Griff

Just one to be careful of folks. We were using ParentPay through our old caterers so they used to get invoiced by ParentPay and we linked it to our systems. We changed our caterer and payment system to something else now ParentPay have invoiced us for a 3 year contract costing about £4,000 and they won't budge on letting us out of it. Admittedly I guess we could of made sure this wasn't going to end up falling back on us when we changed catering companies but having never had to pay for it or sign any invoices to suddenly get one... bit of a shock...more of a shock is how absolutely out of order they are being about it.

So I had this yesterday all our users were getting Default User filtering. We have Ofsted today so I spent close to 4 hours last night trying to sort it out. Updated Smoothwall to latest version, installed new IDex still nothing no groups being pulled in the end I created new groups in AD and added the pupils/students and it started working. Our previous AD groups were groups of groups which probably isn't best practice but I wonder if that was causing the issue. Been on Smoothwall since February not that impressed so far. From implementation to ongoing support its been poor. No communication about updates or new IDex's nothing.

Below is a script I run on my workstations here that I know will need SIMS/FMS etc. Someone at ESS gave me it a few years ago. netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Solus 3 DS" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=52965 netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Solus 3 DS" dir=out action=allow protocol=TCP localport=52965 netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Solus 3 Agent" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=52966 netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Solus 3 Agent" dir=out action=allow protocol=TCP localport=52966 netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Solus 3 Agent UI" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=8739 netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Solus 3 Agent UI" dir=out action=allow protocol=TCP localport=8739 netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="windows management instrumentation (wmi)" new enable=yes netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Windows Remote Management" new enable=yes netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="File and Printer Sharing" new ENABLE=Yes

My top priority here would be fixing the issues with SOLUS. In the long run that is going to save you bags of time, if you're manually deploying updates as well it must be painful. Your SOLUS issues could also be pointing to other issues on the network DNS, ports not open etc.

In an ideal world yes MFA for all is great.. but how do you implement that with students who don't have a phone at school maybe due to school policy? or maybe children who don't own a phone at all..we need to be careful that by implementing security we don't then put up barriers to learning. Sorry but in my head I am just picturing an 8 year old sat in a computing lesson trying to login to their Google account realising they need their phone its in there locker wondering to the locker the phones out of battery, we charge the phone etc etc etc 20 mins of the lesson is gone and for what? because someone might access an account with the most limited access possible?

I think you could argue that MFA for students is not really needed...CE is written with a business hat on. I was part of the DFE pilot that did CE for free last year with IASME that highlighted to me how they need to either adapt CE for schools or have a different type of certification for us.

Here you go bud http://www.edugeek.net/forums/security/221470-portsmouth-uni-ransomwared.html#post1896004

I use Nitro Pro for SAR work

I think I would use Quick Assist if its a large amount of desktops like that. For our school its only a small number of machines so I just shove them on Impero. I have used Zoho assist before which was OK. I know others use Datto comes at a cost though.

Arbor looked fantastic does everything we need just got to convince everyone here. Still not convinced by Bromcom I got burnt at my last school with them. Butchered our migration we ended up back on SIMS within 6 months nightmare experience especially after the go live we were just cut adrift. Normally they get a little punchy on these forums when you criticise them.

I updated our machines to 8.5.85 on Thursday so far no disconnects...

I am on 8.5.73

Play Battlefield2042 on it...oh wait no that game was terrible haha. I would probably immediately take a picture of it and send it to all my mates to get them jealous because they constantly one up me with their expensive rigs. My cat is interested in another warm machine to curl up on. Looking forward to seeing you on the stand at BETT.

Weird one and thought I would post here before I start trawling through event viewer logs. This happens maybe couple of times in a day one, machines will just drop off Impero completely. I have to run a remote script that restarts the Impero services then they pop back up. Things I have noted; - Randomly happens to all machines - Always when user is logged in - Happens more frequently if they are being broadcast to so we get lots of machines stuck in broadcast - We are running version 8.5.73 Any help would be awesome. I have asked Impero about it before but they were kind of stumped as well.

Here any personal device that gets used for work has to be checked by IT before its authorised for use. Part of that process is; making sure they have fingerprint, facelock or pin security (we do not allow pattern as i have heard examples of people tilting the phones to see the lines and guessing the patterns). We only allow the device to be used if its running the latest supported OS the manufacturer offers and staff are aware it must be updated regularly.

STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order is free with Amazon Prime at the moment really good single player game https://gaming.amazon.com/loot/starwars

Impero maybe your best bet. I haven't really looked into the cloud based stuff with Impero I only use it on local domain and it works really well, like many companies they have had their ups and downs recently its been alright but we have had trouble in the past with stability.

Oh hell yeah new cars, lots of young drivers its going to be epic. If its anything close to this season its going to be amazing I haven't been this interested in F1 in a very long time. I think the tag line for 2022 should be “It’s called motor racing"

Yeah Rocket is so awesome. Relay...not so much. We are still using Rocket here for all of our devices apart from Chromebooks they are going through Relay. I will hold out as long as I can before moving them all to Relay... I had a small sniff around for a change a few years ago but nothing impressed me as much as Rocket...maybe Smoothwall came close. I just emailed my account manager at Lightspeed to try and get a handle on what the future is with them..I have a feeling its Relay or nothing

I bought an Aruba 2530 24G PoE+ Switch in the summer we paid £774 for it

Dropped packets has always been an issue....

Apparently they have educationally pricing I am told but I am waiting on a quote. Works perfectly with RDP I use it with RD Gateway like I said 5mins to setup last couple of users I haven't even bothered to talk them through it just sent them the enrolment and when they login to RD it just sends a push to Duo app. Couple of other apps we might set it up for if we go ahead with it; 1Password which some of admin team will be using, Cisco ASA firewall for IT staff, GSuite, Office365 email. I know some of these have their own free 2fa but having it one app would be useful for us so thats the advantage.

I actually gave up with ROHOS found it difficult to get working. We are on a trial with Duo at the moment. Its more expensive but within 5 minutes I had it setup and had enrolment code emails going out to staff. It covers multiple applications so thats the angle I will use that we need MFA for multiple apps and that is seemingly an almost one stop shop.

I am just looking at ROHOS now - did you set it up with Google Authenticator and email out the codes? how did you find it? Thanks

There is nothing wrong with assigning statics don't worry about that, its just making sure you exclude them from the DHCP distribution and put them on Reservations. I am 100% sure we had a similar issue that you're describing and I think we had to poke around in our DNS a fair bit and found that the Server Aging/Scavenging was all out of whack ours is now 7 days on both and ticked on to Scavenge stale resource records.