mikes

Sorry to bump this very old thread but anyone else having issues? I have a better browsing experience on a home broadband connection most of the time.

Sorry for the incredibly dumb question Tefters but what Government audits have you had? I work for an LEA school in Wales and since 2008 we haven't had a single audit at all - except for a 2 page Google Sheets self filled in Questionnaire that had fairly simple questions (such as do you have off-site backups - it certainly didn't mention wifi5 vs wifi6!) Our LEA do manage our Switches, Firewall and Broadband so perhaps this may be why?

OK I stand corrected - either I have got my editions wrong or they have changed it - I remember we had a laptop that did not work via DirectAccess because the version did not support DA, and once we changed the license key and hence the version, it then did work. This was within 6 months of Win 11's release however

Just to warn you, our old NM was wowed by the promise of a new print contract, we were in the middle of an existing contract but they said they could handle that no worries. But by the time the new print system had been installed and we had to get out of the old contract - suddenly that was our problem and the NM was left carrying the can He didn't get anything in writing, he said the sales guy seemed like a "nice guy" and so he believed him. I think it cost the school thousands but I stayed well away from the debacle so as not to lose reputation. So beware - do not trust anything anyone says about getting you out of a contract early.

I don't think Education supports DirectAccess (the old Windows VPN access)whereas Enterprise does - DirectAccess has been replaced by AlwaysOnVPN but if you were running a Windows 10 domain that uses DirectAccess for off site access, and you join a Windows 10 Education laptop to that domain, it will not work via DirectAccess and off site VPN access will not work. Enterprise Edition would work as it does support DirectAccess. So one thing to bear in mind if you still use DirectAccess

This actually staggered me when I first started working in a school circa 2008. before that I had worked in a very poorly ran IT helpdesk for an ISP (outsourced, ran by the same people who were responsible for the post office scandal if that says anything...) I was so sick of everything being ad hoc, mickey mouse, junk, that I quit and when I joined the school I was happy that I'd finally get to work in a well organized machine. I expected: A centralized government set up, with everything done the same by policy in each school (adjustable by needs). A well integrated/organized IT team. A good budget with data, software etc all being accounted for perfectly. I think you all know where this is going but you can imagine my shock the first week I started working there and found out what it was really like. No centralized solution, infact even no advice from the LEA or even from anyone at the school - the NM was leaving for greener pastures and so did not care, and so I was basically shown my office (which was an old girls toilet complete with toilet paper stuck to the wall), given a screwdriver and a box of old broken computers, told to assemble a workstation to use, given my username and password and basically left to it. I had no idea how anything worked and this was the first time I'd seen a CC3 network. It was literally sink or swim and the technicians they had hired before me had lasted at most a month. I asked why there wasn't a central government Windows installation with a government classroom MIS, govt GPO's, all that - you get a govt supplied domain set up how they require it and you do the usernames and software installs as you need them. Instead you are literally on your own to do basically whatever you want, as a result I've seen less than competent IT people waste hundreds of thousands of pounds in my local authority alone. Of course now I'm older I know government corruption would basically waste billions and deliver nothing...

What do you do in regards to machines that would run Premier Pro? We have Lenovo desktops at the moment but they have a similar or the same GPU as those EliteDesks (the Intel 630) and they don't really run Premier Pro very well and our head of IT complains about them. Having machines with a dedicated GPU would be nice but I am sure there are now Ryzen CPU's with onboard GPU's that are powerful enough to meet the Premier Pro / After Effects specs. Our problem atm is Premier Pro runs slow and the screen goes black on playback which seems to be a problem with the Intel 630/610 integrated GPU's I've told him that the school likely isn't going to spend the majority of its IT budget just on his one classroom but there we go... but when I first started working here in 2008 we refreshed a new room every single year. Of course that was before Chromebooks etc

Removing CC4 would be like removing dog poo from chocolate icecream - sure with difficulty it might be possible but would you want it afterward? I would go vanilla - We ditched CC4 in about 2015, so for us we are still running on site domain controllers via VMware, hybrid with Office 365 - but I know there's all this hoo-haa with new VMware licensing and there is now Intune which I know very little about. We are still on our 2015 setup (just with modern Windows Server and o365 e-mail) I am happy with our VMware Windows Server AD setup / hybrid with office 365 for the most part - although it is confusing for students with us also having Chromebooks so essentially having 2 different ecosystems (e.g. our e-mail is hosted on Office 365 exchange but the students use the same e-mail addresses to sign into Chromebooks - so they will sign into a Chromebook and expect gmail to work natively - which it doesn't - had to disable it and make them go in via webmail. If I were still running a CC4 network in 2024 (and had somehow escaped from Bedlam Hospital in that case) I'd definitely start a total vanilla network from scratch - just follow the latest guidelines. Installing and going native was MUCH easier than going from CC3 to CC4 for us. CC4 just did not work, when it did it was full of bugs that made things very difficult - I literally had to rewrite parts of CC4 to get basic functionality - I had to write a program to make sure file and print maps worked for example, and installing software was a role of a d20. Our NM went from CC3 to CC4 and it was such a disaster, that when I went from CC4 to vanilla after our NM had left, our school actually wrote me a letter thanking me about how smooth the process had been and about how little disruption there had been.

Yeah exactly, the photography company would normally just get the students name and the unique number. They won't be told if the student has any additional needs, at least not in my experience. So how are they doing this? by the way the student physically looks? Or perhaps it was a year group photo, and they had the choice to include the "special needs" class in this year photo or exclude it?

weird question, how do the students know? By the school telling them ??

honestly all this talk of landline voip reminds me of when they were building steam cars in the 1910's / 1920's (Doble etc)

Our damage on Chromebooks is massive, our vandalism on our Windows suites however is a lot less - we've always had vandalism since I started here in 2007 - I guess now the Windows suites are used a lot less which is why the vandalism on keyboards/mice is less. However our new desktops all have 24" LCD panels which unfortunately we have had a good number smashed - either by kids messing about causing them to fall over, or even things thrown around the room (like I saw a pritt stick being thrown one time!) The bigger LCD's seem to be a lot more fragile (bigger targets too) so we see more of them broken. The chromebooks are a nightmare, always missing keys, or stuff scratched into them, I think loaner trolleys aren't so good - other schools in our local authority are able to issue each student their own chromebook / ipad which I'd imagine would work a lot better, but sadly we were only given the funds to buy ~100 at a time. We've gone through almost 100 chromebooks in the past 4 years though a bunch of those are just general wear and tear e.g. hinges breaking, apparently the LEA suggests replacing each unit after 3 years (warranty expiry) but we don't actually get the funds to do this?

yeah it very quickly becomes a nightmare. Also the head of a department visiting your office out of nowhere with a new staff member who you've never seen or even been told about before, needing a laptop asap as their lesson starts in 5 minutes...

Am I misunderstanding something here, are people saying it is up to Classcharts to decide what is a breach and what isn't? No matter how serious it might actually be? So if our school gets hit with ransomware but I manage to hush it up I can just say "I didn't feel it met the threshold of a breach" and absolutely nothing would happen to us ?????????

I used my ZX Spectrum so much I wore out the video output port (it went all fuzzy) then it ended up in the bin :-( Loved watching those old "Computer World" programs, the world was so different back then, crazy to think it's how my parents experienced things when they were my age! Things you take for granted like the first episode introducing this funny new stripey thing that will soon be on all our products called a "bar code". What did they do before that, just rely on the stickers and hope people didn't change them?

Yeah we used a laser cutter/engraver to engrave a bunch of our Chromebooks, but we should have been careful as we etched the asset number/room allocated to on the units too! Which was no good when they wanted the chromebooks reallocated and they are now stuck with meaningless etched asset codes on them! We found coloured paint/pens worked better for asset ID's, the laser etching should be just for the school name, but laser etching takes a while so we usually just use the normal securemark goop. It goes look good though having the school logo and name etched on to them, but this would be very difficult to remove for resale - if it's even possible as the chassis would need to be sanded down!

I use Premier Pro but it's a pain in the arse for everything but the most simplest of incidents as you have to keyframe in motion, and the autotrackers are useless as kids walk infront of / behind other kids. Really SMT need to get a clue as to what is / isn't possible, a few years ago I would never have been asked to do this kind of thing

I'm old enough to remember finding the odd 1/2 pence coins though they were long out of circulation by then

Ours are a nightmare; I heard about a script that writes the hostname/asset ID and the logged on user into a google sheet every time one gets logged on with (preferably the IP address too would be good) - but can't find this anywhere - does anyone know if this exists? We have a special problem here in that our Chromebooks are supplied by and enrolled into the Hwb Welsh Govt system, but we log onto them using our auxiliary school domain - this means that the last username, last IP address etc does not get populated into Google Admin - so tracking who has last used a chromebook and when, is a nightmare. Same with Impero, their hostnames don't show up so we can't track individual chromebooks at all. I even thought about giving our Impero server a public IP address so we can at least see if any are used off site but decided against it for security reasons!

Seems O2 sensors are common on Festers, I had my top one fail, the ODB2 sensor was flagging up something about coolant temperature being incorrect, but the cooling system seemed fine - once I replaced the top o2 sensor all the codes went away. Tried to get the o2 sensor off myself and it was impossible, it didn't move, so I had to get a garage to do it in the end

I wonder if it'll be the usual - they'll force schools to do it, it'll be a massive disaster, they'll then scale back the plans for a few more years while saying "lessons have been learned"

Have you heard about some smartphones that fake details of sky shots? E.G. If you take a picture of the Moon, it actually swaps in a stored JPG of the moon? Someone took a photo at night with LED bowl street lamps and noticed when he uploaded it to facebook, each of the streetlamps were miniature Moons!

Anyone having more and more kids needing laptops for exams? We have a separate suite locked down like others here, it used to be 2 or 3, then 5 or 6, now it's 15 ??? Once one student has one everyone else suddenly needs one too

yeah I didn't think £15 for a 265GB drive was that impressive though I haven't checked prices recently; I know lidl do some weird stuff sometimes, watched a video by a music producer who bought a £20 Lidl synthesizer expecting it to be a joke but said for £20 it was actually had some decent sounds. If I go in I'm buying some cottage cheese I love the Lidl's cottage cheese. Plus our school has made it so awkward to just nip to the shop to buy stuff if you need it, it's easier to get stuff off Amazon as bad as that sounds

Got a lot of space cadets at my workplace already