mikes

yeah quite frankly I'm impressed they sorted it out, I'd have expected an automated e-mail and then maybe an e-mail from level 1 support completely misunderstanding the issue giving you a boilerplate response saying you need to be in the UK to watch programmes! I am on a Welsh government IP address but luckily they seem to have whitelisted that already

Just a question do you know what's in all of your staff's mailboxes / documents etc? same with any shared folders? I am curious what other technicians do ! And yes my concern is phishing, data safety, as well as having it available in a centralized place! I've even heard of 2FA attacks now where they can fool a user to accept fake prompts now. I believe the user does deal with the e-mails and files the information in SIMS, it's just they then leave the e-mail in their inbox with this info in it. I don't want to wipe the e-mails and wipe any information we should have kept but the user doesn't want to go through 3+ years of e-mails either. Edit - and interesting that 1 year is a bit hardline, I've seen people on here say 6 months and one even said 3 months! (for generic mail folders e.g. inbox, any specially created folders the mail gets kept longer). 12 months I assumed was what most people had set ?

Got a q about staff members keeping confidential / CP related e-mails in their mailbox, we have some staff members who use their mailboxes as a filing cabinet rather than as a mailbox, one staff member has CP e-mails from 2019 - the staff member is a senior member of staff and deals with CP but should they have e-mails this old? I was planning to migrate to O365 and purge all mail older than 1 year but they cried havoc and that plan is paused for now. Just wondering of peoples thoughts? I am just an IT technician not a manager so officially I am a small fry but I can see this biting the school in the backside so I wanted peoples thoughts?

It's the connector itself, I've been getting some repaired under warranty by our reseller - the ones that don't look that damaged ; but the ones that look physically damaged they refuse to repair saying it is user damage. I am going to try warranty direct with Lenovo, but the USB-C charging port does show physical damage to the outsides of the plastic "line" that the USB-C slot has - does anyone know if Lenovo would honor this warranty or say it is user damage? It's a shame because the entire motherboard has to be replaced as the USB-C connector is directly on the motherboard, not on a daughterboard. We had about 10 fail last year, 6 repaired under warranty but 4 deemed "user damage" by our reseller and not repaired.

Same here it's the usual "don't worry you won't have to touch it, the site team / local authority / some wierd contractor will do ALLLL the work" but as soon as the first minor problem appears they are at your door. This is why it is important as soon as the FIRST call regarding this stuff, no matter how minor, appears, you should decline it and say "We have an agreement with X so I don't want to touch it incase I do something wrong". Advice I did not follow now I have the cameras to sort out. Anyway if you have a very long coridoor you can always put the broken fuzzy camera at the end of it, zoom in to where it gets clear, and use it that way. Otherwise it's only good for the trash.

Don't all "classroom management" software capture all keystrokes though? I'm pretty sure if I set impero to monitor the word "moomoo" and someone had "moomoo" in their password, that would show up under the flagged words in the logs would it not? or is this Lanschool software capturing every single keystroke into a logfile somewhere, rather than just flagging that a particular word was detected? EDIT OK I just read the PDF, it keeps every single keystroke in a nice easy to read text file including e-mail address and password fields!!!!!!!!! it's amazing US schools have all this fancy kit yet their security is utterly nonexistant ??

They're garbage cameras, 5 of ours have the left-right pan fail so they can only pan up and down. 5 more had the focus issue - they get stuck out of focus, if you zoom in and out you'll find a spot where it is perfectly in focus but very zoomed in. Firmware update didn't help, factory reset fixed 1 of them but over time it got blurry and blurrier again and this time a factory reset did nothing. We had to replace the units, cheap and nasty Chinese stuff. These were PTZ cameras (if you log in via the webinterface you can control the PTZ from there). Never had it with a non PTZ unit.

You know I always felt bad pushing in front of the kids during lunch break (pupils have to queue up but staff can go straight to the front). Supposed to lead by example and all that. Don't think the MP's mind too much though.

Had 30 Windows laptops to unbox and set up, security mark etc, same with 120 chromebooks, and our printer MFP contract had ended and we have signed a new one with all new devices, and an all new server install with papercut etc. So it was supposed to be a very busy summer. Same with getting a new Windows 10 build done with the latest Windows 10 + adobe/office suite. However we never had any of the deliveries at all - no chromebooks, no laptops, and the print solution is delayed too. So I will have to squeeze all of this in during term time now! Plus our contractor wasn't able to get the Windows 10 image finished before the holidays ended so I was unable to rebuild our machines (they have a 4 year old install now so due for a re-image. But I was only going to rebuild a few of them as a test anyway, wasn't planning on doing the entire network. So instead the summer was pretty quiet, I spent most of it at home, doing server maintenance, I was meant to move all of our staff over from Exchange 2010 over to Office 365, but I was told to but a halt to that for now because I was only going to move 1 years worth of e-mails and the staff need more time to sort out their mailboxes as a lot of them use their Inbox as their "My Documents" basically organizing everything around it, and losing that would be a nightmare for them! So I had a fairly relaxing Summer but at the cost of the rest of this year potentially being a nightmare! Lots of year 7 SIMS invites / parentapp stuff to sort out this week. Nightmare as you can only do Admitted students apparently and we can't Admit them until they are here, so it's very hard to do things before-hand.

We are still waiting for our Pearson file to come through on a2c anyone else had delays?

Yeah I figured it would be a large cost, I've got a pile of 8 now on my desk and management are complaining that they are being wasted. I'd combine parts to get a few working, the problem is we have about 6 different types!!!

SIMS now has this built in BTW

Still remember watching that very Kiss episode (the Sons of Plato?) as a young teenager and being horrified by it! (Not the kiss, but the episode itself). I think there was controversy with the BBC banning the episode, people thinking it was due to the kiss, but in reality they had banned 2 or 3 episodes of TOS due to their graphic nature - which seems a bit absurd to us now in 2022! But I definitely remember the way the aliens tormented Spock in particular as being v frightening as a kid! Great show and sad loss

27 sounds a bit warm but some places take the mick with ice cold temperatures. I know a hospital has to keep temperatures low to stop the spread of infection but my last stay in hospital (for cellulitis of the face/mastoiditis) - the temperature was soo low it was uncomfortable - I had to pour warm water from the toilets into an empty bottle of water and use that to warm myself! after 3 days of it I ended up discharging myself. I guess I'm just not one of these people who enjoys arctic temperatures. My old NM used to sit in the server room all day and work in there - it was freezing yet he never seemed bothered at all! For us 27c seems so high as to render getting A/C almost pointless, but in spain I remember it being 40c - so hot I just slept outside on the grass, something I'd never do in the UK

Why is it there is a major SIMS.NET update 3 times a year yet they seem to have been selling the exact same product totally unchanged since 1992 ?

Yeah did ours in pretty much the same way, but it was just from 2012R2 -> 2019 and SQL2014 to SQL2016. Glad it worked so well, Made a clone at the start just incase and used snapshots during the process; made sure to delete them now as I remember a few years ago I took a snapshot before upgrading a server, forgot to remove the snapshot and it caused loads of problems later down the line as I didn't realise I was running on the snapshot the whole time. Going to do another full backup tonight but it seems to be working fine along with the Intouch and other third party stuff that was there too. Can't believe how smooth the process was, I was nervous about it for a while - budgeted 2 days, was done in 4 hours!

Do you guys upgrade the OS first then the SQL version, or SQL first then the OS ? And yeah the in-place upgrade seems pretty good nowadays, I remember the days of it being a total disaster. I've upgraded almost all of my servers now to 2019, just left off SIMS as it's very complicated and makes me worried :-(

Looking forward to exoplanet atmospheres, who knows in under 10 years we might get confirmation that oxygen has been found in an old exoplanet, basically proof that life exists on another planet. I wonder how news like that would change the world, I wonder if we'd start planning a mission there? (if it's 40ly away, a small laser-sail cubesat may get there in a few hundred years... such a shame space is so BIG)

Rebooter is great, Mr Restarter Haven't got a callsign but some kids who sometimes sit outside my office, they 'll sing "Hello darkness my old friend" when I walk passed them; I think they have picked up on my enthusiasm for the place I used to be called Screwdriver but that was due to a stupid NSFW joke I made a silly answer to

Guess it's not just me who'll randomly be asked for a bizzare quote that I know nothing about (e.g. moving flashing lights in the hall, or a "school app for the phone") only to get what I think they need and hear nothing again? For our main hall a company came in and installed 4 XLR speakers, a mixer and amplifier, it wasn't cheap but they do full on productions here (comp school), only problem is out old system had some kind of pre-amp "phantom power" box that the laptop plugged into, which then plugged into the main mixer. This meant the main volume could be low so there is no hiss. But our new system doesn't have this; in order to connect a laptop we must turn the main volume up loud which hisses, and buzzes when the laptop is unplugged. Tried checking the mixer for a built-in version of this "phantom power" box but couldn't find one, it's all computerised though so I guess I missed something ?

I'm so sweaty, it's my last day today then I break up for a week for the summer hols, won't be back in for a week. Kinda nervous about the aircon in the server rooms, unfortunately I'm the only IT guy here and the caretakers won't touch anything server/IT related. Guess I can set up a rule for the vhost temps?

Is this Nitro PDF? We bought a copy of it for works use at £60 5 years ago, just checked now and a license costs £180 !!

What about smashed screens I was guessing it wouldn't be covered as it is accidental damage anyone know anything about it?

Anyone know anything about getting damaged units repaired ? I also have 2 out of the box with faults with warranty but not sure how to get them fixed?

Our staff all have Lenovo E590's and I've had a huge amount of them die due to failed charging ports. The plastic on the USB-C comes away and the unit will not charge. The USB-C port is on the mainboard too sadly. Has anyone else had this the warranty on ours ends in 3 months and I am worried about a mass failure rate next year