the case out of them though.

Some of us aren't that lucky - if I want stuff for work off ebay I have to pay for it myself then wait 2 months for the expenses claim to go through. Alright for the odd camera but our last Hikvision buy was 30 cameras and a 64 channel DVR...

Have you tried running "ipconfig /flushdns", then tried the nslookup again? That should clear its cache and then it should pick up hosts file before trying dns. I tried to do this (but did it via dns rather than hosts) a while ago and found windows just wouldn't let you browse to \\server unless you used the server's actual hostname rather than an alias. Never got to the bottom of it, and think it was either on XP or 7 with 2003 server so it may be different these days...

I think everyone has tried the "sold to staff as seen with no support no software" once (and never again). If they are decent enough spec/condition to actually have a resale value (e.g. the £50 optiplex 745s on ebay - core 2 duo, 2gb ram sort of thing) you can usually get £5-£10 per PC from a decent WEEE collector. We stopped using the bigger companies and now just use a small local one, we even got almost £500 cashback for giving them a rare and sought after HP switch to recycle once.

Lies. My new windows (double glazed but supposedly ultra efficient etc and full house worth of them was new 2 months ago) don't stop the ice cream van jingles. Or maybe I've just got sixth sense when it comes to obtaining ice cream...

What a load of rubbish, I can't see this doing anything but reduce their total sales.... hopefully will be able to get round it the same way I do with Paxton Net2 (the electricians we use have a supplier who can get hold of them, otherwise ebay). Otherwise, will be interested to see if anyone comes up with an equivalent to the 3-4MP IP65 fixed dome cameras (the £100 ones) which will sit on a hikvision NVR happily at a similar price point.

My warranty replacement the other month was a replacement unit sent out with courier, with a pre-paid label for shipping the faulty one back to them. Although mine was broke beyond anything an on-site visit could fix (powercycled every 5 minutes)

I've got one of these switches at the top of each comms rack, to trunk via the web interface I've set LACP Status: Disabled, Trunk Type: LACP, Trunk Group: Trk1... with LACP Status set to disabled it stops the dynamic group from appearing and just leaves you with a normal trunk group.

Hooray, but now we have to prepare for the daily "No you can't use this, you bought the software 50 years ago and the system it uses no longer exists." then being personally blamed for the fact that the software they bought is crap and the fact that Adobe have killed off Flash...

Your default gateway for the DHCP scope (10.16.120.0) needs to be the core switch interface for that vlan (i.e. 10.16.120.1). Your DHCP server itself needs default gateway to be the core switch interface in its own VLAN (assuming the servers are in vlan1 so that would be 10.16.118.55). Otherwise no traffic on vlan 120 would be able to "see" 10.16.118.55 because it's on a different subnet as well as a different vlan.

We don't allow it (nor pinterest which our head of art keeps asking for), in the end with so many repeated requests for the same thing over and over (worded "The pupils NEED it to do their coursework") we just started saying "show us the art syllabus that states pupils must have access to pinterest in order to pass" and the silence that came back just proved the point entirely.

+1 to this, I used to have that kind of layout before joining a trust, now we have multiple ranges (not all contiguous) on the trust WAN and it's very difficult to work out which VLAN a device is on just off its IP address

We had to place a £0 order with our MS licensing reseller to get the ProPlus ones to appear on 365, one year they messed up and we ended up with double the number of students and none of the faculty ones so we just allocated student licences to all the staff and it didn't seem to affect anything.

I think you're confusing Sites with Virtual Directories, if you start again and create a new site (point it anywhere, even if it's the default c:\inetpub\wwwroot) and then within that site create a virtual directory for each of your helpdesks (hdesktest etc) then it should work as you are expecting.

The Deputy Head i/c marketing has regular (think it's once or twice a term or half term) "tweet meets" where I assume he goes through the type of things he wants to see posted, but it's left up to the individual head of department as to what they post and to use their professional judgement as to whether it's appropriate or not. Parents are encouraged to follow the main school account which re-tweets anything like upcoming events from the individual feeds etc, but those whose kids are really into the music/drama/sport etc usually also follow the appropriate subject twitter too.

We have about 20 different accounts, the main account is run by the deputy head in charge of marketing (we're an Independent School) and each department head runs their own subject based twitter (or delegates it to one of their teachers). The main account then mostly re-tweets the more interesting posts from all the other accounts. The most involvement we have as technical is to help them create the twitter account and maybe show them how to change the profile picture etc.

It's hidden away in "Active Directory Administrative Centre" in 2012R2 and above, not sure if you can target an OU but you can definitely do it based on security group membership.

Home Hub 3 isn't that good anyway - first thing you see when you go on its web interface is that the Password field is unmasked clear text. I shamed them and asked them why on Twitter and this is their explanation for having an unmasked password field: "Hello Katy. we appreciate the feedback and we'll be sure to pass this along to help continue to improve the services we provide."

The fact is, it is only a website not accessing anything local, so there should be absolutely nothing to do with local AV etc that needs changing. As to claims that it is "scanning the scripts" slowing it down, how much local script do they need for a library system? Everyone else seems to manage writing websites that just work so something must seriously be wrong with them. The only time I have had to disable Sophos to use a website is the web management for our Hitachi SAN, which is some sort of horrible IIS application installed on a server, and I can just about cope with that because it's actually accessing local devices, not just looking at a database of books.

We have the HTML5 hosted version, don't really use it as their support is worse than useless (still not got any users imported) and it is unbearably slow. We are giving up with it and moving to another system (as yet unknown, but the contract end coincides with the appointment of a new librarian)