forkies

Got the prompt at runtime set, so if I run the report through sims it does ask for the dates. It seems to work on one level down but not two levels down if that makes sense. Our LA has logged a ticket with capita!

Hi all, I am trying to get a report to run regularly using command reporter. However I need to be able to set a date to filter one of the linked areas (the blue options on report builder). My issue is that commandreporter using /PARAMDEF will only give me parameters for the main report, not the sub report/linked areas. Does anyone know a way to pass these parameters through on commandreporter? Thanks, Tom

I am close friends with a counsellor and I have to say that counselling notes should NOT be stored in a place general staff can access such as attached as linked documents on the MIS system. They should be in a restricted file, referenced by a client number or code and the list of client codes vs real names stored in a separate restricted file. I would raise this as a concern.

Not saying I don’t agree with you, but our Health and Safety consultant referred us to this guidance by HSE (link at end of message) which states: Section 11: portable “means equipment that is intended to be connected to a generator or a fixed installation by means of a flexible cable and either a plug and socket or a spur box, or similar means.” Section 47: combined inspection and test (pat) “Such faults can only be reliably detected by a combined visual inspection and test. This should be carried out periodically to back up the checks and inspections and is likely to be justified” Therefore according to HSE you should carry out testing on top of visual inspections for pretty much all equipment that has a flexible lead, whether it be with a plug or a spur which is not portable at all. But yet they do not specify how often this should be so as you say it is down to the responsible person to risk assess and determine how often that should be. http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/hsg107.pdf

Hi all, I have just decided to have a play with moodle for a staff training system to host all of our training materials in one nice system. First time install and all seems to be working apart from LDAP. I have moodle installed on a local web server for testing and LDAP is connecting (when I test it on the authentication page in system admin) but if I create a user as LDAP type it just doesn’t login. When it check the moodle log it shows reason 3 which according to moodle means password incorrect or similar. On the DC it shows the ldap query user authenticating in the event log. Has anyone else got this setup and know what I am missing or doing wrong? Tia, Tom

Used ebuyer for years, then had an issue had to return and item and it was like others have said unreal. Tried to keep using them but quickly had another issue and poor customer service leaving me no choice but to stop using them.

Hi all, I have had HAP+ running for some time and when I set it up we had an issue that the "Lessons" across the top of the room booking system would miss the last lesson off the side, so I created a "AfterSchool2" lesson to bump the afterschool slot on the end and make it appear. Now I have just been told (I assume it has always been like this) but the email that the system sends to the teacher has the lesson prior in the time and in the event cal it creates. See below my lessons from the config file, for example if I book "Lesson 5" it would email me "Lunch" as the timeslot but when you actually look on HAP+ it is in lesson 5. Any help would be greatly received. Thanks, Tom

Luckily the servers are in a different building altogether [emoji6]

I manage the fire alarm system, because apparently it falls under “systems” in my job title “IT, network and systems manager”. The on-site site controller attended the initial fire alarm but couldn’t find the detector that had activated, we have recently renamed the whole school, having renamed everything on the fire panel too. He called me out, and good he did otherwise would have had it leaking for almost two weeks unnoticed. While I was there waiting for a plumber I went through the basics of the fire panel again and reminded him about the zone chart which is pretty well broken down into over 40 zones now. On a side note, I am second closest person to the site, so I am number 2 on the emergency call list anyway. I work very closely with the site team on a management level, with that and the fact IT manage most of the site systems now anyway it makes sense. A good bit of overtime pay at least!

Had an emergency call out at 6.15am on Christmas Eve for a fire alarm. Turned up to be a hot water system pipe came apart at a fitting above the ceiling. Spent 5 hours dealing with the aftermath before calling it a day. Now all my backups are failing, looks like I will be dialling in tomorrow to investigate that.

Just reviving the thread, did you get anywhere with this? I have just found out we potentially will be acquiring a class full of these and interested in how to manage these centrally and push out settings/security/ssl certificates etc. How to authenticate each user (as will be up to 5 a day) against smoothwall for monitoring, and how you went about securing all the settings.

In house usually. We have more tools than our site team and do installs in the same time as any contractors we have had in to do installs. I really want another person on my team so we can do more, as recently I have had a lot changed using contractors due to it crossing over with building works and more than we could do alongside other jobs, having one more person would have made it manageable. Luckily our BM understands what is needed and asks me so costings for contractors can be included if we are too busy.

We ask for ex students to come in and sign a form explicitly stating the college requesting the information authorising us to share it with them.

Sorry should have said, when we tested the common factor was the 16XG, if an uplink went through it we had issues with the switches below it, but put the uplink bypassing the 16XG into the core and it was fine.

We have had some similar issues, we reverted to an older firmware but that had some other issues. I ended up upgrading to latest firmware, restarting the switches, force provisioning and then rebooting again and so far haven’t had any issues apart from one switch saying a WiFi point was an uplink which hasn’t changed back even when the port was disabled for hours. Network is working fine now just the interface having a winge now.

Hi all, Has anyone deployed Visual Studio Community 2017 using SCCM. I have had a rather long week and looking at the pages online about it is not working for me today and I am just getting lost. I have downloaded the online installer, then done the download all then install for the offline downloaded to a folder but whenever I try to run the command line to install this it takes about 30 minutes says setup complete and does not actually install anything for me? I am using "vs_community.exe --layout %CD%\vs2017 --lang en-US --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop" Hoping someone has a application deployment they can just screen shot or copy and past details over to me. Thanks in advance, Tom

Agreed, at a previous school we ran a scan against our AD and managed to get all passwords readable because ultimately AD is just not secure. But then again, if your servers/network is compromised to a point that can happen then it doesn't matter about how the passwords/account information is stored as all the data is no longer safe.

The IT Management company who was used purely for a one off audit and did criticise other areas of the audit. I used to work in a school with 60% the number of students and if they had 5 students come to the office for password resets it was a good day. Again this is purely risk assessed and baring in mind a password which is not personal data, is accessible by staff who have access to personal data on said student, which can be used to access only non personal data i.e documents of said person at worst. Is it a security bad practice if it is only accessible inside the private network? What if it is compromised, then all your data is at risk of compromise anyway if they can get into that database, so you are at serious risk of personal data being lost. Is seeing a students set password worse than you being able to see all users computer screens with classroom management software, see users emails and web browsing history? I think realistically this is being blown out of proportion. Simply because some schools don't have gates and fences is that a serious security, safeguarding and prevent issue that should be talked about too? Because I know a lot of schools that don't have fences or gates and are outstanding.

As I said before we are a school that allows staff to view student passwords, this happens very little as most students don’t then forget the password continuously because it is always just reset for them. We were audited by an external IT management company and they praised us for our lack of password resets and what is commonly a waste of learning time in other schools. Having said that, I am aware of the potential security concerns and these have been risk assessed when we moved from our LA system (which as previously stated allowed us to view passwords of all users, staff included, across all our local authority schools). This system was in place I believe in the lgfl network as well but I am not sure as I never worked for any lgfl schools. Ultimately my point is we have been doing this for a long time, along with many schools who had this system originally, it has saved us numerous hours of lost learning time and it is clear in our student AUP that we allow staff to view their chosen passwords. We have never had a student or parent on behalf of complain about that. We believe every school is setup slightly differently and I have visited quite a few schools and have seen various security or health and safety issues which would never get past at my school but then again these may be risk assessed and seen as reasonable in other schools.

I would be happy to go through how we have implemented this and you can build that into your unnamed Intranet. It would be up to the end user wether to enable the feature or not and be up to them to risk assess it which would cover any security concerns people may have. An alternative is to just have it feed straight into the other systems for sso, so that plain text passwords are never stored just processed and then each system should store them in some hashed or encrypted form. Again a risk assessment by the end user when they install this. I will pm you.

We tell students in our AUP. As It was an existing feature of our old local authority solution who also run the lgfl network so not sure if the same for those schools. It is no different to how other systems extract passwords for sso. We have this on an internal only access and it is synced to other systems for sso, so yes it is not a secure system but ultimately you can brute force active directory quite easily with some passwords students have, and with the likes of many websites and systems being hacked these days and passwords being leaked is anything secure? Ultimately if a password were to be compromised then only access to insignificant non personal data would occur such as student user documents in our case.

We have developed a system after we left the LA network who managed user accounts back in 2012, we intercept password changes in AD, this is plain text before it is encrypted. This is so staff can view the students passwords but mainly it allows us to synchronise the password changes with other systems as required which don’t support sync with AD natively.

Got an email re this on 7th June. No further updates though

We used to do this but found when scanned it showed through the redaction ink. So we have now PDFd all documents (scanned if needed) then used PDF to electronically redact. This allows us to have an original electronic file without redaction and with redaction. Especially useful for permanent exclusion hearings and such.

We have a 40GB limit for staff, this is to prevent offline file sync filling up which is set via GPO to a percentage of their SSD space usually around 85GB, they all have 240GB ssd but we also role out a larger image than you and want free space should another user log in and get offline sync. Our largest user is 55GB were we have manual raised the limit but majority of staff sit below 15GB. We encourage are staff to put shared resources in a network share accessible to other staff to avoid duplicating files which are slightly outdated across various home areas.