john_robinson001

I'm looking at the exact same thing at the moment. We use Adobe Connect, but we are having terrible trouble with the browser plugin since the last Chrome update. Skype would be ideal, although licensing them through Office 365 would give them the ability to video call other students with no ability to control it (if I'm wrong and there is some way to manage that, let me know!). Instead we've been looking at setting up Skype meeting and sending them the link to be able to join it, so they don't need an account. The sticking point is the plugin, as it wants to download and install it every single time, regardless of whether it's been installed before. We issue the laptops to the students and lock them down, so the plugin won't install. It's the only sticking point in what I think would be a good solution. An extension of that would be Microsoft Teams, which Microsoft have recently announced will replace Skype for Business, and introduce a lot more features.

Hi all, We have some laptops that go out to students to use at home. They use a 3G/4G wifi dongle provided by us for internet access, and so we need to filter the internet connection. We have this set up to work via our proxy server, but I'm having trouble getting the proxy settings to stick. The laptops are set up with local accounts for the learners. I've tried editing local group policy to make the proxy settings machine based, and then remove the option to change them, but Windows 10 seems to ignore this setting. At the moment, we can put the proxy settings in manually, but it leaves them open to being removed by the students. Does anybody have any ideas how I might achieve this? Thanks! John

Hi all, Hoping somebody can help me untangle a HP Warranty issue I'm having. I've purchased some networking kit from one of our regular suppliers (big company, fairly well known). The first batch of kit they sent out was suspect, and on checking with HP, it's been sourced from Egypt / Singapore. They've agreed to take it back and ship UK stock. The second batch they're sending, again checking with HP, is showing as coming from the Netherlands, Denmark and France. HP have been a bit woolly and said it "might not be covered" if it's already been registered in the country of origin - that's based on their new warranty changes from Dec 2014 making the warranty non-transferrable when kit is sold on. I can't find a way to check the registration details though. The supplier is insistent it's legitimate, as it's manufactured in those countries but earmarked for UK sale. This is replacement kit for our core network, so I obviously need the warranty to be water-tight. I'm thinking that because the second batch of kit has come from within the EU, then it should be OK. Every HP warranty check website I can find says the kit is covered for the next 100 years. Does anybody have any advice, or has anybody been in a similar situation? Would you trust this kit? Thanks.

Hi, We're running SMART Notebook v11.4 on a Windows 2012 R2 remote desktop server. Periodically, with no apparently trigger, Notebook will crash, with the following information: Type: BEX rtscom.dll_unloaded It used to run fine in our previous 2008 RD environment, so I'm wondering if this is just an incompatibility with Smart Notebook 11. Unfortunately SMART have now introduced their new licensing model, meaning we can't upgrade to their new version 14. Has anybody come across this issue before?

This worked for me - plugging an audio cable into the speaker / headphone jack allows the videos to play! Thank you :-)

I'm having an issue with Youtube whereby the video plays for around 1 second before restarting from the beginning. This happens several times before eventually erroring with the standard Youtube error message. I've figured out that the restarting is being caused by the video flicking between playback quality settings. What I can't figure out is why it is doing it. Here is what I have tried, all to no avail: Updated Flash Player to the latest version Update Shockwave to the latest version Updated Java to the latest version Updated Internet Explorer, first to version 9 from 8, then to version 10 Tried as restricted and administrator level users Fully unblocked Youtube, and other sites it refers to, in our filteirng solution (Sophos UTM) Tried several different PCs, of different makes and models I don't think it's a filteirng issue, because it works in Chrome under the same username and on the same PC. It seems to be a specific IE issue. Any suggestions anybody has would be gratefully received. Many thanks!

We did this a very similar way to you gill, with a couple of slight differences. Rather than create separate user accounts for each student taking an assessment, we remapped their user accounts to use a different home-folder path. This way, when we're informed that students need to take a controlled assessment, we just change their home folder path to e.g. \\server\controlledassessment$\english. This automatically creates a folder with the right security permissions etc. When they've finished, we put the home folder back to normal.

Thanks guys, some excellent links and really useful information there. The Kent documents are really helpful - I'm using them at the minute to refine our e-Safety strategy. I'm hoping to put the whole staff through the half-day CEOP training in the new school year, having completed my Ambassador training about a month ago. In the short term, I'm targetting Facebook. An e-Safety board would be really useful - I was actually looking for one last night when I was posting, but hopefully it will be along shortly! Thanks again!

Hi everyone, I'm preparing to hold an awareness-raising session with staff on the use of social networking sites, particularly Facebook. The main driver behind this is the current Year 11 cohort, who have just left, now feel its appropriate to add members of staff to their Facebook friends list. Some of our staff have accepted these requests without really understanding the complex nature of Facebook security settings, or what they might be opening up. I'm interest to know how other people have presented this sort of thing to their staff. I suppose I'm looking to scare them with some facts and figures, and also show them how to lock down their profiles, so if people have any stories they can share or know of any useful sources of information, that would be great. Many thanks, John By the way, hope I've posted this in the right section... It seemed like the most appropriate place.

I've been reading the threads about the various methods of encrypting pen drives, as we're currently having a big push to make sure everything is watertight. We're probably going to be using TrueCrypt in traveller mode / install it on staff machines within school. My question is - how do I stop staff just buying their own pen drive and using that, as a way to avoid the faff of mounting volume's etc. Is there a way anybody knows of to block all but certain pen drives (i.e. encrypted ones)? Otherwise the whole process seems a little pointless as it can be bypassed too easily. John

I tend to run Sysprep on the initial template PC before creating the image. After running it, edit the sysprep.inf file and delete whatever value is assigned to "computer name". Now, when you rollout the image, the client machines will stop and ask to be given a name before they finish the setup and join themselves to the domain. I know its not exactly automated, but it makes it really easy to quickly whip round a room, enter the computer name, and press "enter" to finish the job. Certainly quicker than having to change it manually in Windows afterwards. If anyone wants any more info on this, let me know... I'll be happy to provide.

Good evening all... My name is John and I'm an ICT Technician at Hawkley Hall High School in Wigan, Lancashire. Been there for just over a year now. I'm 21 (22 in 10 days), graduated from uni last year with my degree in Information Systems. During my degree I also worked part time for a major Utility company as an IT Engineer. I'm liking the education sector thus far... It gives a real sense of being able to make a difference now that the use of IT has become so infuential in schools.

The server doesn't have the Sophos management console installed, but it does run the client. We had the same thought about on-access scanning and disabled it a while back. It doesn't seem to have made much difference though. Thanks for the reply, John

Nothing of particular interest in the event logs, although I'll have another look tomorrow... We run Sophos on our network, so no Symantec to be found, and the server in question isn't our antivirus server. One of our first thoughts was dodgy disks, but the manufacturer has been out and changed most of the disks and the SCSI backplane, to no effect. One thing I have noticed is that this symptom occurs whenever there is a sustained read / write to the disks. E.g. if I run a search on a mapped drive from my PC, the queue length shoots off the scale and the users start ringing up reporting slowdown. Likewise if I copy a few large files to the server. The times that this slowdown occurs seems to be totally intermittent, I've tried disabling DFS to see if folder replication between servers was causing the problem, but that didn't help. I've noticed, however, that this seems to happen on ANY server, even non-RAID servers, if you watch perfmon whilst performing file operations... Maybe its just because this is our main file server we're noticing the issues. Can anyone else report similar? Thanks for the replies so far. John

Hi all, We've been experiencing intermittent issues with performance on our network recently. At seemingly random times in the day, users in the IT suites report their workstations freezing up for minutes on end, documents getting corrupted when they try to save etc. These are all Windows XP machines patches up to SP2. Looking at the server when this is happening, perfmon shows the average disk queue length on the server shooting right off the scale, and sometimes the avg. pages per second too. We're running Server 2003 R2, and the disks are in a RAID-5 configuration. Processor usage stays relatively low. The server in question is a Dual Xeon 3.2GHz with 4Gb RAM. The manufacturer's been out and replaced nearly every component of the server, thinking it was a hardware fault (mainboard, SCSI backplane, CPUs, and nearly all of the disks). None of this has made a blind bit of difference. I'm fast running out of ideas, hence this post!! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, John Robinson ICT Technician Hawkley Hall High School