PlantHead

We bought a load of Microsoft LifeCams that fit on the top of the monitor. They come with a microphone, so you just need some speakers. On the downside I've noticed that prices for kit like this has gone through the roof, I guess as the demand has increased and the supply has stopped.

I have to say lockdown feels like it is over around me. There are shops open all over the place and people out around town doing pretty much their normal thing. My neighbour has taken his kids to the grandparents to stay over night and is now out in the garden drinking beer and "recovering" from 12 weeks of home schooling.

https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441 FT are doing comparisons of death rates over the normal level for various countries It is pretty sobering and I now see why the Government stopped showing us graphs of how our death rate compared to other nations in their daily briefings. It also makes a mockery of the new "back to work" motto, alot of people have been killed by incompetence.

The lancet is reporting on this as well https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2931094-1 Better get those kids back to school!

How many fibre ports do you need in the Core and what redundancy are you looking for?

What he ignores though is that if you implement those 3 measures on day 1 then the number of deaths is much lower and you shorten the time of the infection So just do it at the start.

Servers we get with a 3 year warranty and usually extend to 5 years, after that we make a decision on what is needed. Workstations we never extend, it isn't worth it. We usually do a Trade in with HP and replace the kit for less money than the cost of extending the warranty

We use PRTG Have you checked the Notification triggers on the devices not reporting and the timeouts? We only report if something is down for over 5 mins for example and then we specify what should be reported upon.

Is the huge official machine, Boris?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1243523925247774722 Dominic Cummings running out of No.10 just after Boris announced he had the virus

We are down 48% of pupils. It is ridiculous that the school is still being kept open.

We created exam accounts in AD (exam01, 02 etc.) and then linked them to an Adobe account - only the teacher taking the exams knows the passwords to those accounts We then locked the accounts down in the firewall so that they could only access adobe and O365 for SSO authentication. It is a real pain in the bum

If you start at the top and remove SQL server it will uninstall most of the rest. I think a reboot is needed at the end but it is a while since I have done it.

We use Planet eStream Very easy to upload and share and all online, so it can be logged into from anywhere

This is a worry . The US has rights to view any data stored in locations under its jurisdiction without notice to the person. If the data is stored in non-US data centres then the US has no rights to see that information. Need to read a bit more about it but certainly there are businesses that will not want their data stored in the US

We use HP/Aruba switches and are in the process of upgrading our links to 10Gbps - I am not sure a 1Gbps switch can be justified except in extreme cases. HP switches are pretty easy to use and configure, never had many problems and the warranty is still pretty great.

Just say you don't have a personal email address.

The recommendation to use the firewall is to avoid leaking between the guest and school network but if the smoothwall isn't up to the job then a switch is the best bet. I also think if you use Windows DHCP then every user technically should have a CAL to use it.

If it was me I would set the DHCP for my guest network as the firewall and keep all traffic as far away from the core network as possible. That way you can get set DHCP and DNS etc from the firewall and they never touch your internal network. Create Guest VLAN on Zone Director switch, Core Switch and firewall switch - which hopefully are all the same switch I don't have a Smoothwall but on your Firewall create another virtual connection/interface on the same port as all your other traffic and limit it to the Guest Vlan and setup DHCP. Use the virtual connection/interface ID as the gateway in DHCP

We have some Chromebooks using O365 - the trick is setting up SSO from O365 to google which means the pupils login with their O365 login on the Chromebook. 1:1 device deployment is a lot of admin and support work - you need something like Intune to manage and remote deploy apps and you need SCCM to rapidly deploy an OS - which is often quicker than troubleshooting issues. The big time sync is in breakages, it is an admin person just to keep on top of the insurance claims and returns.

Open CMD as administrator and type: [list] [*]REG ADD HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 [*]REG ADD HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v CortanaConsent /t REG_DWORD /d 0 [*]tskill searchui [/list] No need to reboot

I sort of agree with this though. Favour the railway and inconvenience the cars to make people change their habits. It would work better if the railways ran on time of course but I support the theory.

How many DNS servers do you have? Hopefully you have at least 2, in which case re-starting one will have no impact on your end users.

Its is ESR 68 at the moment and they are telling me that it has to be the only browser installed on the machine, It looks like we will run up a VM just for this turd of a piece of software.

One of the problems for trains in this country is the bridges. Being able to run double decker trains like the rest of Europe would double capacity overnight but you would have to knock down a lot of listed bridges to make it happen. Personally I'd give up the historical bridges for better trains with more space.