altecsole

Agreed. I've been asked to look at it from a technical point of view, and report back. The complete change to the way we currently work will be something Leadership will need to agree on, and sell that to teaching staff.

I've dug out our old power meter, so I'll take some accurate readings of power usage so we have a benchmark for moving forward. I doubt the PCs in our classrooms are pulling 250W, but it will be interesting to find out. Many thanks.

Many thanks for taking the time to reply - that's very helpful. Our current Wi-Fi setup would definitely need replacing before we could move forward on this. Is all your data stored in Google? Moving our existing data to the cloud will be a big undertaking.

Many thanks for the link to the Government publication, that's very useful. We are currently looking at installing Solar panels, and we have widespread use of LEDs. Some of our buildings are very old, so insulation probably needs work. Wind turbine would probably be an issue, though. Many thanks for your detailed response. The Chromebook suggestion was, I think, plucked out of the air, and hasn't got as far as our Leadership Team, let alone the wider community. Plenty of other things to consider - cheers.

I suspect that the bottom line is about ticking a box, and saving money. In fact, asking pupils to charge at home, before coming into school, was a big plus for him. Good points about the carbon footprint of the devices themselves - many thanks. We do have PaperCut, and I've already used it to highlight the impact of printing, but he's not too bothered about that. I've also made the point about the energy usage of projectors, compared to Interactive screens (we only have a few), and that is something we will be looking at too.

Our COO has decided that the focus for this year is on reducing our carbon footprint. Part of the approach is to reduce our electricity bill and he's asked about issuing pupils with a Chromebook, and removing our curriculum computers (Windows 10). Pupils would charge their devices at home before bringing in to school. I've been asked to consider how this might work, but it seems like a big ask, bearing in mind the follows: Curriculum software requirements - Computing are heavily invested in Adobe Creative Cloud, particularly, Animate, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Music use Sibelius and Cubase. DT use 2D Design. It would need departments to agree to using online alternatives - if there are any. How well Creative Cloud Android apps work? File storage - the majority of user files, and shared department files, are stored on local file servers. Users do have access to OneDrive (via our Office 365 tenancy), but this isn't the location for their 'My Documents' We've been an Office 365 school since it was 'Live@Edu', so including the Google infrastructure may be confusing for users. All the Google education stuff I look at seems to show primary school pupils using laptops, so what about secondary school pupils? I have a Chromebook at home, and I really like it, but there is no way it could be my work device. I see that the Surface Laptop SE is on the horizon, but that seems to be aimed at KS3 and below? Has anyone gone through this process already? If so, any tips on the way forward?

Absolutely. No problem streaming 4k content on multiple devices, at the same time. Compared to our previous 3Mbps BT connection, it's no contest. The only thing that's not brilliant is the Wi-Fi signal on the Genexis router, but I believe they've moved to a different model now. We just about get coverage in our house (modern build), but I know people with older houses, with thicker walls, struggle. However, B4RN are very good at assisting people with this and they have a range of products to extend coverage that they are happy to loan to people to try out before they buy. They don't sell them, it's just to assist people, so it's not a case of them providing an inferior product and then trying to sell you something to improve it.

I probably should also mention that I have a B4RN connection at home - full 1Gbps up and down. I spent 18 months, with a team of volunteers, digging in FTTP around our village. Our previous speed with BT was around 3 Mbps! For domestic customers it's £30 per month, but we were able to save by not having to pay line rental on a BT line - we just use our mobiles for calls.

I don't know what router they provide for primaries, and whether that supports a 10Gbps connection to your core switch, or firewall. I know our Sophos XG only has 1Gbps ports so, other than link aggregation, you're going to be limited on the bandwidth to your core. I suspect it's great for publicity, without adding any additional load to the B4RN network. Before we were with B4RN, we had a 100Mbps link via CLEO, which was then taken over by BT. They made a big deal about how secure it was. And it was, but trying to get any additional services opened up was a nightmare, and took weeks. The B4RN connection has no additional security, so you're responsible for that yourself. External IP addresses are limited - we have four, but that meets our requirements. B4RN is a local company that has grown from a couple of employees, and a bunch of willing volunteers, to quite a big employer in our local area. They don't have the glossy marketing of larger companies, and definitely aren't as corporate. But, if you have a problem, or a question, you can speak directly to the engineers.

Yes, we're a High School with 1650 pupils and 200 staff. We have had a B4RN 1Gbps connection for about 3 years - they only seem to offer the 10Gbps connection to Primary Schools, for some reason? Maybe because they know they'll never use anywhere near it I believe we can upgrade to a faster connection, but we would need to pay more. We have the B4RN cabinet sited on our land, but we don't get any discount for doing so. The connection is excellent, with 1Gbps up and down. Only one or two instances where the connection has gone down (usually by someone accidentally digging through the fibre), but we've been back up and running within the hour. We are an Office 365 school, with high reliance on Email, Teams, and Stream, plus a lot of use of YouTube by staff and Sixth Form. We use Sophos XG as our filter/firewall. So far, the connection has coped without a problem. I highly recommend them.

I'm looking at options for air-gapped backup and have seen quite a few recommendations for LTO tape. Can anyone recommend a supplier who can lead me through the options available? I'm guessing that the backup server will need to be a physical devices, to allow it to see the LTO device? Many thanks.

Perfect, thank you.

Can you confirm that you can use this reader to output the card number to Notepad (or Excel)? Our Paxton 514-326 doesn't do this and I've been looking for a reader that does. Many thanks.

The web filter seems to be good, but is only as good as the category list that it updates from. We block site without a category (none), and that seems to work well. Plus, the application filter does a great job of detecting stuff - like BYOD devices trying to connect to VPNs (which we block). Our approach is to give as much access as we can and then monitor and educate as required - it seems to work well and (most) pupils appreciate the responsibility.

As part of our Task Sequence I copy the wireless profile to the local disk. To do the connection my command is: cmd /c net start wlansvc & cmd /c netsh wlan add profile filename=%windir%\Wifi\wifi.xml & cmd /c netsh wlan connect name=wifi_name ssid=wifi_name After this, I have a step in the task sequence that deletes the Wifi folder from the local computer.

Yes, please.

Ah... We're only using 9 APs, so I've not run into that issue! It's a shame that the APs don't report to the UniFi Controller and then the UniFi Controller reports to XG. That's how our Ruckus system works. I'm sure Sophos support, and UniFi community can advise. Sorry I wasn't able to help.

I have my UniFi WiFi setup as WPA Enterprise and the UniFi RADIUS profile uses our NPS server for authentication and the XG for RADIUS accounting. The IP address of each AP is then added to XG.

Do you have the IP address of each Unifi AP added under Authentication -> SSO using RADIUS account request on the XG?

We distribute the certificate using Group Policy. For BYOD devices, we've put the certificate on the school website, with instructions on how to install it. We do allow limited access to some sites without SSL inspection, including our website, so users can connect to WiFi and still get to the certificate.

Good question! I'd like to know this too. I've been installing old laptops from a bootable USB drive, with the latest version of Windows 10. I modified the autounattend.xml file to auto logon the local admin account for the first logon, and then install software (added to the Windows USB drive) and windows updates, via Powershell. It also connects to Wi-Fi as part of the process, so what you say should be possible. I set them up with localadmin and localuser accounts, the same as the DFE ones, with auto-logon for localuser. By the way, I install using a MAK key, rather than KMS. We don't have any Intune licenses, so I can't push out settings from there.

Thanks. We already do that. This is a different problem. Some pupils have found that they can use the @ feature to include people in their custom status message. It's not the same as the Chat function, but is being used as a form of 'chat'.

Hi. Did you ever come up with an answer to this? Many thanks.

The link doesn't seem to be working?

I've just asked my reseller for pricing and it's coming back as £11.88 per faculty?