Aprice

Not got an Ikea desk as such, Just bought an Ikea worktop, cut the ends off so it fits in the room and attached some legs (also Ikea) worked out fairly cheap and it's rigid as anything and pretty hard wearing. At its full length it just fits in a Ford Focus with the boot shut.

Yeah Smoothwall is pretty good if you're asking me, It's not an awesome firewall but it has all the basics. I'm of the opinion that it's still the best filtering option for edu. Used it as the edge device in many schools, can't think of many reasons where It's needed something more sophisticated, but in those situations I'd just use it as a filter only paired with something else.

Used to work for ED-UK Technologies, had this sort of arrangement with a number of schools for third line / escalation.

I’d go Eaton or Reillo. Over the years had a fair few APCs or rebadged APC units go pop or fail.

Yeah, Still think it will need some additional protection on them. We fitted Verkada ones in a school and promptly removed them all the same day after two of them were ripped off and in a toilet.

Give PeaSoup a call, We found it's often cheaper to get some cloud storage with them than it it to buy the Veeam licensing. They bundle the Veeam licences in free when you get the cloud storage.

Well that's going to hit Verkada, with this being under £100 and subscription free.

Had plenty of Kyocera machines, found them to be pretty solid machines. The school had bought them second hand from the print company on a crazy cheap deal. They were getting pretty old but were still good.

Historically I've liked the Aruba Instant system (not confused with instant on - which was a bit rubbish). Personally I haven't been a fan of Aruba Central, as we felt it didn't really justify the license costs, as the functionality we needed was available without central. Since AOS 10 firmware needs central it put me off Aruba wireless, at least for the sort of deployments we were doing. Sure AOS 8 is still supported but it feels like we'd be investing in something that clearly isn't the priority for Aruba. Unifi has always worked well for WiFi in my experience, Switching has been a bit rocky, but has got a lot better. If there's a 'need' for Aruba sure, but our Unifi WiFi experience has been great, no license fees either.

We've found it more cost effective to run something like a virtual Mikrotik in Azure and use that to run the VPN from than using Azure's offering. The licensing is perpetual and pretty cheap, especially for something like a 1 gig which is probably more than you need for a DC.

Yes, we had issues with another phone system (PBXact) with talkstraight. Problem turned out to be their GRE tunnel reducing the MTU size, which then caused fragmentation of the SIP packets leading to inconsistent problems establishing calls. In the end we managed to get them to bypass the GRE tunnel for SIP / RTP so it didn't suffer the same problem. Took a lot of work to get there in the end, did also end up ditching them in the end and putting a smoothwall in with a different provider.

I'm getting near to going in for Unifi with one of our customers. Years ago we had loads of PSUs failing in the Gen1 switches, but now looks like we're through with those issues on the newer models. I'm really waiting for the Enterprise Aggregation switches to support VRRP. At the moment our only option would be to go router on a stick which I'd rather not do at bigger sites.

Just done another using Veeam. You can do an instant restore to Hyper-V and then commit the storage back once the VMs running.

Not a fan of the framework model in general. The suppliers / contractors typically have to pay a percentage of the job to the framework, thus inflating the price of the job to keep the same margin.

-1 for Teams, we are currently on it, looking to move off. Few customers we've picked up that were on it that also want to move away from it.