[sims] SIMS Teacher App service issues

[synaesthesia]

Reaching out here as Capita really can't be bothered to reply to emails - 3 and counting and the only reply I've had is automated response

 

One of my schools has SIMS Teacher App, quite a costly investment yet it's not actually working as intended. It's all set up correctly as far as I can see, and I've gotten as far as getting in, getting activation codes sorted for staff, getting staff online; however the services seem to go offline randomly and very often; for instance twice a day today! Restarting the services in SSM isn't enough however restarting the SSM service followed by the login & data services in SSM brings it back online. I therefore believe it's SSM related.

 

Anyone come across anything similar?

[PhilNeal]

Have you raised a case via MyAccount?

[synaesthesia]

No, I've tried both the places I'm usually advised - the esd@ address and also as per the documentation supplied with STA, sims.support@ .

[PhilNeal]

I know the desk has had a flood of calls owing to start of term "can't remember" type issues but they are getting through them. I've asked the Product Manager to take a look at your posting to see if he can assist.

I believe that the problem you describe is down to some of the port requirements not being opened.

[synaesthesia]

Cheers, I'll await a reply. I know there's 2 ranges of ports opened for it, one has 5 or 6 addresses and one is 2 addresses. Always a possibility I've missed something.

[PhilNeal]

Here's what our product manager says:

 

The issues being experienced are likely caused by the configuration of a firewall the school's internet connection is going through. We have seen this at a few schools where either the firewall at the school, or at their internet service provider has a restrictive configuration, or has been configured incorrectly, the result is that it blocks or restricts the data services needed by the Teacher app.

 

We have had several schools recently that are thinking the Teacher app isn't working - and in each case it turned out to be the school's firewall configuration, either being too restrictive or actually configured incorrectly We've also seen instances where Smoothwall has been configured wrongly at schools and this blocks the Teacher app data services.

[synaesthesia]

Thanks for that. I've bypassed Smoothwall entirely for the SIMS services to make things simpler, probably need to double check the firewall settings.

[splattthecat]

Another issue can be the ports 50000, 50001 used by SIMS Services Manager are in the middle of a range of addresses used by DNS. We add an exception to the DNS settings to prevent it using these two adresses.

 

An extract of the script we use for this is:

 

dnscmd /Info /SocketPoolExcludedPortRanges

dnscmd /Config /SocketPoolExcludedPortRanges 50000-50001

dnscmd /Info /SocketPoolExcludedPortRanges

 

NET STOP "DNS Server"

NET START "DNS Server"