bossman

@SarumDave We eventually went with BT with a dedicated fibre channel which has a guaranteed 99.9% uptime with its SLA, we have 100MB soon to be 200MB and as yet in the last 3.5 years we have had no outage's We moved from our LA as their system was constantly falling down and causing problems especially around the online exams and this is what drove us to seek better quality and reliability from our ISP. PM me for costs

@Jawloms I had to update the drivers for mine manually as Broadcom had sold the rights of that particular Nic to Q-logic, Intel Nic's are usually sound but the Realtek could be a problem, its worth checking them out with the latest drivers manually,

@JAWLom What Nic's are they? I had a similar problem with Broadcom!

@foofighterjim I have managed to sort by doing the following: 1. Create a user account specifically for Skype usage which has its proxy settings to allow for transparent authentication in SW, this user account is only allowed to login once across the network at anytime, it is a controlled account which the staff only have access when required and can be monitored (Safeguarding) SLT are made aware of its usage and Staff have to justify its use to SLT. 2. List of URLs to unblock and also have No https inspection: Skype allowed and No HTTPS inspection: go.skype.com smetrics.skype.com login.skype.com a.config.skype.com secure.skypeassets.com secure.skype.com api.mcr.skype.com apps.skype.com apps.skypeassets.com pipe.skype.com b.config.skype.com api.skype.com 3. Set reserve IP address for the particular workstation in DHCP that is required for the Skype usage and make that exception in Smoothwall. It works well, is controlled and has a Skype usage policy. Hope this helps

@MarkPurvis It maybe that the version you have at the moment is not what the new version is expecting, you may have to upgrade to a version closer before you can go to the latest version, had this once with a Sims database version when I tried to update, I had missed out an incremental version in between. It could also be that the download is corrupt, try downloading the update again

@maestromasada We have just had an IRIS 400 franking machine from a company called "The Mailing Room" they hail from Manchester here Machine has static IP and we installed yesterday in 10 mins, service I am told by our admin staff is par excellent so give them a whirl,

@MatthewL We just got 99.8% of files back for our DH using Kroll and they didn't charge too much, he is over the moon and got me quite a lot of brownie points to boot

@mrhcarlin Thats why its called "Code Academy" its where you learn to code using lessons, for young students of your school. If you search around you will find plenty more which will probably have what you require, Good luck

@MattDLEA Why not use an online coding site for Python, in fact this one has other coding languages to utilise on its website. A cheap work around which is free

@Simcfc73 Do you mean just ICT policies or the whole school policies?

Whatever they are called nowadays it is still a given fact that most Teachers don't want to embrace the technology as it shows their teaching practice for what it is and this can be seen by SLT, yes there are some good working models and some good Teachers utilising this but as a whole it is not revered by the Teaching fraternity I feel, We have Moodle but for 2 pins I would do away with it as the Staff have been so reluctant to take it onboard. My advice is if you don't have to then don't have one simple!

In answer to your questions: 1. How do you say the word no (when referring to support requests that may not be possible etc.) If the request is for something that is not supported by your system and will cost then I always refer them to my line manager, if they have an ounce of common sense they will do all the work for you in saying "No" to the respective requester! 2. How do you get people to accept the word no I always refer them to my line manager, if they have an ounce of common sense they will do all the work for you in saying "No" to the respective requester! 3. How do you take the word no yourself You can only ask for what you require to do the job you are employed to do, if the answer to your request is "No" then the answer is "No" and if it is good enough for other members of staff then it is good enough for me! or You hehe! It is all about setting precedent's, if a member of staff has requested something which, you or any other member of staff hasn't, then by granting that member of staff their request they have set a precedent and thus this constitutes the "Argument" about the action by example. If a member of staff has a request which is defined by the school policies as not allowed, then tell them so, stating "It is school policy" blah! blah! de blah! Remember your line manager also by stating "It is school policy but if you want to take it to my line manager then that is fine by me" I have just had an instance where as one of our school policies decrees "Supply staff are not given access to e-mails" one of our HOD's has come to me asking for a supply teacher to be given access to e-mails, my answer was "Unfortunately due to one of our many school policies it will not be possible to grant this request" I then followed up with "If you would like to take it to my line manager I am sure he will help you with this matter" knowing full well he will quote exactly the same, Its not my network its the schools! whatever they want they have to pay for it in either man hours or money or both! If the system you have will not support whatever it is that they require to further enhance their teaching practise then once again it is turned to your line manager, this is what your line manager gets paid to do as part of his/her duties. If in doubt always involve your line manager then they can make an informed decision based on your assessments and criteria and also the staff members. So in essence I don't have any problems saying or accepting "No", I do what I am asked to do by my line manager and if what he asks is not feasible due to systems or finance then I point this out for them to make the decision, Simple!

@john hehe! and happy Christmas to you It was just a momentary lapse by the DH and he more than anyone else knows that they are only temporary storage devices for transferring data from one computer source to another, he has learnt his lesson, Your right though, too many people don't take head of good sound advice from IT professionals because they just don't listen and feel it will never happen to them.

@Galway £125.00 for initial diagnostics and approx £250 - £400 depending on how much data and how long it takes to recover. Sounds expensive but for the school to reclaim the data would be invaluable, fingers crossed!!

@all Thanks everyone, eventually passed it to Kroll OnTrack, see what they can do for him.

@apur32 Have you tried manually installing the agent setup on the affected workstation? Try it and see what you get?

@kennysarmy Could it be one of your smoothwall policies applied to students? IE.11 Could it be compatibility view settings in IE? Works fine here for all user types!

Hi All, Hope this is in the right forum, anyway here goes, usual case of SLT member of staff has found that their USB data stick has suddenly given up the ghost when they least expected it, it has lost its FAT32 table and the last readable sector, I have tried Testdisk to try and recover the data which is still on the USB data stick and recovered most but not the stuff he desperately needs, the irony is that he is my boss and DH and he should know better, the usual scenario of rushing and not allowing his laptop to backup the Data stick when first inserted, cancelling the procedure before it has had chance to backup, as he has said "It takes too long!" Well now he has come to a sticky but hopefully recoverable end, Question? Does anyone have a contact for a good data recovery expert as the data on his data stick is very crucial to the school. Thanks in advance: Remember "Lets be careful out there!"

@colly72 If I was replacing my kit now I would go for Meraki switches with layer 7 protocols, I have seen them in action and boy they absolutely rock! https://meraki.cisco.com/

Update: Have solved our problem with the mapping of the z: drive disappearing, apparently when the session is first opened it maps the drive but creates a session marker which was being filtered by our SW which timed out and therefore wouldn't remap the z: drive for the second part of the question. All working well in both the Word and Powerpoint and no complaints, seems that they have sorted out a veritable heap of problems and of course we not using Java yeah!!! Most we have had using the portal is 90 at one time! Happy Days! @FN-GM you didn't have that much hair to start with hehe!

Me too!

We are totally Casio here and in all we have had a couple of failures at around 3 years old but these have been repaired by Casio (Very promptly too), most of ours are now at the 5 years old stage and as yet no problems. The model we use are the AJ-145 a little pricier than the base model but worth the extra I feel.

I use my yahoo mail account for business transactions and my Gmail account for personal items and never the twain shall meet, oh and my Zimbra account for work related.

@safcgac Reason your Solus was not working as expected then decided to work the following day: Capita update services were experiencing problems and your Solus deployment requires authorisation from these services in case an update is withdrawn, happened to me and then worked last night. Simple reason but very frustrating all the same! All is good now

@mrbios What units do you run it on if I may be so bold? Looking for a decent coupling of micro atx and a good 32" display monitor for our reception area which is small hence the 32" but with a vision to have more 50" displays around the school for the different subjects to display their offerings. Cheers