synaesthesia

TES seems to be having a hard time of it at the moment. Edukey still also dead.

Yeah it's tough. Accountability and responsibility are the name of the game - all the time you used to muse about how doctors and nurses spent more time doing paperwork than treating people? That's us now. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a lot will depend on the school or trust's structure . Academisation levels are likely to be double what they were 12 years ago (guesstimate!) and again depending on structure, what IT looks like could vary from having complete freedom to being just a body on the ground changing passwords and toners which is absolutely soul destroying. VLEs do pop up every now and then but the answer is quite rightly always the same - "why are you still using that with the prevalence of teams/google classrooms?". And to echo some others, yup SIMS is still a thing but it is no longer the market leader; you're more likely to come across Arbor than SIMS, and many schools still using the latter are likely to be considering a move. If they aren't, they should be. And the SIMS cloud system that was touted more than 12 years ago? It's only just sort of hit the ground recently. I can't say hit the ground running, it just sort of "splatted" and no-one paid attention. Infrastructure setups vary wildly from school to school/trust to trust, but as was said cloud first is what's on people's minds. DfE requirements/recommendations are ensuring each wifi point has multi-gigabit connectivity to your core, multi-gig internet connectivity with backup lines and it's no longer the norm to find a secondary school with dozens of virtual machines running. Security wise, everything is 2 or 3 steps more difficult than it was 12 years ago. MFA everything, and in some cases (colleges and unis) that includes students too. Safeguarding/KCSIE changes more often than some people change their underwear, the general premise is still much the same but updated for the influx of AI. Everything needs consent.

This one's hit me hard, an absolute hero of mine. RIP Sir Patrick. Absolute legend of stage and screen, a proper gentleman who's been there and done everything. A fellow Red Dwarf fan. What a loss

Hopefully sharing a beer and some tales with Anton Yelchin somewhere

Cheers Tom, support have me a date of 28th.

Must hand it to their support, their replies have been quick and they've enabled me trial access for logging a ticket, fingers crossed!

I love it (well, I did until today, and I'm currently swearing at it). One bounced email appears to mean you get added to a blocklist and agents automatically uninstalled from your endpoints... Trying to liaise with support now, which is fun for the free tier!

Is that due out imminently, @tom_newton? It's not showing for us yet on Maiden.

I would try and challenge it but charging ports will always be a tough one, rather like HDMI ports in devices. They get abused the most and it's rather typical, but £70 isn't a huge amount compared to what you'd pay anywhere else so would probably suggest paying them for it. At least then the work is properly guaranteed too

What are people's thoughts on keeping a local appliance running? On one hand it's still rather reliant on the cloud connection, but on the other it still gives manageability in the instance of outages etc. The only real downside is the lack of saml support for easy pass but need to properly weigh up any pros and cons. As I've alluded to before, the reliance on cloud controlled systems and whatever may befall them makes me quite nervous!

Quelle suprise. There must be a reason for this to happen so often in comparison to other providers surely.

And another shining example as to why all windows updates with exception to zero day security patches should have a decent cooling off period (2 weeks imo) before being installed, automatically or otherwise. Instant installation in the name of any supposed requirements is absolutely insane, unfortunately. We should be able to rely on them being fully tested before hitting shelves, but at the same time we know testing often never begins until hitting the general populace

For us it was so intermittent it took nearly 6 months back and forth with Sophos and seems to have resolved itself. Clients would present exactly as you described, and a reboot or browser restart often resolved it. The best reason we could find for this happening was a delay in resolving the certificate chain possibly down to local network conditions; the only thing that changed since it stopped happening was a full WiFi network replacement. Wonder if, even if not relating to AV, a network delay might also be involved? I do know it never happened on any wired device. Was a strange one for sure, Sophos kept going round in circles after seeing logs, packet traces and thinking it may have been smoothwall or Impero. I hate intermittent issues we can't reproduce!

Is it definitely smoothwall cert showing up as the error? Had very similar but it was Sophos interfering despite having none of its HTTPS stuff enabled.

Sure - see In a nutshell, where mobile data is available should a device not be able to reach a website (in our case due to filtering) it will use other methods to get to that site, effectively loading it via mobile data even though wifi is available. How this is reported on filtering systems is yet to be seen - the current assumption would appear to be it shows as blocked, but in reality the user is browsing those sites apparently still connected via WiFi. My understanding may be flawed however and there's been precious little information other than this and a couple of news articles. It may be that we just "suck it up" but in my black and white mind I can't see how this could be usable.