ReBoot

Thanks - I will copy to internal storage and try from there.

I'm having some problems importing my Smoothwall security certificate on some Android 11 tablets used by teachers for pupil observation. My provider is Suffolk County Council and the filter is a hosted Smoothwall tenant. I have the downloaded certificates in .crt and .cer format on USB storage. To import certificates on Android 11 you have to go through the security menu and select the internal storage containing your certificates. When I do this the dialogue just exits and I'm not seeing any of the certificates in the file browser. I did read that for Android 11 certificates need to be in binary format. Anyone got any experience of this process and the correct format for importing certificates on Android 11. Thanks

I'm pretty sure all mine are eMMC. The boot in under 15 seconds and in use the performance is OK.

I have the opposite experience with these laptops. I image them with Enterprise LTSC 2019 and they work fine on my domain. Ok they are not powerhouses but fine for general use in a primary school and I have had no issues with them crashing (all drivers are available for LTSC 2019). They are a bit expensive from Dell but as freebies from the DfE a very welcome addition to our inventory. I have successfully used the 64 and 128GB versions.

An afterthought. You may be better off ditching the RAID controller and setting up a ZFS array. This can be managed natively through Linux and I've found it a good solution for my servers.

I would start by going back into the RAID management interface you used to setup the array. This may be accessed through the BIOS during boot or there may be a Linux management application. That should give you an idea of the RAID state. From the looks of the errors you may have a failing/failed drive. Its unlikely that Linux will have a application built in to manage the MegaRaid (Avgo) card so you may need to see if the manufacturer provides any support for this. This would be the same for a Windows server. I assume you setup the array using the cards firmware interface accessed through the BIOS. This is probably the best place to start. Something like https://hosting-tutorials.co.uk/tutorials/linux/installing-megaraid-storage-manager-on-debian

The original Dansguardian distribution and the more recent e2guardian web filters came with weighted phraselists in various languages including Polish. This would give you a starting point to work with although the lists haven't been updated for quite a while. However, much of the language should still be valid. e2guardian

That makes a bit more sense. I did go on the Office365 educational site which included pricing information and chatted with a MS employee who implied students needed licenses as well as staff. I guess we will also have to continue OVS Windows licensing on top of the Offfice365 products to cover installed operating systems. Thanks for your help. I guess I need to talk to a MS Partner to get accurate costings.

I've seen a few people commenting that going for CSP licensing (Office 365 A3/A5) could be cheaper than an OVS license. I'm interested in Office365 A3 but the pricing appears much higher than OVS. Roughly speaking we have ~25 staff and 150 pupils our OVS license in less than 1K for Windows/Office. Office365 A3 licensing looks to be about £25/annually. For 175 licenses this is over 4K over 4x what we are spending on OVS. Am I missing something here ? I have seen suggestions that for CSP products its only staff that count for licensing costs but after some research this doesn't appear to be the case.

FreeNAS is readily available and works really well with top end performance. I have two installations of FreeNAS running on HP Microservers which make a good combination. Installation is very straightforward. There is a little learning associated with setting up network shares but once mastered you won't look back. ZFS is a brilliant filesystem with many advanced features which I also highly recommend. A Gen8 Microserver with FreeNAS is my network storage of choice.

I think the answer to this is that the Sophos XG does not perform dynamic content scanning to identify and block pages with offensive words/phrases. Out of the box there are no weighted word/phraselists comparable to what you will see on Smoothwall. This is a characteristic of the Sophos appliance and there isn't much you can do about it other than add you're own banned word list but then you have the issue of compiling the list and keeping it up to date with current trends. The Smoothwall test page probably includes banned words from their phraselists to test the content scanning. If you want this level of protection you probably need to look at Smoothwall.

I've had the same issue using DNS to enforce Youtube restricted mode on iPads. I have been meaning to try Chrome as the browser on our iPads as I think this is a Safari issue. May be worth a go but not ideal as it may be difficult to enforce the use of Chrome.

Before buying licenses I would do a test install on one of your machines. You may find it has an embedded digital license which will automatically activate. Recent Dells do this. I spent some hours worrying about activation of my daughters PC only to find it automatically activated using MS Media. I use Millgate for my licensing you could give them a try.

Another word of caution. Don't try and use a single shared account for Youtube administration as this will break. Each teacher will require a G Suite login and permssion to administer Video restrictions. May seem obvious but initially I used a single G Suite login for teachers to administer Youtube content but it stopped working after a while and advice from Google was to use individual accounts which resolved the issue.

Finally got this working. Turns out I was getting confused over the User Id which is used to identify a "Hold Print" job and the User Code used for authentication. You need both these set to submit a successful hold print job. In my custom driver I enabled the User Code pop up but the default for the User Id is "Create Own Id" which was blank and caused the job to be rejected. Setting this to "Windows Login Name" provided a value for the User Id and the job ran successfully. Easier to see on these screenshots.

Hi Here are some screen grabs of my print preferences.

Update on this. Have taken a couple of fresh builds using LTSB 2016 and W10 Education and installed the vanilla driver for each machine. If I turn on authentication on the printer I'm still getting no output (using preferences to set a user code) however with no authentication everything works as it should including hold print jobs with a user code. So the Driver Packager was a bit of a red herring as authenticated printing does not work even with a vanilla driver.

If anyone's interested I have got a definitive answer on this which is that Sophos web filtering does not include dynamic content filtering using word lists associated with inappropriate or illegal activity.

I did have a go at this and I think I got it working. The issue I had was that the controller needs to be reachable from the guest network which is commonly on a separate VLAN ideally isolated from your primary network. So you need to setup access to the controller from the guest network which is sort of defeating the object of an isolated guest VLAN. As I remember the controller can only have an interface on one network normally the untagged management VLAN. It been a while since I did this so things may now have changed.

Been having a look at the Sophos UTM as a possible candidate for a replacement webfilter/firewall for a pimary school. Have setup the free home edition as a test environment and pleased to see it even includes AD integration which I have working. My question is that the webfilter appears to be primarily a URL filter and does not scan pages for words/phrases which may indicate inappropriate content. It does scan pages/downloads for malicious software/viruses but this is a different thing. Filters such as Smoothwall, E2guardian, Diladele do include word/phrase based Dynamic Content Scanning which is an important element of filtering. Can anyone with more knowledge of the UTM confirm or inform me otherwise of its capabilities for content scanning. Thanks

The RICOH Driver Packager is reasonably straightforward to use although the documentation is a bit hit and miss. However, the resulting drivers don't seem to work with the machine as expected.

"Do the user codes already exist on the Ricoh? " No they have to be configured in the printer address book. There is also an option to create them dynamically as they are used. I have configured accounts for all staff users on the machine.

It probably depends on the authentication scheme being used. The fact that this is an option in the driver suggests by default there is no automatic dialogue for the code. If papercut involves spending money its probably not going to be an attractive option. Also my DC is a Linux Schools server running Ubuntu so not sure if papercut would be an option in this environment.

We have recently taken delivery of two new RICOH IM C3000 multi function printers. The head has asked me to setup user codes for staff so that we can get some usage stats within the school. Pupils are also going to be required to enter a class code and to facilitate this I am deploying a customized driver which pops up a dialogue requesting a code prior to printing. I'm creating the driver using the RICOH Printer Driver Packager NX Lite tool. All seems to be OK until I submit a print job. I get the user code dialogue but the printer auto deletes/cancels the job usually with Error 91 (Printing was canceled by the auto job cancel function due to a command error). The printer rcf file is as follows and I have set preferences for job type, colour and the code dialogue. I've been in touch with RICOH support a couple of times now and so far they've not come up with anything useful. I've also tried starting with a number of different drivers including the PCL6 UniversalDriver and PCL6 Printer Specific driver all with the same results. Our clients are running LTSB 2016 x64 and connect direct to the printer with no print server. (As I understand it the code dialogue won't work through a server). Has anyone any experience setting something similar up and any idea what's going wrong here ? Any insights much appreciated.

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