Blue_Cookeh

In our case we switched away from SchoolsBroadband to Starlink, deciding to do the filtering ourselves. I'm very happy that we managed to do this for various reasons. I got our filtering/firewalling down to Smoothwall and Sophos, we ended up going with Sophos but as far as I understand Smoothwall can do failover between connections etc nicely too. We have both Starlink and an FTTC connection from https://www.aa.net.uk coming into our Sophos appliance - the Starlink has honestly been rock solid but the once or twice the dish needed to reboot for updates at 3am our monitoring didn't even detect the downtime when the Sophos failed over to A&A. That slower FTTC connection is also a nice to have since it gives us a small subnet of public IPs we can use for incoming services and our SIP trunks, which I wouldn't want to send over Starlink anyway. This setup seems to work really well for us so far - we've had no complaints, and our staff are happy with the better speeds I'm surprised that the DfE are surprised about your usage - we're a 150 pupil rural primary school, the first month in we used 980GB on Starlink because suddenly everything could go away and do big updates, and I made the most out of patching everything as best I could. Nowadays we hit around 700 - 800GB a month, so I could see how a slightly larger school could very easily go over that TB allowance!

We're directly with Clarus - I just checked and they sent us two emails about this, one in March and another a month later in April so there was plenty of time to act, hence why I assumed it was the DfE that's dropped the ball in your case!

Sounds as if the DfE dropped the ball on that one. Clarus sent out very clear communication before this came in, we made sure we told them we wanted to be automatically billed for extra data

Bit of a thread bump but we finally got around to sorting this out. We ended up purchasing Starlink through Clarus (so we can pay up front via PO), with Sophos provided by Wave9. Both companies were excellent throughout procurement and provisioning, and the Starlink has been top notch for the past couple of weeks we've been using it. It's taken our Primary from 30/20Mbps to 230/30Mbps. With the high performance dish we've seen 100% signal quality (with a brief 5 minute downtime at 3am for a dish software update) and averaging 25ms latency. The Sophos failed back to our FTTC beautifully for the 5 minutes it needed to. It's certainly not suitable for everyone, especially with the upload, but we don't have any reason for staff to connect back to site remotely and we use Tailscale for remote tech access.

We've had an OR survey that needed in the region of £20k+ ECCs so far (no change from 10 years ago...), is there funding for fibre available? I haven't found anything or been pointed that way by existing providers. The 1/2TB priority plans Starlink offer shouldn't be an issue for our size of school, particularly if we offload some traffic to the slower backup FTTC connection. It's a primary with ~200 pupils - the majority of use is web browsing and some streaming from staff laptops/a laptop cart/iPads. Is there a PO option on the Starlink site?! Every reference I've seen thus far points to requiring a credit card and any PO looked to be US only, unless I'm being daft (highly likely given how long I've been investigating various options)

Hi all, Has anyone successfully purchased Starlink for their school and can recommend a reseller willing to invoice? Going direct is... incompatible with how schools generally pay for things I find. I've had one quote back from a reseller that is basically double the monthly cost of what Starlink charge direct. Currently trying to find something better than the 25/5 FTTC connection we're relying on. Three will offer us 5G Broadband but again, invoicing. Cheers

Enable logs and take a look to see if it can even connect out: How To Check SMTP Logs in Windows Server (IIS)?

What SMTP server are you using? If you're using postfix or something on a Linux box the logs should be quite verbose in what it's having trouble with. If you can see it's successfully connecting to Office365 (I'm just assuming you have a postfix server talking to Office365 like we do for relaying) then the issue is with Office365 and there should be more logs in your admin center for example. You can see problems with `mailq` or by looking in somewhere like /var/log/postfix If SPF was failing I'd expect mail to still arrive, but end up in spam.

We had an unlimited IP license for Sophos UTM/XG (we had a hardware appliance) with filtering/IPS/IDS/AV etc for <£900 a year in our primary.

Had a very good experience going through VeryPC last year.

Not true - only on certain models of SSD. Regardless of this it can be mitigated by not using the built in hardware encryption - use software encryption instead. Performance loss is no longer a valid complaint in 2018. How do you stop staff storing data on there? What do you do when someone opens a document on there and it's copied into the various caches on the device? Security is done in layers, and it sounds like you're missing a huge part of it.

If your member of staff loses a laptop or USB stick the ICO wont see it that way. You should be encrypting your laptops. It's the easiest thing you can do nowadays, especially with BitLocker.

SCCM managed Windows Defender here. If you're buying BitDefender, NOD32, whatever else there is thinking it's providing you more protection than straight up Windows Defender then your security strategy is completely wrong. You need to look at things like AppLocker, Defender ATP etc and use them in conjunction with your A/V to cover all your bases. EDIT: This page goes through all the Microsoft technologies you should look at using, albeit it is marketing material: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/windows-atp

I was told Intune is done on number of faculty (all, not FTE like typical EES licensing) @ roughly £6 each. This would then cover you for all staff and student devices. I believe that might be a little expensive to be honest (I think you can get it for between 4 and 5 quid) but the overall quote worked out cheaper (we needed Win Server etc etc) so we just went with it anyway.

Doesn't accept our .sch.uk address either - using my ICT one that's registered for VLSC etc too. EDIT: Should have looked at the OP's date...

If they have the BitLocker key that suggests they perhaps own the device, or that it is compromised anyway? Anyway, I don't care about answering the question - the info can be found anywhere online. You can boot into a WinPE instance and use manage-bde to unlock the drive and decrypt it. This will allow you to use the standard tools like Hiren's to remove the password.

You'd usually have some sort of VDI setup - so multiple VMs waiting for connections.

That's why you go and work for mega $$$ at the service provider!

Do you really rely on e-mail internally that much? I'd be *really* surprised if the fact people couldn't access the Internet was a higher priority. I worked for an 80,000 employee Telco and we were shifting to Office365, even the NHS are using Office365 for various services. I think you're overthinking the requirements of your environment personally but at the end of the day that's what they're paying *you* for and not me

DAG doesn't fix your Internet connection going down, or your UPS not providing enough uptime, or your Exchange database filling the disk, or your core switch dying, or your server room flooding, or whatever happens. Why would you go through the hassle of hosting an (or multiple) on premise Exchange servers when you could farm it out to Microsoft for free? All of the reasons you've posted in this thread can be countered and mitigated in 15 minutes. If you truly are having the problems you listed r.e. things like Outlook connectivity to Office365 then you have some serious problems elsewhere on your network or user's computers.

With the risk of a mod giving me a warning... is this entire thread a troll? Microsoft has infinitely more resources in their datacenters at their disposal than the largest organisations on this planet. When a server in their DC dies, they don't notice. Your school is a tiny fish in a gigantic pond. We've been using Office365 since it was originally introduced as Live@Edu and we've seen 0, yes, ZERO downtime on our mail service. You're making a huge mistake.

I don't know why you guys all decided to deploy LTSB against Microsoft's recommendation, to be quite honest. If you ever needed Microsoft support it gives them the biggest card ever to turn around and deny support until you deployed CBB or CB. It's quite clear that the industry is going towards continual updates and SaaS, I wouldn't bank on there being a successor to Office 2019.

You shouldn't see a noticeable performance drop with BitLocker. Make sure your servers have a TPM (virtual TPM if VMs) and the disks support hardware encryption. We don't encrypt Hyper-V hosts but we do encrypt at the VM level.

I think these are more of a technology demo than anything... eventually they'll come down in price enough to be affordable for new builds or office refits.

What a completely nonsensical statement. They both do different things well but the fact is most users know how to use Office and the integration between Windows/Office and Office365 is second to none. Our office and business managers would murder me if I took away Excel in favour of Google Sheets. There isn't "an obsession" with getting rid of servers either - I very much see the need for them in large organisations and even large schools but for primary schools (from those that rely on one server to more technically advanced ones like ours) they're complicated, expensive, and a pain in the ass to manage when most don't have full time technicians. I think if you're of the opinion that the cloud is big and scary then you'll be very quickly left behind in the IT world. Teams has a long way to go yet, we're using it in the NHS extensively now for IM and voice comms.