forkies

Finance should have all bills relating to line rentals. The problem with your DR is that all those lines are probably all entering premise at the same point, leaving a single point of failure, likewise your electricity feed.

£100 cashback if you buy new Epson projectors I believe Edit: when you trade in your old Epson projector

We have a laptop loan agreement and a confidentiality agreement for them to sign if they are collecting prior to their contracted start date. This therefore is a contractual agreement for data access and only is allowed by the head when the new member of staff has food reason for needing access early. For example we have a new assistant head starting and she is collecting hers a week early, has good reason to have early access for handover, will be signing the agreements putting her in contractual obligations to cover data protection and other relevant legislations.

We ask for consents every year, therefore we MAY be asking for student consents in September once they are over the age of 13 (or in the relevant year groups if that makes sense). This hasn’t been confirmed here but is a potential option as we feel it is important to inform and have our students understand about data protection and consents, especially with all these websites doing naughties with their data. Best way to educate them is to involve them

As a note someone asked that at my place and the finance team said no, the member of staff kicked up a fuss so we got the auditors involved and basically they said it was a big no no to buy through school without VAT and then sell to yourself as such for personal use. They summed it up as if this person did it, they would be committing fraud.

We are still in discussion with our legal but it looks like we will be issuing privacy notices via our website and directing students to that (still providing paper copies as required). We will gain consent from students when they move up a year rather than on their 13th birthday as this seems acceptable, obviously we would still treat any requests or issues based on their age at the time, for example if they have just turned 13 but hadn’t moved up to the next year yet.

Surely they can keep track of their own attendance given pen and paper. “Was I in and on time this morning?” “Oh look 100% attendance”

We are looking at replacing our existing ageing and expensive meraki wireless system with Unifi. We have got one Unifi AC EDU wireless point deployed and are very happy with it, not only for the wireless but as a PA system. My query is, to make this viable we would need one AC EDU in each classroom and possibly in certain communal areas/corridors for the PA system to be heard in all areas. Therefore I am concerned this may cause interference for them being quite densely deployed. We would be going from our sparse 26 AP deployment to over 80 to cover all areas and vastly improve our WiFi deployment. Most of our buildings are 1960 ish solid brick double skinned in some places. But we have two new buildings (one going up) which are mdf backed partitions with steels. Has anyone got these APs and/or have any thoughts about this? Thoughts much appreciated, Tom

I just used the installers they left and then migrated the DATA folder and shares/permissions. Did this a few years ago without issues.

Drivers?

Thanks for the replies. I have got into contact with Virgin Media again, last time we spoke to them was a couple years ago as they came out but said they couldn't go up the drive as it wasn't owned by us (our neighbors drive we have shared access). I spoke to them again and they said they would be able to do it now, but I am not sure as that is what they said last time and when the installation team arrived they said they couldn't. I have gone and ordered a 300 Mbps line which will give us enough download and upload for the work my dad does. If needed I will have to get it changed to a business line for higher upload speeds but think it is a massive improvement on what he has now. I have an installation date of 2 weeks tomorrow so lets see what they say when they come out, they did say I could call a number and ask for a pre installation visit but I don't think it is worth it. I am going to try and force them to come in round the back of the house if they say they can't go up the drive, we have a public footpath from their duct up round the back of the fence so should be ok to go that way with a soft dig. Now I just need to get a cabinet and power in the loft which is where I am planning on running it all from. Will be a bit of a waste if they can't do the install. I will let you guys know how I get on. Thanks, Tom

Hi all, Looking for some advice. My parents house is on up a shared driveway with no ducting, leaving only aluminium cable (according to BT) coming up the drive being joined to copper at the road then fibre at the cabinet. Therefore they are struggling with home broadband providers as Virgin keeps saying they can get fibre up to the premise but when they send out a team they say they cannot. Currently with BT they can get a maximum 18Mbps download which is fine for home use but my dad also runs his business from home and it is quite internet intensive work. I want to look at providing a 4G service to provide faster internet. I have done some quick tests and on my phone I get 22-30Mbps on 4G with 50-80% signal. This isnt really fast enough to justify the cost of going down this route. Would any of you have experience with EE external mounted antenna and if this improves speed quality/speed? When I am out and about I get speeds of 70Mbps on 4G in the local area. Does anyone have any recommendations or experience with 4G home broadband or even any business 4G solutions that may offer a static IP? Or does anyone else have any solutions they have implemented? I was contemplating asking our neighbors if we could go halves on a broadband line to their house, then have a wire or wireless link between buildings to share as they can get fibre to premise. Very frustrating situation at the moment. Anything cheaper than digging up the driveway though. TIA, Tom

Had some similar issues in previous schools and they were down to a few different issues: scheduled antivirus scans, scheduled shadow copies (problem with shadow copies caused it to lock up), Impero (although I am sure this issue no longer exists as over 5 years ago) and the other one was spanning tree config on a netgear switch were they have rubbish firmware that causes network problems. I would start of looking at scheduled tasks/activities. Check event logs on the machines to see what is going on at that time. If it all ties to a single server like documents server, check it’s event logs to see what’s happening at that time. You could always run a wire shark to see if any massive broadcasts happen at the same time too.

Should also say. We did have a structure before where each member of the team was assigned a set of departments or systems to support as told to my the head. However his worked really badly, one person was always under a huge pile of work and the other twiddle thumbs. When one was absent it was a nightmare too. I then setup the structure as per previous post and it works quite well, just need another member of staff.

We have someone who is labelled as IT Suite Support whose primary role is to support the IT Suites and general classroom tickets. Then a senior technician who primarily deals with the staff laptops. This is the main split but then they help each other out when one is busier than the other. I sit above as manager and deal with all server side, development and projects along with the other hats I have. The senior tech is being trained up on all systems so if I am absent he can cover. The junior tech is being trained up fully on the day to day jobs of the senior tech so he can cover in his absence. Ie, the person below the person is trained and covers the absence of the person above. If the bottom person is absent then every one above knows everything about persons jobs below. If that makes sense?

If you do import students again and do a new csv it should match the students by their unique identifier and update the year group etc. But yes, it is terrible in every other way possible.

What firewall settings are on the laptop, does it specify what network type it is. I assume as your rebuilt it, you manage to domain it, but can you try re-domaining the laptop. Also check event logs on the laptop to see if any more details available.

I popped into work the other day (I am supposed to be on holiday this week) and decided to test your changes, I found it did not work either for us. However, when I was testing I did find that if I waited about 10-15 seconds after the desktop appeared and then went to word (for example) to print, the printer was there. I am not sure if this was just coincidence or whether it is a timing issue. I am going to implement the Printer Spool service restart fix at the start of the week hoping that is constantly reliable as a short term fix until we look at rolling out 1709 as others have reported a potential fix with that. Not sure if Server 2016 for DCs/print server would make a difference either? Thanks. Tom

We have a room with a “test bench” of computers not connected to our network where students can install an OS and do whatever they want ready for it to be wiped and done again by another student. The student takes screen shots or photos (pre os or hardware changes).

I specify 750mm per seat, then when they say they need to increase class sizes by 2-3 then they squeeze those in. My new IT room design (given the space I have) is 750mm per seat with 32 computers. One room has 35 computers but the majority will only take 32 at a max given 750mm each, we have the biggest rooms available so nothing more I can do for that.

Same error here, below is the file in the directory called "SIMSerror.log", it is happening at "Step 2: Export to Exchange" Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1. System.Xml System.Xml.XmlException: Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1. at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(Exception e) at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseRootLevelWhitespace() at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseDocumentContent() at System.Xml.XmlLoader.Load(XmlDocument doc, XmlReader reader, Boolean preserveWhitespace) at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Load(XmlReader reader) at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Load(String filename) at CHS.SIMSExchange.Thread.Start()

Well in that case all students should hide in blankets while they walk around school so that you don’t see them, as it’s exactly the same view you would get when you are out and about school. As others have said, it’s down to your cctv policy and reasoning behind having it up. We have ours up so we can ensure safeguarding of the site and we respond to missing students of student who have walked off from lessons and need tracking down. I also always have it up when working off hours for personal safety, so I can see who is around the site especially weekends and late at night. All of this is clear in our cctv policy and acceptable as per governor ratification.

We use CPOMS and they are on the DfE website for completing the supplier checklist (I think so is MyConcern) relating to cloud suppliers and DPA when we looked into them. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cloud-software-services-and-the-data-protection-act

Just to throw a rock on the ice. Are the people who are of happy with SB move away when contract renews? I have been with an ISP away from LEA for 6 years with on premises filtering and had about 20 minutes of school hours downtime in the past two years. Which was due to our need to restart our filtering appliance during the day a few times. Seems a lot of people complaining on the forums about downtime with various providers of off site filtering aimed at education. Are people who have been affected/complaining looking to move back to on premise solutions and business ISPs? Or are you hoping it will be *better* after you renew?

You can delete staff even with data against them, it just requires a bit of fiddling and manually deleting other data. The “delete staff” options tells you we’re all the data is that needs removing first. If you can’t get anywhere then you can always make a list of staff and ask Capita to write a site specific patch to do it.