Dickens

That's not a bad idea - either that or we use it as the excuse to move the final few staff members that are clinging on to W7 into the big scary world of W10.

OK, add my name to the list of people struggling to activate W10 LTSC ! Can I just clarify a few things (mostly to ensure we're not missing anything)... We're running a KMS Host on Server 2016 using KMS rather than ADBA. Everything was fine until we decided to take a look at W10 LTSC and found it wouldn't activate. We go through the usual rigmarole of contacting the VLSC and requesting the Server 2019 KMS Key (why do they not automatically assign it to you if you've requested it each year for the previous xx years ???). The chap also gave me the W10 LTSC KMS key as well as he thought we may need it. I go on to the KMS Server and install and activate the Server KMS Host key through the Volume Activation Tools which all works perfectly. We try to activate our test machine and get Error: 0xc004f074. I can see above that KB4462917 has introduced a bug in 2019 Server key activation, so assume we are awaiting a fix for this before we can continue ?? My questions are: From reading https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started-19/activation-19 (thanks Mark Wilfan), the new 2019 key can't activate Windows 7 and neither can ADBA - thanks for completely screwing this one up Microsoft - after all who could possibly want to use W10 LTSC and possibly have a few Win7 legacy clients still in existence. So does this mean we're now forced to keep using KMS and the old Server 2016 key to keep our remaining few Win 7 clients activated, and also run ADBA in parallel with the new key (once MS releases a fix) to activate W10 LTSC ??? It would appear that the 2019 Server Key has overwritten our 2016 Server key, so I presume i'll start seeing failed win7 activations shortly ? I guess we can't have both keys in KMS together (since they both appear to be called "VOLUME_KMS_WS16") ? The solution to spin up a 2019 VM and activate presumably only works for ADBA, is there a known workaround for KMS whilst we wait for MS ? Is anyone running both KMS and ADBA on the same server, do they play nicely, are we better off leaving the Office activation in KMS or moving this over to ADBA ?

We moved from two separate MIS platforms (from Double First for accounts and a bespoke MIS for pupil management) to iSAMS nearly 2 years ago. Once you're used to iSAMS, I find it works really well. For the on-boarding process, we were provided spreadsheet templates to export our existing data into, then a team at iSAMS loaded this up. We did a couple of test runs to check data and run through some cleansing exercises before the main load during the summer holidays. We use daily for all the normal activities, parent contact (via SMS and email), reporting, timetables, exams, pupil rewards / discipline, detentions, registration, finance etc etc. We self host, but isams will provide hosted packages, it's entirely browser based so accessible inside and outside of school (staff just love writing reports at home) and they have just revamped the iTeacher app for Apple and Android which is a big improvement and allows our nursery to do their registration via iPad, contact parents from trips using iPhone / iPad etc etc. We visited another school who were already using iSAMS and got the daily pros and cons of using it from them - if you speak to iSAMS they can arrange this. I can't say what SIMS is like, as I've never used it, so can't say if iSAMS is better or worse. For us, at least, it's better than what we were running previously. Like anything, the more effort you put in, the more you get out. We're a small independent school with nursery through to y11 and it works fine for us. If you want any more details, let me know

Sounds like a permissions issue. May not be, but that is certainly where I'd start looking. Is it just this one user, can other users save to this folder, can an administrator ? I'd check the permissions on the network folder as a starting point and work on from there.

Long shot, but we had an issue in OWA with the window going completely white post login on ie. Traced it back to the SmartBoard "smartInk" software running in the ie window. Disabled SmartInk and the problem disappeared.

Been having a nightmare time with the App recently trying to allow a path through Smoothwall, glad I found this, the web version works a treat - why didn't I think of looking here first !

That's how we used to do it, but we found that using Impero provided a more granular approach as we could just unblock it for a single suite rather than all or nothing at the content filter level. I've managed to get through to Impero this afternoon, and spoke to them, apparently add-on support for Edge has just been released and they are working on a plug-in. No ETA as yet, but their advice is to put in a caption block for Edge for the time being to force users back onto ie11 until the new plugin is released.

We've just rolled out our first suite of Windows 10 desktops, resplendent with Microsoft's shiny new Edge browser. We run Impero on all student machines, so duly installed the client on these new machines which all went smoothly. Watching a class of students on day 2 and we noticed some of them on YouTube despite it being blocked by Impero under the "Blocked Websites" block group. Investigating a bit further, there appears to be no support for Add-Ons for Edge currently, so we're assuming no Impero interception on Edge ?? We could just use a windows title block, but this will only stop access to the full youTube site and not any embedded videos found elsewhere - so less than ideal. We could also block access to Edge via AppLocker until Impero have a solution - forcing users back onto ie11, also less than ideal. Just wondered if any other schools have encountered this and how they are tackling it ??

You're not along - we're suddenly getting the same thing. End of last week, we started seeing a huge increase in downloads maxing out our bandwidth. We spoke to Smoothwall and they traced it to Microsoft Updates, so put in a bandwidth cap during the day to limit bandwidth to the Software Updates category but this didn't seem to alleviate the problem. On Monday we tracked the problem down to a number of Windows 8.1 machines (but interestingly not all Win 8.1 machines) downloading gigs of data from 'bg.v4.a.dl.ws.microsoft.com'. We've put a daytime block in for that domain and everything settled down until yesterday. One of our students on the BYOD network started downloading lots of data from 'officecdn.microsoft.com.edgesuite.net'. By the time we'd traced it to him, the download had stopped. This morning we come in to find a PC in the office that we'd done a test install of Office365 on a while back had downloaded 9 Gig of data from 'officecdn.microsoft.com.edgesuite.net' and 2 Gig from 'officecdn.microsoft.com'. We've removed the test install and life is back to normal, but we're concerned as we're just about to offer Office365 to students to install and use at home, some of which will be bringing in devices to connect to the student BYOD network. I don't want a lot of student devices eating bandwidth (although we do have a throttle on their SSID), and equally don't want to completely block officecdn.microsoft.com.edgesuite.net as it seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Is anyone else seeing this (particularly high bandwidth to 'bg.v4.a.dl.ws.microsoft.com'), we think it's related to the Win 8 Store App, but can't see why it's not all machines and why they don't update then stop. Everything usually goes to our WSUS server, and resetting WSUS on the client (wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow) has no effect. Any advice, gratefully received.

Hi, We're using DPM as our backup solution quite happily - two servers one intra-day for short term backup and one weekly for the longer term stuff, however I want to go back to having an off-network / off-site backup. We did have a Quantum Superloader and backup exec, but the drive went a bit funny, hence the move to DPM. Now we're using DPM I wouldn't go back, but I miss the security of having tapes (or similar) off site, just in case. Looking at the options, we could: Get the superloader repaired and run a monthly backup to tape, storing them offsite Use a VTL with DPM and some relatively inexpensive portable HDDs to store offsite (the data I'd be looking to retain offsite is less than 1Tb, so could comfortable fit on a drive) Sign up for Azure (or a similar cloud storage option) and backup long term stuff online Following up on the VTL options, it would appear we can use Solarwinds or Firestreamer on the DPM box, but we're looking at £800+ for Firestreamer and double that for Solarwinds, or go down the free route with Quadstor. I'm considering purchasing an HP microserver, sticking CentOS on it and installing Quadstor, but was wondering if this was the best solution, if anyone has done it already and suffered any major headaches. I'm sure we can't be the only people wanting to use DPM with offsite backups, what do others do to fulfil this requirement ?

Start by narrowing down the problem, take away the stuff that is just noise and leave yourself with something easy to troubleshoot. Take two PCs one that gets an address and one that doesn't then swap their ports on the switch - does the problem follow the PC or stay with the port ? Do you run VLANs across the network - could the loss of power have reverted a port based VLAN to the default VLAN or vice versa. It does sound as though it could have been switch config in running memory not saved to NVRAM - been there, done that. IS this on one particular switch or multiple switches, are you able to directly connect a couple of PCs to the same switch as the server and if so, do they both get addresses ? You could try installing WireShark on a PC, monitor the network traffic then switch off your DHCP server, see what traffic you still have - this should highlight any rogue DHCP servers that are causing trouble.

For me it's Putty - fantastic piece of software at a fantastic price. Just got a Surface Pro, so have stuck Office Pro Plus 2013 on there - started having a play with OneNote so I could use the surface and the pen for note taking in meetings etc - not got too far with it so far, but liking what I see. VLC is also up there - very powerful bit of software, we use it to multicast a BBC News feed around our school, and the Firefox client to subscribe to the feed and display on an info display webpage - very useful.

Slightly different issue, but same area - we've got (amongst other things) an HP DL320e which has a 1tb OS drive and 3 3tb Data drives running DPM. From day one it was a bit of a nightmare, most times it would boot OK, but on the odd occasion the raid array controller would fail to post citing drive faults. A reboot and it would boot fine, until one day it just kept doing it. HP engineer came and replaced the drive backplane and enclosures and since then it's been as good as gold - certainly worth asking the question. BTW: Why do the Gen 8 HP servers take sooooooooo long to boot - what precisely are "Early Processor initialisation" and "Thermal Calibration" - just start !!!

You have old i7 systems sitting in the corner - what do you give the children to use in class ?? I've got a 60Gig SSD sitting on my shelf itching to be put into a (really) old core 2 duo lenovo laptop for a bit of a play - mmmmmmm start menu !!!!!

I'm in the market for a *cheap* solution as well. Currently we have an internal web page that sits in our CMS and rolls notices round on one half and has a bit of javascript on the other half which picks up a multicast TV stream using the VLC plugin for Firefox and runs BBC news. For display we have a PC that, on boot, launches Firefox in kiosk mode and has this page as a home page, sending it's output to a VGA into 8-way cat5 splitter with small cat5 to vga receivers behind each TV. I know it sounds a bit heath robinson, but it largely works, apart from the VLC plugin seeming to crash overnight on an alarmingly frequent basis. Was thinking of looking at Xibo as a replacement but wondered what others views of it were ? Big question I guess is can Xibo handle streaming a TV channel alongside DS content ?

We use Print Manager Plus here and all students are allocated £5 per term (£5 per old full term so £15 per year) and staff double that. If the students print more than this we give them more credit and recharge it back to their parents. Teachers overspend comes out of their departmental budget. All colour printers are setup with 2 queues one for B&W and one for colour with B&W being the default printer. We then have all of the SMT and some office staff on unlimited printing, but they are mostly reasonable about what they print. On the whole it works well, and we don't get too much wasted printing and little moaning from staff or students as the system has been in place for a couple of years now. We charge 5p and 15p per A4 sheet - i'd be interested to know how this compares to others who implement print restrictions. Witch - was the option to disable repeat printing for 1 minute in PMP - I'd not seen that in our version but will be going to have a look for it now !

Rabbie - have you tried doing a restore of the SQL database from your full disk backup - apologies if you have and I'm teaching you to suck eggs. We ended up going the same way as others have above, nightly incremental DB backups from SQL Server Management Studio with a weekly full backup of each DB. These get picked up by the file backup job that runs 1 hour later each night - we've test restored the backups and confirmed it's all good.

Hi - we're in the same boat, a new school build is starting and the task falls to me to get some sort of time lapse solution setup. I've been quoted £1500 setup and £75 a month for a managed service, but this is way out of our budget. I'm totally new to all of this, so looking for advice on the best solution. The construction site is quite large with initial work being farthest away from the camera position, so I guess resolution will need to be reasonable. The camera will need to be external and mounted on a pole, so I presume I'm going to be looking at some sort of IP cam based solution. Can anyone provide recommendations on the sort of kit I should be looking at and a rough guide to setting it up ? Do I look at a time lapse camera which will take photos say once an hour and store them away, or do I have a constant feed camera and use some sort of PC based software to save a snapshot away every hour ?

Tom / Guys, We're having exactly the same problem, and our system logs are filling up with "smoothwall unable to connect to the database to run reports, or insert new information". Looking back through the logs, it's been happening for a while - just not noticed it as everything else was running fine. When you go to information -> settings -> database backup it says "can't connect - please review settings" and the databasetools perl script tries to connect on port 5432 but fails. Running netstat - nothing appears to be using port 5432 (which would explain the connection failure). We've rebooted (always a good start) and get "Starting Database (if available)" and "Starting Database Migration Process" come up ok towards the end of the second stage boot ? Nothing else looks out of place on the main -> summary page - so any ideas what could be causing this ?

Rob - you're a star ! I'd removed the details of the second nic from /etc/network/interfaces, but forgot to add the gateway onto the internal nic to allow it access outside of the network. Once the gateway was added, everything fell into place and I can now access the mail server from outside of the network. I've also added the source mapping - thanks for the tip, much appreciated ! :)

Hi, I'm hoping one of the smoothwall experts out there can help with a small problem we have. We just upgraded our internet access and previously had our email server straddling both the internal and external networks - two NICs one internal and one external. Our cisco router was then directly connected to our Smoothwall box and the external NIC of our email server, allowing email webclient access both internally and externally. I want to move our email server behind our Smoothwall box and just open up the necessary firewall ports on Smoothwall to allow external access to email. I've configured an external alias on Smoothwall, using a 2nd static ip from the range allocated, then set up port forwarding to forward http and https traffic onto our mail server's internal ip. Now when I try to access the mail server using the alias ip from outside of the network I get a 404 Not found. Looking at the access logs on the mail server, the external traffic is not getting through, and looking at the realtime firewall logs on the Smoothwall box I can see why - entries from my external ip (with strange port numbers - e.g. 31225) are being blocked, however the destination ip is the internal ip of our mail server and the port is correct (443). My question, finally, is why would an http request be hitting smoothwall with a strange port number, rather than 443 as one would expect, and why would the logs show the destination as the internal ip of our mail server, since the firewall rule is not being matched - hence the block. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here - any help gratefully received.

A little tip to hopefully save someone going through the same grief I've just had, we couldn't get the Enterprise Console to force the AV and firewall down to a new Lenovo Laptop running win 7 pro - followed all the instructions above, including the detailed instructions from Sophos all to no avail. We also found that we couldn't access the laptop from any other networked machine (only got ping response). Checked and double checked all the networking settings in the Network and Sharing Centre etc. Finally traced it back to File and Print Sharing not being enabled for our wired connection (from the sharing Centre, click on "change adaptor settings" right click on your connection -> properties then tick "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks"). God knows why this wasn't enabled when we set file sharing on in the nice windows 7 wizard, but that was the cause of our woes. Once it was enabled, Sophos installed perfectly.

Last year's summer project was to upgrade the ageing Panasonic phone system to add 25+ extensions to the 20 we had already. They got our phone guy in who wanted about £8k to upgrade the system to a panasonic digital system and run new extensions round to all the classrooms. We took the decision (and the plunge) to do it in house instead, so we decomissioned the old system and put in a complete new asterisk system. A scary prospect to start with, but we had some help from an external consultant who'd done this before, and apart from some teething troubles with echo on the external calls (mostly sorted out by enabling software echo cancellation) it all went very smoothly. We now have 4 ISDN lines (2 * 2 channels) coming into our asterisk box to route external calls and 45 internal extensions - Linksys SPA901s in the classroom (basic models so the students don't tend to play with them) and SPA962s in the office, headmasters office and server room (nice 6 line models with full colour display). I'd recommend the Linksys models, very sturdy and the 962s are full featured. The system is simplicity itself to manage, adding new extensions, moving phones setting up personal voicemail, even down to checking call activity logs is all very simple. International calls get routed out over a SIP line which is just our backup line currently (gets used if all 4 isdn channels are in use) until we can increase our bandwidth. Once this is done, I'd consider dropping the BT lines altogether and just using SIP - saving even more money. It was a bit daunting to switch a pstn system over to VOIP to start with, but now we've done it, we wouldn't go back - the school saves a fortune on phone support costs now it's handled by us

I'm a little lost here - perhaps it's just me not understanding the concept. Why would a school subscribe and pay money to a site that hosts TeacherTube content, when they can get it from TeacherTube for free ? I appreciate that you will have filters in place to block objectionable content, but my understanding is that it's our teachers who have to rate this content and deem it appropriate for use at our school ? Currently we allow access to youTube for our staff and year 11 pupils only. Blocking access to you tube from within the school does not stop pupils bringing content in on pen drives, phones, email etc. We have considered some fairly low tech solutions (as well as the high tech ones) such as a row of big mirrors across the back of the IT suite, or a large TV at the front of the room with screen caps of all screens in the room. So if we're spending a lot of money on a solution I'd want to block / monitor more than just the one channel / medium. We currently use Smoothwall for our content filtering and I'd be very interested to hear someone expand on the post above about using it to filter you tube content - can this be achieved in some way with the current version of smoothGuardian ?

Yes I've done it and it was fine. I renewed mine and my children's passports about 4 years ago and printed the photos out on 6*4 photo cards and cut them to the appropriate size. These were accepted without any issues at all. Unless something has changed in the last 4 years with the newer biometric passports you should be fine. As far as I could see, my photos were of no less quality then anythign the little booths produce. You just need to ensure that you follow the guidance notes about having a white background and how big the face is in the photo etc.