Jollity

That does seem to settle it. It also led me to a more detailed version here. At first the table seemed to imply that Macs purchased after the EES agreement was purchased did not count, but then I noticed the "academic & charity" column. So OS X counts as a qualifying OS, and software assurance that comes with EES allows for dual booting OS X and Windows. I would still be interested to know what Microsoft think you are supposed to purchase if you do not have EES, though that is not relevant to us.

I am trying to get my head round how to to obtain Windows licenses for use with Bootcamp on our Macs: we would probably install Windows 7, but it would seem silly not to license 8 if we have to purchase. We are shortly to enter an EES agreement, in this previous discussion, edugeeks are all saying that EES would cover Windows on the Macs - OS X counting as the base OS. However I have not been able to find a Microsoft source on this and my supplier tells me that Microsoft says it is not the case. Does anyone know if the situation has changed with Windows 8? Even more baffling, if EES does not count, what is the correct license to purchase for use of Windows 8 on a Mac with Bootcamp or virtualised in a school? Now there is no full retail license, it seems as if none of the licenses are actually right. It is not an upgrade; we are not reselling the hardware so we cannot use system builder OEM license; it is not for personal use so we cannot use System Builder personal use license.

This problem still seems to be happening as I just encountered it. There does seem to be a Microsoft Knowledge Base article on it now at least.

As a pupil then, what is the fastest rate I could download a file at your school?

I think we are okay on this, as the website and email are hosted off-site. We have a VPN that SchoolBase, MIS uses to get data to the externally hosted web interface, but I think that will nearly all be upload. WSUS and the email access in school are something to consider. No VLE currently in use.

The 400GB figure was just a guess pulled out of thin air, based on looking at the available packages from the ISP. The 60Mb/s is just the total available speed from the FTTC line. Those are all very useful figures. Do you throttle the bandwidth for each pupil?

Fair point, Steve. A big problem is that even if I could get some data, I am not sure if it would be that helpful because I think the usage patterns are likely to change considerably with the new ISP. In particular, we block youtube at the moment, but with the new connection we will have better filtering that supports YouTube for Schools, so likely will be allowing access to the children. I also imagine data downloaded will increase with a faster network speed.

In choosing a new ISP, I need to come up with an estimate of how much the school is likely to download each month, as some of the ISPs I have been looking at have a download limit. Unfortunately I have no numbers from the current Internet connection as our current ISP manages the router. This is a primary school with about 60 devices and 100 full time pupils, we are moving from ADSL to FTTC which is estimated to give us a speed of 60MBps. I am thinking that 400GB per month probably would not be a problem for us, but I am not at all sure of that. Does anyone have any suggestions for coming up with a good estimate? Does anyone have any comparable figures they could share?

I have been sent some marketing material by a firewall manufacturer called Stonesoft. They make a big deal of blocking what they call "advanced evasion techniques" - they say these are a set of different methods to evade the protection against external attacks provided by a modern firewall. They do not seem to provide many details of the methods - they cite the the need for responsible disclosure - what I have found talks about techniques like sending packets deliberately out of order to confuse the IPS. The provide a free test suite to test whether your existing firewall is vulnerable to these technique. I have not tried this yet, has anyone else? I am currently looking at new firewalls for my school, and I am not sure whether I should be giving any weight to StoneSoft's claims. There seems some plausibility to what they are saying, but I have found a lack of 3rd party discussion of the issue. Closest I have seen is this stack exchange post from 2010.

Thank you for your thoughts, especially to SchoolsBroadband/Dave for a really solid explanation. That's an exciting offer. Whether we would be interested would likely come down to the probable price for GEA once released. If I give SchoolsBroadband a call, would you be able to tell me roughly how it will compare to normal FTTC? If we were on normal FTTC, am I right in thinking it might be relatively easy to upgrade to GEA FTTC at a later time?

I am looking at replacing our ADSL connection with something rather faster. FTTC is looking very tempting, but I was wondering if there was good reason for me to be pushing for more expensive solutions like Ethernet First Mile. We're a small primary with 60 simultaneous users at the very most. We are also close to an exchange - promised speeds of 60.7Mbps download on FTTC speed checkers. Do I need to be concerned about contention with an FTTC package? I have not been able to find any figures for FTTC contention ratios - it would be nice to know how this varied between different packages and providers.

It needs an https. https://eduupgrade.office365.com will at least load for me. It was after logging in that the problems started!

I did my second update to Office 365 last week, on a domain that was actually in use. The actual update process went very smoothly: each of the two stages only took under half an hour (with under 300 users). However the overall migration was not smooth, because the eduupgrade.office365.com site to reset passwords failed to work at all. I was able to log into the site with my test users, using their Live@Edu passwords, but it would not actually let then change the password. I got an error "We can't process your request at the moment" with detail "We are sorry we can't process your request at this time". Microsoft support could not come up with anything, at least not within that afternoon, so I had to arrange to distribute temporary passwords after all. The problem that I mentioned in my earlier post was definitely occurring consistently: if a user went to the Office 365 login page they would be presented with their email address saved from Live@edu, but if they clicked on it to log in, it would attempt log in to Live@Edu and fail. I also found that if the user had checked the box to save their password on Live@edu, they would get stuck in a redirect loop (with the page blank and repeatedly refreshing) on going to the Office 365 login page - clearing cookies fixes that.

One of my domains has been upgrade to Office 365 (though that domain is not actually in use). I have just received notification that we are allowed to initiate upgrade on the other domain. Has anyone used the user self password change site (https://eduupgrade.office365.com) during an upgrade? I think this may be new as I did not notice any reference to it in the documentation when I did the first upgrade. If you have used this, can you verify whether this description is accurate? Apparently after setting their password with the tool, the user is immediately prompted to change it again when they log in for the first time. Here is a gotcha I noticed after the first upgrade. After I had used the Office 365 admin page to reset the password on an account, when I went to the Office 365 login page, I was presented with my saved account name (next to the head and shoulders silhouette). However if I clicked on this, it would attempt to log me into Live@Edu and hit an error. In order to log in to Office 365 it was necessary to click on "Sign in with a different user ID" at the bottom of the page and re-enter my username and password. Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

Thanks for your thoughts, guys. I was looking at that option, so I am very interested to hear your experiences. How do you monitor what the endpoint protection clients are up to? My concern would be about a client falling over or a nasty being found that it could not clean up. I was going to say that I could not find GPO templates for the latest version (System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection), but this blog post apparently describes how to use the FEP2010 GPO tools to manage SCEP2012. The truesec management system looks too expensive to me too. It seems to have gone up since you looked at it - £12 per license now for under 100 clients. This would take up most of the cost saving of going with the Microsoft anti-virus, and as it is third-party there is the risk of Microsoft making changes that make it inoperable somehow.

What system resources (processor, RAM, disk space) does System Center Configuration Manager 2012 require if it is managing under 100 clients? We are on the point of signing up to EES and I was hoping that we could replace our anti-virus with the System Center 2012 (formally Forefront) Endpoint Protection that is included. I was told that we needed SCCM to manage it, and I just got around to having a proper look into it. The hardware requirements listed made my jaw drop. They do seem reasonable for the tens of thousands of clients mentioned, but we only have about 70 clients in the whole site. The server we have available to run it has a Xeon E5520 (4 core) processor and 6GB of RAM - it is also the main file server, an AD server and DNS server. Is there a hope in hell of it running SCCM as well? I might be able to put in a substantial memory upgrade.

CompuCover do have a really up front straightforward quotation page. Unfortunately they are considerably more expensive than the manufacturer accidental damage policy.

I love hard numbers. Many thanks. Though of course rates may differ - especially between primary and secondary.

I am pretty sure we are among those exceptions. The building is listed I believe. I will mention it to our Health and Safety chap, but I would be very surprised if he had not thought of it.

An alternate angle on the question. If we did not have an accidental damage policy, how much does it typically cost to repair damage from falls or spills, say a cracked screen for example? How much damage needs to occur before it is more economic to write off a laptop than have the manufacturer fix it?

Some of the staff here had had exactly the same idea, actually! I am delighted to hear it works in practice.

I think relative to the school population at large, the rate of malicious damage is likely to be low. The children are relatively well under control. We plan to assign the same laptop to a child in the class each lesson, so if damage occurs there are only a couple of children likely to have caused it. We might even be able to bill parents. It is more drops and spills I am worried about, and I just do not have a handle on how likely these are.

There are two classrooms in the building each on its own floor. There is no elevator or similar between floors, and as you say, we could not haul the trolley up and down stairs. We could not afford to have a suite of laptops for each floor. The only way I can think of that does not involve one class of children carrying the laptops up and down stairs is to insist the teachers swap classroom every time they want to use laptops. I think that would massively reduce the usefulness of the laptops.

Yet another thread in which I try to mine your grey matter for tender nuggets of knowledge on laptops. I am trying to decide whether it is worth going for an accidental damage policy. Scenario: we have 20 laptops, they will be used by students of ages 9 to 11 and carried up and down a flight of stairs. What is your estimate how many are likely to suffer minor\serious accidental damage within 3 years? Do you tend to get accidental damage policies on laptops?

Sorry. Was news to me, but we don't actually have any android devices so I don't follow developments about them at all closely.