hallamke

Cheers for the reply. Ive checked our settings in Central and likewise these are disabled. I hate these intermittent authentication issues, troubleshooting is a nightmare, to say nothing of managing the support tickets 😵‍💫🤣🤣🤣 I've logged it with Sophos support... see what happens. If I ganer anything useful from them I will post here in case it helps someonelse .. Cheers --Keith--

Hi folks, Bit of an unusla one here. On Monday we sudenly started getting issues with devices on our RADIUS authenticated network dropping off and failing to reconnect. Error logged on the Aruba controller indicates the server isnt responding. Checking the NPS config on our DC indicates all is well with the service and config. Weird bit is some clients seem to connect and are happy, and others just drop and wont reconnect. On Tuesday the issue seemed to resolve itself beofre I could get to the bottom of it. Today the problem has re-appeared. After an hour of faffing and fielding the neverending stream of calls (🤪) I disabled Sophos on the server. This has brought everything back to life. Before I log this with Sophos support throught I'd run this by her eto see if anyone else has experienced this, and what if any was the eventual solution. As ever any replies / comments greatfully received 😉 Cheers --Keith--

We're running 6.7 currently which works fine on 25H2 (have to run the install silently though as the Client option is greyed out otherwise). We still run 3 doors on the classic controllers so that rules out upgrading to v7 at the moment (plus we're using the Pro version which would incur another expense 🤣)

Can we order seventeen physical ones of these for our exams 😂😂😂

Whilst certainly not the biggest fan of Civica here, same as in the rest of this thread, long hold times on the phone (then sometiumes getting booted before its even answered). Tickets sitting in limbo for days at a time. I Must say though that the last 3 support tickets I logged were dealt with with and resolved within an hour, so by that measure there seems to be an impreovement. Sadly I cant comment on the move to the cloud side as we are still packing a locally hosted server, but I know it will be something we will be considering in the not to distant future.

08 August 2000 15:05:42 (I've been here since 2005 😖🤣)

We switched from SIMS.net to Arbor in 2023. We began the project of setting everything up after the Easter break with an anticipated go live at the end of the Summer Term ready for September. Wasn't as painful as I expected with the data migration being managed by the Arbor team quite well. As with others we ha d a live demo site to play with as we moved along. The project management was a bit flakey (we went through 3 primary contacts in as many months which was painful). The documentation was done through a Google Sheet. This worked but was a bit clunky. Staff have been hit and miss about the change as you can imagine (genarally anything different is bad 🤣). Full training was provided and the Arbor help system is reasonably good. Ive not missed the thrice yearly updates that inevitably broken things and would require database patches up the wazoo to fix. We had switched from FMS the year before (PS Financials) so dodnt have that nightmare to migrate. From an admin side we've not looked back. I hated SIMS and its many quirks (doing my own server / SQL upgrades didnt help much 🤣🤣🤣 ). Overall its been mainly positive. I'm not so sure I would have like to do a mid-year switch as others have done. I guess its down to when you can get the migration all booked in. We had ours order with Arbor processed in the latter part of The Autumn Term 2022 to secure the Summer switch over 😉

I fear the end is coming for flexible PC builds. In the not too distant future the x86 market will go the way of Apple. Soldered / intergrated components with little upgrade potential. We've been seeing this with lower end laptops for quite some time now. Such a shame 😞

Whilst long dead now most of our estate from 2006 - 2018 utilised the RM One MK2 & 3 AIOs. Other than a spate of PSU failures on the second batch (replaced under warranty) we had no issues. We replaced the "guts" in short order given the low spec of the original components. Other than the replacement cost of the internals and a Windows licence they held up remarkably well over the years 😉 We've gone the HP SFF route now as the screens on the off the shelf AIOs dont seem to be particuarly durable from what I've seen. As others have mentioned it is also cheaper to replace an individual screen versus an AIO.

Plus one for Kubota and Toro machinery. That stuff will survive WW3. Used both in a former life when looking after school grounds rather than IT.... there are days I miss that simpler quieter life 😄

Remember one afternoon in the late 2000's in the schemes dying days. Arrived to find a Royal Mail "there's a fee to pay" card in my pigeon hole marked with my name. Curiosity got the better of me and I went to the local Post Office and paid the £1.75p to collect. Turned out to be an envelope a parent had stuffed full of these vouchers and slapped a single 1st class stamp on it. Remember laughing quite at that given the contents probably wouldn't have been worth 10p 😂

We upgraded from v4 to v5 then v6. Not tried the v4 to v6 route but would be surprised if it didn't work as v4 Paxton Pro users would need to buy a v5 licence as well as v6. I don't think you can downgrade after upgrading due to the firmware being incremented with each version as 5nowman says 😉

We've had real hit and miss with cable lengths and interactive screens (ViewSonic Viewboards in our case). Running HDMI 2.1 cables direct (some up-to 10 metres) seems to yield good results. In the classrooms with installed faceplates we had issues with everything over 5 metres. We either have to drop the refresh rate to 30Hz to get a picture, or it doesn't work at all. This would seem to be a power issue as testing with desktop devices gives us no issues. Active HDMI faceplates are the ideal option as a solution but I've not found anything cost effective to try as of yet. USB we have no issues with connections up-to 5 metres. Anything over that it seems to depend on the connecting device. Our staff HP Pro Books don't seem to like it, but some DFE Dell's and my XPS 15 work fine. This must be down to power delivery on the device side so active USB would certainly be the way to go here. Ultimately testing with the devices that will be the primary users of the screens is key to this (in our experience only directly run HDMI cables have been universally successful). Our woes came when the layout of 16 classrooms was modified post install during an electrical re-wire. Hope this helps

We are also a Trilby school after we transitioned from Anomaly (formerly Life Channel... don't ask! ). We currently have 5 screens all being run from small Latitude 3190s from the DFE in 2020. Easy enough to use from a cloud based console. They are in the process of changing their pricing based on a per screen model (currently we pay one price that covers "unlimited" screens). Think the new pricing is about £200 per screen which in our case will save us money going forward. Those with larger estates may not find it as economical though.

We moved to Arbor in summer 2023 and in August last year migrated from RM CC4 to a vanilla network on Hyper-V. As part of the decommissioning process I exported the old SIMS server and its associated virtual disks to a portable hard drive. On building my new workstation I installed VMWare Workstation (our CC4 network was VMWare) and imported the server and disks on to a separate SSD. I can now spin this up when needed. So far my testing has proved successful in accessing the various parts of SIMS without issue. Networking has been disabled on the VM so no indirect access / Internet access is possible. Whether SIMS remains accessible come the end of our ESS Contract I've no idea as its valid till late April. I've only had course to access the old SIMS data once since 2023 and that was for Options data. The remaining requests the data was already in Arbor