themightymrp

Brace yourself guys, we North Yorkshire schools aren't back until next week. Expect higher load on the servers and lots more crashing 🙂

I've been asked to look more into Microsoft Copilot, namely to have a secure environment where we can upload work related documents safely and build bots etc. The licensing model, as always with Microsoft, is like sludge. Has anybody gone that next step and started building bots/agents for their school? And if so, what licensing did you pay for and roughly how much was it?

Just received a call from them - they have manually reapplied our licenses while I was on the phone and it's now working for both schools. So expect a call shortly!

We have just come across this same issue of being charged to restore a users data. When did this become a thing?? We only signed a new contract in December so I have the latest wording here. Nothing mentioned about a cost to restore data from a backup! This is disgusting

Honestly, we've had no issues. Engineers are usually onsite same day for mechanical issues, unless we report them too late in the day in which case the following morning. Can't complain. We are coming to the end of our current contract and have an ongoing tender. It remains to be seen if we go with them again, have to wait and see

Though under GCA Framework RM6361(Lot2), Kyocera direct are also listed as a supplier in their own right if you were potentially thinking of a direct award

We use Kyocera devices, currently under lease from XMA

It was slow, but I've just managed to get on!

Our finance officer tells me we've had this in the past on the first day back after a holiday. Too many parents trying to get on at once when they realise they forgot to top up their kids account. Apparently it usually starts working again around 10:45 to 11:00 ish. We shall see!

Issues with logins here - I can't get in and neither can any parents

Do you know what version you're currently running?

I assume you've tried updating the firmware over the air directly? Or is that not an option?

The ad says salary depending on experience. Have you got a ballpark range? I have a colleague who might be interested

Never mind, no sooner as I post this than I've fixed it. Not a proper GPO policy but a deployed reg key. For anyone interested, a new GPP registry item to create the following (I've only set it for students): HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify New DWORD called SystemTrayChevronVisibility with a value of zero hides all icons EXCEPT the volume control and network icon. Great for me! A value of 1 brings them back

Don't suppose anyone ever got around this? We are deploying 24H2 and can't get the policy to hide the icons

Wouldn't the data they are backing up be in the MIS though? And surely the MIS provider (if Cloud based) or the school (onsite servers) would be backing things up anyway?

If you deploy VLC, just ignore DivX. You're just introducing unnecessary bloatware. VLC will play the files just fine. We used to deploy the K-Lite codec pack with media player classic It would play just about anything

I've made progress! In the end I took pot luck and added Active Directory as a secondary "Directory" to compliment Idex. As soon as I did this, logons started to work! So not sure if purely Idex works with it? I need to tinker a little bit to ensure the filtering is picking up correctly but I might be there. @timbo343 thanks for all the help with this

I don't think so no. I was asking @timbo343 about if they use IDex as their authentication directory, and they do. But they also have Active Directory listed. We only have IDex so not sure if that could be an issue? I've probably missed something somewhere, it's having time to figure it out that I'm struggling with right now.

That's pretty much exactly as we do - the core switch's default gateway is the Smoothwall. Just struggling to figure out why it isn't doing it. I'll get there eventually!

I'll compile my notes that I took after a session with @timbo343 - but I'm still struggling to get mine to work. Our school setups are quite different and I'm trying to adapt what I've been told to work with ours. Do you use your Smoothwall for VLAN management? Or a core switch?

That would be amazing! How do you want to do it and when would you have availability?

I seem to be going round in circles reading articles and getting myself in a twist. Does anybody have a real easy guide to set up BYOD on a Smoothwall? We use Aruba Instants for our Wi-Fi with various SSID's, one of which is designated for BYOD. I'd like it so that if students (sixth form only) connect to this, they need to sign in with AD credentials, possibly with the prompt to install the filtering certificate (needed?). I'd like Safeguarding reports to show the name of the user and not the device IP. We have the RADIUS service installed on a Windows Server, but it doesn't do a whole lot at present. How would we set Smoothwall to use that for RADIUS? Many thanks for any pointers

I really should have replied to this sooner - just for anyone else. I added the Whatsapp Messenger into the 'do not inspect' part of the SSL Inspection page and it worked instantly. Such a noob Thanks!

It seems to be the messages themselves. They sit with the clock symbol waiting to send and then after a time, you get the 2 ticks. But the time can vary enormously