jonwitts

Queen Margaret's School, York are looking to appoint a person with a strong technical knowledge of computer hardware to work as part of our essential team supporting IT across the School. Click here to view the full Job Description. Please email completed applications along with a covering letter to Claire Tonks, P.A. to the Head, ([email protected]). Closing date: Monday 17 July 2017, with interviews to be held soon after.

Queen Margaret's School are looking to appoint an IT Technician to provide support to users of the School’s network and IT services. The role provides a first point of call for many of the School’s users and will mainly be a supportive role working under the direction of the IT Manager. This role would suit someone who is looking to start/develop a career in IT. Click here to view the full Job Description. Please email completed applications along with a covering letter to Claire Tonks, P.A. to the Head [email protected]. Closing date: Sunday 5 March 2017. For full details and links to applications forms etc. please see the school website: queenmargarets.com

Queen Margaret's School are looking to appoint an IT Manager to manage, maintain and oversee the running of the School’s network, servers and associated IT services. This role requires managing the work of the IT Technician as well as acting as a 2nd and 3rd line support for client support issues. In addition, the IT Manager, working with the Director of Digital Strategy, will be instrumental in the development and delivery of the next stage of the School’s Digital strategy both within and outside the classroom. Click here to view the full Job Description. Please email completed applications along with a covering letter to Claire Tonks, P.A. to the Head [email protected]. Closing date: Monday 27 February 2017. For full details and links to applications forms etc. please see the school website: queenmargarets.com

OK, so I have found out the reason... two MS updates are at play here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3177108 and https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3167679 Whilst uninstalling these updates would get things going this is not a suitable fix in the long term! The reason that it is failing is because to use the ChangePassword object you now need to pass the UPN of the user and not the samaccountname. Anyway; thought I would post this here. We are now using this tool for BYOD password resets: https://github.com/unosquare/passcore Jon

Any thoughts on this issue, anybody? It is beginning to cause us some real operational issues as BYOD users are struggling to get their passwords changed now!

Hi there when ever a user tries to change their password through HAP+ we are getting the following logged to the web server's event log and the user gets a warning message to their browser: ------------------------------------------- An error occurred in Home Access Plus+ Page: System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement The system detected a possible attempt to compromise security. Please ensure that you can contact the server that authenticated you. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800704F1) System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.PrincipalOperationException: The system detected a possible attempt to compromise security. Please ensure that you can contact the server that authenticated you. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800704F1) ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The system detected a possible attempt to compromise security. Please ensure that you can contact the server that authenticated you. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800704F1) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.SDSUtils.ChangePassword(DirectoryEntry de, String oldPassword, String newPassword) at System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.ADStoreCtx.ChangePassword(AuthenticablePrincipal p, String oldPassword, String newPassword) at HAP.AD.User.ChangePassword(String oldPassword, String newPassword) at HAP.Web.LiveTiles.API.SetPassword(String oldpassword, String newpassword) at SyncInvokeSetPassword(Object , Object[] , Object[] ) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.SyncMethodInvoker.Invoke(Object instance, Object[] inputs, Object[]& outputs) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperationRuntime.InvokeBegin(MessageRpc& rpc) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage5(MessageRpc& rpc) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage31(MessageRpc& rpc) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.MessageRpc.Process(Boolean isOperationContextSet) at System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.SDSUtils.ChangePassword(DirectoryEntry de, String oldPassword, String newPassword) at System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.ADStoreCtx.ChangePassword(AuthenticablePrincipal p, String oldPassword, String newPassword) at HAP.AD.User.ChangePassword(String oldPassword, String newPassword) at HAP.Web.LiveTiles.API.SetPassword(String oldpassword, String newpassword) at SyncInvokeSetPassword(Object , Object[] , Object[] ) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.SyncMethodInvoker.Invoke(Object instance, Object[] inputs, Object[]& outputs) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperationRuntime.InvokeBegin(MessageRpc& rpc) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage5(MessageRpc& rpc) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage31(MessageRpc& rpc) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.MessageRpc.Process(Boolean isOperationContextSet) ------------------------------------------- Any ideas gratefully received!

For simple checks use SNMP - you need to enable it on your VMWare hosts and then setup SNMP checks on nagios to query the hosts' CPU, RAM etc. If you want more in depth reports about the VMWare infrastructure then use the check_vmware_api.pl script from OP5... does the job for us! Jon

I will replicate when I get back to work after the weekend and post the exact lines of the HAP+ Application Pool which is trying to insert the document type.

The issue is that the HAP+ script was trying to add a default document type to it's application; however the default document type already existed. This causes the HAP+ site to return a 500 error... As my earlier post says...

I know; I wasn't adding it at the sub-level; a script in the HAP App Pool config was trying to... Hence my question...

Hi there, I ran into an issue today with our HAP+ install due to the HAP Application Pool trying to add Default.aspx as a default document type to the application. As our top level IIS7 had default.aspx already in as a default document type this caused HAP+ to throw a 500 error after anyone logged in. To get things going again I have removed the default.aspx from the top level Default Documents; however I suspect that it was a Windows update which put it back there in the first place. So my question is, is it not possible for the HAP App Pool to check for the existence of default.aspx before it tries to write it in? Thanks, Jon

Hi all, I keep seeing the same question come up on Twitter and over on CAS about how to get a Raspberry Pi to update via apt-get through your school firewall / proxy... So I thought I would write up my solution for it over on my blog: Getting your Raspberry Pi to update through your school firewall | Jon Witts' Blog Hopefully of some use to thers. Jon

@jconstan As far as I know the only to change this is by opening the file... When I ran this I ran it locally on the file server and started it off last thing on Friday and left it running all weekend... It can take some time! Jon

@jamesfed - very nice!

I'd be interested to see how you achieve it with SIMS @jamesfed - iSAMS is kind to me in that the pictures are stored on the hard drive as jpg files... Doesn't SIMS blob the files into the SQL Database? Jon

This makes for an interesting read on systemd... Linus Torvalds and others on Linux's systemd | ZDNet

For those of you running Moodle and iSAMS; you can have a read over here: Moodle User Pictures from iSAMS | Jon Witts' Blog about how I automatically set up a sync of student photos out of the MIS straight into Moodle. It could well be modified for other MIS platforms too; without too much difficulty! Jon

For all those out there using iSAMS for your MIS and Moodle for your VLE; just thought you might like to know that I have finished writing up my process for automatically synchronising student photos from iSAMS straight into Moodle user profiles. You can find the post over here: Moodle User Pictures from iSAMS | Jon Witts' Blog Jon

That's good to hear @webman!

@webman Hi there any chance of another feature request? It would be really useful if the reports page could show a report of when stock was added to the system as well as when it was installed into a printer... Cheers, Jon

Have asked Smoothwall if they can help implement this fix... http://www.edugeek.net/forums/smoothwall-direct-support/145977-java-8u25-smoothwall-wpad-pac-issue.html

That is marked as a duplicate of this one: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8061643 which is showing as resolved for version 8u40... Guess we have to wait for them to release the fixed version...

Our WPAD/PAC is auto-generated by our Smoothwall device and we then use DNS / DHCp and point IE at the proxy.pac file... Not too sure how I would go about editing our WPAD entry like that... I might put it Smoothwall's way and see what they say...

Just come across this issue today whilst testing Java 1.8 update 25 in our domain... Looks like from the bug report you raised it has been fixed, but not until 1.8 update 40! Has anyone else got Java 8 working behind a proxy with IE? Jon

Hi all - apologies for the cross post with the VLE forum but kind of feel that this belongs in both ;-), I have just finished the final part of my write up on the synchronisation I have set up between iSAMS and Moodle to synchronise user authentication, course creation and student and teacher course enrolment. It's a blog in three parts. You can find them here: Part 1 - iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment – Part 1 | Jon Witts' Blog Part 2 - iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment – Part 2 | Jon Witts' Blog Part 3 - iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment - Part 3 | Jon Witts' Blog Hopefully someone will find it useful! It should not be too hard to adapt this to work with any MSSQL backed MIS System... Jon