synaesthesia

Not committing to an answer on a public forum?

There was a post under the smoothwall forum for this, their certificate chain is incomplete so pages under the edexcel.com domain that are forwarded from pearson.com are not trusted. It's a Pearson issue, unsurprisingly. You can get around it by whitelisting, but that defeats the point of smoothwall's checks in the first place. Pearson need to get off their backside and do things properly for once.

Cheers. I managed to finagle it in the end by just calling the relevant WMI bits from powershell, however found it breaks Google Drive, so appears to be a no go. Playing with permissions instead for now!

Yeah, it's still too slow (maybe we're asking a bit much). Our current solution which is unfortunately only available on windows (much of the reason why we need an alternative) has predefined buttons to press - so for a medical call, press the medical button, type in what's needed and send - no faffing with subjects, types etc.

Cheers guys. Unfortunately I don't think it ticks the boxes for us anyway; what we need is something far quicker for non technical staff to send messages out to groups, individuals or everyone and judging by the demo this is just too faffy; more work than sending an email. I can see it's uses for other things, but not for ours.

Hi all, For reasons it's not worth going into, I need to try and set up SharedPC mode this summer, or something to approximate it. We'll be moving to that via Intune in due course, however until that happens I'd like to give users are very similar experience with our Windows 11 rollout. The biggest thing I want to achieve is no local storage. Whilst this could likely be done with fancy permissions, I'd like to block as many entry points as possible, very notably the local library links in the navigation pane of Explorer (Desktop, My Documents, My Pictures etc). There's a load of registry tweaks which don't work (mostly all deleting keys or setting hiddenbydefault=1 for those namespace entries under their respective GUIDs), and wondered if anyone had achieved anything similar. In a nutshell, all that should available locally is the downloads folder - everything else is done via Google Drive & DriveFS.

Go to wickes/B&Q and pick up an electrical tester for a few quid, they'll tone out live cables without having to probe anything; https://www.wickes.co.uk/Non-Contact-AC-Voltage-Tester/p/276107

Can anyone provide a ballpark figure for Netsupport Notify costs please? Need to figure out if it's a possible go for us, have already requested details but need figures ASAP. Cheers

That's the ticket, cheers

Feels like such a daft question I should know, but I'm lost! Just want to create a report in Smoothwall that shows me pretty much what the realtime logs show - give it a client IP and get a list of browsing activity back, blocks, categories etc. Is this possible or do I just have to use the realtime viewer and click the Pause button whilst giving it a timeframe?

Indeed, but these aren't houses - we're running schools and cliche as it may be, what we do has an effect on the lives of others - as a result we have a responsibility to do as much as we can to make it reliable, keep it running at a decent cost and also bear in mind liability. If I had a chinesium device installed in a cab and it went up due to a manufacturing fault causing untold damage, there's not going to be a single person in Shenzen or the Temu factory it came from that will give two hoots. Not saying the device you posted was that bad, and it doesn't just cover those devices either - some quite well known battery brands (DCS in Australia, anyone?) ended up in hot water because their devices were just not cutting the mustard or outright unsafe.

Point taken on "just comms cabinets" but don't you want control or basic logging? Don't you want to be able to detect possible issues before they come major problems such as persistent voltage problems, brownout frequencies, spikes etc? Ok the shutting down devices was aimed at servers, but we've all seen plenty of random crap stored in those comms cabinets over the years but even so some higher end switches will take command from UPS and vice versa to safely shut down or even adjust things like PoE budget to suit (keeping certain ports powered but not others). I said nothing about a preference for acid batteries - there's plenty of modern lithium ones, I would prefer ones that are not chinesium however - your post came across rather condescending considering you were plugging a camping battery.

Air 2s I believe are too old. I think you can force them to play ball if you want to faff with an older version of Configurator but I found out the hard way it was just down to age and ended up chucking the devices (Had exactly the same problem)

no Vorders, Rachel Riley or Susie Dent? Count me out.

Yes but it's not the same thing is it? If I found one of those in any commercial or educational setting I'd laugh it out of the building - as would anyone carrying out any sort of IT audit. No control, logging, no smart behaviour for shutting down devices, no nothing. It's for boiling a kettle whilst camping on the moors, not powering system critical systems.

Just don't cheap out on them like I did - figured with the specs that the 400VA APC Back-UPS would suffice. Forgot to factor in the raised current draws at reboot on switches with larger PoE budgets which throws the UPS into a hissy fit of beeps and non-powery-function.

Toner particles are quite nasty in volume. One device in a room you can get away with as long as it's ventilated and not used by other people all the time (like a small office). Multiple devices = straight no. It would need active ventilation at the very least.

I honestly have to question if any company would have actually plumbed in 80 million over 2 years into their sinking ship? Do they honestly believe they will claw that back? (outside of legal fees of course). At this point they could rebrand under the name Oceangate without any sense of irony...

Yeah, if I recall 1920x1200 was designed to best view 2 sheets of A4 (or letter) side by side but 1080 won over because films/consoles or something Might just be worth trying to enforce 1080 by software. Also have you had any luck trying different USB C cables? (if the ones on your docks are changeable, our HP ones are and can be sensitive with cables that aren't the original HP supplied ones)

By "New" resolution you mean "Proper" resolution (1920x1080 is an abomination, and many people rejoice that the correct resolution of 1920x1200 is making a comeback!) Each faceplate is adding a load of interference to your cable runs - eliminate them where possible. Try lowering the EDID version of the display to 1.4 and see if that makes a difference.

Well, this is Pearson - everything they say should be taken with a pinch of salt, which you must assume is actually pepper

All being overthought surely - none of that is required. https://support.pearson.com/uk/s/article/Pearson-Onscreen-Platform-POP-Delivery-methods

Going very off topic but if you're buying a car with a wet belt, you're part of the problem

christ, what? Out of interest, why? It was bad form in Windows 7, mostly decided it shouldn't be a thing any more in Windows 10 and absolutely shouldn't be done in this day and age - hence interested in what a reason might be to do it?

Sore subject. We were cleared for CtC originally (based on poor current provision as well as low OFSTED rating) then rejected right at the last minute, not long after the final round of visits & quotes from project leads & suppliers to do it all based on a technicality - we'd just been taken over by an MAT and as a different school, the OFSTED rating was null and void. (But it still mattered for everything else, absolute bloody liberties!)