IrritableTech

As @northeast_technician suggests, speed tests aren't much use - but here's our bandwidth graph for this morning. It's fairly typical of our usage but bare in mind this graph shows some averaging. But as you can see we can hit 90-100Mbits without too much bother.

We have a bunch of schools using Schools Broadband for the last two to two and a half years. Installation, management and support have all been very good and overall all the schools have been happy with the service and price. A totally different experience to our days with the LEA provider.

@tj2419 What switch gear have you got? VLANs aren't too difficult as long as you've got the equipment to handle them. Each switch where APs connect will need to support vlan tagging, but you might get away with not having smart switches on the majority of your kit. There's loads of threads on setting up VLANs with Ruckus, and DHCP. Have a search then ask some more questions specific to your environment, I'm sure one of us will help.

We've got a very cheap plugin device that monitors power and temperature. Being cheap (and having marginal mobile signal in the server room) it doesn't work very well. It has however alerted in the past when the aircon packed in. I was able to remote in and switch a good deal of equipment off bringing the heat levels down to something slightly less tropical! I've been looking at building my own based on an arduino. Add a temperature/humidity sensor, door contact sensor, voltage or ampere sensor and a wifi or network adapter and I think I could do it for less than £40 with a decent enclosure.

I reuse those crates even now.

Can you run wireshark on the server to see if it is receiving DHCP requests? That might rule out firewalls and switch issues and allows you to concentrate your efforts. That's a huge scope and subnet by the way. DHCP is broadcast traffic, and there's a good chance the size of that scope is causing quite a bit of broadcast.

I had a user report duplicate emails last night, but haven't found any evidence in the logs. Internal emails aren't being flagged as spam though thankfully.

When I read this story yesterday I hoped that it wasn't going to become a self fulfilling prophecy. A story around administration results in orders being pulled which ultimately tips a company over the edge. I'm very pleased that it seems the article is factually incorrect and Stone Computers is here to stay. ~350 of our 450 machines are stone built, branded and still under guarantee. We had 110 machines delivered in July - I think one had a minor issue. Price and service wise we've found them difficult to beat in recent years.

I find speedtest.net hugely inaccurate generally. You need to think about contention on your connection for a start - if a teacher down the corridor is downloading a video from their cloud storage for example, your results will vary massively. Before thinking about who is hitting the same server as you at the same time. We monitor the switch port connecting to the SB router to get a better idea of what all devices are using at any one time. We use the dude - free and fairly easy to setup. You should have access to look at your microtik router port though, which produces the same type of data - I think that's still the case for everyone isn't it @SchoolsBroadband?

Currently doing 25Mbps and we've peaked at ~90Mbps in the last hour. No obvious signs of slowing down here...

Thanks for the update @SchoolsBroadband / @DanJackson - I'll add this to my list and get around to calling and configuring soon.

They'll help set it up at their end - creating new scopes if required and setting global filtering on your BYOD devices. They may have a suggestion or two on how to setup your internal network, but it wouldn't be right for them to be doing that bit. The only issue (which I believe is still the case @SchoolsBroadband - David?) is that you can't get your Radius server talking to the lightspeed radius. Which means you need to somehow internally log which IP gets assigned to which device for monitoring purposes. Not difficult to do, but does add a few extra steps if you need to investigate.

In my home (which is a new build - but it was completed by the time I set sights on it meaning I couldn't spec any extras) its very much a mixture of all three technologies. I have wire (actually I used external Cat5e) running between the bottom floor and the middle floor where the majority of my kit is (router, set top boxes, TVs, streaming boxes, NAS etc.) with an access point in each location. Then to link to the spare room (study/sewing room/dumping ground) we use Powerline stuff to connect to the printer up there. All of the devices which move use wifi - all of the devices which are fixed use wires. It's about adapting to your home and your budget. Having Cat6 everywhere would be great - but think carefully about where you locate points. Wires are unsightly.

Thanks - I did raise one before posting here... #619511 I see you've now responded there too. Thanks very much

In almost two years I think only one of our two reval machines has broken down due to a broken bank note reader. We encourage online payments obviously, but the revals are still well used. We use LiveRegister. It doesn't have the same feature list as cunninghams and nationwide but does exactly what we wanted from a cashless system. Quick and easy tills speeding up service. As for biometrics, initially we had about 2% of students requesting pins rather than us scanning their thumbs. Mainly by sixth formers rather than parents of lower years. That number has reduced since then. I'd assume you'd need three quotes with the cost of such systems, so it'd probably worth looking at them.

Thanks - I've been able to edit the database, restoring the older softwareSetup returned an server error on access. Thanks for your help.

I updated to v2.6.2915.27400 MR4 the week before last. Everything working well except we can't seem to turn on the resource manager anymore. We turned it off a couple of weeks before the end of term because we had a timetable change, but now I need it back on. I've cleared the resource manager data and run through the wizard again, restarted the application pool and website on our server but it still wont activate. Any thoughts anyone? I have raised a ticket but hoped someone on here might have a quick fix?

If you host your pac file on a webserver (remembering to add the mime type!) internally or externally you just put the link to the file in the url section when you click 'Auto'

Similar to 360safe? Although created by the people at the SWGfL they had national funding to so it - as a result it is open to all schools.

I got a canon mx740 I think it is. I use comparable cartridges in it to keep costs down. It's a five cartridge model which also helps. Sits quite happily on the network. Printing from Apple and android (Google print) and our laptops quickly. The scanner app works quite well on the laptops. Just pop your paper on the glass and select the computer you want to send it to. When looking around I found Kodak printers were the cheapest branded cartridges due to the fact they had the smallest amount of ink in them!

It's worth noting that from this month Ofsted refer to the subject as Online Safety. The term eSafety has been dropped by them on the suggestion by David Brown HMI for Computing and Online Safety, although it is likely to be the term everyone else uses for a long time!

Ofsted want to see it embedded across the curriculum these days. So if a geography teacher sets a homework which includes research (and therefore most likely the Internet) they should be reminding students to check sources and consider what they search for and what websites they visit. A single assembly a year, or covering the subject IT lessons in year 7 won't cut it, and with online safety now covered within the safeguarding inspection area - a poorly designed program may put the school in special measures. Whole staff training on how all staff can identify and advise on online safety matters is vital. Every child must know the reporting mechanism to find help too. Have a look at http://360safe.org.uk it's a free review tool from the SWGfL that outlines what schools need to consider and where you can improve.

I'm sure some of the users can help. Firstly we need to know what networking equipment you have in place, IP scope currently used and if these can be changed at your perimeter? Do you manage your edge router or is it an outside agency?

I think others have made good responses to this question, but even before thinking about BYOD devices schools can have dramatically different pupil to device ratios. Then we need to look at storage models for example. Schools heavily using cloud storage for example would dramatically increase required bandwidth. As the technical director of a company that delivers filtering solutions and network consultation what are your experiences? Do you provide solutions based on x amount of users, devices or something entirely different and may I ask why?

Bandwidth is a funny thing. You've asked how many pupils, but not concurrent devices. You've asked how much bandwidth the school has been sold, but not how much is utilised or the connection capable of carrying. Utilisation is key. A school of 2000 users, but a poor use of technology in the class room might use a fraction of the bandwidth of a school of 500 who run a 1:1 scheme. Thanks for creating the form, and thanks to those who fill it in. It will be interesting to see the results, but I don't think it'll necessarily be overly useful to someone looking for a new connection without the right background information in the specific school.