chris11256

I think for the time being it's fixed. I've installed the April updates and rebooted it have tried on several occasions to login and each time has worked. Will update if it happens again.

It uses local profiles and I went through this morning and had a clear out deleting all old profiles. Currently I have two teachers logged in, but myself and another teacher get stuck on preparing windows(this is while the Broker is logging in, not on the host). Am currently looking through the event viewer to see if I can find anything.

Morning All, Recently I've been having a problem with our remote desktop/app infrastructure. When logging in either to the remote desktop environment or remote app, the remote desktop client sticks on 'Preparing Windows'. This happens on the remote desktop Broker which is running Server 2019. The host is also server 2019, although sessions don't seem to make it to the host. Nothing within the environment has changed and it's been working well for months. The problem also seemingly random with some users able to login normally and others not able to get past preparing windows. Both the Broker & Host are patched up to the March 2019 cumulative updates. Thanks, Chris

For Aruba specifically I can recommend Khipu Networks. They're very good and they also supplied/support our firewall.

On the pc note, I have Impero switching on all unused computers once a week. Our laptops on the other hand are a different story and most likely will all need checking!

Haha yep, £8520 to be exact! Thankfully it doesn't come out of the IT budget!

We're a Firefly school, costs us about £8000 a year based on 480 pupils and is a good VLE and is very easy to use. Firefly are usually happy to do a demo site for you. They only offer cloud hosted now, their locally hosted platform is being discontinued.

TalkTalk here and get about 30 Mbps normally. No faster options available until Cityfibre finish their Southend rollout.

This is a test so show if you have it at that moment in time. Not to test whether you've ever had it.

It's the same thing with my office. There's two of us and proper distancing is not possible under any circumstances!

I've noticed that here in South Essex, have been a more people & cars out generally this week. Am also starting to wonder whether we're seeing lockdown fatigue.

Might not make much difference but as I've now got a few physical servers not doing very much, I've set them going with Folding@Home working on Coronavirus related work. Very cool that Folding@Home is now technically the worlds most powerful supercomputer reaching 2.4 exaflops.

I've recently used LeysEncrypt for a wildcard. On the server concerned I installed the 'CertifytheWeb' program wich mostly automates the process. Only step I had to do was add a DNS entry to prove we owned the domain. Depending on your DNS provider that can sometimes be automatic as well. But after adding the entry & click proceed it then generated the certificate. Something I'll happily do every 90 days to save in certificate renewal costs(we had a GoDaddy wildcard as well).

No one has reported anything on our end, will update if anyone does.

I've just made a new test account and the same thing happened.Only error I can find on the Broker is 'Error in the WMI interface to localhost. Check that the machine is running and connected to the network. If the problem persists, reboot the machine. Error Code: 0x8004100A' Found some UseURCP errors on the host server. I've found a suggested registry edit to make and have scheduled the server to reboot tonight. Will report back in the morning with any progress.

User profiles are local profiles on the host server with all folders redirected to the users H drive.

Sadly it's not a disk usage problem. Both the host & broker have over 20GB of free space currently.

Hi All, Hoping someone knowledgeable in remote desktop can help. We have a remote desktop host which provide a virtual desktop which staff can access remotely via a gateway. However within the past day or so it's stopped logging people in properly. From windows machine they gets stuck at 'Configuring remote session'. From MacOS it sticks at preparing windows, both do the same thing, just displayed differently. It's not a resource issue or a licence as far as i'm aware, both servers have been beefed up given the current situation. Thanks, Chris

It was fixed for us but very intermittant. I'm trying to edit team owners through the admin portal and the vast majority of the time I search for a team it then errors when I click on it.

Had this on Thursday for 20 minutes or so. Firefly support said it was because of significantly higher traffic levels, but would be sorted within 10 minutes as they were increasing resources on AWS. Ours is cloud hosted rather than on site. True to their word our site was back to normal soon after.

Do you guys have supported devices are students allowed to use anything? Any device which supports WPA2-Enterprise can connect. Chromebooks always seem to error the first time, then connect normally. Android devices need some settings, but all other platforms it's just a simple username/password. How do students submit work? All teachers must set homework via Firefly, so students can submit work via that or use OneDrive for their own files. No remote access to their H Drive Can staff monitor their screens? No. Only our domain devices can be monitored via Impero. What do you do about printing and applications please? Papercut Mobility print. BYOD has a seperate DNS server which has mobility print enabled. Do you do any other “neat tricks” that could enhance T&L please? Not really. At my old school we had Air Squirrels reflector, so any device could then be mirrorred on the classroom projector. As a whole the BYOD vlan is islolated. Only has access to the serves that do the authentication, printserver on the specific port for mobility print and the guest DNS server. All other internal traffic is blocked. If anyone needs their BYOD access blocking, I just add them to an AD group which has it's own block all traffic rule on the firewall.

Another update with a gotcha that's come up. Both the Palo Alto Agentless user ID & User ID agent don't support dual stack IPv6 with Active Directory as your user source. They both simply report the IP address that was used to do the initial computer login. So as I've given my domain controllers IPv6 addresses, user ID then only reports the IPv6 address as that's what was used to do the domain login. Handy that only IT computers have IPv6 currently. I've been told the only workaround is some kind of script that does User ID via the XML API. As I'm no good at scripting that'll be fun.

I'm very happy to recommend Palo Alto. We've got a VM-300, which according to the spec sheet offers put up to 2Gbps of throughput with thread protection enabled. We've had no problems whatsoever and it's been absolutely fantastic. If you'd rather have a physical box there are some good education bundles based on the PA-820 & 850. But based on your traffic in box terms the 850 or better would be good.

I might well end up sticking with DHCPv6 for BYOD and not support IPv6 on Android devices, I'm using DHCPv6 for the domain side of things anyway.

Thankfully our network is fairly simply topology wise, so just needed a default route on the core and then some static routes on the firewall. Need to experiment with our BYOD wifi though, in my last school the NM said he had problems getting user-ID to work properly with BYOD & IPv6, so that'll be some out of term fiddling around.