lmgtfy

I installed 60 Unifi Pro points over the summer at a total cost of around £10k. This was replacing a failing 3COM managed system that was about 5 years old and was falling over regularly and not coping with the increase of iPads and general WIFI connectivity. Although it was a big investment we have around 2300 students and 200 staff all of whom are able to BYOD. We also have 300 college laptops/tablets in constant use so it is heavily used. Just looking on the stats of the Unifi and it says we have on average 600 users connected at any one time in the day and around 30GB of data transferred per day. So far it’s been flawless but its early days I guess. We were quoted around £50k -60k from Aerohive plus ongoing yearly maintenance on top which wasn’t cheap for the same kind of setup so I think so far it looks like we made the right decision but I guess time will tell.

LOL I've just come back from annual leave, I took my Ipad with me but I promised myself this year I would turn off my exchange email which I did. Turns out the only time I do turn it off something other than the normal this and that has broken, I forgetton my password etc, pops up! I don't know if I am too late but I would love the Music Monster Speaker - Black Ninja x 1 if its not gone

After having use of an IPAD2 with IOS5 for a week here are my early conclusions. I may well be wrong on some of the points and am interested in your views or ways around some of the problems and indeed in need for more good uses for them in the classroom. For: • Sleek interface engaging for children • Easy typing for a touchscreen • Good battery life generally lasting 6-9 hours depending on use • Good screen with good colours although a little reflective in direct light • Good range of educational apps • Good app integration in OS • Very portable • Great for web surfing with the exception of plug-ins requirements. • Great for reading EBooks • Can be remotely wiped using exchange if linked to an account • Great for instant on research Against: • Expensive £200 more than Netbook for 32gb WIFI model • Need cover with stand to make it portable and useable otherwise you have to hold device as typing whilst flat is difficult and causes neck strain • Expensive connectivity for example connectivity to TV or Projector requires £40 cable. • No USB for flash drives or memory card readers • No locking of own apps, for example if you setup settings in apps bought this could be changed or deleted by students. • No locking of settings - a big issue is WIFI where a student could tether their own mobile to the IPAD and allow the whole class to access full unfiltered internet. Other examples are password lock settings, wallpapers in fact you can’t lock down hardly anything. • Desirable to steal and quite easy due to size • Limited free apps • Pay for apps have to be purchased individually needing multiple apple ID’s as you can only buy app once per ID. • Pay for apps have to bought individually at full price not an volume discounts or with site licences. • Limited printing need to print Airprint or need additional software • Limited saving via the cloud, or via Frog which takes a long time to access and upload using touchscreen. • No locking of app layouts students can move icons easily. • No automatic upgrade of apps or IOS without additional software • No flash which is still required for lots of websites such as BBC, MyMaths etc • If you enable restrictions if a teacher wants to take them off all folders and layouts are deleted. • Charging port easily breakable if inserted with wrong way up • Charging multiple devices will need expensive trolley. • Ultra droppable • Not yet jailbroke so can only install authorised Apple apps, as there are some apps which can get around some of the above. Let me know what you think, although I am really enjoying the IPAD to use, I just think Apple has overlooked some really essential problems for schools to use them in real life situations. I know you can send out configuration XML files but still the locking down seems mainly geared for businesses which is a shame. Cheers Chris

Hi Maniac, sounds good but unfortunately we don't and probably never will use entry prefixes in front of student usernames can your program be modified to work with OU groups?

Yes they are, this is definitely the right LDAP path and it does bring up all the students in all the years just the reset password bit fails with the error "Error: An invalid dn syntax has been specified."

Thanks for the reply, I have tried putting in the ip address in instead of the DNS name for the field ADServer, which bit are you referring to in "Are you sure that that is the DN for the top level OU?" Thanks again

Hi localzuk, Looks like a wonderful little app could be really useful for our school. Been trying to get it to work however but with no success so far, I can get a list of students to reset the password for but when I click "Reset" it comes up with an error saying "Error: An invalid dn syntax has been specified." I have checked my settings in the config file but can't see where I may be going wrong, please see below: Domain Admins (Just to test the app out) schooldomainname OU=Students,OU=Managed Users,DC=school,DC=devon,DC=sch,DC=uk curriculum college Any advice would be amazing, probably missing something obvious. Cheers Chris

I just wish FSRM let you put limits on file sizes so you can say this file type can only go up to 500mb or whatever. This would save us a lot of time having to move stuff to the media server and stop users putting huge files or certain file types in shared drives. Anyone know how this can be achieved?

Any news on when the update mentioned above is going to be available? Cheers

Hi all, We are looking at moving to Windows 7 in the near future and having very little time to sit down for development I was wondering if anyone is kind enough to share some GPOs or know of any good starting templates. As most people using this forum are managing school ICT, I was thinking someone out there must have a working GPO with the normal kind of things locked down such as restricting Control Panel access to Personalization settings etc, and all the other security loops the students and staff try to get round. I have started making my own but with literally hundreds of options its becoming a daunting task. I appreciate everyone will do their GPO slightly differently, but even a good locked down starting point would enable me to then start testing applications etc and then start opening anything up that is necessary for our school. If anyone is able to help me I would really appreciate it. Also to people that have already got a Windows 7 environment running how are you doing profiles are you going down the mandatory or roaming way? Thanks Chris

We have CS4 Web Premium installed site wide which includes Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. The problem with this is that Adobe have made some kind of mistake on the activation of the suite and Acrobat is the only product that will not activate the suite. If you open up Acrobat it says CS4 is not activated yet and you should open up another program in the CS4 range such as Photoshop. This is all well and good but as many of you know Photoshop takes ages to load and must staff decide to open up MS Publisher or something else instead and ring and ask why Acrobat keeps shutting down and asking for activation. I have looked through these forums and google and the only way around this seems to be to open another program in the CS4 range. I thought a good work around was to install a MSI of Adobe Reader 9 which rolled out silently and I thought problem solved, but then the file association still opened up .PDF to Acrobat Pro not reader. I have tried using the GPO Folder Options to change the association class to "Adobe PDF Reader" but although this applies to the machine it still opens up in the dreaded Acrobat. I have look at the command ASSOC in cmd and it says for .pdf=AcroExch.Document and if I change the file association by clicking on a PDF and defaulting opening with Reader and restart the machine the association is kept but if I rerun the ASSOC it is still says .pdf=AcroExch.Document? Can anyone recommend a way to change the association class so all .pdf open in Adobe Reader while keeping Acrobat installed. Many Thanks Chris

Thanks for the info Tom, did you say the next guardian release is due in the summer of this year or is it too earlier for time scales? I am just thinking about what setup to use for the new school year in September. Thanks again.

Thanks for your help its been great. I will try playing around with different authentication types together tonight and see what works. I remember last time when setting up NTML authentication on the second port that you had to have transparency option ticked, but as you say there is a update coming out where you can turn this off on certain ports that would be amazing and I might just wait. Thanks again

Thanks Rob this option worked a treat; I really wish I have found this out earlier. I turned transparency off last night and test out both of my above issues and both work amazing well now. HTTPS can be used as the first page and no time out issues or wrong person authentication. WOW! I have had to turn it back on for the moment as we have a third interface installed within Smoothwall for our wireless system which relies on the SSL Login redirect port option if NTLM is not available I.E a laptop is off the domain, but this only works with the transparency turned on. I am now going to look into using dual authentication with transparency is turned off and using smoothwall DHCP to give a automaticic proxy config URL for the laptops. I hope this will work has a anyone tried this before? Thanks again Chris

Hi Pete, I was thinking about using Ident, but from the sounds of it, the person I spoke to today said that this would have the same issues with the timeout period. Do you know if this is the case? Thanks

Hi Tom, I have sent you an email regarding the issues last week, but from speaking to someone in support at smoothwall today I don’t know if it is possible to sort this out. From what they were saying it is a timeout issue which would only be sorted out by increasing the timeout of a user but then my biggest issue with this is getting the wrong privileges when someone else logs on. Do you know of any authentication of identification method that does not prompt the user to logon, will record their windows domain login username and will work with all HTTP / HTTPS websites without any time issues or timeout periods and ideally would allow a HTTPS website to be their first page. These issues are making me seriously consider moving away from smoothwall and taking back up a product such as Inty which had a client on the local machine which we had no browsing issues. With more and more websites using HTTPS as their main page I.E job sites and university applications where people need to spend time filling out forms this is causing us serious headaches and without putting proxy exceptions for each site I do not know how we can solve this issue. Thanks again Chris

We have smoothwall School Guardian and I have a couple of issues that I was wondering how other people using the product are getting around. 1. We use NTLM Authentication as our primary and only authentication method which works well for HTTP access of websites, however we are finding that if a user receives a link in an email which is HTTPS when the user clicks the link they are getting a “page cannot be displayed” error as they are not logged into the proxy. This seems to be as NTLM only allows HTTP requests as their first page. I tell them to open up Google or something similar first and once they are logged in they don’t have that issue, but telling 2500 people the same thing day in day out is not fun. Is there a known work around for this? 2. Also a related issue with HTTPS websites is if they are taking longer than the log out time (currently 10 minutes) to complete a form for example when they click submit all their work is lost as they are logged out and get another “page cannot be displayed” error. This annoys them greatly when I tell them to open up Google and then go on their HTTPS form and fill it out in less than 10 minutes. If I increase the log out time this then means if they access the Internet log off the machine and a new user logs in they get the last persons access levels for that period of time, Not good. If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve or solve these issues I would be very grateful. Thanks Chris

We are planning on streaming using Windows Media Encoder which is available free for XP from Microsoft.com There is practically no delay and its very low bandwidth about 1mbps. Can see the our internet slowing to a halt though anyway! Heres to blocking *.*