Jollity

Anyone using shared iPad in practice? How well is it working for you? I am thinking about whether to use it with our new iPads. Particular questions: how much load is it going to put on the wi-fi? should we be going for 128GB iPads to allow caching more users? As this set of iPads is going to be quite heavily shared, I can see there being 10 or so different users who might use each device.

We are just about to do a big expansion in the number of iPads. We previously have been using configurator, but I do not think that will cut it any more and am wondering a similar thing to @FN-GM. What do people think of Apple's profile manager for managing iPads? If not quite free, it is very cheap if you already have a Mac to run it on. However, I get the impression it is not particularly well regarded. What are the issues with it? Or are there people out there very happy with it?

Spotify FAQ explicitly says no schools sadly. We have allowed use of music from iTunes, but I am not sure that is strictly allowed - I think nearly all downloadable music is "personal, non-commercial use". We are signed up for various schemes for licensing music for public performance, but I am am not sure how those are supposed to interact with the EULAs you agree to on the music download services. musopen.org is a good source of creative commons and public domain classical recordings.

I did do this migration, though it was a few years ago so the situation may have changed. I used the GAMME migration tool from Google. Is that what you are using? My notes do not mention any issue with connecting to IMAP. I think the tool was happy to just connect without TLS. The main issues I have were some bounce messages that could not be migrated and had to be deleted.

We are currently testing MSO My School Portal, connected to SchoolPost.

To be clear, you just mean a fan to move the air around inside the room, not a fan with its own vent to the outside world? That does sound sensible. I was looking to rig up some kind of temperature monitor. It probably will have to be something I put together rather than a pre-built. A high temperature shutdown sounds like a good idea, but I think I would do the monitoring on each server and look at the core temperature rather than the ambient.

I can see that being true on really hot days, which I suppose is when I am most worried about overheating. But if the outdoor temperature is lower than the target temperature, say 24oC, as it usually is in the UK, does it not still make sense to have a vent open and aircon on?

Hello all Should I get an external vent put in the wall of our new server room? Currently in the middle of a cupboard upgrade. Moving our main servers from the technician's office to a room about the same size (2m square) but without the need to fit in the technician as well. Fitting in 3 servers, 2 switches, one smoothwall appliance, but I think probably still only about 700W total. The new room is a walled off part of a boiler room with an external wall and a non-opening window that is going to get boarded up. There is an aged extractor fan that still seems to work a bit, and we are going to get a hole drilled for the outlet of a cheap portable air conditioning unit. But there is no other ventilation. I am concerned if the aircon packs up on a summer weekend the servers may cook, so thinking should put in kind of vent to allow some passive airflow. However also do not want a lot of damp air or rain getting in during the winter, or to let in a lot of bugs. So perhaps something I can open and close. To vent or not to vent?

Agreed on VBScript's verbosity. I think I will start a trial with a powershell version of your script, and see if I get issues. I would like the script to run some tests if we still get errors and I find batch scripts a pain to deal with (similarly what you are familiar with). However I have seen a few issues with powershell login scripts - they seemed to be sticking up errors when the CD drive was ejected at one point.

Thanks, Ephelyon, that is really helpful. I can see that running as the script from the start menu startup folder might be helpful. We have used that method for setting the default printer before, but not for actually installing the printers. Sorry all for the stealth thread necromancy. We have a similar problem to some of the later posters: we have been using group policy printer deployment (the print management console type, not the GPP type). It has never worked that well, but just recently we have been getting many more cases of printers not appearing. Maybe due to finally decommissioning our last Server 2003 domain server over the Summer. The issues mainly seem to correspond to a PrintService log error: Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-PrintService/Admin Event ID: 513 Task Category: Routing print spooler command(s) Group Policy was unable to add per computer connection \\printServer\printer. Error code 0xbc4. This can occur if the name of the printer connection is incorrect, or if the print spooler cannot contact the print server. I have had disappointing results with GPP printers in the past, particularly around slowing login time. I am going to give a login script a try, which might at least let me run more diagnostics on failure. Couple of questions for Ephelyon: Did you use a cmd script as opposed to vbscript or powershell just because that was the easiest technology to hand, or deliberately for reliability or other reasons? Am I right you have a delete action at the top of that list of GPP ini file rules to clear out the file?

Thank you, @pete, that is really helpful. Is that the default behaviour from enabling automatic update install or did you do something to configure that? What are the benefits of Munki over the app deployment in profile manager (which I have not tested yet)?

For our new macs, I am trying to decide what to do with the App store settings for "automatically check for updates", in particular "Install app updates" and "Install OS X updates". I do not want users bothered with update prompts, but the automatic updates do not seem to allow me any say over when they install, so I am concerned they might decide to do so during lessons. This question seems to apply whether or not I use the Software Update service to approve which updates I want to go out. I found this useful article, that points out that turning off automatic updates can cause background updates to be disabled for various security systems like XProtect and Gatekeeper, and gives some rather fiddly sounding workarounds. It would be very helpful to know what other people are doing with these settings.

I am in a very similar boat to Mr Haggis. We previously had a very few macs that could be largely managed manually, but now we have a suite of ten. Also no System Center here. I have started reading previous posts and wondered about a couple of things in particular: Is Workgroup Manager completely dead now? There seemed to be some people hanging on to it fairly recently due to lack of features and unreliability in Profile Manager, but I think it is no longer supported in Yosemite. Is Profile Manager limited in comparison? How do the features of Munki intersect with those of the Mac server software (if at all)? Can Software Update server not be used to deploy updates? Is Munki just better or does it do additional things?

Thank you, Grumbledook that is a really helpful starting point. I will ask whether we can talk to our legal advisers on this. Since making my original post, I have now received their actually contract text. It does include a section saying they will not "remove or copy" any of our data off-site without our permission and that it will be encrypted (according to specified standards) and securely erased afterwards if they do. It is brief.

We are currently looking to retain an external support company on a contract to provide technical support when the in-school technician is not available. The salesman of our preferred company said that they will store admin credentials to the system or not as requested by the school. I think for the support to be effective we need them to have that access. He said they did not normally have anything formal in a contract about confidentiality of school data, but that this could be arranged. It seems to me that to meet our obligations to protect pupil data, I ought to be looking to have them agree to something like our AUP for staff, but a bit more tailored: putting the obligation on them not to remove school data from our network or look at anything not required to perform their job. Do other schools using external support do something like this? Does anyone have a model for such an agreement I can refer to (or borrow if necessary)?

Does sound good. Have you used it and found it worked well? I had not heard of Owasp Zap either. I will add it to the list. I have been collecting vulnerability scanners: Qualys Detectify Nikto2

I know cloudflare mainly as an anti-DDOS and CDN. Does it work well for catching exploit attempts as well?

Thank you for the suggestions for fixing. I will look out for those when I get my hands on the code. I agree it would be safer to ditch the whole CMS and start afresh at this point, though that would be a hard one to sell to our management as the site was not built that long ago and they are largely happy with it in other respects. While I know no one could ever catch every hole, I am thinking it might be possible for someone who knew what they were doing to patch up the worst of any security issues, put in place a rapid response plan in case of it happening again, and be sufficiently protected. However I know there is a point where it takes less time to rewrite something completely than try to fix it. If an unbiased expert opinion after looking over the site code was that it was fundamentally unsound that would be useful to know in itself.

We have been having problems with our website getting hacked and the front page defaced. It has happened twice now: apparently different groups (and not the little darlings in the school unless they did a very good job of disguising their trail). It's a PHP website with a custom CMS and has been managed and hosted by the web development company that built it, but we do have ownership of the code. They have tried to clear up after each occasion, but they have now admitted that they are not really up to the job of tracking down the underlying problems. It does appear (certainly the first time) that the problem was the site code itself and not vulnerable 3rd party software. There are more details I cannot really go into on a forum. While I will be taking a look myself, we are now interested in finding someone who could review the website's security and perhaps help us out if it gets hacked again. Is there anyone here a website security consultant looking for a job? Or does anyone have any recommendations?

Thank you, all. I may well give EiS and System Professional a call, bearing in mind concerns over EiS. I have also had some PMs from possible support companies. We have used Select Technologies as a supplier before. They were helpful for a long time, but we have had issues with them recently, and they are in my bad books at the moment. I had not thought of asking the Secondaries - I will see if there are any we have a good relationship with.

Thank you. We are in the Tonbridge area. I should have mentioned we are an independent.

Does any have any recommendations for IT support companies who might be able to help out a primary school in Kent? I am looking for a company to provide phone support when there is no technician on-site, cover times when we do not have a technician available, and potentially do contact work on major projects (eg Server upgrades or major software install).

Well I am glad we did not get them then. I came to the conclusion that their processor was just not good enough. We went with the Lenovo X130e, which has been pretty good.

And in that account the sent emails appear in the inbox in light view?

Do your sent items appear in the inbox in the light view? That does not have conversation view, so if they are still in the inbox there then that actually is the folder where they have been put.