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.

Yep, would always suggest a separate domain for the cluster, also makes troubleshooting easier. I'd say minimising the services that are on a DC is a good idea, from a security practice anyway. The downside of running it on switches / routers often is that it's a pain to manage over the Windows DHCP utility.

My experience with secondaries is that 1GB is generally more than sufficient. Are you sure it's the WAN connection that's the bottleneck and not the filtering?

Windows firewall turned on on inventry? That would probably break it!

Very variable with devices, Surface ones seem to work for 50% of devices. Used an Anker one for the other 50%.

Some kit might support adding a second IP to the same VLAN interface (known as multinetting) As you say anything you do here should be temporary, it's not a good solution! You could add a router onto the network with 2 ethernet interfaces, one interface with an IP in 10.0.1.x and the other in 10.1.x.x. the existing router on the network will need a static route to get to the other network via this new routers IP. And the new router a default route via the existing router.

Always found Riello to be very solid. APC generally do the job, however have had several fail over the years, including my home one which started smoking. Eaton also generally seem pretty good.

Masterclass in how to wind up any potential customers!

APC SmartUPS would do the job, with a management card installed. https://www.comms-express.com/products/apc-smt750ic-smart-ups-750va-lcd-230v-with-smartconnect/?_gl=1*8m2gpf*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4PqU253VjgMVLYdQBh1VownjEAQYBiABEgKpcPD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAAD_eWHTyXyq-M10n2dwDHtkT9xYpY https://www.comms-express.com/products/apc-ap9640-ups-network-management-card-3/?_gl=1*urijno*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4PqU253VjgMVLYdQBh1VownjEAQYBiABEgKpcPD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAAD_eWHTyXyq-M10n2dwDHtkT9xYpY That's a basic model, just size up if you need it, so long as it's got a slot for the management card you should be OK The new ones have an Ethernet port for their cloud platform, wouldn't bother with that though, needs a subscription to be of any use. Just pop a management card in and setup email alerts.

Starlink would be my go to for something like that. Maybe throw in a few Unifi APs.

Something like a Fluke Link IQ, however it's not cheap. If it's not a regular thing, maybe hiring in might be more viable.