dmj

If yours is a simple star without failover links I would set edge switches at default and core lower (at 24576). If you have failovers (eg via another physical building) you may need to set the near edge at 28672. (it was about nearly 10yrs ago since I last did failovers on networks!, so don't quote me on the last bit)

Surely you want to have all the switches have the same priority, except the core with a lower one?

I've used both in two different educational settings. IMO Teams is much more geared towards business and Classroom is very much focused on schools. I preferred Teams for chat and videoconferencing, but Classroom wins handsdown for things like homework submission and remote classrooms. The management of both was effectively a non issue because they can both be configured automatically using API's and I rarely needed to touch anything.

This makes things hard IMO. I would create a DNS entry for the sharenames that points to the servername. This means when you change things around it's a simple DNS change and you don't need to mess with servernames. To take it a step further, point the DNS name at a loadbalancer so you can scale the number of servers with load and shut them down automatically when you don't need them.

You can usb boot exFAT. It's been supported on macs since snow leopard.

Can't you use exFAT? It's been around for about 15yrs

Sounds like BS boxtickery to me. If you can't do it you could use that as an opportunity to get the funding to upgrade your network It sounds like it's going to be a lot of work for very little gain.

Ansible. You just need a list of ip addresses/hostnames and it will run all the tasks in parallel. It's free, simple to use.

Just incase anyone is searching for this thread and needs to do something like this bash, it's a oneliner and multithreaded. (windows SFL, Linux, mac) find /path/to/source -name "*.json" | xargs grep -il "search term" | xargs -I{} cp --parents {} /path/to_dest

The way we do this (in GCP/Workspace) - but exactly the same principal applies to Azure, (I used to have to do this for Azure): Build out the azure tenant as IasC, to protect from any manual changes, configuration drift and so you can automate changes Rebuild the production environment to a new tenant, replacing environment variable specific to production with you testing vars. test the application Tear down the test environments You can use your favourite CI/CD system so this is all automated. We currently have this entire process automated. The system is: Engineer writes some code and commits the change to github. Github sends a hook to Ci/CD (Jenkins). Jenkins runs tests and linters against the code. If these pass it builds a new environment and tests the code actually works. When the engineers has approval and the github code is puhed to the main branch, another hook is sent and the code is automatically applied to the production system. or just test it live YOLO

There's an entire ansible collection for CX6100 if you want to save some time in the future: https://developer.arubanetworks.com/aruba-aoscx/docs/using-the-aos-cx-ansible-collection

Altered the deal

It's educational software, it doesn't move at the same pace as industry

The ribbon cable connectors can be a PITA when they break. There's couple of hacks you can employ 1) bend the cable over onto itself so that the pressure from the cable itself helps seat it. 2) use a bit of card like this: (edit: use Kapton tape, not masking tape ) re-soldering the connectors is really hard, you need a microscope and some fairly specialised equipment. I agree with @localzuk cannibalising broken machines is the way forward for parts.

I was also unclear on this point. There's a really good explanation here: https://community.cisco.com/t5/switching/where-to-apply-loop-guard/m-p/1969256/highlight/true#M220492

Appreciate they are old, but we are talking centralised management, not software defined networking so it doesn't need an api - plain old ssh and a tftp server will do it. Have you thought about simply centralising the config files, per switch and just templating those config files and deploying with ansible. All the tools are free.

Sounds like you've inherited a hand managed system! Your #1 takehome from this should be that you need to track changes and manage these centrally. At the very least so you have documentation of how the network is supposed to be configured! As for the specific configs, I'm a bit too far removed from network administration these days, but what your network consultants are saying make sense to me. I don't believe LLDP and STP are mutually exclusive, or even related. I would certainly set a STP default priority on all switches, and lower it on core switches. I think loop-protection is more for ports that connect clients and unmanaged switches that can't use STP. I'm not clear on this though. The important think is to set it the same on all devices, unless you have a reason not to. It sounds like it's a bit arbitrary at the moment.

Carla Geisser

yep. Automating stuff like this is basically my job now I've left the education sector! It will be a lot of configuration as code, and many of the members here think that's a waste of time and only for large orgs (of which I am not employed by!). I would start by learning some ansible: https://www.ansible.com/overview/how-ansible-works

Did the teaching staff elaborate on what they need to do? what exam board is it?

Automate a weekly restore into a new environment and notify on failure. Ideally you could use this test environment to test any changes before applying them to the production system, thus integrating your backup/restore procedure into testing procedures.

I recall this being an issue like 20 years ago, so I'm surprised microsoft have not fixed it. Then again, I'm not sure these old style AD domains have much future. When I joined the school it had just had it's name changed to one of these newfangled community technology colleges (the CTC's with 'specialisms' introduced by labour). There was pressure for us to change the name from X-college to the new CTC. We resisted the change because it didn't really affect anyone. 15 years later the CTC's get scrapped and the school changes it's name back. Finally the domain name matches

There's sooo many possibilities! 25 years ago, when I was at Uni they used to boot entire linux desktop labs that way, I don't mean for installers. I think it was LTSP, or its forerunner. When I was a NM, back in the days of thin clients, we used to setup an option to boot to an RDP session, KVM VDI host, or just a browser. I think there was a memtest option too. It's pretty good method or kiosks. I was always keen on the idea of rebooting entire suites into supercomputing clusters, but never got around to doing that. When I was a Uni sysadmin, we used to let staff choose whether to re-image their PC. If they interrupted the boot process they'd get a PXE menu asking if they wanted a fresh install of Linux or Windows. Self Service FTW!

Ultimately you just need a DHCP server, a TFTP server which you are already running in WDS. I suspect the component you are missing is syslinux (I'm making an assumption that it's a linux ISO you are booting). There's a howto for that here: https://kenvb.gitbook.io/deploy-linux-with-microsoft-wds/adding-syslinux (you can serve the image via tftp, you don't NEED to use NFS) If you want a more complete package, checkout Foreman or Cobbler. https://theforeman.org/ https://cobbler.github.io/

I guess it was in the fine print of the contract. I suspect Bromcom would be able to do the transfer, for extra money.