IrritableTech

I can’t get over how many of you name you pc’s after something or someone that may change. Devices move rooms, people change roles, staff change, I just can’t make it make sense to me. Similar to the blue sticker number above, we give all our devices in school an it asset number. Abbey High would be AHXXXX. AD is built in a way so that each device is sat in an OU describing the office, classroom or area. In classrooms the IT asset numbers are placed sequentially around the room. The number lives and dies with the device. The number easily gives a rough idea of age of the device. I can easily find out exactly what the device is by cross referencing a spreadsheet (could be in AD description to I suppose). I can find them due to good AD structure management. Users know a straight forward way to identify the device when there is an issue. Worked for us for more than a decade now.

We’ve been using SupportPal for the last six months or so after a few years with spiceworks. We’ve added the site team to SupportPal and dropped their previous solution. Hope to expand to other departments too.

Our smallest devices are 4.5p & 0.5p per click, but the rest are all charged at 2.3p & 0.23p per click. Those prices were set almost three years ago now.

My UPS errored on frequency out of range earlier this week. First time I'd seen that. Zabbix showed it was resolved after ten minutes. In winter the voltage tends to be higher, perhaps the warmer weather has caused this normal adjustment to be higher than planned?

Looks like a decent solution and I’m a fan of cloudflare. Might be an issue if someone shares documents via google with your custom domain though - you’ll be trying to access the share with your gmail account.

I know it takes the fun out of the game, but have you seen how easy it is to get the full list of words? We've just extracted them and mapped them for the next five years! Might try to drop the daily word in conversations the day before they show up :-)

We setup SupportPal a couple of months ago. We’ve two brands and currently four departments set up. The helpdesk is really good and we’re all enjoying the features it has. We’re running it on IIS and although not a fully supported configuration it works great. SSL using lets encrypt and although we’ve had a couple of issues we’ve been able to iron them out with a few tips from SupportPal support. I’m a big fan of the ticket macros allowing us to automate some tasks and the api is great to raise tickets from other systems. I know what you mean by feeling a bit cheated with the licensing. Their prices are clearly set out, but for example after the trial we were having issues that the licensing server was upset if our IP changed. An issue around the cluster of proxies we use. SupportPal said, no problem we can sell you another licence… I liaised with the ISP instead to sort this one cost free. It’s cheap, feature rich and looks great out of the box but do watch out for additional charges.

We're trying the screen capture function in PowerPoint at the moment. Works fine in our testing but the videos are quite large and obviously then need to moved to cloud storage to replicate the google meet functionality.

Yeah me too, but they haven’t contacted me direct as yet. It’s going to be a little under a fiver per user per month. You get twice as much storage (30gb) but it’s far more expensive than the google one storage tiers, and they are now counting google photos and docs against your quota.

This is our experience too. Perhaps seven years in and we’re still asking a few people to raise a ticket - but we’ve just built a new helpdesk with a site staff queue as well. We hope our success will help them. Hope to get science, DT technicians, reprographics and admin on there in time. A one stop shop for support is a great thing for all staff.

I think a lot of the issues with BYOD have been identified above but perhaps originally the terminology was confusing matters? I'd refer to BYOD as pupils bringing their own devices of any type into school, jumping on the wifi and using them to support their education - filtered and monitored when they traverse the school network, but otherwise IT hands are off the device. A device users can choose to use with permission. I'd refer to compulsory devices as a one-to-one deployment. Schools owned or a shared lease device of a single type which can be managed, filtered and monitored and a written agreement between school, learner and guardian. Both have their merits and their issues. You did ask originally about youtube. We allow youtube for all year groups in my secondary school. We use Youtube for Schools and can approve videos for our learner when we feel it is appropriate. Strict, Moderate and Unrestricted levels of access can be assigned in the Google Admin console if you choose to use Google Workspace. You can also add video approval permissions to particular uses if you like. The filter levels aren't perfect, but reasonable. More info here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6214622?product_name=UnuFlow&hl=en&visit_id=637734348547343883-54517424&rd=1&src=supportwidget0&hl=en

I've just done a speedtest in the last couple of minutes run from one of our VMs. We're on a gigabit connection and got 916.41Mbps Down and 579.36Mbps Up. I'm not a big fan of speedtests giving accurate results, but there doesn't seem to be much wrong at our end. Netsweeper might seem slow to react because of your slow connection? Clearly something somewhere is amiss. Changes to lists will take a few minutes to deploy, but shouldn't take over ten. To request a recategorization use the URL Alert option in the URL Tools menu. Hope that helps

We had a really odd firewall issue week before last which took us down for a few hours. It was isolated to our connection - our partner primary schools were not affected. That was the first issue we'd seen in months. Level one support is now outsourced and isn't great in my limited experience. Once you get through higher I think they are very good. Interested to hear what netsweeper is/isn't doing for you.

A consultant we had said he'd had good experience with VNC viewer / server or TeamViewer (view only through TeamViewer QS) but we preferred using google meet which was already being used by staff and students.

Is it ink? Our old RISO reprographics machine used ink and on cheap paper it was a really poor end product. It was cheap to run and we ran it into the ground. The engineer had his own mug in the staff room by the end.

We also had the email below on September 23rd.

We've been with Liveregister for years now and it all works pretty smoothly. They warned us that support may be slow this month after taking on a lot of new schools but to be honest their response times have remained good in my experience.

I did this a good while ago, now that it is done my advise would be.. check DNS for entries in the old subnet. Double check DHCP is setup correctly and issuing the right gateway, IP helper, DNS servers etc. Make sure you've added the new subnet in Active Directory Sites and Services Reboot everything, like half a dozen times or something It might be worth connecting a laptop on the old subnet with Angry IP scanner or something and scan all addresses in the old subnet to check nothing replies. check DNS

We have used standard microsoft usb keyboards and mice with our macs. A fraction of the price, fairly robust and far less desirable.

Congratulations. Excellent to hear your story and raising awareness of sys admins in education who have been working tirelessly through the last 18+ months. Well done.

About a third of ours are ok for a couple of years in school, the others just aren't up to the job. I hope we can give them away to pupils because it is going to be a big waste of money otherwise. I've not seen this - happen to have a link?

No...?

I have the same type of background so... I drove Alex from the artic monkeys and his girlfriend (at the time) Alexa Chung in my beat up ford focus (much to the tour managers disgust). Had Dave Grohl pretend to recognize me three years after meeting him the first time (genuinely the nicest guy in rock). I had breakfast with Seasick Steve. Bowling for soup had me drink at their bar on stage. I got in Liam Gallaghers way when he tried to exit stage (whoops). Stood up to Papa Roach over timings. Smashed Tom Jones' tea set (by accident). I've also done loads of book events with writers, poets, celebrity chefs and politicians. Far too many to recall them all.

@Katy has a super blog. Some useful information here I think... https://katystech.blog/2020/08/wireless-guest-account-management/#more-380

You don’t need the s drive to run most of Sims. Gpo to edit the program files\sims folder so staff can’t acces it?