smarties11

There is an onprem version of cnMaestro, however in my quick research this evening it looks like it has to be activated via Cambium servers first. It might be worth spinning one up now and activating and then powering down in case it's needed in the future? The biggest issue I think is ongoing development and bug fixes. If this is abandoned then how long will it be until the solution is effectively useless because there are so many bugs / incompatibilities with newer devices etc? We ditched Ruckus for Cambium as it represented a ~£4k total saving Y1-Y5 and then at least £7k total saving Y6-Y10 once Ruckus annual support became payable. I really hope we haven't made the wrong decision. We're really happy with it as a solution, it has been straightforward to deploy and has been performing really well. If it does get purchased by a competitor then presumably the competitor will just want to integrate the APs into their own cloud platform (like Cambium did when they bought Xirrus)

FFS, how typical is this after deploying our solution over the summer 🙄 Fingers crossed that there is an interested buyer. Might be wise to buy a few spare APs for any future warranty issues!

Anyone seeing issues today with local SIMS? This morning SIMS was really slow for users and occasionally hanging for a couple of minutes. Noticed that the CPU usage was constantly high for sqlservr.exe on the server. Rebooted, has been fine all day - now it is doing the same. Just wondering if there has been another issue with the Services Manager or anything else?

Hi Rob, Thanks for your insights! If we can't get the captive portal working then I think we will likely go down a similar route. In addition to lockouts, we also enforce password changes every 45 days, so we'd likely need to consider not doing this anymore and being less aggressive on the lockout policy. As you say, with Entra / MFA these things are less important now, but I feel still a consideration for the case of an on-site brute force from another student etc. Appreciate your input, it's definitely some food for thought 🙂

@FragglePete @RobFuller Thank you both! Are you doing this with an 802.1X SSID or are you using OWE with a splash page (captive portal)? We are trying to achieve the latter and it all works beautifully on a single AP but when you roam the client to the next AP, internet connection is lost. SmoothWall then sees the traffic from that client as unauthenticated. So there is an issue with the authentication/accounting packets when roaming. I have Lee at Redway and Cambium looking at it for us, just wondering if there was any knowledge here from someone who has achieved the same. We are using full 802.1X radius to NPS and accounting to SmoothWall for our staff SSID and that roams fine. But reluctant to use this method for students as it's more complicated for them to sign in, and when users change passwords and forget to update wireless profile on all their devices it triggers our account lockout policies. Plus there's nothing to stop a sixth form student (BYOD allowed) signing in a lower school student (BYOD not allowed), a daily captive portal sign in hinders this. The account lockout is already a bit of an admin burden on our staff SSID although we have them fairly well trained now! Thank you ☺️

Hi All, I was just wondering - those of you who replied to say you are using Cambium - are any of you using a splash page for your student BYOD Wi-Fi, sending RADIUS auth to NPS and then RADIUS accounting packets to SmoothWall (or another web filter) to apply filtering policy? This is the only bit we're struggling to get working correctly and I wondered if anyone has any tips to share 🙂 Thanks Andy

Thank you to everyone who has responded. The overwhelmingly positive support of Cambium has been really reassuring, and we have decided to go with them for our new deployment 🙂

Yes, we have received an alert since turning off DEX.

You are an absolute legend! Turned off and my frozen session immediately opened. Thank you 🙂 This is bad news for SIMS, though. They're already in dodgy territory by forcing us over to Next Gen for certain modules when the whole system is far from ready. Thanks again

We're seeing login issues with SIMS (local) today. I rebooted the server first thing, that fixed it. Then it happened again later on. Again, a reboot fixed. Happened again since, so I am looking now for the cause. Users logged into SIMS are not affected. They can continue to work no problem. But new users can't login. There are no errors; it accepts the password (and tells you if it is wrong) and then you just get the SIMS splash screen forever. No clues in the event logs. I have logged a case with SIMS but I am wondering if anyone else has seen this issue?

Hi All, We're in the process of procuring a new Wi-Fi 7 solution for our School. We're currently a Ruckus site and have had great experiences with them, and have no reason to not select them again - except price. We've had a Cambium quotation pitched - I've had the demo of the management UI and it looks good. I am looking for real world feedback from Schools who are currently using Cambium - and in particular any comparisons against Ruckus. Cambium have quoted X7-35X APs, and Ruckus have quoted R575 (due to be released in the summer). We currently running Ruckus R510, with the Virtual Smartzone controller. There's about £3.5k between the quotes (~55 APs) which is enough of a saving to warrant serious consideration. For context we are a secondary School of approx 850 pupils. Thank you 🙂

Sorry to hijack this thread - but seemed a good place to ask! Those of you using UniFi - which reseller are you using? We are looking at a new WiFi solution this summer and I want UniFi to be in the mix - so recommendations for resellers would be appreciated!

Thanks @ChetterHummin! Apologies, it's an S10 we have. I don't know why I put S6, I can't even use the typo excuse......😂 Obviously we have this already so it does make sense to continue with it in many ways, where it can operate as a firewall and is capable of load balancing the two lines. I just wasn't sure how strong it performs as firewall, when compared to for example a FortiGate? Infrastructure wise, we've probably been stung by our emPSN experiences. In the last three years, their service has been down probably 7 or 8 times, and every time it's been because of an issue in their datacentre, affecting all customers, rather than line issues. Also aware of the issues that SchoolsBroadband faced recently - again, DC issues that affected all customers. So I suppose in my brain a solution where the backup line is as diverse as possible from the main line makes sense!

We've been with emPSN for our broadband for many years, with the filtering done on prem with a SmoothWall physical box. We also have a 1gbps FTTP backup line (local provider to our area, not OR) which we manually connect to the SmoothWall on the (very many) occasions emPSN have let us down. emPSN are closing in October, and by coincidence this is when our SmoothWall contract ends too. We have been happy with SmoothWall and would happily stay with them IF that's the best solution. My question is, what does the BEST broadband, filter and firewall setup look like in 2026? Our key requirements are: - load balancing / failover of a new leased line and existing FTTP backup - user level filtering on BYOD (as we do currently with SmoothWall) - as cyber resilient as possible - current generation modern filtering We've contacted a couple of companies already - the solutions are very diverse across companies from fully managed service (in their own DCs) to on-prem firewall and filter. My key concerns are: - is the SmoothWall S6 a good enough firewall for a wires only leased line / existing FTTP? - Using a managed service with the infrastructure in their DCs is a SPOF should they have issues (as emPSN often do) - I fear that cloud based filters are going to be easy to bypass with VPNs and present challenges for user level BYOD - do Schools who connect directly to the Internet from their site see more issues with cyber attacks, DDOS etc than those who route through a managed service / JANET What would you do? Thanks!

Hi All, I was wondering if any other ParentMail schools are facing issues at the moment? They appear to have updated the parent app, without any communication to Schools or parents, and the new app is causing many parents to have difficulty in singing in and topping up dinner money. Also iOS users are having trouble updating the app - they open the app and it says an update is needed, but the update button does nothing and ParentMail's advice is to manually update via the app store / re-install the app. We're getting calls every day from parents about this and have had to put together some instructions ourselves to get out of the update loop. We've had no comms from ParentMail about this other than when we have raised the issue with them in a support ticket. Additionally, absence reporting has changed so that parents can now notify us of future absences. Again, no communication to schools or parents that this was happening. Initially, the future absence date was the one reported in the admin backend, meaning it was impossible to tell when a parent submitted the absence. After some pestering, they eventually put through a fix so that both the absence date and request date and time are shown, but now the absence list is sorted by reverse absence date - so future absences are always on page 1. Consequently, todays absences are often on page 2 or 3 and will be further back still once future absences build up. I've reported this to ParentMail but they cannot see beyond their own mindset and are saying this is intended design and just to search through the pages to find the unread ones!! I've tried to explain that in a School office, once a future absence is reported, we will record in our MIS and mark it as dealt with. We don't then need to see it at the top of the list every day in ParentMail - what we need to see is NEW absences for today - but again, their stubborn answer is that this is how it should be, if you want it different raise a feature request, but it won't be treated with priority as developers are busy with the new version. Every time we report an issue to support we have to go through the AI response first which is really frustrating. And they are now advertising a new version of ParentMail coming soon (again, no comms about this prior) - great if the new version brings improvements but the issues we've had above are leaving us feeling a bit concerned about this. Are other ParentMail customers feeling the same frustrations?

Thanks @Jawloms @psydii - yes, we are syncing to NextGen and have been for some time. It's just there is a technical issue that means not all data is going across (for example student contacts) and I've had a ticket in with ESS that I have been chasing twice weekly since the start of August!

Did you get anywhere with this? We are syncing to Next Gen however there is an issue that not all data is syncing fully, and this has been with their third line support now for 4 weeks. I haven't applied the Summer update yet because the instructions said that NextGen must be working before doing so. Do you know if there's any technical reason not to proceed with the Summer update, or whether it is simply a ploy to get people across? Has anyone successfully applied the Summer release without NextGen working fully? Thanks!

We can get MS Defender for 365 P2 for about £1300 a year to cover our 105 staff, then students are free. I'm sure this is a good product in terms of catching e-mails, but it's an absolute dog to use for releasing e-mails if it uses the same Managed Quarantine system that is included as standard with 365 mailboxes 😕

Thanks everyone. I'm going to check out Barracuda as that seems to be a popular option here 🙂

Anyone?!

Hi All, We've been using MailRoute for a few years for our first line of defence mail gateway. This license is included with our SmoothWall UTM. SmoothWall are discontinuing their relationship with MailRoute, and hence I am now looking for alternatives. I was wondering if anyone can recommend a replacement product that has favourable educational pricing? Continuing with MailRoute directly isn't an option as they don't have a proper educational model; licensing all staff and students is several thousands of pounds per year! I know a lot of Schools now have mail delivered directly to 365 and then pay for Defender for Office 365 P1 or P2 on their EES subscription. However I find the hosted quarantine interface so slow and clunky for releasing mail - is it improved at all with with P1/P2 licensing? Thank you

What is your number of students on roll, please? Thank you 🙂

Hi All, I'm looking for some printing stats from secondary schools. If you have something like PaperCut and have these statistics, I'd be really interested to know... The number of pages your School printed between September 2023 and August 2024 - all printing, across all printers and photocopiers within your School The number of students on roll We've had our eye off the ball with print volumes since COVID (stopped monitoring and recharging due to COVID 'catch up') and they just seem to be escalating; we've a new Reprographics contract in place now and are starting to bring that back into line, and now our focus is turning to the rest of the School's printing estate; with a view to going down a managed print & virtual queue route. We already have PaperCut. I'm looking to get data from as many Secondary Schools as possible so I can see where we fit, as an average..... Thank you 🙂

+1 for this; we have used Wasabi delivered by AutoData for a few years now. We use Altaro rather than Veeam but it's completely seamless with native support in the Altaro UI. I've done numerous test restores over the years and had no issues.

This seems a bit backwards to me. Surely you have to "be aware of it" more on a physical machine? Hardware failures are much more likely to happen on a consumer / business desktop. Your virtual infrastructure presumably has better levels of redundancy and resilience - dual PSUs, UPS, RAID / storage spaces direct, and hopefully some form of HA / clustering. For a service as critical as a phone system, it should be on your most resilient platform. We run ours on our Hyper-V cluster so it auto migrates in the event of a host failure and when we apply patch Tuesday updates.