msi_school

I have used Salamander and a shared word document to gather all the extra info required. Salamander works great but I rarely had nay of the extra info supplied.

Been there its not a nice feeling but is fairly simple to fix.

I had a head buy one of these for all staff once, I think about seven got taken out of the box if you count me, the head of IT and the Head who ordered them.

In the wild almost all animals will eat meat if given the opportunity generally any much smaller animal and even more will eat eggs or drink milk.

We have a super complex enrichment calendar where any student can go to any event without booking. we have tried a number of different systems to register these sessions and are currently using Signin App with the sessions set up as member of staff so the student signs in with their QR code and just selects "who" they are visiting. we can then export the visitors logs and record attendance with these. The main drawbacks I can see are we are not using the software as intended so this work round could stop working and the information is not able to be written back to SIMS although in general Sign in App can do write back.

I can see an argument for on prem Exchange at very large or very security conscious organisations but that sector does not really intersect with Rackspaces customers.

Have you asked the LEA? They generally have a team of staff to support SIMS.

We allowed students to lock screens and fast user switch at my last school, which allowed us to instill best practice and made helping classroom support easier. However, we did find some machines with 10 or 15 students logged on at the end of the day which caused slow downs, this was partially resolved by forcing a shutdown every evening which also made the site manager, finance manager and eco committee happy.

Not a massive issue with Smoothwall but I would like to be able to name the policies so they are easier to manage.

I have tried the self service route but it seem too complex for 75% of users especially users who are not using PCs, I gave up in the end and ran drop in sessions. For school devices I deployed via GPO or MDM and it worked like a charm.

You are treading on difficult ground with BYOD for students. I have had nothing but problems with SSL decryption on BYOD, I have not found a good solution for certificate install and it was the first item on our recent wireless upgrade requirements document. The guidance is fairly vague about what to filter but about 75% of the internet is now HTTPS so you are going to have to have a good reason why you are not doing inspection. Personal devices are also more likely to be infected or used to compromise the network. I question the requirement for anyone staff or student to have their phone on the school network. What is the business case for allowing access? Social media on the other hand is a decision the DSL should be able to make.

Be careful of fireproof safes, they are generally designed to keep cool enough to prevent paper from catching fire not plastic from melting.

I do not believe that the average member of IT staff even at network manager level have the skills to do this. Short listing staff for a position whilst keeping within the rules, laws and regulations for the employment sector especially with the safeguarding implications of this sounds like a job for a Human Resources professional and possibly a solicitor.

The management port is connected to a management VLAN which is kept separate from the general users because their is no reason form them to connect to it.

I would stay away from Vimeo because it causes filtering issues

I like to use 10.>100.x.x or 172.16.x.x because they are less popular so cause less issues with VPNs after once having a collision with our MIS provider. Obviously you need to do your VLAN and Subnet design but I like to have a management VLAN which has all the active kit on it and is strictly ACLed

I use a safety razor when I am clean shaven which is about 20% of the time I decide a need a change and then get annoyed about having to shave and I find it shaves as well as any cartridge razor and if it gets clogged with hair you can just take the blade out and rinse it.

I have Economy 7 but the prices are the same as the daytime ones, I tried to change providers and no one is taking new customers.

I have found that Octopus and OVO kept bothering me about increasing my DD when it was already covering the usage emails letters and even an occasional phone call but they where both less bothered by my requesting a refund every month.

Domestic fuel production is not a good solution because the producers who will probably be multi national corps will want to sell the fuel at the international price.

Thank you, I work for a large trust and we only use Smoothwall in a couple of schools , there is currently a discussion about what eh best option is for filtering and the MSP are being very slow with pricing for any option so I just want to have all my ducks in a row when we get tot eh end of support.

Thanks I don't know what would be better no internet, no filtering or filtering that looks like it is working but not.

Good afternoon We are currently going in circles over our Filtering supplier whilst all the time the end of contract date for the smoothwall is coming up, does anyone know what happens when it does expire? Does it stop working, stop filtering, just not have support and updates, or something else? Thanks

I like to keep my Registrar, DNS and Webhost separate so in the event of any one having an issue I can quickly transfer services to another, this is more expensive but all of it costs of the webhosting are minimal when compared to almost any of our other yearly planned expenditures. For most schools the website being down is a major issue and I think these extra tens of pounds are worth it for some reliability. I also do off site backups of the website.

Thanks I am looking at these for distributing video to display screens in an exhibition setup.