mikes

Yes - we are using our own Google tenancy but our Chromebooks are enrolled by HWB. We also have a very few Chromebooks that are enrolled on our own Tenancy but these are rare pre-covid. (I entered the Smoothwall setup info into our own g-suite and these seem to show up in the logs fine too) Overall the system works fine but because we have our own tenancy where users are managed I was just worried I'd push it out where a kid would log in via Chrome on Windows, or on their mobile phones, and it would show up. The only Cloud Filter tutorial I have implemented is the Chromebook one, not the Windows one, IOS or Android one, just Chromebook. It's brand new so still messing with it but it seems to be working real well so far. TBH I can't see any evidence so far of it being on personal devices - all the usage so far seems to be school work or kids using it for youtube who may not have their own devices. As I leave leaver users active for a year I can already see a few leavers who haven't given theirs back! Long version and why we have this - We kind of have a weird system - we started playing with Chromebooks before HWB widely deployed their own system, so we had our own tenancy @ourschool.org.uk so kids got used to logging in using that. It was all managed by us and this is where we manage our usernames. Then Covid happened and HWB started handing out chromebooks enrolled onto our system, but as our staff/kids had all their work stored on our @ourschool.org.uk, HWB altered our OU so we could log in using our @ourschool.org.uk logins. They can still log in via hwb on the main page but it's very rare so when kids log into a chromebook, they don't log in on the hwb page instead there's a "Wrong sign-in option? Enter Google Account Info" button - they press that and log in via their @ourschool.org.uk which is pre filled in. It's a confusing system and had we known Covid would have happened etc we would have just moved to Hwb and likely will do soon once we can figure out how to easily transfer everything on our own g-suite domain.

Hi do you know what that flag might be? We also have a few that we have on our own managed domain as well before we started getting HWB devices via our local LEA. Just want to make sure it isn't running on non School devices. I followed the instructions on https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008478500-Installing-the-Smoothwall-Cloud-Filter-on-Chromebooks-using-Google-Admin to do the setup

Hi guys got a question for the Smoothwall Cloud team if possible. Our LEA are rolling out Smoothwall Cloud and it seems to be working well, our report logs don't show the device ID though there's no column for it - not sure if this is by design. We have always had problems with identifying devices due to enrolling them with @hwbcymru.net but actually logging on with our @schooldomain.org.uk Anyway my worry is - the off site filtering and monitoring is working well - I can now see students and what they are doing while off site. But my worry is - does this extension install itself on someone's personal device? E.G. ideally we want it to work only on enrolled devices not personal devices. I already tested it by logging into a Windows machine with my test 22mikes user account and it didn't show up there which is good. But if someone signs in to their own personal chromebook or android device, will it install the client then and potentially monitor their own personal device/ What I didn't want was it monitoring a students personal chromebook or if it did, a way to identify devices (we already give each of our devices a unique identifier in the G-SUITE based on the serial number and OU etc) Thanks guys. When I logged on to my Windows chrome browser on my school account I did see the Impero icon (it doesn't work off site though due to our config) - but I think I deployed that via USERS whereas smoothwall it was via the devices tab. Cheers guys.

I can see things coming up in the audit log now. Will do some more testing next week though as it's part LEA I'm sure they will have it in hand. Apologies should have mentioned we are having smoothwall cloud installed by our LEA. We must have been using some on site one beforehand. (LEA manages it all). Must say I am impressed so far this is much better than what we had before. Before we had absolutely no idea what pupils did off site on their school chromebooks. Just had it mostly working today so going to have some V interesting reading from the non school IP section of the reports.

Daughter gots to have the best vabe babe what would Lizzie down the street think of me if her daughter had a nicer vape? Do you want the other mothers to think I'm poor? I mean who cares about the science and the future LOLZ And my lil angel had more positive points than negative points this year so she deserves it /s

Cheers I may have already done something with those URL's as I recognise them (though it may have just been an allow for google only on chromebooks) as I haven't seen or had any of these ads reported to me at work. At home though I couldn't believe Google/Youtube would advertise basically Ukrainian Brides. And the ad I saw lets just say her figure was hub worthy. How many schools have Youtube blocked then? for students? We allow it for all years - TBH I'm wondering if it's worth discussing blocking it for under sixth formers. From the logs its mostly fortnite, boxing, football, and music that they go on. But I think there are youtube tutorials that they legitimately watch for Adobe and some staff say dysregulated kids do better with music on the chromebooks so it might not be feasible.

Luckily we had a large NAS - 13TB which is enough, still have 4TB free. We are actually going down on space due to the cloud - the newer users use it a lot more. Our system is a bit shabby though as we have two systems - a hybrid local AD/O365, and a totally separate G-suite system - so kids need two U/P's. Wondering what to replace it with. But storage is so cheap, I can back up our entire data (apart from the cloud) on a cheap bitlockered Amazon HDD that cost about £90, as a backup of a backup.

Luckily our smoothwall seems to block these scummy adverts. I use adblock at home but when I've used Youtube without it, I've had really inappropriate adverts I'd expect to see on one of the "Hubs" - We use g-suite here and our users are marked as under 18 here so surely Google shouldn't be showing them any inappropriate ads? -edit - didn't think about teachers though! I know it's frowned upon here but I have saved youtube videos and embedded them into powerpoints to show during assemblies letting teachers know these ppt's aren't to be shared - precisely to stop this kind of thing (or a troll post blocking the page, or the wheel of doom)

We have Chromebooks and the times we had "no Internet" etc upon booting them up, it was due to our wireless AP's - they had been installed with a cat6 cable that really does not do well with kinking - we'd have AP's slow down to 100mbps and flap constantly. Had to replace the cables and they worked fine. Can't answer the other questions sorry - our chromebooks are pretty vanilla as far as setup goes.

We had our open plan toilets and CCTV installed by our LEA who I imagine got the approval of the highest levels of the Welsh government, other schools have been designed in a similar way, the CCTV's only show down a row of cubicles so would be no different to what you might find in a large shopping centre. Our school was looking into vape sensors and while I don't know the whole details I was told they were way too expensive for us to even consider. Plus if you had vape sensors but no CCTV, what would you do? The vape sensor goes off, by the time someone gets up there the pupil has either gone, or they just say "What vape? Nothing to do with me boss". And I have overheard year 9 pupils boasting about what vapes their parents bought them for Christmas. So there's that.

yeah I dunno I am happy to lease desktops because they tend to stay in decent condition - we leased the larger sized ones for the specs. I'd never want to lease out laptops with all the wear caused by heavy use. We always bought outright in the past but this year we have leased the 2 classrooms worth. I wonder if other costs have taken over e.g. in 2010 when we bought outright, we never had any Chromebooks as a spend outlay. I'm only an ICT Tech so my importance here is hardly any!

Yeah I'll PM you the details of who we used, I don't understand the financials of it myself all of that is way above me.

We have just started leasing Lenovo desktops from a local firm here in Wales based in Cardiff. I didn't get involved in the finances/contracts or anything like that, I am just the guy at the bottom who sets them up. Can PM you their contact details if you want?

Did you mean the follow you print queue? could you print using that queue direct from the print server? Anyway glad it is sorted. We've had problems with the Chrome print dialog but there is a system dialog option that sometimes sorts things out. We also had problems printing from Chrome because I disabled printing on the G-suite to stop kids messing but didn't realise it affected people signed in in Windows too so they couldn't print from Chrome either - oops

They call this Tofu Dregs in China and it has caused collapses - especially when it has snowed and the added weight of melted snow has been too much for the shoddy construction. Some heartbreaking stories. Am I being an idiot and getting this wrong or something - I start a scam company that sells scam products. The products sell well as they are cheap but because they are shoddy they fail after 7 months. Company goes into administration/bankrupcy but in the meanwhile I get to keep the big house and jag I could never get wagecucking. Is that really how things work or am I being foolish? Edit - maybe I am being too naïve attributing this to lone actors with brown envelopes and all..

hmm I just made a change to on of our filter lists (ticked on a category to our ks4 list) but it doesn't seem to show up in the audit log. I only just did it though perhaps it takes time?

They can't claim money back from the scammers that "built" this building? our laws are seriously crooked in this country - but I guess they'll never change or how will those at the top benefit?

We run our own hybrid o365 system here and sometimes we have this, one of the services (not sure if it's the Entune one or something else responsible for SSO) fails and we have to restart the server, I'd imagine the problem is on their end. For us restarting a server usually fixes it. How do you find their support? Often they just refer us to our LEA...

Is this not misworded? E.G. We run the usual filters here, but there is still a small chance that adult content could slip through the net - no filter is 100% perfect after all. So I could say "I cannot 100% stop students from viewing adult material on site, no filter is perfect - something may always slip through" - and the press then say "Mikes school can't stop students viewing adult material on school computers" ? Though RTFA seems to suggest their filter doesn't enable safesearch on certain engines - but could they not block these search engines and just allow google's safesearch ?

Get this with pretty much every provider these days. E.G. cashless catering runs fine the first and last 5 mins of lunch/break but slows to a crawl in the middle. And because the UI is poorly designed - no local caching - every single button press introduces a 3 - 6 second delay which is infuriating with a fast moving queue of kids waiting for dinner. The cashless supplier - "It is your Internet connection, we ran a speed test it is incredibly slow, your IT needs to fix it" I get onto the LEA who are our IT provider - "nothing wrong you will need to contact the vendor". Can't find any evidence of any speedtest actually being run on any till and when I ran one speeds were fine, and the fact that the slowdown happens right when lunch gets busy (when our Internet usage would be low) makes me suspect the catering vendor but good luck getting them to do anything about it. And the gall of it, when we had this system forced upon us, I was told "it will be so much easier than managing it yourself because our support will do everything for you" :rolleyes: (Plus some of our LEA support seem to respond as if they are personally offended you are wasting their time every time you file a ticket...) Basically since covid esp. - get used to it - orgs have realised they can slash costs, provide a barely working service, people still have to pay for it right?

My issue is similar but I think unrelated, if we try a dual monitor setup - one with the HDMI output the other DP - it will be very difficult to get both displays to work - one of them will just be a black screen. You can mess with the leads plugging things in and out and it will eventually work, but it will break again. This was with Phillips monitors. Swapped one of the 2 Phillips out for an Iiyama monitor and it has worked fine since.

yeah there seems to be a lot of "Thou Must" orthodoxy and doing anything else is heresy... That said we are a split school mostly due to entropy I guess, circa ~2015 - 2017? the DT department started experimenting with Google while as a school we were all MS (AD and filesystems). While the IT dept started playing with Office 365. All I did was the initial setup (e.g. setting up AD sync, SSO etc) and left them to it. Over time usage of both expanded a lot (move to o365 and a lot more use of Classroom etc) and we've ended up split. It can cause confusion esp. with new students/teachers, essentially having 2 accounts to 2 separate systems that kind of overlap but not really. But overall it's not a bad thing, we get cheap Chromebooks from the authority, and surely it's better students learn 2 systems so they are not blind and confused when they start work and their workplace has a different system again e.g. OSX? One thing I'd look to do if people weren't already used to how we do it now, is to consolidate the logins. But getting rid of one half just because?

Doesn't seem the bosses of Thames Water had to keep moving with the times though, I'm sure they made more profit hence more bonuses and have any of them been penalized for it?

Yeah drove through Newport they used to have about 5 stores only 1 left in the city centre ! "Ghost town"

Staying at the same role for 70 years has to be some kind of record, how long was Patrick Moore at The Sky at Night?