psydii

As Head of Centre, I think this is their problem. If they haven't managed their budget effectively so that they can weather an unexpected £400 charge to ensure students are able to compliantly sit public exams.... ::shrug:: You've offered the solution. Since they are not accepting of the IT Lead solution, maybe the Head of Centre can ask their peers how they do it, and let you know?

Unless you are tiny, the cost of ExamWritePad is insignificant compared to the cost of running Public Exams. Perhaps your finance team are lacking the appropriate perspective.

No experience of Wales, but when dealing with a black-box system supported by others, I have found Wireshark captures to be my ally here. "I'm not really a Wireshark expert, but this seems to show packets leaving and never getting a reply..." or "All that red for traffic to those IPs doesn't seem right to me?" have both got my tickets escalated to someone with the skills to figure out where the problem lay.

TBH I like a bit of posh coffee and good tailoring, and better pay wouldn't hurt.

I didn't mean make it generally available, but to keep an isolated vm around (for use by IT Services only) specifically for the purpose of being able to access/recover legacy data. But the slippery slope argument certainly resonates, sometimes you have to be inflexible to protect users from themselves. I'd suggest though that you don't even look at solving the "i forgot to convert before the deadline" problem for staff in general. If you do, they wont bother and then you'll have to have libreoffice etc on your computers forever more!

It would still work, particularly if you had it installed on a win 11 24h2 vm that wasn't taking updates. The idea is not to keep it working for users, but to have an emergency method of converting a file to pdf that "somehow" got missed before the deadline.

Rather than access to this tab, you might be able to achieve a self-service access to a user's one drive with some groups and a one-off script Have the GA greate one group per user onedrive, something lines of od_SiteCollectionAdministrator_USERNAME For each user grant the appropriate group admin rights to the user's mysite collection (onedrive) Then the helpdesk tech can add themselves to the appropriate group to get access and remove themselves afterwards as necessary. The GA or whoever oversees the tech can run another script daily to check the memberships of the od_...SCA ..._username groups is as expected (in general empty!) DANGER LURKS BELOW: You might be able to have these groups set up as Time-Based (Temporary) Group Membership in Active Directory | Windows OS Hub, but there are two caveats 1) in certain scenarios enabling this feature can absolutely hammer your DCs - so test it in a replica of your domain first. 2) I don't know whether current membership of these groups is sync'd into Entra.

...but don't let anyone find out about the back-stop otherwise they will rely on it. Stick to the line "contents of publisher documents will be lost if not saved to pdf by October 2026"

Can one still buy a perpetual licence to Publisher? If so get that to have available to install into an isolated VM? Work with SLT to agree some sort of SLA for converting old .pub to pdf after the deadline. Something along the lines of get slt buy-in that all staff have been given ample warning to convert to pdf or seek alternative resources, and after October pdf conversion can be done by IT Services, but at the absolute lowest priority, so for example *a doc* might be converted in a few minutes if nothing else is on, but *10* might take 6 weeks.

One thing that helped us was it being set to 100000000.

What's your simstimeout value in connect.ini?

Could be, but also... are you *sure*. ? On more that one occasion here people have sworn blind they weren't running big reports/queries/updates, and a couple of hours with SQL Server (most of which was learning how to use Profiler if I remember correctly) showed that they were in fact running big queries relating to the up coming census (or similar). Do you have any other systems that talk into/pull from sims? Are there any timetable changes or student moves going on? Of course, it could be the Spring update... but this time of year is typically when we see exactly these sort of weird crashes/hangs and its usually the users doing things that lock tables causing update timeouts.

Anyone working on census? We often see crashes when the Data Manager and SLT are running census reports and related bulk updates.

If you are running a service that has 72 cores x3, at its heart, I'd say that ought to be affordable within the orgs entire budget, even if it looks a lot compared to the nominal "IT Budget". But is it value for money? Imagine a world where on prem MIS was still king, and in that world lessons were delivered 24/7. MIS downtime (even scheduled) interrupts delivery of the core service, requiring potentially a hundred people to have to create an hours worth of backlog of admin tasks which they need to catch up, that's 100 people salary x1 hr(of lost productivity). It probably exceeds the annual cost of the of the hotpatch licence in the first month alone. Thus the hot patch licence is affordable when considering potential lost productivity, and time freed up, and any head teacher or school business manager should be able to see the value. Now obviously all the conditionals on that scenario are not in fact true in the real world, and actually the line of business app needs patching fairly often too, so does that make it value for money now? No, probably not. Even if one did have spare cash in the IT Budget to be able to pay for it, there are probably other things that might have a higher return on investment. But consider that even a large secondary school can run fine on two hyper-v hosts with 72 cores (we've had occasion where we've ended up with everything running on a single host with way fewer cores than that, and nobody noticed for quite a while!) in the future when spec'ing out the hyper-v cluster's replacement you might consider the cost of the third host vs the cost/benefit of the hotpatch licence. Its been a while since I costed up servers so really no idea how the maths would turn out, but maybe?

That's not too bad. Certainly pretty affordable if you need it, but as others have said do schools need it? I don't think anyone has been inconvenienced by a server monthly update for years now. The more disruptive things were always SQL Server, Exchange or 3rd part services, where manual intervention is needed thus resulting business hours maintenance windows, (for those of us who didn't have managing updates outside of business hours in their contract)... but with almost everything being SAAS, there's almost nothing left of on-prem beyond core windows network infrastructure.

Yup, been round that route - all uk numbers just cut out or drop you to what appears to be an anonymous voicemailbox. Think we have a solution now, but the phone / web form side of thing might need a little work.

Has anyone been able to contact them recently? They seem to have been bought out again, and now all their numbers go to voicemail, and the web form goes responded. As you might imagine I'm quite desperate to get hold of them. Or the old installer.

Kerberos would like a word.

There was a reason years ago that it wasn't uncommon to have a script un-map all network drives at log off. Thinking sideways for a moment... do you really need an S drive? What if the connect.ini just pointed to the share?

Maybe related to the Action? Create/Update/Replace/Delete? Try Update or Replace? Been ages since I double checked what those action labels actually really really do though, so test carefully

Not the answer(s) I wanted, but what I expected Things were simpler back in the copper-from-the-GPO-or-nothing days.

I wonder now if our network (even with all the PoE phones and APs) might actually stay up longer than our ISP. Would be interesting if @PaddyNewman or @SchoolsBroadband are able to comment on up-time commitments from their infrastructure partners. TBH the original intent of this thread was so check in that people had plans in the event of a 100% tech/power failure to get the kids and colleagues safely home, and whether they had restart plans. Our critical incident plans mostly assume that we have either mobile broadband or our main internet line is available, with access to at least one of our cloud platforms. We have paper backup for contact sheets - but have not considered that in the event of a regional power failure we might only have minutes before the last-mile broadband/phone network collapsed.

Yeah my home fibre router has a battery backup option. They are tiny, when I asked why so small, the response was - there's no point you paying to keep your home router up for longer that the ISP/Teleco can keep their end going. On Boarding Schools - don't they have generators? I remember being without power for a couple of days back way back when, certain things were kept running, the switchboard and kitchens being the priority. Early bed-time, wear double layers, cold showers (man-up!), staff patrolling the grounds with torches. The real fun was when the power would go out for a few minutes/hours in the winter during the evening meal - imagine 100+ teenagers with food on their trays plunged into total darkness. Carnage. (sensible people knew dive under the tables and wait 15 seconds - the generator would usually kick and those that didn't wait often got caught.)

Make friends with the science technician(s). Nothing so good as instant coffee made in lab glassware over a bunsen burner. (FWIW my first IT outage was the '87 storm and we were off for weeks, and running 180V for months. I I lived of that stuff. Mind you I was *way* to young to really have been allowed to prove the supply voltage was that low, and recovering the IT suites out of the smashed up buildings was a positively Dickensian use of small agile children!)

I was thinking more along the lines of "is this scenario covered in the Business Continuity plan". One may find oneself with a school full of kids and no way (or limited ways) for them to use public transport or contact home. I'm assuming that the mobile networks would stay up for a little longer that the lights/servers do, so do you have a plan in place to get the kids home when the servers/internet is down? Is there a comms plan to get people to check in if the outage is extended (days/weeks etc)? I'm ignoring the fact that all their nuclear power stations are currently running on diesel generators, but if that goes wrong and the wind changes, we're likely all in a work from home until further notice scenario - but we've all done that before!