localzuk

Hopefully I'll be able to make it to this one. Bit of a trek to the far north, but hopefully I'll be able to find the time!

When we became a MAT, we initially had Trust relationships between domains, but then decided to rebuild the entire thing from scratch, with the new Trust name. Much simpler to do than trying to rename and fiddle around with a bunch of school systems. It also allowed us to properly centralise services, and eliminate servers from all but 1 of our schools.

I have a discussion going on with our DPO about how long we need to maintain our old SIMS servers now we've migrated over to Bromcom. As our schools are primaries/middle schools, and aren't the final school for any child, the student record side of things goes up with them to their next school. However, certain aspects of the data held needs to be kept until their 25th birthday it seems - exclusion data, safeguarding etc... This leads us to the conclusion that we potentially need to keep these VMs around until 2044 potentially (looking at the dates). This, obviously, seems unreasonable. How have those of you who have migrated data handled this? What about those of you who had hosted SIMS and migrated away, how have you maintained that data?

I think this is where multi-level analysis like that done by some monitoring systems comes in. Eg. Classroom Cloud, a site itself can be flagged as low risk - eg BBC News, but then an individual page within it could flag up as higher risk due to the content of that page. It then takes into account whether the computer was being watched by the teacher at the time, and whether the user has been looking at a sequence of higher risk sites to give an overall score. That sort of multi-factor decision making is likely the best way forward, as it allows a much less crude way of filtering/monitoring. How you'd apply that to filtering is a different matter though!

If you use the default Paxton cards (the hitag2 ones, not Mifare as they are different), only Paxton readers will read the encrypted Paxton ID. If you use other readers, you get the non-encrypted ID of the card instead. There's no way round this that I've found.

There's no interface beyond the splash screen - it simply creates a folder called SetupRST_extracted in the same directory as the installer with the drivers inside it.

The mc.edugeek.net domain is back in place again.

The mc.edugeek.net domain is back in place again.

E-Safety is "Online Safety" these days, and is covered in KCSIE - section 138 of the document for this year. "138. Online safety and the school or college’s approach to it should be reflected in the child protection policy which, amongst other things, should include appropriate filtering and monitoring on school devices and school networks. Considering the 4Cs (above) will provide the basis of an effective online policy. The school or college should have a clear policy on the use of mobile and smart technology, which will also reflect the fact many children have unlimited and unrestricted access to the internet via mobile phone networks (i.e. 3G, 4G and 5G). This access means some children, whilst at school or college, sexually harass, bully, and control others via their mobile and smart technology, share indecent images consensually and non-consensually (often via large chat groups) and view and share pornography and other harmful content. Schools and colleges should carefully consider how this is managed on their premises and reflect this in their mobile and smart technology policy and their child protection policy." As online safety is itself such a large area, I think most schools mention it in their Child Protection Policy, and then have a fully fleshed out Online Safety Policy as well. The DfE list is not definitive regarding policies and the like, as there are other aspects of academies that the DfE aren't directly responsible for - eg the RPA insurance requirements, KCSIE/Safer Internet guidelines, accounting requirements (eg. having a risk register).

For Cyber Response Plan - if you're an academy, and therefore part of the RPA insurance policy, they have a template for it as it is a requirement of the insurance.

This is why we stopped buying APC here. A high percentage of our hardware faults were UPS related. Which defeats the point of having a UPS if its the thing causing servers to not be turned on.

Also, I'm impressed with the building that's been going on!

Currently on a different address due to server upgrade - gs3.edugeek.net:25566

Server updated to 1.20.1. Currently on a different address due to server upgrade - gs3.edugeek.net:25567 - mc.edugeek.net will return soon.

I'm now retiring this pack. FTB Skies and Vanilla will remain for now. New pack coming soon.

We use Tripp Lite here these days.

Ah, yeah, if they're low volume then it makes sense not to lease. We "consolidated" our fleet so we don't have any low volume devices any more.

Quite surprised by that tbh. What sort of cost per page does that work out at for you?

We get them all under our MFD lease these days. We have a mix of Ricoh IM C300, C4500, C5500 and then a couple of production machines.

Yeah, a general use "middle of the road" laptop is gonna be £500 on its own. Adding in that little bit of gaming grunt adds to the price.

I would say this isn't the case honestly. We refreshed our entire central cluster for less than £10k - 3 servers in a HCI cluster. Servers are 3 x Dell R630s with dual Xeon E5-2680v4 (refurbs, with 3 year warranties), 192GB RAM each, and 4x 4TB Micron Enterprise SSDs (those are new), plus 4x10GbE SFP+ NIC ports for networking. OS on a 128GB Intel Enterprise SSD. We went for as cheap as possible, so there's some compromises, but if you went for something a little newer, you could have your OS on RAID1 as well. Setting up HCI, so long as you spec the servers/controllers right (which I didn't originally, so had to swap controllers out), is a doddle. Also, I agree with the HPE vs Dell discussion. We used to use HPE kit, and had some reliability issues with it - we had to have an engineer in to replace the drive backplane for one of our servers shortly after buying it. We also had a mobo die due to the sensor stuff going haywire at one point. Boot times on them are extremely long as well - more than double the time to boot past BIOS/CMOS vs our replacement Dell servers. Not had any issues with Dell stuff.

This is about the lowest price laptop with a somewhat decent discreet GPU I've seen - https://www.ebuyer.com/1615321-asus-tuf-gaming-f15-gaming-laptop-intel-core-i5-11400h-up-to-4-5ghz-8gb-ddr4-fx506he-hn011w Should handle Fortnite nicely, and have enough grunt for somewhat more demanding games as well, though not in super high quality.

I don't have such a list, but I'd ask what filtering and monitoring systems you use as it should be built in these days.

You can't use metal, so how about an ABS plastic junction box? Something like this? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ogrmar-Dustproof-Waterproof-Universal-Electrical/dp/B07KW1W5NP

We had good results with Dell Inspiron 2 in 1 laptops here, until we moved away from the touchscreen idea. The prices have gone up a lot though it seems since we bought ours. (More than double it seems).