disco_samurai

Yup same here, I've had a ticket open since February that the engineer tried to fix and just seems to have given up on, not responding to requests for updates. Had another ticket open for 2 weeks about locking down a VPN app and when I got a response from an engineer he just emailed me a knowledge base article on 'How to Unblock a Website'... very useful. Will be looking at moving away from Smoothwall when our renewal runs out.

Thanks J, that worked perfectly (and also fixed Siri which wasn't working either). Mucho appreciated! N

Afternoon All We've just installed a new Smoothwall S8 box and after some early teething troubles we seem to be getting into a stable state. One issue I'm having though is with our Apple Cache Server that we have running on a MacMini, under our old UTM device (a Meraki MX model) we had to whitelist it to get it serving all iPads. However since the Smoothwall install even though I have added it as a filter exception and configured the firewall rules to allow it access the cache function is not working at all. Just wondered if anyone else had been able to get this up and running and can share any tips? N

We've been looking at this ourselves and it seems like a good idea, how long have STONE been installing these for Charli? We are a bit reticent to be guinea pigs Has it been installed in many schools already?

+1 recommendation from me for Foldr, its amazingly easy to setup and can cope with most of the weird and wonderful ways different apps try to save things. I can honestly say the iPad trial at my school would probably have died on its arse without Foldr, the teachers love it. Mike Turner at Minnow is a really decent guy as well, he was happy to extend my trial whilst we made a final decision on it. Neal

Hey all We are looking at getting some new Promethean boards in the coming months and a lot of the companies I deal with are telling me that both SMART and Promethean seem to have turned the corner and are now pushing the touch screens over the old school projector/whiteboard combo. I've seen a lot of the marketing bumpf for the Promethean Activboard Touch panels and I just wondered if anyone had had any personal experience with them? If so what do you think of them? For our budget range we'd probably be looking at the 65" model and I'm a bit concerned it will appear 'to small' when compared to the 78" whiteboards we've already got? The sales people are telling me that they would be fine and are HD crystal clear etc etc but then they would say that! In an idea world it would be great to see them, I wonder if any other IT Techs based round Manchester already using these boards would mind a 5 minute visit from myself to have a look? (I would bring biscuits of course!). Cheers Neal

Afternoon At our school we don't have a 'proper' intranet system so for us Spiceworks Helpdesk was a good starting point. With this in mind I changed the users homepages to be the IT Helpdesk Portal and put aload of handy links in the right hand side component section. We also update it with a daily event sheet and we stuck a telephone number list on it. I sold it to SLT with the following arguments - Lets users report small problems that they wouldn't normal bother to come track you down to fix - Gives you an idea of the workload in the IT department - Gives the users a far better idea of what the situation is with their jobs (make sure they get an email when the job is closed so that they know what was done) - No jobs are 'lost' as can happen with conversations or emails etc - If one of the techs is off on holiday or off sick everyone still has visibility to all the job requests - Its basic professionalism to my mind, takes the IT Department to the next level standards wise - Gives you some auditing capability i.e. who requested what website be allowed on the filter? Who wanted access to xyz folder? - Plus its FREE There was a bit of resistance to it at first but we kept plugging away and I had my techs consistently ask the users (in as nice a manner as possible) to use the helpdesk rather than emails etc, after a month or two its become standard working practise now. Hope that helps! Neal

Afternoon all Does anyone have a simple way of controlling which icons appear on the Taskbar on Windows 7? I know they appear in C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\ once you have set them but you can't just add these to the Default user directory to copy into new profiles. I want to replace the IE and Media Player icons with others of more use, I've found a few threads on the net like this Add Quick Launch / Desktop Icon locations to Default User profile through registry changes Which give this as the instructions reg load HKU\ntuser.dat c:\users\default\ntuser.dat reg import taskband.reg reg unload HKU\ntuser.dat rem (Microsoft Word.lnk, Mozilla Firefox.lnk) copy /y *.lnk "C:\Users\Default\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\" taskband.reg looks something like this (I shortened the 1st 2): Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_USERS\ntuser.dat\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband] "FavoritesResolve"=hex:d2,02,00,00,4c,00,00,00,01,14,02,00,00,00,00,00,c0,00,... "Favorites"=hex:00,7c,01,00,00,14,00,1f,80,c8,27,34,1f,10,5c,10,42,aa,03,2e,e4,... "FavoritesChanges"=dword:00000009 "FavoritesVersion"=dword:00000002 "FavoritesRemovedChanges"=dword:0000004b But I've not done much fiddling with the registry so I'm getting a bit lost! Any help (in slightly plainer English) would be very appreciated! Neal

I've been doing a lot of work on this at the moment, if its not working check the Error Log, if Windows isn't able to apply the Start Menu because of permissions etc it does actually flag it up in the log (as I found out about 2 days later than I needed!) Neal

Thanks for the advice! I spent the morning looking through the device expecting something complicated only to find that the project engineers had blocked all the google sites manually instead of unblocking them during the project setup as the school had requested...... Enough said! Neal

Evening All I've just moved to a school that has a new Meraki MX80 Firewall doing the web filtering. I'm not getting much help from the company who installed the solution and its causing us all sorts of issues with HTTPS connections I wonder if anyone has any experience with this device (I've used Smoothwall previously). For some sites (all of the google https services including google drive etc) it immediately returns you a page cannot be displayed error and whilst Youtube is supposed to be filtered you seem to be able to just avoid it completely by going to the https version. Before I start getting into the settings on it I'd appreciate if anyone here has any experience with this box as to what I should be looking for and what kind of things to check? Mucho thanks in advance if anyone can lend a hand, I want to spend some serious time with the Meraki setup at the moment but you can imagine just a few weeks into the job I have a tonne to do! Cheers Neal

Cheers guys,quality thinking!

Hey dudes We are just getting some iPads into our school and I have been configuring them with Apple Configurator which has gone pretty well so far. The problem I am having is that each of our iPads has to be assigned a Static IP address (for web filtering reasons) and each time I plug the iPad back in for a refresh or for a new app install the iPad switches back to DHCP and I have to manually type the static IP back in. This is rapidly become a pain in the ass, the more iPads we get in, is there a way to set Configurator to either leave the IP settings alone or to set it so that it pre-fills the static IP settings? I've looked through all the profile options and nothing jumps out! Any help would be greatly appreciated Neal

Hey mate No I gave up in the end, I tried a few workarounds like you mention but never got it working properly unfortunately!

Its weird but with this error even if you choose say a pen from the SMARTBoard sidetoolbar it still won't work when you try and use it within Powerpoint. Did some more tinkering today, completely removed Office & Smartboard software from the machine, removed all leftover files etc then reinstalled them both... it still fails to load the SmartInk Powerpoint add-in. Neal