Strawdog

Will PM you

Same here - some staff have reported being able to login with some browsers but not others but it generally seems pretty wonky.

Lancashire (EDS) are testing the patch inhouse before releasing it to schools - I'm pleasantly surprised that ESS patched it that quick.

Lancashire have an existing mail relay they are offering schools use of - you have to send them a list of IPs for the machines you want to use it but all our core admin desktops have static IPs already from using Sun Global Desktop over lockdown. That being said I've just left it with staff printing to PDF and manually emailing them

Latest update from ESS via the LA.

Here's what I did to bypass the issue: - Told the affected admin staff to print their invoices/remittance to PDF and email them as attachments (I'm only here for another month so I'd rather not leave some convoluted workaround or potential security hole for whoever picks up the reins once I've left)

Weak sauce, someone needs to send them a copy of the BOFH Excuse Board.

We got hit by it yesterday, my immediate thought was MS discontinuing support for basic auth - given the age of the underlying software I can't see ESS being able to easily shoehorn modern auth support into FMS. They could setup their own basic auth capable mail relay for schools to use but I can see a number of reasons they'd not want to go down that path (support, cost, security, liability, etc.). If it is basic auth ESS have only had 12+ months to put a fix in place... :\

Each school/MAT's databases should be siloed so scaling shouldn't be an issue if they've enough grunt to handle the processing and we've never previously had such poor performance as we've had on and off ever since September - for me it seems they've either fundamentally broken something, aren't managing/policing load appropriately (blocking/terminating malformed reports or queries generating excessive load) or have cheaped out on infrastructure. I take your point that systems this large and complex aren't simple to get right but schools pay lots for this service - how Bromcom make the service work isn't our concern, that it works is.

30mins on hold, made it to 4th in the queue :\

We're seeing very slow loading times when accessing student information pages this morning - assessment, staff, cover, etc. all load okay (it's not the quickest but those pages are at least usable). 7 ahead of me in the queue to get through to the helpdesk, usually indicates it's not just us suffering

We already whitelist that for staff, along with a bunch of others that Bromcom relies on (see below), but it was still slow for us this morning. *.mouseflow.com *.bromcomcloud.com *.fontawesome.com *.walkme.com *.getbeamer.com *.cloudflare.com

It's not anywhere near as bad as it has been but yes we frequently see poor performance at the start of the day, the platform seems to struggle with the mass of logons and registers all being loaded around the same time by their entire UK customer base.

We replaced our whole network a few years back with Meraki switches (MS-350/350LP and MS-425 from Cisco 2960/2960X and 3750) after running Meraki APs for a few years before - it's very good kit and although yes it's expensive the price includes the support subscription (e.g. swap outs for any failures, enterprise level support for config/troubleshooting, etc.). There's a few other options out there but I'd be looking at enterprise level stuff just for future proofing and that's all pretty expensive whichever manufacturer you go with (but it's generally only something you're going to be swapping out every 10+ years). Check out https://www.fs.com/uk for sundries (SFP modules, interconnects, etc.) too as they're generally much, much cheaper to pick up yourself compared to those an installer will include in a quote.

....and it's flaky again \o/