Sheridan

In typical MS (left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing) fashion, W11 isn't on our VLSC, so I requested it, only to be told its only available as a preview in Windows Update Honestly, do they ever follow a consistent line?

We've been testing W11 on a couple of our laptops, so far we're calling it Windows 10 Big Sur, as it seems more like a Macos theme than a new OS

Its not showing in our VLSC yet, did you have to request it or anything?

We've seen a recent issue when refunds are being processed by our admin team in Parentmail - they go through the process of adding a refund, and then see the green 'success' message to say it may take a few minutes to update. Then the spinning "Please wait" message hangs for a minute two and the page goes into the Chrome 'page not responding' status. The refund isn't applied either. Parentmail say to clear cookies (ok, did that and as expected no change) and we have the whole parentmail.co.uk domain whitelisted/https inspection excepted on our smoothwall so I can't see any other reason why it would do this - it does the same in Edge as well as Chrome. Anyone using Parentmail seen this issues, as PM themselves have just said its a fault at our end, without giving us any hints as to why!

I've asked the reseller if Acer might be inclined to some goodwill but I'm not hopeful. They're out of warranty and thats usually all they'll say. However with the original batteries being nearly half the cost of the original chromebooks thats Acer on our 'never buy again' list We have 70 much older HP chromebooks and they're still great - battery still lasts 8 hours or so.

Defo dead battery, swapped one from a working chromebook and it worked again. So if we can find some decent priced batteries we can resurrect these. Doesn't speak well for the longevity of this particular model though

These are Acer C733U's - we've now tried several and they will boot to recovery mode (which does nothing as above) with mains power only. Will not boot to anything on battery at all, but will boot normally with mains power and the battery removed. Very odd so we're tested a working battery in one of the faulty ones to see if its a dead battery or faulty board. Either way I'll be avoiding Acer chromebooks in the future with such a high failure rate so early in their life!

We tested removing the battery on one, and it booted with mains power! So its looks like the batteries are completely toasted after just over a year. They must be faulty as the devices won't boot with them plugged in Not sure whether its worth buying replacement batteries if they're that poor, but otherwise its just a box of e-waste!

Serves me right for singing the praises of chromebooks at our place, as 9 of them have spontaneously died. Just over a year old and they won't boot. I can get them to the recovery screen which simply says "Chrome OS is missing or damaged. Please remove all connected devices and start recovery" but at that point CTRL+D does nothing and inserting a USB with the downloaded recovery image does nothing either So it looks like these are now scrap, which is a damn shame - has anyone else managed to work around this, or is it just a mainboard fault? I could try neverware but I'm assuming if it won't take the correct Acer image then its probably a non starter

Unfortunately our print server has just died when trying to remove the updates, its stuck in a permanent loop of 'working on updates 100% complete'. Time to build a new server from our backup. a) I hate MS updates b) Why don't MS understand what 100% means

Does anyone know of a way to reset a users ease of access settings on logout? We allow access to these settings for various students, but when they logout the default lock screen retains those settings until someone else logs in Its not a major problem, but it leads to calls out because the 'screen is a funny colour' or the font 'dont't look right' etc depending on what the student has changed Obviously we have to allow them to change things for various accessibility issues, but it seems daft that W10 retains those settings after you've logged out!

We used to use Printmanagement.msc on our admin PCs to connect to the Print server (2019) to manage jobs etc - however recently this has stopped working. The console shows nothing at all, in Drivers, Ports, Forms or Printers - all now show as empty on all of the PCs that used to connect. We're logged in with accounts that have full access to the printers so I'm a bit baffled as to why everthing is missing? All show up OK on the print server itself, just not on the remote console that was working a few weeks ago. I'm guessing an update has triggered this but the remote clients are different versions (from 2004 to 20H2) so its more likely to be at the server end - but as far as I can see none of the updates are know for this kind of problem. The print server itself it working fine and all of our PCs can print as previously, just the remote management seems to have gone.

Yup - it was created yesterday and the message has now gone today - I assumed the message would clear once the new valid CA was created

Yeah - that's all OK - it uses the new CA for all https services. Its weird as its not the first time I've renewed a smoothwall cert, just this time its convinced itself its still expired!

Its installed on the client, and seems to be ok in https inspection - just the web gui shows the error all the time

I've renewed the Root CA on our smoothwall for Https inspection, set it as the default CA and set the cert to be used for the various services, but the GUI display the message ' The Guardian CA certificate has expired. Click the button below to find out how to regenerate the certificate' all the time when logged in. I've cleared all the old certificates, rebooted and only have the brand new root CA showing (along with the dynamic ones created), which expires in 2023 but the message won't clear Is there something I've missed? I've not logged this with smoothwall as its taking too long to get a response these days.

Looks like google apps ignore proxies as a rule - google translate does exactly the same thing. So allowing everything through *.google.com is the 'answer' - so those apps are now useless in school

Does anyone else use the Google Meet iOS app with a Smoothwall UTM, as I'm really struggling to work out why it won't connect. The scenario is we have all of Google Apps whitelisted, and not https inspected. All the iOS apps they all work fine, except Meet which will not connect to a meeting, nor start one - it just times out The ipads have a proxy/port which maps to non transparent authentication, i.e all these devices are mapped as 'mobile devices for staff' etc. What I don't understand is the firewall shows a load of Deny entries for the device to a range of Google IP addresses but over https. To me that implies the app is simply ignoring the proxy/port specified? A typical Deny log entry is :[TABLE=class: AddEditRemove-table, width: 1633] [TR=class: main, bgcolor: #D0D5DD] [TD]142.250.200.42[/TD] [TD]TCP (6)[/TD] [TD]49337[/TD] [TD]HTTPS (443)[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] So that shows the app is trying to connect (bypassing the proxy) over https to an address in one of Google domains I can't see a way around this, apart from allowing access over https to these addresses (there are several ranges!) but that's allowing access to the google.com search domain, which allows through all sorts of things (I've tested and its not a good idea!)

My test rig has updated drivers and no AV (just defender) - it goes all the way through the process and reboots, gets to 68% and thats it - it reboots back to 10 with the error. Its a year old PC as well so I would have thought an ideal test candidate! Updates were a botch in 10 - so I was half expecting this!

I thought I'd have a look at 11 but it pretty much went the way I would have expected. Test (physical) PC meets the minimum spec and I tried to install Dev insider but it fails every time time with error 0xc1900101. Glad to see some things haven't changed with the updates in W10!

Cheers - its only happened this week (afaik) so maybe related to the last update perhaps

We've only ever had Chrome settings in one policy - never mixed with others. One for staff and one for students (different proxy settings basically) and the chromebooks have their own settings. We don't have Chrome browser in Google workspace as the GPOs are in place. Its odd as we've now had another example - a users searches for something on a diy store site, and gets an error saying 'something went wrong' - do exactly the same thing on Edge and it works fine (this is on Windows 10)

We're seeing some odd behavior in Chrome browser this week - on chromebooks and windows desktops. They're version 91 so pretty up to date Example 1: On a Windows desktop, in Chrome the credit card payments page doesn't work - it just keeps saying 'please try again'. This lead us to think it was a website issue, however it worked ok in Edge. The odd part is that the page rendered differently in the two browsers i.e the expiry date in Chrome showed as two fields (2 digits for Expiry Month and 4 digits for Expiry Year) as compared to Edge which showed this as one single field called Expiry Date (2/4 digits) Example 2: A load of kids running a test login to Chromebooks - half of them then cannot login to the site as it says they login details didn't work (100% checked and correct!) The same kids login to a Windows desktop and use the same site and credentials and it worked absolutely fine! This seems to be like the Chrome browser itself is the issue, rather than any filtering issues (chromebooks and desktops use the same filtering proxy & port) Apart from telling people to use Edge I'm not sure what else I can do - as we have a very light set of policies applied to Chrome on Windows and even less on the chromebooks themselves!

Adobe must have learned their licensing strategy from Microsoft lol I'm hoping that DaVinci Resolve might do all they need for free, but licensing more that the 15 or so required seems to make more financial sense

Yeah I'm thinking along those lines as well, we may as well license the whole school or at least sixth form and get a better deal