mikes

It barely fits on my desk to be honest, but I have quite a long desk so I sit about a metre away from it. I have the font size set to 150% running at native 4K, I have a black background set so I can just have a smaller window if need be. I started preferring a bigger screen because in around 2017 I got a good deal on a 48" Acer PC monitor, 2 years later (2 weeks after the warranty ended) it failed and I couldn't find it again so I bought a 55" TV. Only issue with using some of the cheaper TV's as a computer monitor is some have a non standard pixel layout, or use chroma subsampling, so the image can be a bit wierd if you get the wrong one - but I'm using a cheap £350 Hisense TV and it's working fine for me. Using my work 32" is painful especially for doing video editing as it's hard to see details. But I am approaching 40 now so my eyes might not be as good as they were. Crazy to think my first PC as a teenager had a 13" CRT lol

Mind you a new school might not be great too. We had a new school built in 2019 which was about half the size of the old one, but we still kept the same number of pupils if not more so. So they are crammed in like sardines. And the new LEA managed eco-heating is so bad, or often just not working at all, a lot of staff resort to electric space heaters. I went from a decent office with natural light, to being inside basically a storage cupboard with a tiny slit window facing into the gym, like something you'd see in ADX Florence Supermax. And they had the cheek to say "isn't this office much better" because I was located closer to the main office staff? that's a downgrade not an upgrade to me.

I must be the only one using a 55" 4K TV as a main display at home - I find it so much easier to work on with all the space! At work I have a 32" main, 29" secondary and a 24" tertiary, but I'd much rather just have the 1 55"! I guess I must be blind ? My 32" is 1440p but it doesn't hold a candle to a 4K display

My job is actually Curriculum Technician whatever that is. But nobody has ever called me that in my 15 years here, I am the ICT Technician. On the form I haven't selected IT/ICT as that could be construed as the IT Teaching part, I wrote IT Support. As for the question "How well do you feel your employer understands your job role?", well

We (me and the head of DT) installed a ceiling projector, drilling the mounting kit into the roof etc. But we agreed next time we'd pay an installer to do it as the money saved really isn't worth it compared to the effort the work required (and the potential disaster that could happen if it goes wrong). The most I'll do is wall mount TV's with mounting kits. That said beware the cheapest Amazon mounts, we bought a floor standing mount for a TV stand and it is so flimsy that it flexes

Yep I know how you feel I've been here since 2008 and it gets worse every year. Going to get out next year. But we have Youtube unblocked here (apart from a very few kids whose parents have denied them social media), never had a call to block it, but I think the kids mostly just use it for non educational use (putting music on) so if they did ask me to block it for students I wouldn't really care tbh.

We are in the VOG and run our DC's ourselves, our switches, wifi and broadband are controlled by our LEA so our school is on a giant network with our LEA (all firewalled and sectioned off) but we control our own DNS, DHCP and DC's. Basically anything server side is our problem (apart from SIMS which the LEA supports) and anything networking is done by our LEA. We have access to HWB but we only really use it for the licensing it gives us e.g. for Minecraft and Adobe Creative Cloud. One thing that makes me nervous about using Hwb is that it seems the students show up similar to staff e.g. currently our system, a student would be 22SmithM and a staff member would be M Smith, meaning it is hard to send to the wrong e-mail. But on Hwb it seems a student and staff member would both show up as SmithM2343 and SmithM2112 for example? Our staff would constantly be sending confidential mail to students if this was the case if we moved to Hwb.

Also we accidentally had one of our laptops the students were using set to lock after 10 mins of idle time - if the student leaves the laptop because they are writing and the screen locks, the test automatically becomes "interrupted" and gets locked on the backend, and the exams officer has to log un and unblock the test. So beware of this.

We had this nightmare too we could not phone them nor did they respond to e-mail. So the poor students get panicky and we look foolish. They did not even put a notification on their website. Trash

Had a blatantly underage pupil post a video showing him blatantly being 12 or so years of age (nothing inappropriate in the video other than it showing his age) - asking older men to pick him up outside the school address. Found this out 3 weeks ago and the pupil has been dealt with of course but 3 weeks after a report was sent to Twitter the video and account remains up and still shows up in their search. Useless. This was an incredibly dangerous thing the pupil did and they just do not give a toss. Do Xitter even look at their account reports?

Disappointed to see it becoming payware but I can't deny it has quality most "enterprise" trash you'd pay thousands for doesn't have

Isn't PREVENT enough? it's a legal requirement so you have to monitor the devices they use. I had a parent upset at me in the past because the student did not have his own device and when he signed into the parents device, he had the warning about us being able to wipe it etc. I was told to tell the parent - if they are not happy with these terms then the kid could use the breaktime/lunchtime homework club. But as an alternative a few years ago before Covid when we were being pushed by an MS Rep and another Google contractor, when I brought up the lack of monitoring and filtering, I was told basically that should be a teacher/discipline problem, after all the person in charge of handing out paper shouldn't be getting involved if a student writes a nasty message to another student then throws it to them on a paper plane. And if a student brings up a p*orn magazine it wouldn't be dealt with by IT, but rather SMT.

Can't believe the advice is "Just go to work brah you'll be fine" I was very sick with it last time although not needing hospitalisation but my colleague's cousin caught it back in the big covid days and had the usual sickness. But this variant sent her to hospital for 2 days with breathing difficulties. I believe it's going around our school so I am trying to stay well out of everyone's way.

For me the whole thing reminded me of that Simpsons episode where Bart cuts off the head of the town hero's statue after hearing how cool 2 school bullies thought it would be, but that turned out to be "cloud talk" and everyone hated him for it. But really who would do this? did they know it was a protected tree: if not why just cut it down and leave it there without taking the wood? My friend has a wood burner and finds it far easier to take trees that are already "on their way out"

I know it's 2 years later but did you ever do this? We have a mess of google, Windows, HWB etc and were wondering if it would be easier to move over to Hwb.

Yeah I was running version 1 on Server 2012 and it would not let me upgrade. Spun up a new Server 2019, fresh install of AD Connect, imported the config, put the 2012 mode into "Test" mode (there is a mode you can set it to where it makes no changes) while I verified the new version worked. I had some problems with it not syncing domain admin accounts due to the account it creates not having the correct permissions but that doesn't seem to be a problem. Any problems you can just shut down the new version and go back to the old one - for 1 week anyway!

Vault is great - vault.google.com - lifesaver for checking chat, google docs, e-mails, I only wish it was easier to check version history of docs because kids like to chat using the same doc typing over existing text. You can search all data for specific terms just hope the child specified doesn't have a common name!

Yeah especially with all this AI stuff, before all this AI stuff hit the news I'm sure I remember in 2015 or so I was reading about some kind of automated image categoriser that could classify whether images were explicit, based on skin exposure, organ shapes, etc etc. But any search I do on it seems to bring up nothing at all. Mind you some of the things these kids be looking at these days you'll be wondering which category even to put it in...

There's an amazing amount of explicit things you can find on Twitter - and it would be impossible to block each one manually. We have had to block it for some individual students who were looking up inappropriate material but as our school has a twitter for PR we can't really block it globally. We have an LEA provided smoothwall and it seems some kind of "safe mode" is enforced but I was still able to find very explicit furry imagery on there on a student's account so it's going to have to be blocked for all of them now (same as Reddit)

To be fair at least it has all the keys

Been told "I don't know how it could have happened!" many times Laptop stops booting - open the back and water starts dripping out "Oh I may have cleaned it with a wet-wipe" 🤣

Hi guys looking for some perspective on wether our SAN might be on its way out? We have a Lenovo DE-4000H; with 3 VMWare Vhosts. yesterday afternoon I was in my office when all of a sudden the server I was working on via the VMWare console blue screened, and the RDP ones half I lost contact with - but others seemed to be working fine. Initially I suspected a Vhost had gone nuts but usually they should fail over perfectly fine. I checked each vhost manually and they were all fine but then each server had a black screen with DATA_WRITE_ERROR on it. I checked our SAN and it has errors showing Host Redundancy Lost 2 times (for both esxi SAN controllers) - and it is showing a drive failure. When I checked our drive management it is showing 2 failed drives all of a sudden - 1 hot swap one and 1 normal one. But in the event log all I can see is 21 Sep 2023 14:02:44 CriticalController FirmwareNoneLoss of host-side connection redundancy detected 21 Sep 2023 14:02:44 CriticalController FirmwareNoneLoss of host-side connection redundancy detected 21 Sep 2023 13:50:46 CriticalControllerShelf 99, Bay AVolume not on preferred path due to AVT/RDAC failover and tons of these going back to when the problem started. (I guess it only keeps 1000 rows of logs, teach me to not set up syslog or event notification...) 21/09/2023 13:48 Informational Controller Shelf 99, Bay A VDD repair completed 49188 201F 0/0/0 Internal 21/09/2023 13:48 Informational Controller Shelf 99, Bay A VDD repair started 49187 201E 0/0/0 Internal 21/09/2023 13:48 Informational Controller Shelf 99, Bay A VDD repair completed 49186 201F 0/0/0 Internal The SAN is back up and running fine now(but with 2 duff drives), and I was able to manually restart each vhost so everything is up again, problem is we are wondering what to do now - the DE-4000H SAN is out of warranty - each replacement drive is £500 each and stock is very hard to find. We are wondering - extend the warranty at a high price and get the drives replaced; or buy a new one and go through the work of swapping over the data? It's just wierd how the redundancy was lost on both SAN controllers when I check the cabling all seems fine. It is a mess in the server room Maths seem fit to use it as a cupboard and I saw a spider crawling over one of the power sockets so I wonder if that might be half of it... We were having electrolocks fitted on site at the same time so figured maybe some weird power issue happened though I doubt it nothing else was affected? Just wierd how both controllers lost redundancy which caused all our vhosts to crap their pants, and maybe 2 drives didn't come back up? (last time I checked the SAN was a month ago so I guess 1 drive could have failed 2 weeks ago and 1 fail yesterday as they are getting old now)

Sorry for being ignorant and old but what is S2D?? an option to share drives across servers but they are located on Azure? I just had our SAN crap its pants, 2 drives seem to have died at exactly the same time and despite having 1 more hot swap it caused all of our servers to crash and display a data write error until I manually went into the vhosts and rebooted them. Luckily as we are cloud based a lot it didn't affect too many people, 5 years ago it would have been mayhem. But each drive is approaching £500 and the unit is out of warranty so replacing it will be £££. So I am wondering what to do now. What is S2D??? storing all this data on a virtual drive in Azure? what is the latency like? I noticed when onboarding our e-mail to o365, Outlook will hang now when you attach a 20mb+ attachment (yes I know not good practice) so I can imagine user frustration with large files as our LEA link is pretty poor quality. Or am I missing the point on what it is/

Dear All, we are trying to set up new Shared Drives in Google for various staff tasks etc; our new Asst. Head has set up a shared drive however she wants various levels of access in the folders below. So for example All Staff will see the Shared Drive in their Google drive, but various staff may not have access to the folders below. However it seems (and according to the developers page https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/manage-sharing) - you can only set up folders like that in your own Drive, any Shared Drives the inheritence is mandatory - if BillyBob is given access to the Shared Drive then he will have access to any subfolders and files and that access cannot be removed. However the head has said in their old school there was a setting that could be changed to allow this - a setting I have been unable to find, does anyone know if this can be done? Or any other way of setting up a folder structure like we'd have in AD (various subfolders with various access) ? We would set up separate shared drives for each subfolder but I think with the structure they want it would be hundreds of them Thanks

Thanks, got it now! I'm having trouble putting in the wildcard whitelists such as https://*.googleusercontent.com/* - seems it'll allow site.com/* but it won't allow *.site.com (field is not a valid URL). Got some more fiddling to do (- edit yeah can't even accept the EULA at the moment) Might look into using Impero for it although my concern is how easy Impero might be to bypass on the Chromebooks