Blue_Cookeh

We've got our migration tomorrow and will post back with how it goes - we've not really had any issues with getting the migration process it self sorted, Asmara at SB has been more than helpful. I am worried about losing access to features or having less control, and having to go back to managing proxy settings again (I thought those days were long over ) but will hold judgement! If worse comes to worse I can shift our school onto our secondary FTTC line and filter on our Sophos box - although not ideal with the connection speed. Realistically, I'm expecting some teething issues. SB are moving us from one platform to an entirely different one, it was never going to be 100% smooth sailing. I really hope there is an automatic or scheduled AD sync, though. We change things around a lot in our AD...

Ubiquiti provide their NVR software for free if you go down that route. Our school are currently running about 12 Ubiquiti cameras on their NVR appliance and are now starting to hit the limits of that device. I'm looking at running the NVR software in an Uubuntu virtual machine on our Hyper-V cluster with a 6TB RAID array passed through to it. If our internet connection was reliable enough I'd then be shipping that up to Azure or AWS. In terms of cameras when we started planning this stuff out (we went down the route of doing it ourselves too) we started out at looking exactly what we wanted to cover and where the cameras will go. Get the easy bit out of the way and make sure you have decent cable routes between cabs and your camera locations first. With Ubiquiti you don't have too much choice - UVC-G3-DOME for indoors and UVC-G3-AF for outdoor use in our case. I couldn't recommend them enough to be honest - far cheaper than some solutions out there, police have praised the video quality when we provided footage to them, and they've been rock solid and get regular firmware updates.

If you aren't running BGP etc then you need to go straight to your ISP otherwise you'd probably be better off asking on the UKNOF mailing list - you'll need a damn good reason for requesting the space nowadays though, and you can expect to pay a lot.

I'd be hugely interested in this. Our school is on the far end of a FTTC connection at the moment and we have to have kids on one connection and staff on the other since we can only get 20Mbps on either :/ A few years ago Virgin wanted £20,000 for a leased line install and BT 70,000! (3 months before they announced FTTC in our area... I think they were trying to get us to pay for a load of their own product's install cost!)

We moved ours to Eclipse Internet about 15 years ago - been flawless that entire time.

lol that file has an e-mail address for our school that hasn't existed for 10+ years!

We use OneDrive (Office365) for user storage, SharePoint for 'shared drives', and DirectAccess so we can manage machines with SCCM etc.

Why not do SIMS > Onsite AD > Office365/Azure AD? That seems to be the more popular and most supported flow.

Use the OneDrive group policies and make sure you're using Windows 10 1709 or higher across your estate. You can configure OneDrive to store files online by default (for IT suites etc where space will get eaten up) and force OneDrive into a specific directory in the user profile. You can then use Folder Redirection to redirect profile folders into OneDrive.

We use https://www.stratospherix.com/products/filebrowsereducation/ in our school - costs a bit but it's possible to push configuration payloads to it via your MDM solution so it's completely automated. Otherwise if you don't mind hand configuring each iPad app, you could use https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/fileexplorer-file-manager/id510282524?mt=8 Our staff use these apps to copy media from iPads onto a shared folder, which is then mapped as a network drive on their laptops.

I'd probably have been a little nicer to people I was trying to get "free" stuff from!

Holy moly can you just stop - you're making me want to go put a case out to our SLT for a bunch! I love ThinkPads, and I love the X series more

That's an ISDN2e compatible card (BRI) in his Avaya unit. Ports 1-8 are digital phone outputs and 9-12 are ISDN. As far as I know each of the four ISDN ports should be able to support 2 channels. It's probably a configuration problem on the Avaya unit, particularly as it's seeing the connection (the green light) to the NTE. You should download the Avaya administrator's toolkit and use IP Office Manager to look at the configuration of that ISDN port. IIRC the toolkit also has a live log viewer so you can see what the unit is doing in realtime when (like a call) happens. As much as I like BT after leaving them on good terms, their engineer could have very easily tested the ISDN line. BT engineers are given equipment for this purpose... unsure of Kelly Communications etc. Off topic but tbf, it may be old now but that Avaya system is still very powerful and I'd be hesitant to remove it for another good few years yet!

Could you not use RADIUS accounting on your WiFi network to identify Chromebook users? Just wondering, we're not using Chromebooks... yet.

Lenovo X series for those that like small and light, Lenovo T series for standard deployment, and Lenovo 13 for support/TA staff. I <3 my X270

I think it'll be fair to judge SB based on how reliable connectivity is on the new Netsweeper platform to be fair. Lightspeed certainly left a very sour taste in my mouth e-mailing us (i.e. SchoolsBroadband customers) directly, so much so that I wouldn't consider them if I were looking to filter onsite.

Yeah it says 1Gb for us too which I know isn't true without £££££ for installation - but they seem to have a Wireless network that might be useful for resilience.

Hi Guys, Just looking at our connectivity options and came across a company that seems to provide the various services our school is looking for (whilst out in the sticks!) called https://m247.com/ - has anyone heard of them before, or even used them? Can anyone recommend? Cheers

I can appreciate there's only so much redundancy you can implement but at this point the company ought to be reaching out to customers and actively trying to repair their relationship with them. I do understand what you're saying about those with problems complaining, but it's the same people over and over again. If the same people are all having the same problems time and time again do you not think this in it self is a problem? It's always a "small subset of customers" but they just so happen to always be the same customers - a bit of a coincidence, no?

From a school's point of view, let's assume 87.6 hours downtime happened during the school day over the course of a year. Our finance ladies rely on RM Finance, which is a cloud-only product, so they've lost 87.6 hours worth of work. Even at minimum wage (which none of our staff are) thats £657 per staff member lost. This might sound ridiculous, and maybe there hasn't been 87 hours worth of downtime during the school day, but you can see how quickly the monetary value in hours gets lost once you start multiplying it by multiple members of staff, particularly as we rely on Office365, Integris, RM Finance etc etc which are all cloud based now. This doesn't even take into account the learning lost with our pupils. I have to admit I'm a bit peeved about our Netsweeper migration too - I was offered an after school slot two weeks ago, but apparently BETT/lack of resource put a halt on that and now I'm stuck having to accept another hour to two hour's worth of downtime at either 8am or 1pm - during the school day. We (partly) went with SchoolsBroadband because we thought they would understand the needs of a typical school, and that they were using Lightspeed filtering - neither are the case anymore.

I mean, if we're going to look at cold numbers our business line from KCOM (Eclipse Internet) that we use for SIP/VPN etc has had no noticeable downtime over the last two years... I don't believe SchoolsBroadband is sitting at anywhere near 99% over the last two years for our school, redundancy or not. I've had an incredibly competitive quote from Zen Internet, so far.

Seems like we are too.

Good to see there are IT techs out there wasting today's diminishing school budgets on ridiculous solutions that provide the same service as something 10x less the cost. Ruckus, Aerohive, Cisco or any other central-controller based solution I could perhaps get on board with the pricing of, Meraki? You're paying $$$ for the badge, they're the Apple of the wireless world.

Pricing on Sophos UTM and even Palo Alto (we got quotes for official rack mount appliances from resellers for major vendors) was very competitive. Smoothwall was outrageously expensive for less features. We're talking less than £1,500 over 3 years for Sophos UTM in a school (appliance, 3 year license for all features and support) - we ended up buying through Pugh.

until your license expires and bricks the device I must admit there seems to be a bit of fanboyism among this thread. "Wasting money"? We've had UniFi kit deployed in our school (with high density areas, and supporting our WiFi VoIP phones) for years at less than 10x the cost of Meraki. They don't rely on licensing or remote services, the hardware is cheap enough to keep a whole new system spare on a shelf if you so wish, and they've added features to even the oldest APs for the past 5 years.