simpsonj

As my school network has, over the course of 7 years, finally reached a point where I don't feel like I'm firefighting every day, the above is exactly where I see my role going. I seek out technology, websites, blogs, software and ideas and present it to people, blog about it and try and spread the ideas and potential of technology. I would like to expand more but I've got an exam to invigilate!

Found a nice, clean web search engine that filters using strict search as default: Safe Find - Safe Google Search Solves my search engine woes!

Aerohive has a similar feature to Meraki where you can effectively 'drown out' any rogue AP detected on site. Not had a chance to use it yet...

Threat detection updates every 10 minutes, other updates every hour, though I've now changed that to every 6 hours to see if that makes a difference.

They usually do run at the levels you're talking about @CHR1S its just they seem to spike for some reason and stay at a ridiculously high level. Console is, as far as I can tell, updated to the latest version. I'll try reinstalling as a last resort (seem to remember the setup being a PITA last time).

Twice a day, three Sophos process are taking 25% of my CPU each, slowing my server down to an absolute crawl. Processes are: MgntSvc.exe *32 ManagementAgentNT.exe *32 CertificationManagerService.exe *32 The only way I've found to revive the server is to either kill the processes, or restart the services they are attached to. This server is the 'main' Sophos server (has the Enterprise console installed and hands out the software to clients). Any help on this greatly appreciated!

Right, I've found the cure, but not the cause. To cure said problem, unlink the affected user from Active Directory, login to SIMS. Log out of SIMS, relink the user to SIMS and all is well again. I have no godly idea why this occurs, and why this fixes the issue. The only reason I can think of is if the SQL database for Discover has a user called NETWORK\DataManager, this somehow corrupts whilst using the DAU. I remove the Active Directory link, making the user just DataManager, which then causes the issue loading the catalog as the Discover database is expecting NETWORK\DataManager, but some values are shared so it can't just create a new discover user account. Relinking the account fixes the data corruption in the DAU, and allows Discover to be used as normal. Does any of that have a remote chance of making sense?

Got a slightly odd issue with Discover and our Data manager. She's the only one using Discover in Anger, setting up Assessment tables, Discover groups etc. She needed to demonstrate discover to the LT, so we moved her PC to a meetings room and everything started to go wrong. Usually staff authenticate with SIMS using AD, so the first clue something was up was when the Discover Administrative Utility asked for a username and password. After trying various things to fix this issue (logging out, logging in, changing the authentication method), she tried logging into Discover to get a: 'There has been an issue loading the Catalog. This has been logged. Would you like to try and load the Catalog again?' Clicking Yes brings up the error message, no just loads Discover with no icons at the top. We found a work around involving her using my account for the day, and then at the end of the day, we shifted her PC back to her office, and it started working normally again. Knowing that geographical location had nothing to do with the issue, I just put it down to bad luck. Until today, where it's reared it's head again. I know it isn't computer specific as it her login doesn't work on my computer, yet my login will run Discover just fine. I thought it might be a Database transfer issue, but that doesn't appear to be the case either as I've ran a new transfer using the Discover Administrative Utility and it hasn't solved the issue. So questions are: 1, Has anyone ran into this issue before, and how did you solve it? 2, Is there a way to 'rebuild' a user login to discover? Give it a new catalog, or refresh the user account? Thanks for any help

Just ensure that it doesn't say something along the lines of 'Desktop is unavailable, would you like to make the shortcut here instead?' I've had similar issues with students accessing the C: drive using this method...

Have you disabled Right Click - Send To - Desktop (Create shortcut)? Face palm about traverse, should have seen that! Can you make the entire share a hidden share? Not many students know to add the dollar sign at the end...

Just to finish this thread, I looked into removing the 'Work Offline' button that students could see when they accessed their My Documents and found this guide: http://thepracticalsysadmin.com/disable-offline-files-in-windows-7/ I already had the initial GPO settings in place (though not applied to all computers, which I've now rectified), and if you disable the Offline Files service, that nicely removed the Work Offline button too, so that's another potential suspect removed.

What happens if you deny traverse permissions rather than read permissions?

Yes, I've noticed Offline Files can be a pain, maybe students are accidentally turning it on... Worth a look thanks

Sounds similar to my setup. We have that GPO enabled, it could be that I just need to strip back all the GPOs and profiles and start again from fresh. Will definitely look at removing profiles from students, should speed up login times as well. The only issue I can think of are programs that rely on settings that are held in the profile (Reason 4 being a prime example). Interesting idea with Robocopy as well, could well give that a test. Thanks for the ideas!

Over the past few years I've had issues with students logging onto wireless computers. Around 98% of the time everything is fine, but that 2% still means a fair few issues to deal with over a week/month/term/year! The primary issue is a failure for their My Documents to map, and to give the students an error message stating that their My Documents area (\\server\2008\username\) is unavailable, requiring them to reboot the laptop and login again, which doesn't always work. Strangely, their 'Homework drive' a mapped drive that runs from a script, has a near 100% record of working every time, as does the map to the shared network area. Other issues include computer based GPOs not applying, so trying to install programs via GPO has become near impossible, I'm assuming this is because the wireless connection doesn't kick in until the login screen is reached as user based GPOs work fine. The main DC is Server 2008, with the rest a mixture of 2008R2 and 2012, My Documents are redirected along with favourites and Desktop (which is redirected into a folder in their My Documents). Students have a mandatory profile (created using the microsoft approved method), and all laptops are Windows 7. We have a managed Aerohive wireless system across the school which laptops authenticate with through a Radius server. I suppose what I'm after is, 1, How do you redirect your My Documents? 2, What type of profile do you use? 3, What GPOs do you apply to laptops to ensure they connect properly? 4, Anything obvious I'm missing? Thanks!

Beyond me I'm afraid, looks like someone has managed to lock down that spreadsheet tight! Must be code running in the background to prevent changes. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

Post it up, can take a look!

Sounds like an issue I had with my laptop so try this from my blog: Windows likes to do something called 'Write-caching'. In theory, this speeds up performance of your machine, and prevent data loss in the event of a power outage. All very sensible. The problem is, the data loss part of the equation absolutely kills the performance as the hard drive is in near 100% usage all the time. From the moment I turned the laptop on, disk usage was at 100%. After around 5-10 minutes, it would dip to 90% or so, and the laptop became usable.I had come to accept this as part of the laptop usual routine, blaming the slow speed of the hard drive. However, this does not need to be the case! After my laptop became slow and unresponsive loading up the basic Mail client, I started to look around and noticed something in the system tray called 'Intel Rapid Storage Technology'. Thinking that my storage wasn't being particularly rapid, I loaded up the application. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, however there was a message talking about the Windows write-cache buffer flushing policy, and that disabling it can improve performance. Thinking anything is worth a try, I followed the instructions, written below for your convenience: Right click the bottom left hand corner of your screen, this should open a drop down menu, choose Device Manager. From Device manager, expand Disk drives. Right click your disk drive, and open properties. Choose the Policies Tab. Tick the tick box next to "Turn off Windows write cache buffer flushing on this device." Click OK.

If you don't mind spending money, then you could always try GOG.com which has games like Theme Hospital which have been adapted to run on Windows 7...

We're just getting to grips with Discover, and want to start using it for Ofsted style analysis. One of the criteria is to be able to analyse results of students who are either Free School Meals OR Looked After. Obviously we can filter by EITHER Group, but we need a group that contains both sets of students. The most obvious way would be to create a Discover group, which is easy enough, but we then can't filter by that group, unless I'm missing something really obvious? It seems strange to be able to create such a group, but then not be able to use it in anyway within Discover. If the group is set to be a Dynamic Group, then it doesn't even show in SIMS, it just sits in Discover with the only action you can take is to export it as a .csv, which isn't particularly useful... Just thought I'd ask if anyone knew of a way to use the Discover group to filter as per other groups in Discover? Or whether there is an update in the works to allow this?

1, Primary/secondary? 2, What are you guys using in your school? 3, How are they used? 4, Are they managed? 5, Why did you choose that particular device? Price? can be managed? SLT made me? other 1, Secondary School 2,We have iPads and Android (Some Nexus 7s, and some NATPC tablets) devices for staff and student use. 3, The iPads are used by the SLT as standalone devices. We also have managed iPads for our TAs to help with SEN intervention and a set of 4 iPads in the library for general use (largely research). We tried using a classroom set of NATPC tablets, but they are cheap, slow and extremely hard to manage, so they are now sat in my office. We also have Cisco tablets, but I've yet to find a use for them as neither they, or the NATPC tablets, can run the latest version of Android, making them redundant. I might use the Cisco tablets as glorified cameras. Finally we have Nexus 7 tablets that were used for research until one went missing. They are now used to control our Sphero units. 4, The iPads are managed, both through Apple configurator and Meraki. One of the Nexus's is managed, the other I will add to Meraki later, but as there are only two, it's not a high priority. 5, I didn't have much say in the device, though I'm not against the iPad as such, it may not be the tablet of choice now, as a Windows based tablet would be much easier to control, and would be able to run SIMS without using an expensive app such as Groupcall. But they do prove popular with the students and LT.

Seems an odd place to put a report, but thank you so much!

Our head of cover wants a report that will show how many teaching staff were off on any given week last half term. Last time I ran this report, I had to manually change the spreadsheet and it took hours, and if this is going to become a regular occurrence, I would love to have a more automated system. So I guess my questions are: 1, Is there a way/report in SIMS or Discover that will give me the number of staff absences per week? I've looked, and can see nothing obvious, though I believe that Discover may be improving this aspect in later updates. 2, Does anyone know of a way to extrapolate from a start date and end date the number of days off in any given week. I've looked at SUMPRODUCT, NETWORKDAYS, COUNTIFS but I can't get my head around allocating days off to specific weeks when the days of spread over a weekend. If it's a single day, then it's very easy. But when we get to multiple days, and then multiple days over multiple weeks, it becomes a real noodle scratcher. For example, lets say someone was ill from the 04/09/13 to 11/09/13. I can work out that it is 6 working (network) days that have been lost, and which week the start and end dates fall into. Beyond that, I'm stuck. Ideally I'd like to count the number of network days between the start and end date of the illness period, IF they fall between the date range of Week 1, and then again for week 2, 3 etc... But my excel-fu fails me Any help gratefully received!

The only regulation I'm aware of is the requirement to use 'smokeless' cables when traversing ceiling spaces. Whether I would want to spend hours of my time cabling is another matter! I usually ask the electricians to put in the cable, and I terminate both ends, best of both worlds as it doesn't add much to the electricians bill, and I know exactly where the cable is terminated at cabinet and port as I did it.

Interestingly, we went the other way and ditched the classroom desktop and went with laptops. So far (around 18 months in) and it's been okay, a few damaged laptops, but we've had the spares to cover for it and staff seem to prefer laptops. They have to use the laptops for registration, which means they have to be used and I actually get told when there is an issue!