discoveranother

Yes totally agree with you. Glad to know its just not our schools like this. How they have total disregard for IT protection and security etc is beyond belief, but if something happens they want you to fix it like yesterday. If they can get away with paying anything towards IT they will do it. Without changing the topic, at the same school they had a new Deputy Head about one year ago who thinks he is the IT at the school. The head teacher just lets him get on with it. He even mentioned the other day "we need to remove 2FA as it will cause issues with security". The guy is a complete muppet putting it politely.

I agree with you both. Annoys me so much when schools ignore such emails etc. I spoke to them about this several times and emailed them why warranty is important, they just ignore it. For the sake of £103 for one year you wouldnt believe. Finance ignore such emails and headteachers too, not important to them until something happens. Such ignorance.

Hi all, Have a school, they have a poweredge server out of warranty, the renewal cost for the annual warranty is £103. However, the warranty ran out in February of this year 2026. The school have had a few different finance managers in place because the main manager is away ill. Anyway, its either been overlooked each time because of manager changes or forgotten about. Now they have a permanent replacement they want to purchase it. The school and other schools we look after buy kit from Dell quite often. However they have now added a reinstatement cost of £107 on to the warranty, more than the warranty itself. In addition, Dell have never had to be called out during warranty periods. This was the Dell renewal sales individuals response:- Is there anywhere else we can obtain server warranty ? Ive taken it up with the Dell manager but not received a reply. Thanks all

Hi all, Have a few schools using on-premise Smoothwall filtering. Anyone else using the same, do you have issues connecting Amazon Echo Dot devices to the Alexa App. It can be a battle. Any guidance much appreciated. Thanks all

Ah, I remember when councils were doing it this way. It was very slow.

Hi all, Just a quick question regards how you get your schools or businesses to remote into SIMs from outside. Do you get them to log into the SIMs server directly via RDP session or do you get them to remote into the onsite admin PC and use SIMs from there ? I have read in the past that remoting onto the main SIMs server directly is not really a good option, especially if there are several using it. We do not get school staff to do it this way, but how do others do it for their schools ? Thanks all

Thanks all for replying to this topic in the past. If I may ask. Has anyone ever encountered any major issues syncing on-premise AD with Entra ? The reason I ask, the Microsoft notes (and there are many for this) state it is advisable to have a backup server incase anything basically messes up !!! Thanks all

Thanks guys for great replies. I was wondering about costs really of other firewall providers but the general feedback seems to be stay with Smoothwall. My reasons for enquiring are that Smoothwall quite often on renewal send quotes out increasing prices significantly even for small loyal customers and these types of customers do not need overkiil appliances that are necessary for much larger organisations. This is where Smoothwall are frustrating and they don't want to budge on price.

Hi all, Small primary school has an on-premise Smoothwall firewall controller, but would appreciate anyone out there who has alternative recommendations. Thanks all

Thank you for your reply.

Hi all, If I could ask, what is the best way to migrate data from an on-premises server (Windows 2019) to sharepoint ? We are a primary school. Thank you

Thanks, I got the bezel as you mentioned from AliExpress, it as easy to fit and works. Thanks for your help.

Interesting. i'll have a look at this link, as I have set the shared iLO correctly following all instructions provided by HP but cannot ping the iLO ip address regardless of whether I give it a static or DHCP IP. The Teamed NIC is as instructed as well.

Thanks all for the replies