TechBeard

Hi, I no longer work in a school but do still enjoy checking out the Edugeek Forums Here is part of a post I posted a couple years ago when i change (briefly) from Smoothwall to Sophos and could not turn back quick enough! This was a couple of years ago and things may have improved but this is was as I found it: We moved to the Sophos XG as at the time I was really annoyed at Smoothwall because they changed to that daft “support allowance” system. And also wouldn’t let use our S8 box when renewing our license even though it was only a couple of months old (had been replaced under warranty). Sophos gave us a great deal with a free appliance but I can honestly say it was the worst purchase decision I have ever made. The thing was a complete disaster, we spent months and months with issues. It wasn’t even as if we installed it wrong as we had Sophos professional services do the installation. It lacks some really basic features that the Smoothwall excels at. The website categorisation is pretty much worthless with most sites coming up as unclassified and so your unblock list is pretty huge as our students found the “uncategorised” category has all kinds of terrible stuff on it so we had to block at and manually unblock loads of sites. Chromebook Authentication implementation, forget about it, it’s dreadful. Custom url lists are limited to 128 sites each, No safeguarding built in at all. Unblocking and blocking of sites is a massive pain as you have to use all the regex characters e.g ^([A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.)?example\.com\.?/ The worst part is the dreadful support. Support in UK time is fed out of India which is no problem in itsefl but in the experience we had you will be on hold for up to 3 hours at a time and then you will get put in an escalation queue which might take a few days. We went days without internet at times due to bugs in the firmware which meant the proxy engines kept refusing to restart. We went several months with our chromebooks not working properly and I spoke with over 5 sophos support agents who didn’t know what a Chromebook was. Sophos professional services set the firewall rules incredibly strict, as you would expect but everytime we had a problem getting an app or service through the firewall, support would just create a allow any any rule which would fix the problem, but kind of got rid of the whole point of the firewall! Sophos use 123rescue for their remote support. They could not get it to work though their own firewall, so they made a any any rule for my machine that I had to turn on when they wanted to remote in. Our support experience was so bad that when I complained so much to the head of Sophos education they actually paid another 3rd party sophos support company in the UK to help us out, who told me they only have a business because sophos XG customers had Sophos’ own support service so much. They also told me that when they install the XG that they don’t do it the way Sophos recommends as in their words, it doesn’t work for schools”. Most recently we had basically no internet for a week as the authentication service kept breaking, I spent 8 hours on the phone with sophos and they couldn’t figure it out. I can’t give full details here at the moment but once I found out Smoothwall had changed management and had changed it’s support quota system I contacted them, told them my predicament and said I wished I never left and even though we are still under license with sophos we have come up with a deal that we will be using Smoothwall from now on. We put it in last week and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. Personally, my biggest thing working in a school is safeguarding and the sophos gives me no confidence that it was being done correctly. I am sure in a business environment where web filtering is not the main concern, the sophos would be fine , but for a school where you have to be 110% sure the students are protected against all the nasty, it’s a big failure. If you do want to go with it I would recommend buying through the 3rd party sophos company and buying support from them, wave9 I think they are called as they were really helpful and knowledgeable, but would have worked out quite expensive. There might be other schools who had a much better experience then me, but I can honestly say it’s been a disaster for us.

We moved to the Sophos XG as at the time I was really annoyed at Smoothwall because they changed to that daft “support allowance” system. And also wouldn’t let use our S8 box when renewing our license even though it was only a couple of months old (had been replaced under warranty). Sophos gave us a great deal with a free appliance but I can honestly say it was the worst purchase decision I have ever made. The thing was a complete disaster, we spent months and months with issues. It wasn’t even as if we installed it wrong as we had Sophos professional services do the installation. It lacks some really basic features that the Smoothwall excels at. The website categorisation is pretty much worthless with most sites coming up as unclassified and so your unblock list is pretty huge as our students found “uncategorised” has all kinds of terrible stuff on it so we had to block at and manually unblock loads of sites. Chromebook Authentication implementation, forget about it, it’s dreadful. Custom url lists limited to 128 sites each, No safeguarding built in at all. Unblocking and blocking of sites is a massive pain as you have to use all the regex characters e.g ^([A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.)?example\.com\.?/ The worst part is the dreadful support. Support in UK time is fed out of India which is no problem but in the experience we had you will be on hold for up to 3 hours at a time and then you will get put in an escalation queue which might take a few days. We went days without internet at times due to bugs in the firmware which meant the proxy engines kept refusing to restart. We went several months with our chromebooks not working properly and I spoke with over 5 sophos support agents who didn’t know what a Chromebook was. Sophos professional services did the firewall rules incredibly strict, as you would expect but everytime we had a problem getting an app or service through the firewall, support would just create a allow any any rule which would fix the problem, but kind of got rid of the whole point of the firewall! Sophos use 123rescue for their remote support. They could not get it to work though their own firewall, so they made a any any rule for my machine that I had to turn on when they wanted to remote in. Our support experience was so bad that when I complained so much to the head of Sophos education they actually asked another 3rd party Sophos support company in the UK to help us out. They were really great and sorted the problem. They told me they only have a business because Sophos XG customers hate Sophos’ own support service so much. They also told me that when they install the XG that they don’t do it the way Sophos recommends as in their words, it doesn’t work for schools”. Most recently we had basically no internet for a week as the authentication service kept breaking, I spent 8 hours on the phone with sophos and they couldn’t figure it out. Once I found out Smoothwall had changed management and had changed it’s support quota system back to somethign sensible I contacted them, told them my predicament and they helped us out big time. We put it in a couple months ago and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. Personally, my biggest thing working in a school is safeguarding and the sophos gives me no confidence that it was being done correctly. I am sure in a business environment where web filtering is not the main concern, the sophos would be fine and I do think it’s firewall is perhaps more powerful than the Smoothwall in that regard, but for a school where you have to be 110% sure the students are protected against all the nasties, it’s a big failure. If you do want to go with it I would recommend buying through the 3rd party sophos company and buying support from them, Wave9 I think they are called as they were really helpful, but would have worked out quite expensive to add on after the fact. Happy to talk in more detail if you want a chat over the phone. There might be other schools who had a much better experience then me, but I can honestly say it’s been a disaster for us.

We do have a separate SSID for Chromebooks but authenticating using the Sophos Chromebook app. We could not risk not having user level reporting. We have so many safeguarding investigations it just would not be a feasible workaround

I would agree, it should be - but unfortunately most of the support agents I've talked to at Sophos don't know what a Chromebook is which makes the whole process quite difficult. "Can we RDP to it" - no its a Chromebook, it cannot be RDPed to "can we please browse to the C Drive to check the WMI logs" - no, its a chromebook, they dont support WMI "can we please check its logon event in AD logs" - no its a chromebook, it authenticates with Google, not AD

Hi, How did you get on with this in the end? We found that the guide was incorrect and the Sophos professional services team had to make up some other rules. They said they would feed this back to the product manual team. We have found the Sophos Chromebook authentication pretty dreadful compared to things like Smoothwall and Linewize etc. Lots of dropping out etc.

Hi I’m having the exact same issue. I found pushing out a GPO that changes the logon for the Cryptographic Service https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.fixyourbrowser.com/browser/google-chrome/establishing-secure-connection-google-chrome/amp/ Solves the problem BUT breaks things like driver installs and also weirdly stops our antivirus installing, so not an ideal solution. Did you get any further with it? - - - Updated - - - Hi I’m having the exact same issue. I found pushing out a GPO that changes the logon for the Cryptographic Service https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.fixyourbrowser.com/browser/google-chrome/establishing-secure-connection-google-chrome/amp/ Solves the problem BUT breaks things like driver installs and also weirdly stops our antivirus installing, so not an ideal solution. Did you get any further with it?

The William de Ferrers Schools is pleased to offer an exciting opportunity to be part of our small but highly motivated IT technical support team. We offer a range of essential IT support and reprographic services to not only our own school but also to several primary schools as part of our traded service. This is an ideal opportunity for someone who is looking to further their career and gain a huge amount of experience working on a vast array of systems and technologies. This role will involve working in the school as part of the team, but also carrying out site visits to the primary schools where customer service and time management is key. The successful candidate will be self motivated and well organised and be able to provide support for our students and staff across the school computer systems and associated hardware, software and peripherals for network and standalone machines, servers and laptops. Because of the different geographical locations involved, use of own car is essential. Closing date for applications noon on Wednesday 03 April 2019. Details of the job description, person specification and an application form are available from the school website: http://www.wdf.school. Please email the school for further information. To arrange a visit or for a pack to be posted please contact the PA to the headteacher, Mrs S Clarkson [email protected]. Senior IT Technician - March 2019.pdf

Did anyone find a fix for this in the end? Im just setting up a new RDS 2019 farm and getting the same error as the OP. Thanks Richard

Hi, Happy half term to all! We have just upgraded our Wifi Network and 14 of the old APs were a bit newer then the others, they are Cisco AIR-LAP1142N-E-K9, which from memory are duel band N aps. Id rather give first refusal to another school, so if your interested make us an offer, failing that we will be listing them on the school's eBay account. We are in Essex near Chelmsford Thanks

Hi Nick, I can honestly recommend without any hesitation the guys at School ICTs for SIMS support SIMS Support Leeds | SIMS Support for Schools | School ICT - I first moved to them about 5 years ago and have recommended all schools ive ever worked with over to them. The support is insanely good and they are always super helpful and truly understand the SIMS system but also how schools actually operate. The training they offer is amazing and we have never had a problem with them. They even do SIMS migrations at a fraction of the price of CAPITA. To give you an idea on price, for a secondary school the costs is £2500 a year, and whats even more mad is that half way through they send you a massive rebate (something to do with a refund they get from Capita) - This year my rebate was around £1700 so my support costs for the year was like £800! My last school was spending over £12,000 a year and my current school was paying around £9000 so for us its been a massive saving as well as infinitely better support. More then happy to talk to you over the phone about this if you like.

I can't recommend Schools ICT based in Leeds highly enough for their amazing SIMS support. School ICT Services - MIS and SIMS Support for Schools I have got them set up in my current school and my last school, saving £7800 and £10500 per year respectively, and their support is a million times better compared with my experience with going to capita direct. To give you a ballpark figure, their secondary school SIMS support is £2500 per year, and you get a £1200 rebate midway through which is nice. Primary schools I think costs £500 so tremendous value. There SIMS support and training is amazing and always helpful and knowledgable. They also do cloud backup for your SIMS data (to Azure) for somthing mad like £150 per year so its good if you want a one stop shop for all your SIMSy things.

Hi Everyone, Hopefully someone on here may have seen this really weird issue before! We bought Adobe Premiere Elements 14 a little while ago for our Media Studies department. As it turns out you don't get any support from Adobe once you buy this software which is annoying! I have posted this on their 'Support Forum' but no joy so far. The students are able to load up Adobe and start making a project and save it. HOWEVER once the project has been saved, they are unable to save any more changes to it. When the click save it says saving 100% but the file time stamp does not get modified and the changes are not saved. When you close the program you get stuck in a loop of it saying do you want to save the project before you close, you say yes, nothing happens - and repeat! - I should mention that the students are saving to a mapped network drive - Under an admin account it seems to work fine, so we made the students local admin but that did not solve the problem either. We gave them full control of the Adobe Premiere Elements folders in the C drive but still no joy. The specs of the machines are i7, 16GB ram, SSD (with lots of space on it) and windows 10 64bit. Annoyingly while we have had the software installed for several months, and i assumed it was all working great, it turns out they only use it once a year which is now and they need it for their final coursework piece! Any and all suggestions are welcome as im reaching the end of my tether!

Hi, Well as I didn't get any interest I stuck in in a spare PCIE slot in my PC and got it cracking away doing crunching 24/7 for FoldingatHome - https://folding.stanford.edu/ as it seemed a good cause! (also it does keep my whole office nice and warm!)

Hi, Well as I didn't get any interest I stuck in in a spare PCIE slot in my PC and got it cracking away doing crunching 24/7 for FoldingatHome - https://folding.stanford.edu/ as it seemed a good cause! (also it does keep my whole office nice and warm!)

Hi, We have some laptop trolleys which are now surplus to requirements. They have a nice PDUs to plug in your adapters and though a bit grubby, do clean up well. We are looking for £25 each buyer collects, would only look to sell to another school. We are in South Woodham Ferrers, near Chelmsford. Any questions please let me know Richard