Aprice

There are two main sorts of laser machines, those with glass tubes and those with metal (RF Tubes) RF Machines are typically a lot more expensive but usually produce a better engraving, usually have a longer lifespan than the glass tubes and can be re-gassed. For light usage, a Glowforge might work and would likely support your chrome devices as it's all web based. I've always found the machines that use printer drivers are much easier to use than those that require intermediary software like LaserCut 5.3. Techsoft have usually been pretty good over the years with support so I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. Also had a very good experience with Gravotech machines.

VMWare Logon Monitor might help, I'm sure I remember using it in the past for this sort of issue

New builds generally are quite easy, as cable tray should already be in, and just needs firestopping when it goes through walls. Asbestos could be an issue in 70s builds which might slow things a bit, its usually quite easy to route around. I can't think of any cabling project I've worked on where it would take two days to run 4 cables, without seeing the run I won't judge!

That does sound expensive. We just did an install of 35 cat6a points across two Victorian builds for a fair few thou less than that. Took a team of 5 about 4 days or so, going through a mix of strange lofts, suspended ceilings and lofts within lofts (very strange place!) Are they going back to the same cabs or multiple cabs? obviously the more you can pull at once the faster it becomes. If additional containment is required, e.g. trunking / cable tray then that can increase costs quickly. installers can't just leave it resting on ceiling tiles unsupported in case of fire.

On the whole I quite like the Dell kit. No issues really over the years, driver downloads I've always found to be really good from the dell site.

Smoothwall appliances pretty much everywhere now.

Yes, that sounds about right. 1 SIP channel gets you a single call inbound or outbound. You must also then have 1 SC license available in 3cx for the call.

Using DHCP options 66/67 isn't recommended any more for SCCM. IP helpers are the way to do it if the machines are on a different subnet to the PXE server. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/mem/configmgr/os-deployment/troubleshoot-pxe-boot-issues#using-dhcp-options-isnt-recommended

User based 100% where possible. knowing 172.16.10.2 googled suicide is a lot less useful than domain/childsname when the alert comes through

Smoothwall for ours, another one of our primaries will be moving from ISP provided Netwseeper and firewall in Sept.

I Suppose you could create a Sharepoint Site, ***School_Name*** with a document library in for each class. Then use something like Cloud Connect / Cloud Drive mapper to map the document libraries to the devices based on user group membership.

Think you might need to be careful here, my understanding is that a volume licence still requires an existing OEM licence in place. I.E if you have bought a laptop with WIN10 Home you are not eligible to use a Win10 Pro volume license on it. I'm sure someone else can confirm or say I'm wrong here. Microsoft Licencing isn't my area of expertise as it's nothing but a confusing mess. ***EDIT*** Might be an exemption for Academic use, can anyone confirm?

We've tried Cloud Connect, and were impressed. Certainly makes the changeover a lot easier for the less technically confident staff. Currently quite annoyed with the windows native client as the changes I've just made and saved on my Excel sheet show on my laptop but not on my PC. Despite both saying their synced. 90% of the time the native client works fine, but the 10% of the time it doesn't it's incredibly frustrating for everyone. Couple of phone calls a day for the work that they did on a workroom PC not being their when they get back to the classroom. Getting people to actually try Cloud Connect has been a challenge, as they're all used to the native client now and don't want to change. I'd get it in place on day 1 rather than trying to bring it in later.

Currently working on this with one of our customers, but we have elected to stay with on premises Smoothwall. Generally we've found the on premise solutions to just be much easier to work with and more comprehensive. Also allows us complete flexibility when it comes to the network config onsite. I'm not saying the cloud solutions aren't any good, we just prefer on prem.

We primarily use Smoothwall across our customers, we just manage them individually with an openVPN connection for us to dial in and make changes. We find the requirements for blocking unblocking quite diverse between our customers so multi Tennant wouldn't help us that much. In your instance, I would suggest a HA Smoothwall setup, and getting the traffic sent from the primaries to that central setup.

Quick update, just found a reddit post from a year back with the same version number for the utility, maybe it's the devices firmware that broke this. Couldn't find the utility on the first device either, looks like I imaged it after clearing the password.

I'll have a look, it might still be on the first on I did.

Yep, same here now. I'm guessing it will be an updated version of the Surface Config tool that has broken this (or fixed it depending on how you look at it). When I wrote the first post it was also on 22H2.

Is the Server's firmware up to date? I've seen mention of a similar issue with intel that a firmware update was the posted fix.

Just tested again and now this doesn't appear to work anymore. I'm presuming Microsoft have fixed the bit that ignores the password failing when the red box opens.

I'll have to try it again to jog my memory, Might be able to find a spare Surface at some point today to test on.

Same sort of experience here, internally, with a decent card printer. Personally I've had very good experiences with the Smart IDP range (last used a Smart 51) If you only need to do monochrome you can make a saving on ribbon as well. I last tried to do cards for a whole year 11 group using a low end evolis card printer and it was a very slow and painful process. MiFare cards are the best value we've found, and most systems support them, if you use Paxton then you can have the readers swapped for MiFare compatibles for about £80 a pop. We used to charge students £5 for a replacement card.

I'd try and mirror the switch port the printer is connected to and get Wireshark out.

Zabbix for us, can be a bit of a faf to setup but it's quite good for impressive looking graphs

We've had the same this week, all have asked for unencrypted so far. One of the exam boards is using an online test player to for the staff to upload work, the teacher just has to log in with the child's code and complete the test by uploading their work / marking. Seems a bit bodgy for a large organisation, but I suppose it works.