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I thought our smoothwall woes were over - but this morning they've returned with a vengeance! Everthing was fine first thing, but during form time the Internet just came to a dead stop. I logged into the smoothwall (which took ages) and noticed the Resource Usage Load average had gone above 45! - a figure I've never seen before. A lot of the students were doing an online survey - or at least trying to, but nothing that should cause this level of performance. All very frustrating.

Re: Smoothwall S9 Issue Hi all - we are having an issue with the Internet, which I can only put down to the smoothwall s9 box. Basically around 9-9.30am nearly every day, when a lot of devices are logging in (PC's, Laptops, Chromebooks) the Resource Usage on the smoothwall box goes up to around 8, which is quite high. We then start getting phone calls with people not being able to get on the internet or they get a Smoothwall Block Page message on websites we know aren't blocked - eg BBC. On the Block Page it shows the reason as "Server Socket Errored". This then coincides with alerts appearing on the smoothwall showing the "Gateway Down". It usually goes up and down 3 or 4 times in the space of 10 minutes. Around about 10am it usually starts to settle down. Only thing that has changed on the Smoothwall box is that we were upgraded to the Leeds 63 release. We are a large secondary. Our connection is full fibre 1gb. Our provider has reported no errors on the line, so I can only surmise the issue is with smoothwall. Has anyone experienced similar issues? Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Perfect! - it worked as soon as I set the VLAN to untagged. Thanks - - - Updated - - - Perfect! - it worked as soon as I set the VLAN to untagged. Thanks

Yes all configured - as mentioned everything else is fine - just can't get to the printer.

VLAN \ Printer Issue Hi I've setup a separate VLAN for a particular group of PC's and Laptops which is all setup fine and working. My problem is I now need to setup a HP Laserjet Printer for those PC's \ Laptops on that VLAN. I've given the Printer an IP address in the particular IP range of the VLAN, but I can't seem to "see" it. I've tried pinging the IP address I've set the printer, but no joy. What I'm scratching my head over is how the printer can be set to understand the particular VLAN - for example on a PC I can set the VLAN ID in the properties of the network card, but I don't seem to have that option in the printer. Maybe I'm missing something obvious? Any help appreciated. Thanks

Can you share roughly what price that was? As I'm guessing you have tested it - how have you found the solution? Thanks

What was the reason for moving away from Acronis?

Where is the setup for instant alerts?

We use Smoothwall Safeguarding Notifications, which produces daily reports emailed out to various people. With a newer version of Smoothwall we also get instant safeguarding notifications, which is very useful. My question is why we get some instant notifications and others, which are just as serious just get lumped in with the daily email notification. Thanks in advance.

Turns out the chrome update issue was a red herring as regards the certificate. The PC's for some reason weren't fully processing the group policy and then deleting the certificate. I rebooted one of our DC's and it seems to have sorted the issue.

Yes - Trusted Root It removes it - or its certainly not appearing in the list of certificates.

Re: Google Chrome Update - SSL Cert Nightmare We seem to be having increasing issues with the smoothwall SSL certificate disappearing from PC's / Laptops. This seems to be connected to Google Chrome Updates. The fix seems to be to let the Chrome Update complete \ Restart the PC to let group policy "push out" the certificate again, and then accept the SSL "Accept and continue" warning. This is obviously causing disruption in classes and for teachers. The are also plenty of instances where group policy isn't pushing out the certificate and we have to manually install it. Is anyone else having this problem? And what is the fix? Thanks in advance for any advice or tips. Steve

You will need to add the ip address of the host to your Google admin panel - papercut \ mobility print documentation will guide you to where the setting is.

We just used mDNS (worked first time) then changed to "Known Host" and that's worked fine as well. I could never get the DNS option to work.

Looks like you need the Enterprise Edition for this. At present we have Education Fundamentals - soon to be upgraded to Education Standard.

Hi Does anyone know if you can put Time, Device and IP restrictions on a Google User within the Google Admin Panel? We are wanting to enforce restrictions on a group of users so that they can only login within school on certain devices. Thanks in advance.

Re: Wireless \ Sophos Strange Behaviour We seem to have a very strange issue affecting a number of Laptops randomly dropping connection to the internet. Once the connection has dropped, we can't even ping the Smoothwall or local IP's even though Wireless is still connected. After much testing it appears to be a strange issue with Sophos Protection. Once a Laptop stops connecting, we then disable all Sophos Protection - within seconds the Internet is working again. If I enable Sophos Real Time protection again it will stop working. I can keep repeating this cycle and the same thing happens. This doesn't seem to be an issue on Wired LAN or all Laptops. Has anyone come across anything like this at all? Thanks in advance.

Re: Multiple Access Warnings on Smoothwall Hi All I'm sure we have all had them, but I seem to be getting lots of "Warning have detected 1000 accesses to IP address ......... in the last 15 minutes on the Smoothwall dashboard. They are all to our external IP addresses. Is there anything I can do about this or do I need to be concerned? Thanks in advance for any advice. Regards

I'd like to enable 2FA for our RDS setup, but no idea how to do this.

Re: Bromcom \ Parentpay New Students Upload To upload the new Year 7 cohort into ParentPay we have always uploaded a CSV file onto the ParentPay website containing all the relevant data. ParentPay have then put this data into the Pre-admissions area, ready for promotion to Year 7 in September. This year ParentPay have said we need to use the MISSync tool to upload the data - I haven't used this since we had SIMS 15 years ago! - Is this right? Be interested to hear how other Bromcom schools upload the new Year 7 data onto ParentPay. Worth mentioning that once they are on roll then there is an automatic sync between Bromcom and ParentPay which works fine. This is just to initially upload the new cohort of students. Cheers

Hi - I'm adding a Windows 2019 Server as a DC into an existing Server 2012 R2 domain. I've read that this should all be fine as the 2019 DC will happily operate at the 2012 forest functional level. Just wanted to check if there are any gotchas I need to be aware of. Thanks in advance.

Thanks very much for your help with this, bit of a strange issue that 1 field would cause such an issue, but the reports are working far, far better now. Thanks again.

Well, 3 months down the line and we are no further forward. Bromcom support dragged their feet, came up with a few minor suggestions and then closed the case! Basically then the web merge reporting is useless to us and we can only run it with around 10 students at a time. I can only surmise that the Bromcom reporting engine is totally inefficient and not up to the job of running reports of this nature for a large secondary school. Anyone's continuing feedback would be very welcome.

We had our first full session with around 25 teachers last night using SchoolCloud and the experience was terrible. We have a 200mbps connection which was hardly getting stressed (only using around 10-20Mbps). Our ISP reported no issues with the line or bandwidth. Our smoothwall box has been generally fine, though we are having the disks changed to faster ones shortly. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what the problem was, but it got so bad I couldn't even do a reliable ping to Google without it timing out constantly. Could it be that the Smoothwall box (an S8) just couldn't handle the number of video streams at once? I did see the resource usage go up to 20+ but it then settled down to below 10. The staff who went home and used SchoolCloud never had an issue. This morning everything is fine, countless chromebooks, laptops, pc's etc all connecting ok. I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences, but we are at a loss to see where the issue is.

Hi - yes if we run it for one student, the data previews in a few seconds. I understand what you mean about why we have 10 and 11 in the filter. Maybe its wrong but we are pulling out the forecast grade, which was entered when they were in Year 10.