ChrisERoots

Just wanted to know what policy other schools are enforcing around this? We have several students (Year 7) who have Youtube accounts. Some with questionable videos with students dressed in uniform which is a no no straight off the bat. Others who post videos of themselves playing games etc which in itself is reasonably harmless. However they are openly advertising themselves to predators. Have any of you gone about getting Youtube channels deactivated? If so what was your method of doing it?

Thanks for that Butters. I did do some benchmarking of the SAN from numerous VMs in our estate. Can't remember the actual numbers the MIS server came back with the same results as a lot of the other VMs. What I will do though is bench the physical device and see what thats saying in regards to performance. The memory side of things I will take a closer look at though. There's definitely some food for thought there. Thanks for the suggestions.

Here's a quick snap of the current machines. The Document Server files and storage are now on the Physical server to see if that would decrease the times but this has made no real difference in performance. Current VM - Utilises our SAN for storage Physical Server - uses built in storage

Interesting this, we have been suffering with brutally slow SIMS performance for some time now. As a rough guide, currently staff can wait anywhere between 3-5 minutes for an Address Label report to be done for one year group on our Virtualised Host which is awful. As a test we setup SIMS on a physical server and the time went down to 10-20 seconds. Nobody has come close to being able to assist us in seeing what the actual problem is with our VM but I am close to switching back to the physical box as a real test. I just get the feeling that for some things Physical is the way to go. I always got this impression from when we first installed SIMS on this VM.

Thanks for this @steve_forbes and @AButters. Most useful posting here anyway and at least I know not to waste any more time on them. Onwards and upwards with some newer kit. Would love a few pointers from people on how they got their extra backup solutions going with FreeNAS or equivalent?

@steve_forbes Correction on those serials: W04590730 W045910801

Thanks everyone for the information so far. Really appreciate the feedback. @steve_forbes Got a couple more Serials if you could help with the SPECs. ECRI5100113 & ECRI5100021. I initially just saw the Xeon name and thought they'd be okay. Might have to rethink and replan as @AButters got me thinking about Power. I'd already have to fit several drives in to the unit to accommodate capacity and the more I think about this and that hardware the more out of reach it seems. Did anyone manage to get the boxes to boot from USB? @mrwoberts Would love to hear a little more about your setup. Going at this from a blank slate but it sounds like you might even let staff interact with your setup?

Thanks so much for the suggestions. @cpjitservices I'll definitely look at FreeNAS. Ive never really done something like this before so its all learning really. @steve_forbes The serial of the server is: W048555901. They're old boxes so not expecting much performance wise but would definitely like them to come in useful in this scenario. Not 100% sure what they're like eon storage either at the moment. I would really need to put in a few TB drives to accommodate the current amount of information.

I'd just like a bit of sense checking before I continue. I have several of the RM servers doing nothing at the moment. I was thinking of repurposing a couple of them to be used as Offsite (in different buildings) purely as backup servers. Has anyone else done something like this with old server hardware? It just seems a waste to have them sat there and it would provide us with a bit more resiliency. Has anyone else installed Server 2012 on these devices?

Thanks for the heads up about 2016. I was half thinking that could be the saving grace in all this but I will hold off for longer. You would think that this might have shown up for a few more users online. Massively annoying, i'm going to try installing the Promethean tools and see if this works with 2013 but I very much doubt it. Promethean' ActivInspire doesn't even import files now unless the filename and path doesn't have spaces in it. So much for giving it some time before rolling out an update.

Been struggling with this myself and I wish I knew which update would solve this. Its very annoying for all concerned.

Thanks for the reply @robsonma. Yes we are running Papercut and the printers are connected to a Windows Server. All seems to be setup correctly. We do have the Papercut Client running and have had Papercut look at this too. They have indicated though and I fully agree that the job is failing before Papercut even knows about the problem.

I've been on to them a few times now and in all honesty the support is a bit sketchy on this one. I will go back to them but i'd love something else to try in the meantime.

For a long time we have had a follow me Print solution in school. Summer 2015 we started a new contract and got new printers in the building. We have 2 queues, a Mono & Colour. Since installation we've had a really strange problem in that sporadically users will find that they cannot send a job to one of the printers. Usually, it will take a long time to try and connect to the printer in question and Word or other Office app will eventually time out and give an error like this: There's no real evidence of something wrong in the Event Viewer apart from the failure notice above. Both printers are on different virtual ports and in every case the opposing Printer will still work without issue. The problem appears to affect all other programs on the system. The problem can usually be rectified by logging out and back in again which isn't always ideal we just need it to work consistently. I've also installed the following patches: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2647753 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2713128 The last patch should go on over night but i'm not hopeful for a fix. Drivers are all up to date and things are working as they should be most of the time. But still this comes round and affects people everyday and its very annoying. I'm thinking it could have something to do with profiles but i'm at a loss to go about testing and replicating the problem. PLEASE HELP!

We are currently having some problems with annotations in Powerpoint. Teachers are finding that sometimes they have to restart Powerpoint or log out and log back in again before the Annotation feature will work. I have observed them selecting the Pen tool while the Powerpoint is 'Showing' and the cursor changing to the pen. They go to write on the board and the cursor moves around but there are no marks left. Its quite annoying that something so simple is flakey. Not really sure if its a problem with Powerpoint or the Promethean drivers/input. Some of you will already be aware of an issue with Powerpoint 2013 and importing PPTX in to ActivInspire. Since the update this will not work unless the path to the file and the filename itself does not have any spaces in. Promethean haven't seemed to release a fix for this which is annoying. Would love to know if anyone else has experienced this?

Just suffering with this problem myself using some iDevices. Could you let me know where you put those items on the Smoothwall please?

Thanks for the reply @jimmyhotfingers All roads are pointing to sending them back. Its unacceptable really, I reckon HP have put those faulty ones in these machines. Copying a 30mb file from the network wirelessly takes around a minute. Not a great experience.

Hello! I've recently got a couple HP 450 G2 laptops with the RealTek 8723BE Wireless card inside and I've had some terrible issues making them work properly on the wireless. If cabled to the network they will log in, in around 30 seconds or less. We have some Dell E5500 which on the wireless, fresh build and no cached profile will login in under 1 min 30 secs. These HP devices average anywhere from 4-10 minutes. I've tried different drivers, altered the settings on the wireless card so that it picks up on the correct band. During my ping tests the connection frequently drops for a few seconds and comes back. All the while though the single strength in Windows shows that it is connected with 3 or 4 bars. The Access point is about 5 metres from my office. I've dropped the machine in to a test OU with no policies applied and the time comes down to around 3-4 minutes consistently. I'm at the point of sending these devices back. Has anybody got any devices with this Wireless card in and have had and cured this problem? I know it can't be my build or anything that runs during the log in process. Theres a fair amount of people online who have suffered performance issues with this card.

Looks like you've added the URL properly to me. For Meraki (which is what we use) it looks something like this: https://ios.meraki.com/apple_mdm/profile/4443333333333333333?org=322222

Can I point out that if you use Server 2008 R2 the process is the same but slightly different as i've found out by trial and error. This guide really helped me out after initial attempts enforced Safe Search but broke all other Google Services (Gmail, Youtube etc). Google SafeSearch and SSL | Robiul's Blog

We have had a trial of a Chromebook. It worked well but we had to get Storefront installed first. It would not work with ICA at the time. I hope the new app which has been released will support this. Will check out those Chrome clients again. In some respects Citrix doesn't really bother about the age of a device providing you can get your build on it or customise the embedded software for your environment. I really like the FX160's they tick a lot of boxes on price, performance etc but they are pretty old now and i'm just wary of bringing more older kit in to our already ageing end user device environment.

Apologies if I wasn't quite clear enough. We will be using our older Desktops as Teacher machines, they are Core 2 Duo's with a decent amount of ram. What i'm trying to do is make a cost saving really. We're pretty tight on funds when it comes to hardware replacement. We spent a fair amount on our Citrix install and that will accommodate 300 concurrent users. Leveraging this by replacing full fat clients with Thin terminals in classrooms and pupil resource areas will allow us to use those computers as our Teacher machines for powering whiteboards and delivering better performance and reliability than the laptops which teachers currently use for everything in school and are themselves needing more repairs etc after 5+ years of daily use. Our Academy was designed to be a wireless school along time ago, with teachers docking devices for each room they were in. Thats fine providing you have the money to replace lots of laptops later on down the line. We made some decisions about where we were headed when we installed Citrix and turned all of our Laptops in to thin Clients. Still, we haven't taken full advantage of what we have in place. In another 2-3 years time the Academy profile in respect to hardware will have changed again with more and more iPads coming in to the school.

Hello! I'm after some advice on Thin Clients. We currently have a pretty large Citrix Install and i'm looking to trade some of our Workstations in for Thin Clients, repurposing the older hardware. Just after opinions as we are looking to go down the Refurbished route for our clients and i've had some Dell FX160's which seem to be working pretty well for us. At around £60 they seem like a steel but before i push on and buy 30 i'd just like some sanity checking and a feel for what other people are using and if we might be able to get something a little newer...... I look forward to some replies....

This might seem a bonkers idea but I would like to give Staff access to be able to amend Print Credits for students. It will save a lot of Admin time for myself through a day especially when Course work deadlines are due. I'm just after some basic knowledge on how its done and what needs to be installed where in order for Staff to be able to do it?

Do you have the facility to use VLC Player. It can stream DVD content to any location if you can connect to IP Addresses. Only drawback is that everyone will have to watch at the same time or you'll have to have screening at different times for each class.