synaesthesia

Seen it for a couple of ours users yes - both on virgin with a 200mbit connection with decent latency levels, nearly unusable or outright unstable regardless of whether they're using wifi or wired. The above may be a happier alternative to fiddling with personal routers.

Aha, great stuff, manyu thanks @cstreet!

Sound advice above - starting to get a few requests for addons for Teams too. Whilst it's a far more curated list of apps than anything on the Chrome store for example, they're not always going to be ready to use here as opposed to the US. I'm likely to need advice at some point regarding an addon called Polly for Teams - it's a globally enabled app (well it was) for which the online, paid for presence via polly.ai appears to be GDPR compliant, however the addon has a very different set of policies and does not appear to comply. I've said no until further notice to cover ourselves first on the basis that all data is stored in the US and the "we can use your data anywhere we like" policy can do one too.

Could be worth a chat with your leadership - perhaps something has happened that they're keen to avoid again.

Nope, doing it for the first time right now using Edulink - the cameras really are vital if anything, it does good for parents to be able to see who they're speaking to, both to put a face to a name, judge comments easier because they can see body language etc. IMO those safeguarding issues are pretty much void unless there's a chance of someone else appearing in the background - other students from your school for instance.

We're loving the chromebooks and actually looking forward to normality with how they can be put to use when in school, or even when not. Using office 365, they log into them using their office 365 credentials, go straight to the office 365 portal from where they can access emails, all the (online) office apps, Teams and of course the web and it just works. Filtering is done via smoothwall whether off or on site and very little difficulty in managing them. The most we've had to do to rectify a device is a hard restart (refresh button & power) and the most we're likely to have to do is a powerwash (factory reset). We're still Windows incumbent and likely to remain that way, we still have shared drives etc but are already well on the road to changing that. CV19 has been a catalyst - the suggestions of moving the majority of those shared areas to online was met with questions and uncertainty last year. If I suggest it again now, it'd barely raise an eyebrow. It's a very different way of doing things, and a couple of years ago I have said no. Even if we had to manage them with gsuite fully, create yet another account and manually log in it's too much, but like this it's easy, quick and hassle free. There will always be a push-back for anything new, and there's always going to be software well used and loved in school that isn't cloud based and won't work (at least not easily) in the way you'd like, but the people making those packages also know where things are heading. If they don't have a cloud product now, they will. Unless it's called SIMS of course! (and no, a remote session doesn't count ) It's worth getting a couple in, getting them set up, and if your office 365 based looking at having authentication done by Azure - that's not something I can advise on as our MAT lead Azure genius managed that for us but it makes life so easy and no doubt well documented. You need to be comfortable with it too of course and as has been said you need to be able to manage expectations with staff. Get those couple up and running, present to your leaders what you have, what you can do. It could be a no. It could be a gamechanger for the better. Good luck either way!

Oh, just dandy! They get even better.

If anyone gets the LCD panel model please post it here, it'll be very handy for anyone that needs to replace it. Likewise if you can't source them let me know the details and I'll do my best.

Difficult stock wise for just the components however it's worth looking at whole systems if you have the money for now (or credit) particularly if needing a graphics card too. For example, you'll often find the processor & GPU in a prebuilt system you need, swipe the parts you want for your PC, replace with cheaper & better available parts and resell the prebuilt.

Hmm, thats an interesting page - missed that one when I was diagnosing those faults but not sure if it applies to us as we're doing it all via the artist formerly known as Intune.

Ah I see - is the VPN profile correctly installed? quickest check if it's always on and device level is powershell cmd get-vpnconnection -alluserconnection

Lots of variables - ISPs and router settings vary often. "Port clamping" and family safety settings are the biggest culprits we've found on the staff members' router - and indeed we've had this cause intermittent connection issues rather than just not working all the time. We've also had staff members struggling as their connection is too slow (22kbps a record so far) or they have decent download speed but latency numbers are just diabolical - 500ms latency with a 12mbit connection isn't acceptable in any line of work. Fiber, apparently! Also some DNS providers seem to have a bit of a paddy, setting people to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 has often done the trick - again, a router-side job though otherwise you break things when they come back to work

Out of the Dell, HP and Samsungs we've had, they're all much of a muchness usage wise but the Dell and HP appeared far sturdier and therefore IMO more suited to the younger users, plus both had far better connectivity than the Samsung. Samsung's biggest letdown was lack of connections (which could actually be a benefit for younger people who might poke things) but only having the single USB-C for charging was a letdown.

Pull it apart and grab the model from the back of the panel itself, they will be a very generically available model. Take the opportunity to grab a couple if they're cheap enough - wouldn't want to pay any more than £30 each considering the worth of the whole device.

Ah sorry, misread. Certainly would be a bonus at the moment with so many differing devices going out! For our DT users at home we've supplied them a windows device for that purpose - not many of those spare any more of course!

Any reason you dont want to stick with 2D design? As the newest version allows licensing to work from home.

Why are you complaining, you're now getting more value for money out of the Geobooks now with extra preinstalled software!

Will take a look at that - not sure if its on our licence (A3). We have all internet traffic going directly out but just wanted to rule out the MFA as an issue - i may very well be overthinking it!

I'm getting mixed messages about handling split tunneling for our AOVPN. Currently it's working well for the majority but so many little niggles are keeping me busy. One thing I heavily suspect is an issue is the fact that all off-site traffic to Office 365 has MFA enabled in Azure. This works very well for email, however things like OneDrive and general office365 use whilst working at home connected to the VPN can be ropey. Selective split tunneling is being used, so the only traffic that goes through our network is traffic directly aimed at it - internal drives and services only. I'm reasonably confident that if I added all the Office 365 IPs and addresses to the split tunneling setup we'd get around this - but a) that's a hell of a lot of addresses to add and b) that puts a lot more traffic through our already busy network. MS are aware of this extra load of course and have guides for enabling only certain bits of O/M365 in split tunneling but its not something I'd want to go implementing in a rush. Does anyone else have any experience of this? Ideal scenario of course is that everything stays as it is, only internal traffic goes via our network but 365 recognises the device as being "in school" and no longer prompts for MFA after a timeout. Wondering if maybe there's something internal we can do as MFA works via an internal NPS server.

Really can't go far wrong with Wave9, nothing but praise from us here for reliability, service and attitude.

We're not doing it, I'm walking them though. Wouldn't normally go near it, but asking them to phone their ISP to explain something they don't understand when they finally get through after 2 hours on hold... I'm a human, I wouldn't want someone else to go through that - I'd rather catch COVID. Just to add, explaining fully what the issue is, what the settings are and what they do, and ensuring they understand how to change back should they need.

Yeah, we have that for those particularly bad cases, although we're trying as hard as we can to keep people out of school. There's already too many in, staff & student which undermines everything, and we've got it easy as secondaries. Primaries have around half their kids in which is smegging ridiculous.

Hi, I've spent the majority of the last week troubleshooting connection issues relating to our Always On VPN setup. 90% of our staff have absolutely no problems - a couple don't have good enough broadband (thought someone was joking when their fast.com report stated 22Kbps. They were not.) but ISP's seem to like putting a fair few blocks in the way. So I thought it may be wise to have a few tips here in one place, feel free to add anything that may be of use! 1. Disable "Family Safety Settings" - aka Web Safe, Family Safe etc depending on the ISP. This appears to be the most common culprit, meaning either intermittent connection or none at all. Downside is, particularly if the teacher has kids, no filtering but have to balance the means! 2. DNS - particularly with Virgin Media who on some connections appear to append some real ropey looking things to their DNS entries. For instance, resolving our website for a few users via nslookup brings up http://www.ourwebsite.org.uk.ourinternaldomain.internal ! Set the router or wifi connection DNS to Google/Cloudflare instead. 3. DMZ - putting the laptop on the teacher's DMZ is another good method of working around anything but please be aware, if using split tunnelling this means they have no middleman protection from their laptop to the outside world. Has resolve an issue on Virgin for us where we couldn't even get in from Teamviewer. "Protection against scammers" is a great thing but a PITA when you're legitimately trying to use it to help someone! It's been horrible trying to explain to laymen why these things cause issues, certainly when each ISP will usually have 3 or 4 different routers and 4 or 5 different setups for each, and not making it sound like you're trying to pass the blame onto them!

They are entirely unconnected and unrelated - all data imported from SIMS to FMS such as employee information is done on initial setup. Of course anyone sane would question why anyone would want to remain with FMS!

Input power usually. Had this before, as the voltage coming in was over 253 volts the power grid co were obliged to resolve it.