ChrisH

I'm looking to get rid of some of the options that you get when you add behaviour points from the register in SIMS like the unresolved, resolved review in 2 weeks etc. I know it can be done as somebody showed me the other week, but can I find it again........ Cheers Chris

I've just got round to troubleshooting our AD auth from the web page after the upgrade this weekend. It turns our they must be using a different method to connect back now as my original firewall port entry was 636 (SSL) but now it seems to want the TLS port of 389 to work. Just an FYI for anyone struggling.

Sorry I was referring to my SIMS issues, my reply is a bit out of current context it was rushed!

You need to make sure the dependencies are set correctly on the server and workstation services, I disabled mine via power shell but ended up going back and running similar commands to the recommended ones for server 2008 R2 using the sc command even though it worked on all the other servers.

The one factor about Sisra vs 4 Matrix for me is results day and when we used to use Sisra the delay for waiting for the reports to process which normally takes minutes but ended up taking up to an hour, now they may have sorted that now as it has been a few years since we used it but that was extremely painful, especially if you missed something the first time around. 4 Matrix is all local however so it's pretty much instant but to be fair to Sisra they seem to do more on the developing of the product than 4 Matrix.

I'm sure I've just made a new quorum disk in the past and swapped over.

Remote powershell or a remote tool to run netdom such as Psexec or something?

If it is like ours there is an SD card in the controller module you could take that out and grab the config.

Everything is on the same server. Sims general performance is okay there's only generally a short delay when doing things. I have seen other issues though like the attendance managers pc likes to freeze Sims when you minimise it, and disappears but comes on again if you click on SIMS but goes straight back into SIMS with no login. I even swapped her PC but it started doing it again after a few days. There's no special software on her PC and I don't get that issue anywhere else. Today my Sims kept freezing when I was trying to change a pupils class membership every time, if I tried something else it worked fine, I replicated that 5 times and then tried it later and it worked first time!

We keep having trouble with SIMS slowing down and sometimes completely crashing (for everyone). The only thing I can attribute it to is when certain reports are run but not always. The reports in question are gathering achievement and behaviour data which is then processed by Excel. These reports are set from the beginning of term to the current day. When I first created these reports I'm sure they only took about 7 minutes to run and slightly longer as the year progressed. These reports now take up to 40 minutes to run. The first thing I did was report it to our local support and got the re-indexing patch and the other patch. I know all the housekeeping routines had been done as I do them at the end of the year, every year. While everything else is running on Hyper-V the SIMS server has its own dedicated hardware with dual quad core processors 16 gigs of ram and local SAS storage. SQL is limited to 10 gig and our SIMS database is only 4 gig, so there is no problem with capacity there. The other SQL files are all normal size according to the relevant databases. We are running SQL 2012 and this is fully updated. I am seeing the odd deadlock error but this is very rare. When SIMS is not responding there is absolutely no problem getting a remote desktop to the server. The CPU usage is fairly minimal and the memory usage can be anywhere between 53-80%. Disk access seems fine as well. I have tried to cross reference the times that SIMS become unresponsive with other scheduled tasks such as Group call etc but most of the time these task aren't running/or have run recently at the time we are having an issue. Event viewer doesn't shed any light. Monitoring the network connection does not bring up any errors (I haven't gone as far as a packet trace yet) The issue generally goes away after 10 mins or so. Everything has been scanned and I have even toned down the AV to see if that's causing an issue. I have absolutely no errors to go off (apart from the occasional deadlock running reports). All in all I'm a bit stuck at the moment. I have been running big reports via command reporter over night to try and help but this is not really ideal as some information is needed at short notice. Anyone got any ideas? Anyone else having similar issues at the moment?

You can power cycle the controller without upsetting the access points as well.

Thank you for confirming that for me it is what I suspected.

I'm covering for data again and I have this exact same question but I need it for year 7 for their baseline to work out targets. Basically I have been told to start from the KS2 Fine level as per David Pott's blog but my question is will that even exist for current year 7s with them changing everything, AWL etc. I have tried an export from Key to success as that is what I have done previously but I just get scores that obviously aren't them. I also have an export from FFTA but that appears to be the same sort of data. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

We have an A2 running on windows 7 x64 was a pain to get the right driver. If anyone else is using any other software I would love to know as I'm not keen on 2D design. I've tried other things but they didn't seem to work.

We use VNC running in application mode on the teachers PC and the VI pupils connect as view only, it works absolutely fine. The only thing the teachers have to remember is to turn it off and on and that freezing the projector does not stop them seeing what's on their screen!

Okay thanks I finally got it done, it took me seven attempts though... For anyone else attempting this clear your schedule and have some stress toys on standby.

I've just gone two rounds with the call centre on this exact issue. What was the best way to resolve it and I am assuming from the comments that we are entitled to Enterprise as stated or am I going to have to enter the education key, which it says is an "upgrade".

I use this macro in my reports, I cant remember why I do the number format twice but there is probably a reason. Just trying to do it in Excel never worked for me. You will need to change the cell range or change the code to work on the selected range. Sub FixDates() Dim lastRow, lastColumn As Integer Dim rnData As Range With Sheets("Sheet1") 'Remove the teachers first names lastRow = .UsedRange.Rows.Count LastCol = .UsedRange.Columns.Count 'Miss the titles else error Set rnData = .Range(.Cells(2, 13), .Cells(lastRow, 13)) For Each xCell In rnData If xCell.value <> vbNullString Then xCell.NumberFormat = "dd/mm/yyyy" xCell.value = DateValue(xCell.value) xCell.NumberFormat = "dd/mm/yyyy" End If Next xCell End With End Sub

Might be a bit too big and heavy for that lol.

I only use the MDT apps only when I am building a base image. I use a VB Script wrapper that is MDT friendly for return codes and such, I got it from some of the Johan Arwidmark deployment books, I just modify it for each app and it produces good logging etc.

Thanks, that's the kind of thing I'm looking at.

Thanks for those. Hmm going to have to do something in the iterim though as the EMC warranty is up soon

I asked a question along those lines but more regarding hardware but didn't get any responses. Have you had any ideas for hardware yet? I am basically looking to move away from a single SAN point of failure to more affordable storage like some fully loaded servers or some direct attached storage. I can afford another SAN just about but I would like to stretch that money to get a more redundant solution. I am maybe looking at utilising some of the new Server storage features such as storage spaces etc. All I want really is hardware that comes within my budget and some sort of replication and redundancy. At the moment I have a cluster of Hyper-V servers accessing storage over ISCSI and an EMC SAN with redundant controllers disks etc but it's still one box that could go wrong with no backup.

It would be vendor specific as you say with ini files etc. If permissions are set correctly though it should only be an annoyance and too much of an issue.

This is where windows UI based restrictions fall over if software is not using the standard API for dialog boxes etc.