synaesthesia

Get your points and I'm the first to be cynical as you know, but still these are rather harsh unnecessarily. I dont like the self promotion either, hate the litigation and all that but this is a bit far fetched to moan about surely?

Re-read the times please - there's no conflict of interest because he *was* the head, and *is now* working for Bromcom.

Indeed; worth noting the dates on the post, as I'd hope not to see too many accusations of "internal shadiness" or somesuch. Bromcom, just like many educational service suppliers will always be looking to recruit from their target market to get the best knowledge possible.

Right up my alley, no bugger to play it with though But still, I do prefer the real things! Picked up a C64 with disk drive, tape deck last week to add to my collection! Currently this comprises: C64, Vic20 Amiga 500,600 ZX Spectrum 48k, Spectrum 3+ 128k, Sinclair QL BBC Master 128 Atari 800XL, 1040STE Amstrad 286 Laptop, RM Notebook 300 386 laptop Various spares, odds and ends and always expanding

I honestly am starting to wonder if ESS ever will have a cloud offering; it's going to be an extremely hard sell to tempt people away from either of the 2 big players. Of course there will be plenty of schools who don't get on with their new setup for one reason or another and want to move away again, but even that's going to be a hard decision to make with such an upheaval, but how many of them would literally think "Ah yes, ESS, the company who tried SO hard to screw us and all their schools over have a new version - let's go back to them, things will be different this time!" Even typing that it's hard to justify why ESS continue at all, at what point would/should they just drop it and stick to the other products? The only real things they have left which are any good are just remnants of old systems that just haven't changed over many years. How long can a company hold onto something which is already figuratively covered in grease and wriggling frantically for freedom?

Sounds familiar - I changed schools a couple of years ago, after coming from somewhere that wisely got a load of Chromebooks which will no doubt be in service until 2030 (other than those which got used as frisbees by the kids), I moved to a school which opted for a lovely batch of Geobooks and Dynabooks. I'd love to say we've gotten rid of the last of them, but even last week I found a couple during a laptop hunt & amnesty. The dynabooks won't even take ChromeOS Flex, so their usefulness was zero

Ah bum - yeah if those are the DfE covid ones then indeed they're likely soldered storage. If you have time and willing then you could boot from USB with something like Hirens (that's now fully legal so hopefully won't get a slap for mentioning that) and then DBAN to securely wipe them, but that will take a long time. Physical destruction might be the way forward - or, could you not send them to your WEEE provider and get a certificate of data destruction? Most of the decent ones will do that for you, and destruction can either mean physical or software depending on whether they're reusing or not. EnviroElectronics, PRM Green/Restore Technology are two I've used and will provide that level of certification.

Geobooks AND dynabooks? Christ, you have been working through some e-waste! Depending on the model of those though, I believe the storage is usually standard NVME/SATA m.2, so for the few you have it's probably best to crack them open and remove the drives & either physically destroy them or keep them if they're worth keeping as spares.

Yeah, the only use any Geobook has is stress relief via percussive scheduled disassembly. Relieves stress, destroys data.

EEK! Yes, why on EARTH... Perhaps because SIMS is involved, subconsciously many of us would like to tell ESS where to stick their products so maybe that was on the mind!

Yeah, it came up in a Pingcastle run and had a hunt around everything that might use it and couldn't see anything obvious (but naturally I was wrong! )

Yeah, Alex from support mentioned that it would almost certainly be replaced in the next proper version of SW. He did find something but the text in that config file made it clear it wasn't immutable - a restart or update of Smoothie would put it right back to where it was, so just not worth the hassle. Happy for now though, but obviously that's one thing to look forward to Let me know if you need a feature request or anything raising for it.

Issue found! I had done some security housekeeping, one of the steps of which was ensuring NTLM v1 was disabled and v2 was enforced. Smoothwall doesn't like this! FreeRadius apparently only works with v1 by default (nasty) but the support guy I've been dealing with says there's a way around that which he's going to look into with me later

They shouldn't have any qualms with anything like Redstor or Veeam to online suppositories and the relevant encryption. To be honest they probably wouldn't give two hoots if you stored the backup on your personal My Drive, that bit was more aimed at general data security. As long as it's only ever accessible via methods using MFA I can't see it being an issue, but at least with the proper backup solutions you have guarantees about the services and SLAs covering both parties should something nasty happen. If a human error was to occur granting someone access to those backups on a google drive shared area, you'd pretty much be on your own.

A DPIA would go without saying when you involve your MIS and finance databases. Yes it's legal, it's probably only slightly less safe than proper backup methods but I wouldn't recommend it unless it's a one-off or a backup of a backup. However, ESS's recent actions make doing that a little bit of a grey area - yes you're backing up your data, yes you have an active license with ESS, but are *they* happy for their "proprietary" data formats to be sent to Google for storage instead of a compliant backup solution?

NPS isn't involved though, all accounting and Auth is done via the Smoothwall. Support are remoting in on Monday

I second this. Starting from the bottom as Dave Lister, working your way up through the ranks of officerhood to Captain Hollister, then the ranks of being - Skutter, GELF, Legion, the Inquisitor etc

Certificates crossed my mind, but everything is done Smoothwall end. The auth logs only show successful group mappings and don't seem to hold any relevance to the auth failures

Morning all! We've been using Smoothwall to authenticate for our BYOD from our UniFi network for a good year or so without any issues, however randomly a couple of days ago we started getting a lot of account lockouts and it was soon clear this was down to the users of the BYOD network. Removing the BYOD from our APs stopped this. I'm now investigating and I can't seem to find a route cause and therefore no solution - Smoothwall has been rebooted and updated since in the hope that would help but alas no. Groups are correct and haven't changed, firewall logs are still showing traffic flowing and marked as allowed on ports 1812 and 1813 when requests are made. The only change I know to have happened since last weekend are windows server updates, however the servers only handle accounting, not authentication. I can't seem to find any useful logs on Smoothwall to check for BYOD authentication - can someone point me in the right direction please before I try support?

Took me far too long wondering why the design & tech department would have something against that!

Maybe the "don't know" indicates surgery to remove part of the brain?

Well you probably still shouldn't be using 2025.... still issues that haven't been ironed out, even if you aren't using them as your DC. Just stick to known quantities, dual xeon silvers will be more than sufficient for the majority and don't skimp on the RAM. It's always good to overspec, but at the same time how many servers might you expect to lose in coming years with increased cloud usage?

hows that any difference to Teams/Zoom/Google etc?

Don't only use them, but as long as you understand what they are and don't think of them as a laptop, then you're golden. Just think of it as a browser on a box - and usually that's all you need these days.

Firewalla definitely does not cover the majority. It's not just about capability - there's responsibility too. Who can support it? Do they have a support desk, with what SLA? I, like the apparent majority (there was a recent poll) use Smoothwall. Lightspeed, Fortinet, Sophos XG, Netsweeper are the other big players along with some ISP specifics like Exa Surfprotect. That link is far from generic; I'm not just citing something and running away - it is in depth and links to many other resources directly related. The UK is subject to very strict guidelines, so they need to be as clear as possible. Doesn't mean it's always right of course! And I am only speaking from experience in the UK.