Aprice

If it's being Natted by workstation, it should be ok. Provided nothings using the test domains as its DNS servers it should be OK.

I've used an Cisco ATA with a BT Bell device before, seemed to work OK. Then just create a ring group containing the phone and the ATA. Had to use a RJ11 to BT adapter, which needed the wires swapping over for some reason.

Just a pain to deal with Iris, when we last looked at it we were surprised at how little the school paid for it, which is the only reason they haven't looked to migrate.

We had one a while back, it was a very positive experience. They wanted to check what was paid for was actually there. In our case just switching, Just really checking the model numbers. Then went into a meeting with us and the head, where we discussed the program in general, feedback about the experience. They wanted to know the good and bad to feedback and hopefully guide future programs. Very relaxed and nothing to worry about. More interested in the T&L impact rather than how many VLANS and other technical aspects.

Getting rid of roaming profiles would be my suggestion, and switching to folder redirection. Granted its not a quick 2 second change.

Yep, little tank keeps the heating loop that heats the Radiators and Hot water cylinder coil filled, and allows for said water to expand when heated. Big tank fills the water in the hot water cylinder, and provides pressure for the hot water. if you open a hot tap it will be water that was in big tank that comes out. Lovely!

The smaller tank basically acts as an expansion vessel for the boilers heating loop that runs through the cylinder and radiators. It's known as a feed & expansion tank or F&E tank. Recently had to figure out how my system worked, which was quite confusing initially as I have an unvented cylinder but also have a vent pipe There's a surprising amount going on with these, when I looked into it. lots of specific distances, the cold storage tank (usually bigger) has to have a higher level than the F&E tank or the sludge filled F&E tank could back flow into the cold tank! Can't believe anyone would install these over a combi, seems like an awful lot more work! Also the whole cold water tank in the loft has always seemed a bit disgusting to me, thankfully with an unvented cylinder I don't have that. but that big tank is what fills your cylinder up and gives you whatever hot water pressure you have.

Glad to have got rid of AB Tutor, Net support was very cheap and I guess did the job.

Maybe a PowerShell script to input the MAK key

NO! recently had an email from someone saying all the other converter sites had been blocked apart from XYZ.com please can we ensure XYZ.com does not get blocked. Only staff will use it as it's a bit dodgy and opens up random tabs and stuff. first job block XYZ.com.

Agreed, I'd advise against just moving VMs straight to Azure unless there's a really good reason to do so. We use some VMs in the cloud for lightweight Linux VMs like Unifi controllers, PBXs etc as the cost to run them is trivial. Replacing with services makes a whole load more sense, we're gradually moving customers away from on premises AD to Fully Entra / Intune. Print will likely move to PaperCut Hive. Running services is much more cost effective.

Every school I've worked with has just used a standard whiteboard. The digital clock thing has wasted countless hours of our time and proved a real nuisance.

If someone finds one, might be worth letting Bromcom and Arbour know for their SIMS export battle!

Appliance would be my preferred, preferably HA as every Smoothie we've had has a tendency to lock up twice a year or so needing a power out reset to get it back up again.

I'd immediately disuse all of the others, it's clearly a design defect. If I was Zioxi I'd want the unit back to know what exactly went wrong with it. I made a point not long ago of not charging devices and ideally not storing stacks of lithium batteries in the server room.

Cue well timed Bromcom Outage!

Our standard setup for a secondary type site is: Non domain joined Veeam VM, which lives on the schools Hyper-V cluster (Cluster is on it's own domain rather than the schools production domain) Local firewall on VM is fully enabled, RDP disabled e.t.c. All the associated backup hardware / VM lives on it's own VLAN with ACLs applied on the core to it. Veeam VM backs up to a NAS device over SMB for the normal daily & other routine backups. A second NAS on a scheduled basis is powered up and a full backup taken (usually bi-weekly) then shut down. Syncro (Our RMM) monitors the event logs and reports on sucess / failiures. We also have a separate backup job to PeaSoup with 7 days immutability. The shift now really is moving to backing up the cloud data, apart from Net2, cashless catering and a few other bits and bobs the local VMs are becoming less and less important for us.

I'd suggest SSHing in and having a look. Make sure you have the right sort of number of APs showing in the cluster. If some became split then could run their own instance of the VC without getting the deleted message.

I do like the 3Pars, but wouldn't really be looking to install SANs in any of our customers now. S2D or VSAN would be our go to.

Depends, we often have a 'wires only' service. no ISP router provided. In which case just an LC to LC patch lead between the Adva and our core, or a media converter to go to a Smoothie. The Adva takes in the single mode and usually just has a multimode on the customer end. (provided by Openreach) It's really a link monitoring device for Openreach, often if it's another ISP running over the Openreach network then they tend to provide their own router so they too have some increased visibility of the network.

I guess it's a case of making sure that all the financial data has been exported prior to the end of contract. or continue to pay for FMS and it's replacement for a further 6 years, which I'm sure nobody will do. I'd be interested to know if FMS does need a valid key in order to actually launch, in which case holding onto the VM seems a bit pointless.

I presume it's the same as SIMS where you are 'supposed' to delete it at the end of your contract as you would be using their IP without licence. I'm sure I remember threads on here about having to sign something to confirm that it has been deleted. Would make me nervous having to delete a schools SIMS or FMS data. Looking at this it looks like without an in date key it won't let you in anyway: https://www.schoolicts.co.uk/sims-license-campaign/

I'd say Forti is the 'best' firewall, I certainly thought it was the most intuitive of the ones I've used. Smoothwall as a firewall I think is fine if it's just a stateful firewall you're after. It does have IDS / IPS just not maybe as fully featured as something like Forti or Watchguard. As a filtering solution, I'm quite happy with Smoothwall and am now rolling out cloud filter, so we're less reliant on the actual box. Definitely wouldn't want to go near Netsweeper again.

Agreed, had lots of problems with hosted solutions. Having full control of the solution makes life a lot easier. Do like Fortigate as a firewall though, not much experience with it for filtering though.

There's two variants of the readers, unfortunately it's not just an activation card for MiFare. Swapping the readers is fairly easy though. We fit the MiFare as standard for customers, it's then their choice whether they use Paxton or the hugely cheaper MiFare cards. Believe it's HID that the activation card is for