mikes

Bear in mind do your office staff update the gender and pronoun fields ?? Our office staff do not - the pronouns fields are totally unused, and our gender section is never changed - we have many transgender students who will have their preferred name changed e.g. from Ellen to Elliot, but their legal name stays their deadname - and although they may identify as male now, their gender remains female. This is never updated in SIMS, I am not sure why - an age thing or an exams thing I have been told. So be wary and check your SIMS data if you are running reports based on gender using it - it may well pull up the wrong gender and if you use legal instead of preferred name you might end up deadnaming somebody. I have had a nightmare with our poor transgender students there will always be some system that is pulling up their old name from somewhere!!

We've had problems in the past with reverse DNS and DKIM, that said Schoolcloud which are an entirely external system to us, we've had problems with e-mails going to btinternet addresses via them. I suspect they have some fishy rules set up. We are having trouble with NHS Wales addresses atm, e-mails going into a black hole. I really think e-mail is past its prime tbh considering how important it's getting.

Our problem is staff not understanding that Windows software may not run on Chromebooks... I guess we are so far into the future now that the days of each model of computer running their own bespoke software, is something that only old men like myself remember. They did one exam on the Chromebooks in the Hall, because it was a webbased client, and I simply set the page to open up as a second tab once they'd logged on. Took me 5 minutes to do in the Google console while the children were busy setting into their seats. Problem is 6 months later I get a call to do another exam in the same way. Only this exam required the WJEC secure client to be installed on Windows machines, and there is no other way. I'm reading the instructions and the kids are sitting down and I start to sweat as I realise this is not going to work... The teachers seem to think I am lying to them or something as "well this worked last time" "it worked this way in my friends school". Now they have a webclient thankfully. But I really think there should be an actual computer basics course available for both students and staff. I'm not talking about making spreadsheets in Excel; I'm talking about basic computer concepts such as different Operating Systems, File Types, File Systems and how files are stored, things like that. E.G. about how computers are not magic, they use physical laws, and if the button you have always pressed that says "Show attendance results" has now disappeared since the update, and a new one has appeared that says "Display attendance results" - it might just do what it says and there is probably no need to sit around in a panic for 25 minutes while people need those attendance results just because you can't get hold of IT. Look at how much harm this has caused because people didn't understand where their data was being stored (e.g. this celebrity photo fiasco where they didn't realise those pictures weren't actually physically stored on their iphone, but were located in a data centre where any minimum wage could type in their name and see them..)

Hi guys not sure of the right place to put this, we have been getting odd issues with our network - I think it started when we had new switches fitted by our LEA but can't be sure. I get the odd issue with staff complaining about network dropouts; and the symptom I get is this: My workstation will lose connectivity to certain servers eg. DomainC-02 - I'll lose my RDP connection and pings will time out for 3 ping attempts. But I can ping other servers fine and connectivity stays up. However the odd thing is that other workstations around the site, can continue to ping the affected servers perfectly fine - they won't lose any packets. Also the time I will lose ping connectivity (to say DomainC-2 and Domain-C1) is usually the same time but one can be a few seconds earlier than the other, or one might stay down 5 seconds longer than the other etc. Also these servers are virtual servers, and I will lose ping traffic to say 2 of the servers on that vhost while 5 other servers on the same vhost are fine so it's not a vhost issue? When the ping from my workstation drops out to the affected servers, I can have a ping running from the servers back to my PC - the pings outbound to my PC go through but the Milisecond response time shoots up to ~200ms instead of 1ms for the period of 5 - 15 seconds or so that this happens. Our switches are run by our local authority so it limits the diagnosing I can do, however they say they see no problems with the switches so I am stuck there. (We also have issues with non-workstations e.g. voip phones and printers taking 5+ minutes to obtain DHCP leases, and our voip phone setup often phone calls will be silent for the first 7 seconds but these may be unrelated) We have Aruba switches, anybody know what might be causing this?? It's a hard thing to even search for describing it can make me go round in circles

Did you figure it out? On friday half of our servers and even my local workstation/laptop stopped accepting logins, it just says the login failed - originally I poo poo'd because I thought someone had hacked the admin password - but logging on locally via VMware worked fine, plus if I reboot the machine I am using to connect from, it'll let me reconnect but randomly it seems to stop working again. Baffled as to what is causing it we did swap the PSU in a faulty switch around the time it started happening but I really can't see how the two would be related

I ended up going back to work rather than getting a sick note, the first 3 days were a struggle but today I felt better. Unfortunately I have spread it to my boss the assistant head as we did some work together on my first day back, and some of the office staff weren't sounding too good today either. On my first day back they said as they'd had covid in the past few months, they would be immune from catching it again, but I guess there are new strains?

yeah 3-G is right, I have seen SSD's slow computers down to a crawl - even if it was plugged in as a secondary disk and Windows shouldn't really be accessing it. One time in work after a half term, my workstation ground to a halt - it would take 20 mins to boot, 1+ minute to open a browser window etc etc. Checking eventlog revealed drive errors. Replacing the SSD fixed the problem. But, if I ever plugged that faulty SSD into another workstation, even as just a 2nd drive, that entire computer would again grind to a halt - take ages to boot etc. I think Windows tries to index the 2nd drive and it just hangs timing out waiting for r/w threads. I think this didn't happen with a USB-SATA converter so I used that to get the data off (it might however have just been that the SSD hadn't been used all weekend so ran quicker - I noticed that the faulty SSD would run OK for about 10 minutes if it had been unplugged for a few days wierdly)

Our symptom was one day our attendance officer sent out the usual absenses, and then at 2pm she contacted me to say - she hadn't had a single parent reply to her about them, which is odd as usually it's 5 - 10 every single day. So we tested, outgoing mail were sent OK, but if we replied to those mails, nothing would show up in SIMS intouch. So the fact that every single one of your outgoings are failing, it's either something with their backend, or have you checked the SIMS intouch module settings "test e-mail" button? Our data manager had a login for the ESS SIMS support forum and I posted on there, basically in a day the e-mails were coming in and they got back to me saying there'd been a backend issue. Since then our intouch have been going out fine (other than the hotmail/sky/yahoo addresses blacklisting the intouch outgoing address as spam... you'd hope that if this happened, ESS would have a secondary mailing address/server they could send from instead of just junking the e-mail....)

I caught it on the 6th March, first time I've ever got it. My boss and mothers friend had it too, wonder if a new spike is going round. And to make things better I'm still testing positive a week later and the school are whining trying to get me to come back in even with a positive test saying after 5 days it's fine?

Is this with Intouch, we had an issue with incoming mail not showing up, we had to file a ticket with ESS

We had this a few years ago, and we had to just wait a month or so before Google, Hotmail etc unblocked us. Check the blacklist on mxtoolbox and it should tell you more information. It caused havoc with staff who needed to send "important" e-mails to gmail accounts etc but there was nothing I could do. Google just sent me to an FAQ page about how to set up mass mailers. On this subject does anyone use SIMS Intouch? We are finding a lot of our e-mails sent via Intouch get rejected as spam from Yahoo and Hotmail accounts

Sounds a good idea but I worry if this was implemented, suddenly half our year 11's would be mysteriously ill on the day of the maths GSCE

a 4K display on a 13" laptop would need display scaling on to be usable but it would look much nicer and crisper than a 1080p or less display at that screen size. Unfortunately though you get some software that doesn't scale well, so for a teacher they might load an old SIMS module only for it to be tiny. Anyway for me I really need a 4K resolution screen to be properly productive. I have 3 1080p screens here in work, at home I have 1 4K 55" and 1 1080p 32" (I prefer big screens being sat a bit further back) - at home I find I can be much more productive purely due to the 4K screenspace. Of course for teachers they all require laptops and tbh I think 1080p is fine for most of them

We had this issue when our onsite clients couldn't contact our NLS server, have you checked this? Certificate expired maybe?

Well, they ruined Sprite, by making it half diet. There was already diet sprite if you needed it, now "full sprite" has that horrible chemical diet taste too. Just waiting for the rest of them to be ruined

Hi all, we have a few foreign students who don't have good English skills, same with their carers, we have been using Google Translate and other methods to communicate. However we have started using SIMS Intouch, but whenever we get a message that isn't in Latin script (e.g. cyrillic characters) the message just comes up as ??? ?????? question marks? Even running an Intouch Report brings up the ???'s so we cannot translate the messages at all. Does Intouch really not support Unicode, is there a way to get the original characters at all?

This is what I thought would happen but we don't have a single person in the school who speaks any Russian/Ukranian (we also had Turkish speaking refugees too). So the poor kids are in a school where they don't speak any of the native language, they have to go round with Chromebooks and have to speak into the Google Translate function to communicate with anyone! and auto-translate any of the classwork set for them. It's a good job this didn't happen 10 years ago back when everything was paper based and there were no chromebooks! I guess one advantage of the Chromebooks is, they can translate into any language, one of the Turkish and Ukranian pupils are friends so they can translate Russian --> Turkish and back again. But I would have thought we'd have a human translator whom the students would share a class with? (I guess for different year groups this wouldn't work so much). The translate function is pretty good but sometimes it can be hard to communicate with and understand natively born pupils who are speaking English - so there can be some challenges sometimes.

Our external 3G pitch lighting is controlled by our LEA, and our office get them to set up the times we need the lights on after school as we hire it out to external customers. Only problem is they neglect to turn on Daylight Savings Time compensation, so often when the clocks change, the customers will be in the middle of a game, and the lights will all shut off an hour early, because they put in the correct 6pm - 8pm timings but the internal clock is an hour out

Looks like we had this too with Lenovo laptops - I'd install the driver and it would work for a bit but then the laptops would stop allowing brightness changes! sounds like a bug Impero should be able to fix ?

We don't have SOLUS here, something about our LEA not wanting to pay for it - is it true SOLUS is a paid extra or am I being told lies and the LEA just don't want to set it up? We had to install SIMS manually on every laptop and then manually upgrade every single laptop every time there was a SIMS upgrade. But I wrote a batch file I can run via Impero, simsapplicationsetup.exe /S {QuietMode} (it needs simsmanualsetup.exe and SIMSAMPARKSetup.exe too), you could also add the connect.ini into the batch file if needed. It's not ideal but I can select any needed client in Impero and run the batch file, and it'll install SIMS. If you have SCCM you could probably create a custom Application for it, not sure if it'd work well though.

Hi guys we have been running Impero since 2019, it now takes up 80GB - mostly logfiles and backups of logfiles. I can't find a way to clear them however and Impero recommends not messing with the file structure. I removed all of 2019/2020's iLog files to save space but it didn't make any difference to free drive space, it just seemed to shuffle the actual ilog files around on the HDD for a bit. Same with the backups, we have 5 of the backups, but there also seem to be a different Data backup that is done daily, it only takes up 50MB but every day this adds up to 30GB+. I can view a list of these backups and can restore to them, but there is no option to delete them. Can I just delete all but 2022 of these backups directly from the drive? or is there another way to free space? After I Removed 2019/2020's iLog files in the UI, I manually deleted the corresponding files from the HDD but now realise I maybe shouldn't have done so, anyone know if this will cause problems? Also one other thing, we've had a strange issue where the Impero server causes massive SAN reads/writes, every hour, for an hour, then the next hour is quiet. So we get an hour with our SAN being hammered, so much that using other servers is visibly slow. Then after that hour everything quietens down and is fast again. I haven't been able to narrow down further what causes this (as I've been clearing ilogs it hasn't happened today so hopefully that was it) - has anyone else had this? We've had this issue for a year or two now, random performance problems at various times (even during the evening and at night when nobody is using the system) - only now have I narrowed it down to our Impero server. I was hoping maybe clearing some logs might make it go away?

You can trace where a loop occurs by logging onto the switch and checking which 2 ports have massively higher packets than the others. That said it can be very difficult to log onto the switches in the first place when a loop has occurred. Prior to STP switches, we had a few loops usually caused by kids messing around (unplugging Ethernet to dodge RM tutor, then plugging them in wrong), since STP we haven't had a problem. Yes I was shocked when I found out too, it was that easy to bring the entire network down, luckily students never figured it out or we'd have had it every single week.

If you have a Russian list it would be useful for us too, our Ukranian students all speak "Russian (Ukranian)" which I guess is a Ukranian dialect of Russian? (our school bought Ukranian dictionaries etc in preparation only to find out they spoke Russian 🤣)

I've never heard of a school moving to CC4 in the past 10 years (other than some of the BSF ones back when), but 1 or 2 post every year here about moving away from it. We installed CC4 a year after it came out and it was trash. Much happier vanilla. And also I found the expectation that an untrained ICT tech could use the system not to be true also; the thing was so fragile it was always going wrong, machines needing rebuilding, patches needing to be run on the server; incompetent RM support giving bad advice... Honestly if I was a primary I'd consider just moving to g-suite and using chromebooks. They can all sign in using Classroom and do homework etc there. Though there are problems with web filtering / kid friendly browsing that need to be considered. I'm not sure what a primaries requirements are but saying that our feeder primaries can't be using Google as all our Year 7's barely even know what a user account is, same with left/right click, so they can't be doing that much advanced IT...

yeah check the doors are actually connected to the net2 system, make a brand new card and see if that card will open those specific doors. if it doesn't chances are the doors aren't connected and are using an old database