localzuk

Server updated to 1.6.3c

I just use asset stickers. Some do get peeled off, sure, but we have the devices logged against individuals, so we can find it by their name as well as the ID. Or there's the serial number as well.

The fundamental flaw in Peston's argument is treating education as something that has productivity that affects inflation or GDP in such a short term. It isn't like a factory. It isn't a business pumping out widgets. But that comes from his not understanding education. He's a business journalist. He understands businesses. Not schools. Long term? Over 10+ years? Sure, you could probably comment on productivity, but a few months of lost teaching and a couple of rounds of missed exams? Not so much.

Nope, Ruckus.

Thing is, they were working fine until very recently. We'd had a single faulty wifi card in about 16 months, now suddenly we've got reports of dozens of them doing it.

It depends on the school - some schools the wifi is enforced on them, some not (as we've not yet finished standardising their wifi setups). All go through a transparent proxy (so, no settings on the devices).

We have about 1000 Chromebooks in our Trust now and in the last few weeks we've seen a massive increase in devices randomly dropping wireless mid-use and in many cases then acting like wireless is disabled on the device. Some work again if you log off and back on, some require a powerwash, some refuse to work again. Has anyone else seen this? Anyone got any ideas?

I would suggest installing Fiddler and get SOLUS to try and download the file and see what it is doing via the log in Fiddler. You may need to allow it to install its own interception stuff as everything is HTTPS these days.

One of my schools has unifi WiFi, and most of my schools have unifi switching, all behind a single XG pair of XGs. What issue are you having?

The permissions to the GAM folder should be restricted to only those people who are able to use it. Oh, also, if you have some staff that only need a subset of permissions, generate an OAuth token for them with only those permissions. Eg. My technician has a subset of capabilities within GAM available to them. It means you have to have more than 1 install of GAM on your machine if you use a shared environment, but it is more secure than giving all your technicians Super-admin rights.

Does not bode well considering SIMS and ParentPay are on track to be merged into a single company...

They still don't sync staff?? That means they've not improved it in a decade at this point. Appalling.

Don't need a command prompt to do any of that tbh. Can run those same commands straight in the windows start menu, or via a Macro in Excel, or via the Run dialog, or via a file shortcut etc...

Same thing. Lock down the data, which you access via computer.

We've used Data-Path for a number of years - https://www.data-path.co.uk/

At the moment, they are hosted on our central site server cluster. No, we have central DHCP/DNS, we have no servers on other sites at all (well, except an MECM DP at our second largest site) No, the RODC is more likely to have an outage than the connectivity. For my setup? No. For a slow connection like FttC, you're going to want onsite servers (the main issue is upload speed - even the best FttC line will only really give you about 20Mbps). We have gigabit fibre between all our sites though (it can be done a lot cheaper than most realise, with point to point leased lines). All our staff are just "staff". Moving around makes no difference to their network set up beyond which groups they're in and the "office" fields in AD. Nothing changes with their files.

Between our OA and the DfE devices, we are using them for our next year 5 1:1 provision in Sept, plus any spares will be going out to the children that most need them at home. Ideally I would have liked to buy the usual devices we had planned, but needs must in these trying times.

With GDPR, the increased risks of ransomware, etc...? I'd say there's far more reason to lock a PC down now than ever before.

NetSupport DNA would be running in an elevated user account wouldn't it? Not the actual user account logged in? So the end user would need admin privs to end that process?

It isn't bitcoin, but Ethereum and other alt-coins. They mine very nicely on graphics cards still (bitcoin has moved on to dedicated ASICs). For example, my RTX 2060 SUPER, is mining away whilst I am not using the PC. I am averaging about £100 in returns monthly on it, with about £20 in electricity costs running the PC when I don't normally run it. Scale that up if you've got the capital to buy cards in bulk and you can make a huge profit.

Yes, if it isn't your device, you have no power over it. Which is what I'd expect.

So, with Chromebooks, it is an enforced extension for them via Google Workspace. It can't be uninstalled.

My experience with Securly is that a) it works well but b) it is pretty inflexible. The safeguarding stuff in it is great, receiving notifications of worrying searches is very useful especially in these trying times. But, there are some aspects that I feel are missing. Eg. Regex rules. Reporting is a little bit limited too. I had an issue where I needed the details of Youtube videos a child had viewed. The site limits this to a certain number it'll list for you, after which I had to go to support and they sent me a spreadsheet - which obviously didn't then have the previews/titles etc... Another area I'd like to see better filtering for is importing URLs - at the moment I have to whitelist each individual video manually - there's no way to import a list of URLs. I tried sending a list to support a long while ago and nothing ever happened with it.

Server updated to 1.6.2

Search is actually just advertising. Ecosia get paid advertising fees when you search and see ads in the results. They then use a chunk of their profits to plant trees. https://cariki.co.uk/blogs/the-green-road/is-ecosia-legit-or-fake I believe Ecosia uses Bing underneath, so I think the safe search stuff involved is the same between the 2? Not 100% sure though - testing may be needed.