Easy_506

Decent opportunity for the right candidate. Further info here - Home - The City of Portsmouth Boys' School

We have an HP MSM765zl wireless mobility controller which keeps resetting itself to 1st Jan 1990 and throwing out all of the wireless access points. I've had zero luck so far, but can any EduGeekers give any advice re: how to change the system date and time via PuTTY? HP documentation says this: Clock Supported on: MSM710 MSM730 MSM750 MSM760 MSM765zl clock Sets the system time and date. Parameters Time as hh:mm:ss. For example: 15:44:00. Date as dd Month yyyy. For example: 17 Oct 2004. I've tried this and the controller returns 'Unknown command'.

At least now I've got some more ideas of things to look for, so something is better than nothing! Thanks very much for taking the time to write back.

Thank you, I will start with your suggestions as I am happy there aren't any GPO failings so it must be the Squid proxies. And sorry, yes these are all Win 7 32bit machines running IE10. Last year I was nice enough to let pupils use Chrome too, and I saw the same issue occur with both browsers.

Thanks for the replies. Pac file is being pushed out via GPO. It does seem that the GPO is applying itself to the machines fine, it's that point of contact with the proxy server (e.g. trying to reach Google on HTTPS) that you can have 30 PCs in a suite all hitting the same site simultaneously, and maybe 5-10 machines will not connect.

Hi all, Just posting this on the off-chance there's someone on the forums who has the knowledge to feed back on our current PAC file we're utilising. We have two virtual Squid proxies, one for staff the other for pupils. What I'm seeing a lot of is our pupil machines not being able to reach the proxy and then getting the classic IE 'This page cannot be displayed'. The problem is intermittent and occurs randomly. Any thoughts on whether this looks ok are most welcome! Thanks in advance. PAC: function FindProxyForURL(url, host) { if (isInNet(myIpAddress(), "10.167.0.0", "255.255.0.0")) { return "PROXY 10.160.2.6:8080"; } return "PROXY 10.10.2.16:3128"; }

I've had lots of dealings with our LA recently and not a single mention of an SMTP relay. In fact I had to go to some trouble in order to supply LA details of ports to open for particular apps/software. Got the ports opened up and the monitoring software still doesn't work. I'd like to think I've covered all my bases but unfortunately I wasn't the person who built or configured this network, so when you've got 2 x 3rd parties who both say 'oh everything looks ok, it *should* work'...THE END... you can find months slipping away without actually getting much up and running. However, I'm no IT genius so chances are there's a way to get everything sorted, I just need to find the right people to collaborate with.

Aah yes this issue came up earlier. But we are on Office365 in the cloud for email, and I've discovered that SMTP connections cannot be made from behind a proxy (encountered this issue when attempting to set up monitoring systems on virtual servers, plus Spiceworks and PaperCut). I like our email system but I think i'm going to build an exchange server soon to gain some more direct control over things.

Aaaaaaand i'm done Thank goodness we're about half the size of a regular secondary! Must say...big shout out to Capita on this one. Spot-on support wise, and whilst it wasn't a quick 'fix', I can't complain about the difficulty of the task.

Oh yeah...should add, two support staff members were able to log in, so of course they shared their login details with EVERYONE :-/ So yeah there's probably too much data from today as well now.

I'm painfully aware that's not a fix - after all i'm the one who has to sit here manually changing everyone's details for however long that's going to take(!). I can certainly vouch that no database changes/upgrades were done on the sims server since the Spring 14 update was released in April. Re: last night's backup - the problem first occurred at 3.40pm yesterday afternoon and the backup took place at 6.07pm. I was toying with the idea of going back to the 30th June backup, but unfortunately it's reports season and so much data has been written in that 24hour period that i'd probably be lynched by the staff if I said they'd lost it all.

Hi guys, Quick update - I did check the firewall, database attachment, sql studio, connect.ini etc etc. Just spent the last 45mins or so in a remote session with Capita and they couldn't explain how or why it's happened but basically about 90% of our users have had their accounts reset to 'inactive'. During that process Sims has also re-amended users' usernames to LastnameFirstname instead of our normal naming convention which is FirstinitialLastname. The 'fix' is for me to log in as sysman and manually change each affected user's account back to 'active' and to amend their username back to our naming convention, then supply the new randomly generated password. I don't know if any edugeekers have ever had this before, I've certainly never encountered the issue, neither has the support teams from my LA or Capita. Very strange indeed. Thanks for all the replies above.

Hi guys, No changes whatsoever to Sims server since the Spring 2014 update was applied in April. Literally just stopped allowing users to log in. Server time has been an issue in the past but is not now. All systems showing correct time.

Morning all, Got an interesting one today, our sims is no longer allowing any users to log on. It attempts to process the request and then presents the prompt "invalid username or password". I'm unable to log in to sims server side also. I have already tried bouncing the server, checked the event logs, and checked the size of the database and transaction logs. Whilst I wait for support from the LA, has anyone else got any ideas? Thanks in advance!

I'm doing the same project this week during half-term. We had a handful of D-Link IP cameras a couple of years ago, but no PoE switches to power them (so each one had a power block) and they ended up causing the old cat5 network to slow down to a crawl. What we now have is a much more robust network with fibre links between each cab and the core. I've taken the old cctv 'server' (that resembled more of a high-end gaming machine - NOTE your CCTV server does not require a £300+ NVidia graphics card) and rebuilt it into a fileserver with an i7 processor. Highly recommend WD Red HDD's. We've currently got 2 x 2tb that record 11 cameras archiving for one week. We've gone for the Milestone Pro software to manage the cameras, and am happy to say it hasn't let us down yet. I will add though - the only reason I rebuilt the server was because it was sat there full of usable parts. If starting afresh, I would keep costs to a minimum and purchase a DVR box. Much simpler and cheaper. I think we've learnt a lesson that D-Link, whilst solid kit, is overpriced compared to other options out there. The other problem we experienced was with the D-Link software bundle. I found it to be unstable and buggy, especially when trying to configure cameras or maintain connections. And attempts at getting support were painful and fruitless. As the Milestone license allows for more cameras I've also just ordered eight Hikvision fixed dome cameras. I cannot recommend Hikvision enough. At around £100 per camera the quality is excellent - particularly good for picking out faces in crowded corridors. Another plus-point is that Hikvision cameras use Sony CCDs which are noticeably better than other alternatives. For further info/advice I can highly recommend speaking to Stacey at CCTV Direct, and Phil at Use-IP Ltd.

Hoping someone out there might have some insight on this. Notified by a staff member earlier this week that some staff were appearing in our address book as their full names instead of their display names. This isn't affecting all users, just a small number...funnily enough including myself (the Office365 admin). The main concern here is pupils being able to see staff first names instead of looking at a Mr/Mrs/Miss etc. I've checked each user's settings and the fields are still populated with the correct details. If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears! Thanks in advance.

Thanks for your reply. Makes some sense since the Web Lab runs v.2.7 and the download I installed this morning was 3.something. If anyone else out there has any other thoughts i'm all ears! Google searched this particular error earlier and got more results than humanly possible to sift through...

Hi all, Hopefully someone out there will be able to point me in the right direction on this... Disclaimer: I know nothing about Python. Initial proposal was to set up VMs running Python, but instead we've opted to use the Codecademy Labs online. Not a problem for most stuff, until one of our ICT teachers reported the code below: firstname = input("Please enter your first name: ") surname = input("Please enter your last name: ") county = input("Please enter your county: ") print("Hello {0} {1}. You live in the county of: {2}.".format(firstname,surname,county)) This works fine when run from an installed Python GUI. So when I run, it prompts me to enter my firstname, surname etc. And you can see what it spits out in the last line of code. But when trying to run on the Codecademy website it returns the following: Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in File "", line 1, in NameError: name 'Matt' is not defined Anyone got any ideas on this? Many thanks in advance!

That would certainly be the professional thing to do... but without going into detail, that course of action wouldn't work here. I don't believe our LA has a DP officer as such.

I think most schools approach to Data Protection is 'We'll worry about it when the ICO slaps us with a fine'. I can't remember the exact details but I know some schools and local authorities were fined in the recent past. I find the problem is that we as IT professionals are responsible, but actually getting users - whether they're SLT, staff or even governors - to adhere to the rules is next to impossible. We've got people who take sensitive data home on usb sticks, copy documents to personal devices etc etc. And that's aside from staff who leave themselves logged on to multiple machines on site, potentially allowing pupils access to staff/school data. All-in-all, not good really.

James, Can't thank you enough for this! Much appreciated! Matt

Morning all, We've been on Live@Edu/OWA/Office365 for a long time now, but just recently a couple of staff members discovered they could create email groups. Unfortunately, these industrious people have created security groups instead of distribution groups, and therefore the groups do not show in our global address book. Anybody got any thoughts as to the best way forward with this? I've been investigating the issue, but cannot see an easy way of converting existing security groups into distribution groups. Cheers.

How do you get along running 64bit OS? I'd thought about making our 'power-user' rooms 64bit but it completely throws a bunch of other depts' software out the window because they won't run in compatibility mode...

Thanks all for your replies. Still seems to be a question between the i3 and i5, but I guess that's down to what the user considers to be 'fast'...

A mate of mine has this. I was impressed. You can get them for about £175ish (education pricing). Although I wouldn't buy them for our pupils...