lmgtfy

Got to say I haven't tried this its more of a case of o dear its happened again restart the server and all is good nothing in the logs etc but I will try it if/when it happens again.

I installed all updates available two weeks ago when it last had the problem hoping it would go away but it happened again today. We had the same issue again on a different 2012 file server which was upgraded from 2008 r2 and I ended up rebuilding that server from scratch and have not had the problem re occur. Feel I might end up rebuilding this file server if it does it again.

We also had a similar problem today, luckily for us it only seems to happen every couple of weeks very strange though, Server 2012 Standard on Hyper-V we have about 6 file share servers and this is the only one with a problem.

I've pretty much just done the opposite. Always had freeview a Humax 9200 for the last 5 years but it was on its lasts legs so decided to get a Youview box. All I can say is don't its really slow freezes regularly and only really plays iplayer without issues and even if the other catchup channels decide to work occasionally you can't skip the adverts like on Virgin. So got fed up with it missing recordings so I have just got a TiVo box, must say I'm happy overall

Maybe "High Load average and/or Slowness" I see you have put it on already but other than that keywords maybe CPU that's about it. We did turn off the Sophos web protection for a day and it didn't seem to make much of a difference to general load averages but I can certainly see why it might effect some sites and I will bare it in mind if our smoothwall goes slow. But for the time being I am once again happy :-) Thanks

OMG I can't believe this after months of problems, 4 tickets, countless technicians, phone calls and remote sessions I think I have found the fix. Was reading the latest news letter November 2013 from Smoothwall and in there it had a section entitled "Force NoSSL on Google!" It mentions users who have been using Smoothwall HTTPS filtering which we do won't have seen any issue but you can use the Beta Google NoSSLSearch to prevent inappropriate content if you don't use HTTPS interception. Now this got me thinking if Google is our highest usage domain and all traffic is going through HTTPS and being decrypted and inspected for students (excluding updates, banks etc) this is going to cause a huge load as @brougham mentioned earlier. So I made a new content modification policy with the new Beta Google NoSSLSearch for everyone and all I can say is WOW, the load averages have come down from 12-13 to 3-4 this is amazing, we were considering spending £5k to solve this problem as everyone suggested it was a hardware issue. I am both annoyed and relieved that this is now sorted. I just hope support read this and can add this to their knowledgebase so other customers don't have to spend the amount of time I have fixing this for themselves.

Thanks I will certainly try this. That's the problem I'm just stabbing in the dark trying different things hopefully we will get somewhere in the end.

@tom_newton After removing all of our BYOD from our Smoothwall box over half term today with less than 400 users logged into Smoothwall our load averages are still crazy high. Roughly 650% CPU for dansguardian and 100% for datastore. Can you confirm this is normal CPU load usage for the amount of users vs. hardware spec? Regards

I tried installing XP on a samsung magicinfo television before for xibo as we got so fed up with the magicinfo software. Main problem was hard drive size which on ours was only 4gb and secondly speed even after getting it installed it was painfully slow and crashed regularly. Ended up having an Acer Revo attached the rear now works well. Hope this helps

Yes I have tried a number of things too, got so angry I had a little rant on another thread http://www.edugeek.net/forums/netbooks-pda-phones/126276-shared-ipads-using-apple-configurator-1-4-ios7-shortcomings.html#post1079489 LOL

Yea seen this option but as @InterwebsGuy mentioned you have no choice but to "refresh" it everytime due to the lack of Apple restrictions

Can confirm this is the same with the setup we have here which is latest IOS7, latest Apple configurator using Meraki MDM. Although I have found information about IOS7 having this new feature (silent install) I can't find any information about how to implement it being MDM info or Apple info.

Item 3 is just because its so easy for a student to change the homescreen layout, hide Apps, or just play around with the other 100 settings therefore making it unusable for the next student. Yes this is more a classroom management issue people may argue but what teacher says they have time to both checkout an iPad make sure they record who it was given too and the check every setting and condition when it is given back at the end of the lesson. Hopefully it won't effect the life of the iPad as it is an Apple approved method of deployment. Cheers

Just interested in people's opinions about shared iPad's in schools. I see a few threads about people using them in this way and of course all the teachers have seen them when visiting whatever school they have recently gone to and judging by the amount of trolleys and storage boxes available to buy there must be a lot of school using iPad's as shared devices but why are Apple so poor at letting us use them in this way? By this I mean I am happy to accept that I need to: 1. By an expensive trolley with sync facilities instead of just charge 2. By a Mac to go with this trolley 3. Let the devices effective wipe and setup each time they are plugged back in 4. Deal with the nightmare that is credit cards and volume app purchasing 5. Accept that the students can change whatever settings they want 6. Accept the fact that in a few taps they can reset the whole device back to factory settings But really what would it take for Apple just to take away the little Settings icon that would prevent most of the above! When I heard about iOS7 and the Activation lock I thought what an amazing idea but even this is turned off if you Supervise a device in Apple configurator what a joke. In a few taps a student can wipe the device pop it in their bag and we can't do anything about it in terms of tracking or preventing reuse. What a wasted feature that could have been so useful for schools. Thanks Apple, love the hardware and the software to some extent, I know you want everyone to have their own device but you would sell a lot more to other schools if you just implemented a few simple things. Rant over LOL this comes from two days of playing with 15 iPads. Has anyone managed to get around any of the above? We are using Meraki but didn't know if any of the paid for MDM's or profile manager have anyway to get around these shortcomings. Cheers

Plus I just remembered the whole if you have Microsoft EES all your students get free Office which should also add some weight in the cost debate

I don't want to start the whole Mac vs PC war but I do think the price angle is still important. With the Mac cost structure your paying for the on-going free software in the price of the hardware. For example the MacBook pro is £800 ex vat where we have bought similar specification laptops for staff this year at £400 ex vat. They come with the latest version of Windows and then we have a Microsoft agreement to install Office or upgrade windows along with other software etc. If your buying 500 laptops multiple by £400 cost saving with a Windows laptop £200000 most schools Microsoft EES is going to be less than £20000 so that's 10 years of Microsoft licencing you have for the costs saved. Unless your hardware is going to last more than 10 years is it really cheaper?

Wow it never ceases to amaze me the amount of money some schools can spend (arguably over spend at the tax payers expense) on ICT, p.s yes I am jealous nonetheless

Yes we are with HTTPS turned on and Redirect users to SSL login page (with session cookie)

The only content modification rules we have in place is one for enforcing safesearch and the second just for students for the Youtube header for Youtube Education. I'll PM you now about the config file. Thanks

@tom_newton this is the latest top from a busy period squid is in the top 3 but only 10% CPU is this ok I'm guessing?

@tom_newton Thanks for your help I will try turning off Sophos web protection and see if that helps at all. The processor we have currently is a dual quad core Xeon running at 2.33MHz (Intel L5410) its not the newest thing in the world and your right the internet has changed a lot generally in the way it was used from two years ago so if we need to beef it up then that's what we will do. I guess the only concern is not ever being able to tie down exactly what is causing the big CPU loads yes dansguardian is running at 600% but that's all we know. Will run top tomorrow when busy to see what squid is doing but I can't ever remember it being up there in the top 3 CPU hogs but I will check and let you know. Cheers

@tom_newton I believe we still have the same amount of computers/tablets/laptops around 1000 but there could be two load differences between now and two years ago. The first being that we now have a 100Mb leased internet line whereas before we had 30Mb so perhaps the demand for internet is instead of be held back by our external connection perhaps smoothwall is having troubles keeping up (I doubt this one is true) and the second being BYOD which as I'm sure you know has taken off. We only have around 50 BYOD "surfing" the internet at once but a lot of devices are automatically connecting to the wireless where smoothwall is the DHCP on this VLAN. In regards to dubious activity I hope not we have everything locked down quite tightly but I will certainly try and monitor activity more closely. @twin--turbo we are quite a large school here 2800 users, 1000 devices easily and during peek times we do see 600 users accessing the internet be it for simple Google research or more bandwidth eating activities such as MyMaths the top 10 sites today are as follows: Hits http.00.s.sophosxl.net 262686 kh.google.com 196649 Google 183069 encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com 111055 encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com 110999 encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com 110962 encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com 110608 clients1.google.co.uk 90338 static.bbci.co.uk 50298 Bandwidth Google 6.42GiB kh.google.com 1.50 s.ytimg.com 0.92 apis.google.com 0.90 http://www.reactiongifs.com 0.65 bits.wikimedia.org 0.52 cdn-the-2.musicradio.com 0.51 downloads.bbc.co.uk 0.49 r14---sn-aigeznlz.c.youtube.com 0.48 I think it may be case of switching off BYOD for a couple of weeks see how many people it annoys and two how much faster all other traffic goes. Thanks for all your help and suggestions everyone. As I have said I like Smoothwall and the amount of time I have put into it setting up all the different features and polices as well as learning the interface I don't really want to move away as I still think the functionality is the best in class but we do need to resolve the issue.

@tom_newton We did have the connection tracking problem and this issue was sorted out via a support call at the start of September but now the problem is when we have over 500 users page loads get increasing longer upwards of 2 minutes loading per page. I have had a support call open (ref 00045814) and the last response I have had said the problem is purely down to our hardware not being up to the job. I would love to find out the bottleneck before we change hardware etc.

The UTM3000 spec is I believe dual Xeon E5645 processors, 12GB of RAM (only 4GB would really be used at the minute being 32bit) and 2 1TB 15RPM and 4 Gbit network cards. Nice spec but £5000 I think I could buy two. Sorry

@buzzard Just interested to know what are the other solutions you have had running, at this point I'm willing to try anything. Looked at Lightspeed but they only do it as an appliance I believe and seeing as we have just renewed to Smoothwall we would not have this money again until September. As to rebuilding I would gladly do this in the half term but as support have told me its a hardware issue is there any point I ask myself?