Linfit

Panel 11 in Student Details - the date of leaving goes in there and there must also be a Reason for leaving given. I don't think its possible to enter one anywhere else, unless you are doing bulk leavers at the end of Year 11 or 13.

I think 3 months is very short. Bear in mind that e-mails may be required for evidence in all sorts of legal situations - emplyment tribunals, for example, can look at stuff up to 6 year back, and there are some legal obligations for stuff related to employment that operate on similar timecales, so I would think retention of staff e-mails would need to be in the order of years, not months. We currently archive ours and keep for three years, and it is annoying, as its a LOT of data. If I coud keep it for less, I would, but wouldn't like to change without very clear gudiance from legal type people.

Go ahead - there must be other schools who have raised the same issue. I can understand why some do not query it though as the IT staff may not get involved in this sort of thing if the teachers and Exams Officers are the ones sending the stuff out, and they may not be aware of the issues. (Although they should be, but most exams officer training is done by Exam boards.....). I was in an unusual position as I was the IT Manager and the Exams Officer.

Videos for moderating the spoken endorsment of the new English Language GCSE caused us issues last year. There is no secure portal for uploading them - they wanted them sent unencrypted on a memory stick in the post. The pupils have to identify themselves at the start of the video. When I queried this (I was the exams officer until last summer) the response was pathetic - no, we have no secure portal plans, no, you can't encrypt them its too complicated for our moderators, whats the problem, all the other schools are cooperating and no-one else has queried things (I didn't believe the last one). In the end, did as I was told as the HOD of English was paranoid about unpsetting them, but made sure the Head knew it was under protest. It will come up again this year. As I am no longer the Exams Officer I will refuse to have anything to do with it if they take the same attitude. I think OCR have a secure web portal for uploading work but the other boards seem to be just hoping people won't question things and are in denial about their DP issues.

We make it very clear in our AUP that all traffic is monitored and therefore may not be secure. We also make it clear that the internet service at school is to help them do their work, and specifically mention things like personal shopping and banking as stuff they shouldn't be doing. If after all that, they do it anyway, I don't think they have much room to complain. They can avoid the issue by not doing the things we have told them they shouldn't be doing anyway !

Its a very intensive process - and it may be the client-server connection is timing out. Might be worth running it direct on the server rather than a client ?

We went for LTSB here and it took a year and a false start before we had a rollout we were happy with. I read the threads on issues people are having with new versions of 10 and I am glad I made the decisions to use LTSB. We musn't lose sight of the fact that what teachers want above all is stable and reliable systems. (Confession, I used to be one, in another century). If updates break those systems, thats going to cause issues. You then have to use support time to resolve them. All schools are strapped for cash at the moment; we have gone from 4 support staff here to 2 and to zero capital budget. If I am going to develop our systems, maintain our increasingly old kit and introduce new functionality by being creative with the hardware we currently have, that is going to take time. I don't want to waste that time firefighting issues with our base OS - I want it sorted, once and for all, so I can focus on things that really do make a difference.

I believe this is referencing the "Cover Grid" Notice board summary which is one of the option in the Print Cover Arrangements dialogue.

You can get a new set of keys from exam boards at any time. So if you want to have two machines with the ability to download results, if you do two installs from scratch, download keys from each board and install the same keys on both machines, both should work. What you can't do, is install one, then later get another set of keys and install another - the new keys will replace the old ones.

We have updated our phone system and consequently have some stuff to sell off: 66x Cisco 7911 single line handsets 5x Cisco 6941 four line handsets We also have a Cisco 2810 Telephony router with an ISDN card and a 4 port analogue card fitted. All six years old, but in good condition and working until yesterday. Its all EOL stuff now but I know a lot of places use them so I thought I’d try on here before they go on e-bay. Looking for say £750 for the lot. I’d prefer to sell it all as a job lot but might consider batches of phones separately. Would prefer buyer to collect if possible, we are just off the M62 North of Manchester.

Is the username you are trying to connect with a member of the Remote Desktop Users group on the machines you are tryig to connect to ?

Well *******r. It was the ******* firewall service. Turned on firewall service on two test clients and they are deployed and showing in the console within half an hour. Thanks ever so much @Steve21, I owe you mucho beers if you are ever North of Manchester. Been fiddling with this off an on since the start of term. Hours wasted going down google rabbit holes. Why isn't it documented anywhere that the firewall service needs to be running !!!

Yes, and the service is not running. You mean turn the Firewall service on and then try it ? Will give that a go.

ccmsetup.log shows it checks that the files it needs are not present, identifies the DP and finds the packages on there, and starts BITS downloads for them, one example being: [LOG[Adding file 'http://SysCent-Server.SMSC.Local:80/SMS_DP_SMSPKG$/NEW00002/i386/vcredist_x86.exe' to BITS job The BITS downloads never start, I see repeated attempts: [LOG[Download Update: A recoverable error has occurred. A retry attempt will be made.] and eventually the BITS downloads time out. I then get this: [LOG[Failed to download files through BITS. Error: 0x800706d9, Description There are no more endpoints available from the endpoint mapper. [LOG[Failed to get client version for sending state messages. Error 0x8004100e] [LOG[[] Params to send '5.0.8540.1006 Deployment Error 0x800706d9. Path http://SysCent-Server.SMSC.Local/SMS_DP_SMSPKG$/NEW00002'] [LOG[sending Fallback Status Point message to 'SYSCENT-SERVER.SMSC.LOCAL', STATEID='309'.] [LOG[] [LOG[state message with TopicType 800 and TopicId {09EE4C15-CC39-47ED-BC5D-6FCC395A07B1} has been sent to the FSP] [LOG[Failed to download from DP 'http://SysCent-Server.SMSC.Local/SMS_DP_SMSPKG$/NEW00002', error 0x800706d9.] [LOG[Enumerated all 1 DP locations but none of them is good. Fallback to MP.] [LOG[Cost settings successfully set on '{D8D68A5E-C446-4D4A-BB00-DF63D9E6709F}'.] [LOG[using branch cache option.]LOG] It then tries to get the same files but this time from a different location on the server - (presumably because it is now trying the management point instead of the DP ?) [LOG[Adding file 'HTTP://SysCent-Server.SMSC.Local:80/CCM_Client/i386/vcredist_x86.exe' to BITS job But this too just results in repeated [LOG[Download Update: A recoverable error has occurred as before.

Yes, no issues with this, I can ping any of the workstations I try by hostname. I have checked our DNS and records seem correct, scavenging is on and working, no relevant stale records.

Yeah, thats it, because you only need to defined the scope of the updates you are looking for (date, type, product, etc) once, but obviously the bundle of updates that catches will change each month.

OK, I am at my wits end with this one. I set up SCCM last year and had it working fine for updates and endpoint protection. Over the summer, we updated most of our clients from Win 7 to 10 (2016 Enterprise LTSB). Since then I have been unable to deploy the SCCM client to any Windows 10 workstations succesfully. Deployment to 7 or Server works no problem. To 10, push deployment fails: it copies the sccmsetup.exe, gets as far as initiating the BITS downloads for the other parts, but stalls at that point and never recovers. If I try a manual install using the command line on the workstation, I can get the install to appear to complete by using the /nosystem switch, but the client doesn't seem to communicate properly with the server - its shows in the console as having the correct site code and as active, but it isn't getting policy and always shows a grey query mark rather than the green tick, so its seems to know the client is there but communications are impaired in some way: this suggests the install isn't quite right in some way. Its on every machine, every new image we build for testing. I have tried totally clean images, no GPO's, no other software, same result. In contrast, we built a Win 7 machine and push client install worked first time and the client was in the console and up and running withing 5 minutes. Servers, (all types from 2008r2 up to 2016) are fine, but no joy with 10. SCCM is the latest 1706 version 5.0.8540, and fully patched, and technet confirms its compatible with 10 LTSB. I have been all over the web looking at possible causes, tried all the obvious ones (boundaries, broken MP or DP) even went so far as to do a complete re-install of SCCM with a new site code: but if it was any of these things I presume it wouldn't work on 7 either. My gut feeling is that it may be something to do with WMI issues, perhaps permissions, but my knowledge in this area is weak so am not really sure what I am looking at. Has anyone else had issues with SCCM and Win 10, or any suggestions for what else I might look at ?

Short answer is yes. For monthly updates its recommended you create a new update group, as otherwise they get very big and there is a limit of 1000 I think on the number of components they can have. The best way for monthly updates though is to create an automatic deployment rule - this will do the exact same process but automatically, so you don't need to remember to go back and create a new deployment. Its very easy to do once you understand how updates and packages work, and there are lots of guides on the interwebs

You can avoid this by editing the absence reasons in Tools>Cover>Reasons for Staff Absence. We have a category defined in there as Trip or Visit, and if you create this and Edit it, you can specify Internal Unavailablity for that reason. If tis box is ticked, the absence does not transfer to personnel, it remains in Cover only. We have several absence types like this, for things like meetings, language orals, exam invigilation, anything really where the teacher is not absent, but not doing the thing they are timetabled to do.

We had an EMC SAN fitted as part of our new build in 2011 and I thought it was overspecced and too complex for our requirements. It ran Citrix Xencentre and Xen desktop virtualising Servers and VDI collections. I was never happy with it (it was specced and fitted by a well known IT outsourcing company who had the contract to fit out the new builds) and in 2015 we replaced it with a VRTX, everything running on Hyper-V. Much simpler, cheaper than buying a new SAN, and as pow says, rock solid. Of course, your other option is to use local storage on your existing or new servers, which these days seems to be a good option. I very much agree with you on the SAN, I was never happy whilst we had ours.

On the Timetable layout screen in SIMS you can select the box "Week 2 under Week 1" in the layout settings which should show the 2 seperate weeks neatly on an A4 sheet if you play around with the cell size and margins.

We have it running fine on a Server 2008r2 VM, been running for 5+ years now no issues. Its got 4 cores, 8GB Ram allocated and its fine. We are running the pro version, with 45 controllers plus 2 additional readers for the car park gate and signing in. CPU usage rarely above 15%, usually much less. It isn't AD aware, at least not our version, but maintenance is straightforward enough. We use the paxton keyfobs, as thats what was given to us, (system was installed as part of a newbuild) but haven't seen much need to change them - if we were starting from scratch I'd probably us the cheaper Mifare as well.

Enterprise LTSB on my desktop PC since Jan and not had any issues.

There are a number of causes of this. You will get more useful info from the SCCM logs-in the logs folder look for WSUSCtrl.log This will give you more detailed information about exactly why the connection is failling. A common cause is that the IIS application pool related to the WSUS Service has stopped because it is full and not recycling the memory. If you open up the IIS console on the SCCM server and look at the application pools, check the one called WSUSPool and check that it has not stopped. If it has, manually re-start it and see if that temporarily fixes the problem. If it does, try allocating more ram to that pool - its in Advanced Settings on the right hand IIS menu, and the setting is called Private Memory Limit. I had to give ours 8GB before these connection errors stopped occuring, and that is with a single site, approx 800 devices.

We have been using 64bit since last summer with no issues. We use SIMS profiles and reporting extensively and have had no problems with it.