kaphc

One of the recommendations from the audit was the staff using laptops running Windows 7 use the built-in encryption to secure data on their hard drives. I've had a look and assume that the auditors were referring to Bitlocker. Unfortunately, this only seems to be available in Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate, and we are running Windows 7 Professional. Can anyone recommend any free third-party software that would do similar to Bitlocker? Ease of use for the end user if a high priority!

Bit short notice this one, but I've just had the latest emPSN newsletter and it has the following seminar advertised: "They[Capita] are also running an Apple in Education Seminar on Friday 28th June with Apple at the Forest Lodge Education Centre, Leicester. This event is open to all emPSN connected schools across the East Midlands and starts at 9.30am, ending just after 1pm." The link to the site with the details is June 2013 Capita. Thought I'd post it here in case it's of interest to anyone. I'd love to have gone but can't make it now!

Well the firmware upgrades have arrived, so I am going to apply them one by one to see how we get on. Given that the first one is an hour and counting .... this is going to take a while. I feel like I have more of a grip on the situation now at least, where I know where the APs are and which is the most prone to dropping out. I've decided that the next step is to follow the supplier's advice and do the firmware upgrade and then keep the PoE injectors and mains power as the next solution if there are further issues. It's one of these issues where if I try too many solutions at once, I'll never know which has fixed it! But I do feel much clearer on the path to sorting it out - and the bottom line is I have been able to explain to the ICT Co-ordinator that it's his classroom which is served by the temperamental AP and explain the impact that this has on his ICT lessons if the AP is down. Thanks to everyone for the information so far.

Do you mean IP addresses outside of the DHCP range or allocated out of the available DHCP range?

Another thought that has occurred to me - does it matter if the APs have reserved IP addresses outside the scope of DHCP. These are obtaining their IP addresses through DHCP whereas on other systems I am working with the IP addresses are reserved. Could this be a factor?

The power analysis is interesting, even if it may not be the fault I'm looking for. Given that I placed the order for the Ruckus support over a week ago and still have heard nothing back from the supplier about whether this is in place now, it's worth me looking at all avenues cos I feel like I'm hitting a brick wall. The problem is that until one of the APs disconnects ... I have to assume that swapping the two APs over has fixed it so it's now a waiting game!

All 6 APs are cabled back to the same Cisco switch. Which is interesting. As it's a managed switch, I'll have a look into the performance of it next week when I'm back on that site. I feel like I'm getting somewhere with this at least, and I'm not barking up a sole single and possibly wrong tree trying to sort out the firmware.

Thanks for the offer @IrritableTech, I will PM you. @Net-Ctrl I'm hoping I can put pressure on the original resellers of the system to help resolve the issues, but I'll bear that in mind, thank you.

I'm back on this site this afternoon investigating further. I have located the AP which disconnects first every time - typically it's the one outside the ICT Co-ordinator's classroom. It does explain why he constantly has the most issues though! I've swapped this AP with another one from another classroom which hasn't dropped since last year. And labelled them both so I know where they are now. Hopefully if there are any further problems these will narrow down to the either the AP or the cabling. The AP cabling itself goes into a Cisco SG300-10P Managed PoE Switch. Re: PoE Injectors - this is a new one on me so forgive my ignorance, is there a "standard position" for these to go in - would they most often be near the switch or near the AP or somewhere in between? I've had a look and can't see any, but a lot of the wiring for the APs goes into the ceiling voids so it's possible that they could be part of the infrastructure somewhere. Without copping out, I support this school technically for 3 hours a week, so am keen to get the supplier involved where possible to resolve this issue in order to make best use of my resources. Thanks for all the replies so far, it's really helpful to have some directions to go in rather than just having this "upgrade the firmware" approach as the sole solution.

Thanks, I will investigate the APs labelling further. I may be able to get mains power to them, however, their locations are all high / in corners of rooms so we'd be looking at extension cables and trunking to do it. Certainly once I find the one that disconnects first, I will assess whether we can mains power it instead.

Hi Witch Yes the two that dropped over half-term were two of the four from before. One of them has also dropped in May as well. There are Ruckus systems in two of the other schools I support, but most of the APs are plugged into the mains, not PoE. They've never droppped as far as I know either though and have not had firmware upgrades, which is why I've never gone into depth on the Ruckus ZoneDirector and how it works apart from the very obvious bits. We could try swapping the PoEs as well but that will necessitate me working out the way they've labelled them and sadly it's not obvious. For instance, there is one AP outside a Year 3 classroom and one AP in another Year 3 classroom, but only one AP labelled Y3. I'm quite happy to investigate this further but am hoping I'm investigating in the right direction :-)

I'm supporting a School with a Ruckus Zone Director ZD1106 plus 6 wireless access points which are all PoE. The school is on two floors so there are 3 APs upstairs and 3 downstairs. Currently we're on verion 9.3.1.0 build 20 of the firmware. It's a Victorian build school and so the walls are fairly thick - all the APs have been positioned high up in the classrooms or in corridors to try and maximise coverage. When I first started with this school (after the Ruckus had been installed), there were all sorts of issues with Group Policies not applying or logging on to the network being intermittent etc. which I tracked down to 4 of the APs having disconnccted, so I rebooted the ZoneDirector and powered the switch off and on again, the APs came back up again and everything was a lot better. The issue I have is that the APs keep disconnecting. I have checked again today when I'm in and two have disconnected over the half-term again. It's not practical to keep basically switching the ZoneDirector and switch off and on again when this happens! The supplier has recommended upgrading the firmware to the latest version - for which we are purchasing the ongoing support from Ruckus to be able to download it. What I'm after is someone else's opinion really - has anyone been in a similar situation? Does this sound like a sensible path to be taking to resolve the issues? Certainly once the support has been purchased, I hope I'll get access to the Ruckus training and want to learn a lot more about the info given in the ZoneDirector so that I can better analyse it. Is there anything obvious I can be looking out for in the logs in the meantime?

That looks like an interesting hour and 15 minutes to sit and watch when I get chance (yep I know how sad that sounds but it sincerely does). At the moment, I have gone back to the network shares, and worked out the permissions from there. There might be a couple of inherited permissions I've missed but I think what I'm putting together will be enough for the auditors (I hope!)

I'd never come across Sysinternals on there before and there's some cool stuff. I've looked at AccessChk and that shows the access rights for an individual user object which great, but there doesn't seem to be anything for security groups. I ran AccessEnum as well and that was useful to show permissions to a folder, but that's pretty much what you can get from right-clicking on the folder and checking the security. Thanks for the heads-up on this software as it's great but it doesn't seem to quite do what I'm after.

It's audit time and I've been asked by several schools to do a list of network users and their access rights. I can list network users and their group memberships easily, but is there a way of being able to tell what effective permissions a group has without going through every folder on the server separately. These are small schools with only 20 - 30 logins so if I have to do each one manually I can cope with this. I had a look at SolarWinds as a tool to automate this but am not 100% sure if it will do whatI want. Thanks

We've recently moved over to the online version of Testbase and staff are having lots of problems with it. We realised that it needs certain pop-ups to be allowed - which is fine, but the act of being prompted to allow pop-ups and then confirming them causes the user to be taken out of Testbase and shown a message saying "Please launch this application from the original location". I had the most frustrating support call ever with Testbase last week where they seemed convinced that we were pressing the back button on the browser at some point and couldn't seem to realise the nature of the issue I was trying to report. I thought I'd sorted the issues by going through and allowing pop-ups for the four sites that they require, but teachers are still reporting problems, including when exporting to Word the questions appear but the image to accompany the question doesn't. Plus - when using it at home on different machines, different browsers etc. they are still getting the same pop-up issues. Has anyone else had problems with this software and found a foolproof way of getting it running smoothly? I'm doing a step-by-step sheet of instructions for teachers so that they know how to allow pop-ups from certain sites and am looking at what we can do via Group Policy for when they're onsite at school too. Any other ideas?

Sorry, just to clarify as I didn't leave a space in the right place in my original post ... there's 116 workstations (90 of them netbooks). If I deploy SCEP standalone is there any way of managing it centrally from the server to check for version installs, run reports of at risk computers etc? (Like Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager)?

Having just discovered that as a school we are licensed to use System Center 2012 under the terms of our EES, we would like to deploy it (it'll save us about £500 a year so well worth it). It's a small primary school with about 150 kids and about 116workstations. I'm now trying to work out what we will need to do to move from Symantec Endpoint Protection onto the System Center 2012Endpoint Protection. I know there are lots of guides out there but what I'm not clear on is this: Which software sits on the server to control all the clients? Is it System Center Configuration Manager I need to install or System Center Services Manager? We will be running this on a Windows Server 2008 R2 and it's the sole server so I don't have a test environment and need to get this right first time! It has SQL Server 2005 already installed - will this need to be upgraded and if so will this be done as part of the System Center install or do I need to look into this separately? Finally I'm thinking that we will need to deploy SCEP and then uninstall Symantec EP so that we have continued A/V coverage. Does that sound like a sensible order to do this in? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me figure this out!

I've done this module a couple of years ago, and wouldn't recommend it (I've done 10 other modules to complete my degree with the OU and so that's saying something!) The first block is the Network+ stuff which is not too bad, the course book is OK and the content is great. But the second two modules rely heavily on Microsoft materials, which is all well and good for a while, but gets very dull reading through their robotic presentations. Then trying to get onto their virtual servers to complete the exercises was a nightmare - let's just say I ended up doing some of my assignments at 1am as it was the only time I could get on. If you want to take the Microsoft exams at the end, then obviously that costs extra so you need to factor that in. That said, there were SO many complaints and dropouts about this module in the year I did it, that the OU must surely have done something about it since then. The course directors and administrators gave it everything to be able to sort the issues out. If you are seriously thinking about paying money for this module, check out what improvements they have made - and also compare the costs with just going to a Microsoft training centre directly. If you want any more info, just let me know.

I think I read somewhere that the school website is now one of the first ports of call for Ofsted inspectors to find out about the school and pull off relevant information. It makes me wonder whether if a school monitors its website visitors on a really obsessive basis, it could spot an impending Ofsted inspection because of a spike in the logs (either that or its snowing!)

Thanks for the replies so far .... as far as the budget goes, I think the idea is that we go towards the bottom end of the range, but then again not so far down that we miss out on useful features! Is there are big difference in quality between USB visualisers and ones with the VGA signal?

Hi, I've been asked to research a possible visualiser for use in a junior school. The idea is that the school buys one for one class and then tries it out and if it works well as a teaching aid, they buy more for all the classes. In the mix is the fact that the school is running a mixture of Windows XP and Windows 7 (plans to upgrade to Windows 7 entirely are in negotiation). Now I thought a visualiser was there just to magnify something up onto an interactive whiteboard, but looking at some online, there seems to be more functionality - e.g. a video camera or OHP as well. There's such a wide variety of prices too, it is a case of you gets what you pays for or is cheap and cheerful just as good as something high-end? Can anyone recommend me any makes/models to look at as a starting point? Thank you

Just to resurrect this thread, I'm having the same problem in another school. Again it's a machine running Windows 7 and IE9 and Flash 11.6. I've given permissions to the folders on the hard drive but it hasn't had the same effect in speeding Internet Explorer up. If I log on with an Administrator account the speed of Internet Explorer is fine so I know it's definitely some kind of permissions thing again. Just wondering if anyone had anything else they can recommend .... or otherwise I'm going to be rolling back Flash to a previous version if I can find one!

Nope, I'm not sure .... I'm talking nonsense. Just checked back and it is port 25. Am getting confused (easily done!) with the port for the proxy server settings which is 80! Sorry for any confusion.

Thanks for the info, have tried it again with port 80 and it failed. Switched the SMTP mail server to mx01.inthehive.net (which was the second record in the MX listings on Nslookup) and port 80 and it worked. Bingo!