schoolsupport

A LGFL Network manager/Technician meeting has been arranged at Woodlands Conference Centre, Chorley on Thursday 3rd November at 9.30am. The meeting is for school IT support staff to keep them informed about developments in IT systems in schools. There will also be an open forum to give technicians the opportunity to discuss any problems with the LGFL/CLEO networks within their school. Please contact call.centre at the Westfield Centre to book a place and it would be helpful if you could provide them with your district and school number and your name.

Just to clear things up, we do not currently support Outlook Anywhere on the Lancashire Network, we did an initial pilot however as a result of the pilot the decison was made not to proceed at this time. Please if you have any queries about Outlook Anywhere contact The Westfield Centre.

A LGFL Network manager/Technician meeting has been arranged at Woodlands Conference Centre, Chorley on Wednesday 6th April at 9.30am to coincide with with ICT exhibition. The meeting is for school IT support staff to update them on up and coming LGFL and CLEO projects that could affect IT systems in schools. The meeting will include an update on where things are with MIDAS from CLEO and developments with the LGFL network There will also be an open forum to give technicians the opportunity to discuss any problems with the LGFL/CLEO networks within their school. Places are limited so please book early. Please contact call.centre at the Westfield Centre to book a place and it would be helpful if you could provide them with your district and school number and your name.

A LGFL Technician meeting has been arranged at Woodlands Conference Centre, Chorley on Wednesday 1st December 2010 from 9.30am until midday. The meeting is for school IT support staff to update them on up and coming LGFL and CLEO projects that could affect IT systems in schools. The meeting will include an update on where things are with MIDAS from CLEO and developments with the LGFL network including the new filtering software. There will also be an open forum to give technicians the opportunity to discuss any problems with the LGFL/CLEO networks within their school. Places are limited so please book early. Please contact call.centre at the Westfield Centre to book a place and it would be helpful if you could provide them with your district and school number and your name.

If you are unable to get any technical forums that you need access to, please let The Westfield Centre know about so that we can have the site reviewed to see if we can get it unblocked. The reason some forums are being blocked is because they are classed as web chat by netsweeper. Anything that includes 2 way communication is regarded as web chat and is blocked for e safety reasons because of the potential for pupils using chat applications. We do not deliberately block legitimate sites and if you make us aware of any specific problems you are having we can look into things and see if we can help. If we are not made aware of issues then we can't do anything about them Thanks Martin

Last Weeks Outage Last Tuesday there was a problem with one of the firewalls that was initially attributed to a memory leak and resulted in a loss of connectivity to schools. On Friday we noticed more issues with the firewalls which had to be restarted whilst patches to address the memory leaks were applied which led to the failure of the firewall. There has been an intermittent issue which has occurred approximately every 3 months since the implementation of the Cisco ASA LGfL firewalls relating to high memory usage and service outages. These issues were raised with the external consultant engineer who converted the original Checkpoint configuration to the ASA command set. ICT services were given assurances by the external engineer that the configuration would not cause any issues and that the reported high memory issues where a known issue with the ASA. ICT services have been liaising with Cisco who have been providing fixes and new software releases to address the intermittent problems and ICT Services focus on detection of the fault to restore the service to the operational state as soon as possible. However, during the recent event of Friday 10th June, the service could not be returned to a stable operating state and ICT services engineers had no choice but to undertake a direct extensive investigation which proved to locate the root cause of the issue. Over the weekend engineers from LICTS reconfigured the firewall as the issue was identified as a configuration issue which was causing the memory leaks despite the original assurances of the external engineers and numerous attempts by Cisco to address the issue. The firewall service has now been running for a number of days with no major issues and the memory utilization has been drastically reduced, resulting in improved throughput and greater stability. On Wednesday some schools may have noticed some disruption as an additional proxy server was added into the network to improve performance following the introduction of the new filtering. Whilst not affecting all internet connections as other proxy servers were still working, it did affect some schools, who, were presented with a logon screen for the new filtering solution. We will be reviewing the issues that we saw last week to allow us to minimize the risk of it happening again. The LGfL server farm is designed to work in resilient way, in this case the failure of the firewall affected both firewalls simultaneously. We apologise for the major inconvenience that the outages last week caused . Thanks Martin

Hi Can I just ask that if you are experiencing problems with the filtering please can you let us know the specific details so that we can try to address them ideally before schools come back. The switch to a new system is a major change and there are differences between the two systems which whilst we have tested the software with pilot schools it is very difficult to pick up all the issues that such a major change involves on this scale. At the moment we are bringing things in on a phased basis, with the aim being that you get a similar level of access as you had before under smart filter but will then bring in new features later on. With respect to primary school filtering we are not going to forcing schools manage their own filtering, they will still be filtered by a default filtering policy that has been tailored for primary schools. What we will be doing is offering those primary schools that would like the option to have a bit more control over the filtering the capacity to do that. Also can I clarify that we did not switch the filtering as a cost cutting exercise it was done as our existing filtering license was due to expire and we had to go out and look at the options that were available and Netsweeper best met our requirements. With respect to the existing white lists we have compared the white lists in Smartfilter against how Netsweeper categorizes sites and have added the lists in. However since we have done that comparison additional sites have been white listed and so some of these may have been missed, please can you let us know about them and we will see if we can get them added back in. Can I just add that the new filtering should ultimately provide you with much more flexibility for those who want it as you will have a lot more local control over what you get access to. It should ultimately speed things up as websites will be categorized automatically. Please bear with us to whilst we work towards making the switch as painless as possible. PS We will investigate the issues with the speed of scanning of the websites Thanks Martin

The presentations from yesterday's meeting are now available at The Westfield Centre | LGfL Technicians Meetings Thanks to everyone who attended. Martin

If you contact the VC helpdesk at the Westfield Centre on 01772 623222 we should be able to help this.

Hi Simon The meeting is open for anyone who looks after Lancashire school networks, they do tend to fill up so if you are interested please book a place by sending a mail to the call centre at westfield with the school number of one of the schools you look after. The meeting will be going ahead and the cancellation of the ICT Exhibition will not affect it. Hopefully see you there. Martin

We will be providing an update on the filtering at the Network Managers meeting on 26th May and will make the slides available after the presentation. If you are interested in attending please contact the call centre at Westfield to book your place.

A LGFL Technician meeting has been arranged at Woodlands Conference Centre, Chorley on 26th May 2010 from 9.30am until midday. The meeting is for High school IT Network Managers / IT Technicians to update them on up and coming LGFL and CLEO projects that could affect IT systems in schools. The meeting will include an update on where things are with MIDAS from CLEO and developments with the LGFL network including the new filtering software. There will also be an open forum to give technicians the opportunity to discuss any problems with the LGFL/CLEO networks within their school. I would be grateful if you could attend this meeting. Places are limited so early booking is advisable. Please contact call.centre at the Westfield Centre to book a place and it would be helpful if you could provide them with your district and school number and your name. Thanks Martin

Please note that The Westfield Centre has no involvement with this, this is a third party company.

There will be an email going out today to invite anyone who missed the last meeting. Alternatively if you want to email [email protected] we will get you on the list.

There will be a network managers meeting here at the Westfield Centre for those who were unable to attend the first session at Woodlands on the 22nd October. The date of the new session is Friday 27th November at 9.30 at the Westfield Centre. There will be an update on what is happening on ngfl and a session about MIDAS.

Updated slides form the Lancashire network managers meeting are now available at The Westfield Centre | LGfL Technicians Meetings

Hi, we represent Lancashire schools ICT support serivces