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It's that time again. Our Virgin Connection is up for renewal, and despite the fact it's only been down twice in three years, and never for more than a couple of hours, financial pressures are causing us to look elsewhere for better value. As part of our staff development our NM has asked me to have a look around for some alternatives, but I'm not sure what's around at the moment. We've got gigabit up and down, 14 external IPs and do all firewall filtering on our own smoothwall. A simple bare connection is all we really need, but we've taken over a couple of primary schools this year, so if we could do something fancy with them (they're currently on standard BT business fibre, which is pretty terrible) that'd be nice, as our current VPN setup works, but feels a bit fragile. Has anyone got any suggestions of other companies we can look at please? Thanks in advance...

Hi all, I know many of you have already been down this route, serverless with a central school, point to point Ethernet etc etc. I'm curious if you could start again from now how would you do it? What would you centralise? Phones, Wireless, Servers, Filtering etc? Or is now the time to start looking into more cloud hosted services, I'm thinking Azure AD, Google Credential Provider, MDM management like Intune etc. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts. Thanks

We have managed to get a WAN 100Mb point to point link put in place to a Primary School in our academy and I am keen to know what other people have done already or what you think the best setup would be? The main things we want to achieve are the following: • Primary school to use our filtering (Smoothwall) and share our internet connection • Primary school to use our finance system and other web portals • Primary school to use our IP phone system • Use Impero on Primary school PC’s so we can remotely support The three main ways I am thinking would be: • Use VLAN’s on either side of the link and add secondary network cards to our virtual servers we want to provide access to. I think this would work for everything apart from Impero as I am not sure how the Impero server would work if at all with two network cards. Plus a negative to this is it adds quite a lot of configuration change to each server we want to give access to. • Setup the primary school to change their network addressing to match ours and then restrict the DHCP scope to use addresses we wouldn’t on our side, and then block DHCP between the link (not really looked into this but I am sure it could be done) we could then plug the link into our core switch and all machines would be able to talk freely to each other and we could also setup a trust between domains? • Share DHCP and DNS but I guess this would increase traffic and if the link failed then everything at their end would come to a halt maybe setup a secondary DHCP, DNS at their end? Now am I missing something is there an easier way to achieve what we are wanting to do? Or has anyone done it slightly differently? There are only around 50 PC’s at the Primary School so it isn’t going to be huge traffic and we are not planning on sharing file shares or anything like that. Cheers

We are a private apprenticeship provider based in the UK with 41 academies including head office. Each academy range from 1 – 3 classrooms – with the exception of 2x 4 classroom academies. Classrooms have an average of 25 desktops in each. Our HO has around 40 staff. The board have asked us to look into moving all existing infrastructure to the cloud. As a result of this, we have been looking at combining Windows 10 with Office 365, Intune (EMS) and Azure Active Directory. The plan will also include some application deployments in Azure (Incl. our business-critical LMS/Portfolio application Maytas/E-Track). At the moment, each academy has its own isolated network with an on-site DC which runs DNS and DHCP. There is no site-to-site link at all. The DC runs active directory for the classroom PC’s on that site ONLY – we have no central active directory. ALL staff laptops/desktops across all academies + head office are either on a workgroup, or connected to Azure AD – head office is a mess as we have no control (i.e. AD DS) An MPLS solution has been at the top of the plan for months now, but after countless hours of reading, it appears SD-WAN is the way to go…especially as most of our infrastructure will be delivered as-a-service (Azure). However, we are still confused as to why we wouldn’t just simply set up a site-to-site VPN (Using Cisco Meraki or equivalent) instead of the SD-WAN solution? Please also bear in mind that we already have Office 365 E3 licenses which all staff currently use for email, sharepoint and Skype for Business. We are also looking to deploy Skype for Business as our PBX solution in the near future. What comms+WAN solution do you guys think best fits our design?

hi people, just a quick one, in device manager on my home pc i found 5+ WAN miniports. i remove them and restart and they come back once i've logged in, i've checked bios and cant seem to think where its reinstalling them from. windows update maybe ? but what are they for, the only thing i can see on the google is people saying there hidden devices (clicked on show hidden devices) but i haven't, i have it un-ticked. any info much appreciated. awaiting you response

Hi Guys, So, I've recently been trying to configure DHCP on Server 2008 Box and, for the moment, it seems to running all good, it's managing to find the DHCP server and the clients are all being dished out with IP's and relevant network information... However, what I'm trying to do is to share internet through the Server... As the server has two (2) NICS on-board I thought all that was required was to have one cable running from the first NIC into the modem/router and a cable running from the second NIC back into the switch, and then just configuring the gateway on the clients to point to the first NIC... However, the only machine that is getting an internet connection is the server. Help would be very much appreciated - If anyone has full instructions on how to do this, I will love you forever! Because this has been bugging me for the last week and a half! - I have read on Google from various sites that you are required to run a NAT server through RRAS - Is this correct? Thanks, James.