mikes

We have Entrysign here too and it works fine, their techs basically set it up and secured it, I had very limited involvement with it other than providing network ports. It runs totally separate to our network and has no access to it - unfortunately it means it does not integrate with SIMS or our door fob system in any way which is a shame. So you have to use your fob to enter the doors, then sign in using the Entrysign system, then if you are a pupil get registered with SIMS. But like PotNoodle we primarily use the Entrysign system for staff and guests/contractors anyway - and as doors are usually propped open during the rush periods you can't rely on door fob scans to keep track of who is on site anyway as most people will just walk in if the door is already open due to the morning rush. In an ideal world it would all link into SIMS or the door system but tbh with the Inventry vulnerability, (and the papercut one a while ago), for me the least amount of systems especially web enabled systems attached to our domain the better, so I am happy with how it works - I don't do anything with it really anyway which is how I likes it. They set up the OS, it is totally separated from our domain, on a separate VLAN

cool might join it when I get back from work. IT Tech in a comp school. Been here since 2008 :-(

I have a hisense, had a 65" A6G but it had a fault - every other row of pixels had a slightly different colour - so if you went into paint and flood filled in Cyan, it would have Cyan and White stripes. After 2 days it died and I got my money back. This was from Amazon. Few weeks later in Curries they had a Hisense 55" on sale for less than £300 so I took a chance on it, and it's lasted me a few years now no problems with it, I only use it with a PC and use external speakers but it works fine. Works well for FPS and RTS gaming in 4K. My eyesight isn't the best so a 55" is great for me, I played some Doom wads on my friends 24" display and found it very difficult to tell an Imp from a Hell Knight at more than 20 metres or so away - on a 55" I can see everything a lot clearer. It's an IPS display so the blacks aren't great and there is some backlight bleed but for the price it suits me fine. Will probably wait a few years for 120hz to become standard at 4K 65", or for MicroLED or some new standard to come out before I upgrade it.

We only block youtube for those kids who consistently misbehave / upset a teacher etc. Have a list set up so those students can only access Google apps no other websites. But for most students it is enabled. TBH If I check the logs for a day it seems most youtube videos watched are either football clips or clips of video games. Too bad youtube doesn't have a reliable category mode. And yeah I've had students whine at me when I had to block slope.io or whatever but I tell them, listen, I have no power here I just have to do what the staff tell me to do, if they tell me to block slope.io then I have to do it or get fired.

does it work on off site chromebooks ? we have impero monitoring keywords for on site stuff here, set up so that any concerning words will auto send a screenshot to the appropriate year group progress leaders - it was hard at first teaching them about false positives but otherwise works well. Problem is it is on site only

Going for a new domain was the best way for us - was a lot better too without all the CC4 bloat. We were hit with Emotet anyway a few weeks prior to that summer (the RM symantec A/V did absolutely nothing to stop it) so we basically needed to start from scratch anyway - new domain, vanilla windows, SCCM, pretty much replaced CC4 only doing a better job, more reliably, much quicker. CC4 is just a layer of bloat on top of AD/SCCM I really can't see the point in it. We got a local firm to do our GPO's, once they are done they don't really need to be messed with again. I hear now a lot of places are going remote with intune not even running local AD? (but this might be for those trusts who manage multiple schools where I can see it makes sense)

I like watching the aviation channels on Youtube like Blancoliero and the others and it seems there is a fatal light aircraft crash over there every 2 or 3 days... seemingly a lot of them are wealthy older people (or people doing it for social media), it's always caused by pilot error basically they get disoriented and crash. I thought there was a medical to fly an aircraft but perhaps for this guys form of license it was like our driving license medical? (just send in a letter saying "yeah bro all cool") And honestly the guy was one of the first astronauts, part of the Apollo programme, he went round the Moon - would you want to be the Dr to tell him he can no longer fly his light aircraft?

Had loads of smashed LCD's on the gen3/gen4 100e chromebooks, they are cheap but the older gen1/gen2 are much more robust. Prob replaced 10 smashed panels in the last few months which is more than I had to replace on the gen1/2 in 4+ years

Can you RDP in via IP rather than the server's DNS name? Had an issue where trying to RDP in via the DNS name doesn't work (ping resolves the right IP address) but RDPing in via the IP worked fine

think I remember an issue like this with a bad Offline files config - it was trying to cache network files locally but deleting them or something - this was back in the Windows 7 days though

yeah literally just robocopied it over the top. Not sure if this would work on a machine without it installed originally sorry, all our machines had last year's version installed.

We have a class doing GSCE PE now fingers crossed it all goes OK. They logged on OK and are doing the test at least. Edit worked OK all submitted. I just robocopied a new install onto all the old installs and it seems to have worked OK

Haven't found any use cases for it myself - not a powershell expert so I wouldn't trust it enough to run any output it gave me without thoroughly checking it, which would take me more time than just learning the relevant powershell myself!

In this new version in the system check - is anyone else seeing an FLV video test? in the old version there was just audio and video (mp4) which worked and work fine - but now I see an additional tab for FLV video which is giving me an error when I try to play the FLV video - but who uses FLV (flash video) in 2024??? The .bat file copying the installed one over seems to have worked at least to get it updated. Too bad the autoupdate doesn't work

Ours are stuck on the update loop, I tried deploying the latest version via SCCM but it seems it doesn't uninstall the old version and install the new one - it just shows "success" for the old one. File ages are the old ones etc. I'm trying the method now using a batch file to just copy a successful manual install over to the other computers via Impero. Problem is it doesn't auto update correctly even with the file permissions set; I was told in March about a GSCE today in an IT room but Surpass have updated the client just a few days after that e-mail, I forget about this exam today entirely, 10 mins before it is due to start they call me as it's not working. Done on paper instead as God intended. But will see how this manual bat copy worked, I have an old bat so it looks like I resorted to that method in the past it seems

yeah exactly what exactly are us schools supposed to do? we kind of have to trust these data processors or we can't use any of the software they supply. So we should just get rid of all the cloud apps entirely and go back to entirely on prem document storage everyone using shared drives with MS office and on prem SIMS db and nothing else at all? It sounds total BS to me. And regarding how we determine how trustworthy a data provider is, how exactly Roberto do we determine that? will they show us their internal processes so we can see how they handle our data?

Bought 2 replacement screens off Amazon £30 each but unfortunately each one had a bunch of dead pixels in a certain spot. (same spot on different chromebooks so it's not the wiring). And now had another one smashed just handed in from a tiny little Year 8 EAL girl who would definitely not have done it on purpose But they are all the new Gen 4's the only Gen 3 I had given with a smashed panel had been done on purpose (student had been caught) haven't had any of the 100+ Gen 2 we still have in service handed in with a broken screen now in months. (edit just noticed actually one of them is a Gen 3 I'm not sure how exactly that one got smashed) So it seems to me the gen 4 does have a weaker screen esp. compared to the 1st gen / 2nd gen which look built totally different in design anyway. I checked out a Gen 3 screen that had been purposefully damaged, I removed the panel and it does seem the Gen 4 panel is definitely thinner and flexing the Gen 4 panel caused cracks to appear a lot easier than the Gen 3. I don't think the ones we have put in trolleys for hour long lessons have been smashed just ones that are used to travel with pupils but we have only had them out 3 weeks, 6 smashed in basically a month isn't great, I don't really want to go collecting all the old Gen 2's (which really should be approaching EOL now, half of them have missing letters anyway), remarking them up as ALN laptops, then doing the opposite to the gen 4's so just going to keep an eye on it for now

I was wondering if it either flexes very easily which causes the screen to smash because the smash seemed to always be slightly to the upper right of centre; or if the kids are being rough with their bags, throwing their bags around and the unit is getting smashed that way. Saying that I've just noticed one of ours is a Gen 3 which does have a different(ish) screen type so maybe it's just nothing. But yes the one I was messing with did seem to flex quite easily and didn't feel as robust as the old style Gen 1 / 2's, our Gen 2 screen type seems a lot different to the Gen 3 and 4. (i.e. different chassis type) I've bought 2 replacement screens off Amazon for £30 so am going to give those a go vs trying to sort out insurance for now

also when ours were newly fitted I found they got booted in all the time but since those kids (i.e. who saw them getting fitted) left, the kids who joined the school with them already installed try a lot less to boot them in. So we haven't had any damaged in years now.

Haven't checked ours locally but ours on the webinterface and on the ivms had no option to set a pattern just a u/p... but you can log in using the U/P on the device I know it's a pain in the ass to do it though compared to just drawing a pattern however. Doesn't the lockout time out, if so they'd have to use the u/p login for now? I am making backup users on ours now just incase...

So did anything happen with that classcharts breach? I never recieved any evidence of any of our pupils data going to an incorrect receipient so assumed I didn't have to do anything. But if classcharts can just say that it wasn't a ransomware breach if our secretary gets hit and all her e-mails leaked does that mean I can just decide it wasn't really a breach and the ICO won't care? or is it because classcharts are (or are owned by) a large corporation wheres we are just a podunk school which is how they could get away with it whereas I likely wouldn't? BTW I've seen shocking third party setups where access level security was non existent (e.g. anyone could access anyone elses data trivially if they tried) so always be cautious around this stuff.

Anyone having a large amount of smashed screens with this generation? Occasionally we'd have the odd smashed LCD panel of any chromebook, but of the Gen 4 but I've had 6 smashed LCD's in the past 2 weeks and we've only just started assigning them - and although 2 were anonymous the rest were from pupils who wouldn't do it maliciously - we assigned them the chromebook by name and they said the chromebook screen smashed while they were in the pupils bags and it's not like these kids with 0 negative points would purposefully damage their own chromebooks. But we loaned out loads of the Gen 2 and hardly had any smashed screens at all. I wonder if they flex or aren't built with strong back panels?

I was asked to put a contact list of our various departments on our school website, and I did so stupidly without obfuscating them - within 2 days every single one of those e-mail addresses had gotten a phishing attempt using a gmail account using our headteachers name (one of those "Please contact me so we can speak about something urgent") ones. Luckily o365 caught it. I don't know how much cash these attackers hope to gain, I think they must know education can be some of the easiest targets due to no 24/7 monitoring, some schools in our area can't keep a technician more than a month, etc

yeah all I know is we were paying a lot for our broadband landline and TV because we were on an old package, we were paying £10+ a month for a landline that only ever annoyed us with spam. They said with renewal this was no longer an option but they would replace it with a VOIP system that plugged into our router, kept our same number and worked in the same way. We declined it to save the cash but the cost for this landline option was something minute like £5 a month or it might even have been free but with usage rates if I remember. This was about 6 months ago now

I could have sworn I'd replied to this saying aren't ISP's doing this automatically due to the PSTN shutoff, ours wanted to charge £5 a month if that for a phone that plugged into our router using VOIP for calls due to PSTN shutoff. We declined, didn't need it. Did my post get deleted or did I forget to press send?