synaesthesia

Having spent a bit of time recently auditing updates & security etc, I've noticed that our servers like to differ the version build numbers slightly. For example, they're all 2019 Standard, all fully up to date and in some cases absolutely identical, yet some are 10.0.17763.5458 and some .5329. Any checks for updates direct from MS don't make any difference, nor do restarts. Never noticed this before, is this normal?

At that price point, it's worthless. You won't be able to buy a lamp for it from 2026, so it would be wise to invest in a new projector now if you wish to keep with the bulbs, and as it's a really old projector, you'll be able to get a far better spec second hand for half the cost on fleabay or facebay.

From experience, Ubiquiti kit is great and can make all the difference in certain situations. For a primary school as an example, the difference in cost between them is large enough to warrant keeping a spare to hand just in case and replace all staff laptops. The early batches of PoE switches had dodgy power supplies which have now been fixed. In a secondary however it's going to be down to risk management/mitigation and the big thing for Aruba (or other enterprise grade kit) is going to be lifetime warranties and support. You can middle ground for smaller schools with the likes of Cambium as has been mentioned, but it's really worth the greater investment especially with the features mentioned that provide redundancy, performance and peace of mind. I still highly recommend not going near Aruba Central for switch management, even several years in it's just not even close to being suitable IMHO. Stick to Netedit for basic management and keep it "in house" and leave Central for it's original purpose, the wifi.

Once - and it meant any future issues with those devices get written off and a replacement ordered. They're simply awful.

The only real way ESS can salvage anything from this would be to put their hands up and say "You know what, our migration procedure would appear not to be as solid as it should, so we've developed something to remove the apparently IP protected queries to leave an SQL database ready to be migrated with all fields and other properties intact." It's not a difficult task, no doubt there's an automation to do exactly that without even needing an expert near it. Failing that, here's a tool which may help them.

Whats the ballpark cost for Cloudpath? With BYOD getting more and more difficult, 3rd party solutions like this might be a necessity. Even with the best out of the box solutions from the usuals (firewalls, wifi's captive portals, NPS, radius etc) it's being made so much harder by increasing security requirements, particularly whilst privacy rights increase and your average person is only just capable of connecting to a wifi let alone downloading a certificate, installing the certificate, trusting the certificate; all on a myriad of devices which are impossible to document for because the settings/procedure differs from OS to OS and version to version

Not something I'd really want to see, IMO you always need to stick with a known quantity. In your scenario I'd suggest something along the lines of UniFi or even the FS.com switches which are both far more suitable.

Sorry, slight hijack but "full of cope"? Am I getting old?

Since when has there been any sort of encryption on the SIMS SQL database other than what's provided with the SA password? What makes the tables in a standard SQL database proprietary enough to be considered IP? have we all been naughty people for diving straight into said database because in the time it takes SIMS to run a report, we could extract the data ourselves and leave enough time for breakfast, second breakfast and brunch?

Just makes me think of this!

ESS/SIMS couldn't set a story straight if they were reading from a book with a ruler. They reek of desperation.

This is a thing of beauty. It's not far off the ability of some mid 2000 laptops - most of them could have pretty much anything added/removed including dedicated GPUs, but mmmmm. Best they won't be cheap!

V series here, just absolutely shoddy. The chargers supplied (large wall-warts) are too short and easily damaged, and the laptops themselves are built of the shoddiest quality plastic I've seen in a device. They're upgradable-ish other than the soldered in 4GB of ram. Their attitude to supporting them however has been dire. I would hope the higher end ones fare better!

Pretty much just the higher end Latitudes or Lenovos (L/T series, not the V series) as nearly all other devices have the keyboards part of the upper chassis, and I wouldn't recommend anything Lenovo these days based on their utterly awful support/service/aftercare/poor recent build quality.

I can't see that being feasibly possible short of Amazonian levels of staffing & infrastructure!

Not sure - there's no chance all hits are human vetted, that's too much work even for one school!

If it helps, one thing Monitor is very capable of is contextual decision making. So for us, as mentioned we have an on site appliance which is not capable of this (yet, hint hint smoothie guys! ). So for example, our onsite picks up hits for drugs, reports to DSL and myself as per design and then we need to manually check the context. By which time the DSL may have already spoken to the student. However Monitor has seen the same thing, seen the context around it, for example it's just one of many hits on a google image search for "mushrooms" and therefore does not need to report it.

Yes, used here in combination with an onsite appliance

Yeah, it's really intuitive to set up & use, extremely popular so support is easy as pie and generally just works! Easy to self-host if you don't mind farting around with the SIP setup (which isn't difficult) and equally easy to find a provider that will host and support you with it too.

Worth keeping an eye out on refurb outlets for ryzen bazed laptops - might be a little pushed at that budget but might find a 3 series with an iGPU more than grunty enough for those games. Might even be worth dropping ICT Direct a line!

I don't think I'd ever be happy using Bromcom just on what they've pulled, however it's good to recognise what they (and Arbor) have achieved in a comparatively short time when SIMS has had the monopoly for so long - and SIMS has certainly never had a "stable, fast period" for any of it's "cloud" offerings.

Well, if they can't make money selling an old product, maybe they can do it by suing those 3rd parties and schools...

I (as do most of us, I imagine!) wish! Still, like what a plumber charges - just because what's what you're being paid, doesn't make it what you're worth.

£40 cash for an experienced member of staffs time (an hour) to discuss IT... Pretty much confirms how valued IT and it's staff are within the DfE. I mean, if they were going to pay for an IT suite or even a couple of chromebooks maybe...

Only for accounts accessing sensitive data. You could, with care, run secondary with a single login (under the context of those standards, although it would obviously fail immediately on safeguarding)