CamelMan

How easy is it to Geoblock? - Its a built in feature of our Firewall - just tick a box next to each country Is there anywhere that lists a countries range of IP addresses? The Firewall providers sustain this but as IP address are registered per country I imagine there is a database somewhere. Wouldn't it cause multiple issues like this? I've had it on for over 2 years and this was the only issue found. Most education resources are UK/US based that we use. Don't most hackers use VPN or do the Russia/Chinese state sponsered ones not even care if you know where they are? Yup this isnt a standalone solution to protection, just a little part of the wider system. Targeted attacks would use more advanced techniques but it would stop some low level idiot and ropey websites\advert redirects. With the ease of turning it on if it added 1% to our protection it would be worth it.

Its via our Firewall - we blocked the top 15 countries known as hacking hotspots. Apologies I've dug through the email chain and they didnt actually come back to me with an IP - I identified it via the Traffic Monitor on the Firewall - 79.133.176.212 whitelisting this on the Geoblock allowed the site to load correctly - I've just replicated it to make sure its still accurate and I had the same result. Their development Team have stated that this is not a known IP address of their product or sites.

We had an issue with Mathletics earlier this year. We have a geoblock on Russia - their site didnt work. Ease the Geoblock - Site worked. Contacted them and they were adamant that no part of their site was Russia connected (however I did have some issues getting an IP address out of them as they kept supplying domain names). Added their IP as an exception in the Russian Geoblock - site worked, take it out site stopped. Still adament that there was nothing connected to Russia - therefore stopped using them.

Site just came back up for me.

We jumped to Paxton last year and found that most things would register into the software via the Paxton reader but the actual readers on the doors were more picky. We found these that worked for ours (would recommend buying the smaller sizes and test with your readers!). https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07TQCTHRZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Office has a pretty good internal backup for files etc - but as an extra layer to cover all the sharepoint sites etc we brought in Backupify by a company called Datto. Not a huge amount of money and worked out alot cheaper than Veeam and Barracuda when we looked at it (about a year ago now)

Jumping outside of Powershell - I did see something called "Teacher desk" or similar that was a plug in for O365. This was a few years ago but offered a GUI for staff to access the student OneDrive accounts. It was free when I looked at it up to a certain number of teachers.

We have inherited a Moodle installation (Teacher ran it with help from a support company - company renewal was £3k, now IT run it) which is Moodle 3.5.14 and MySQL5.5 and Im looking to update it as its a few versions out. Checked out the upgrade instructions for 3.10 which seemed straightforward enough but when we started the upgrade we hit a pre-requisite for MySQL 5.7. Its on Centos 6 - did a general Yum update but it didn't find anything new - read online that you needed to set a repository (mysql-community.repo) then edit the file to nominate which version (it seemed to generally indicate that you should go to 5.6 first) that downloaded but then MySQL threw an error when restarting. Didn't have much more time to look at it so just rolled it back in Veeam. I've since read that there seems to also be a split into MariaDB which some folk recommend. So I know its a bit old now but for those who support their own Moodle servers - did you have any issues MySQL5.5 -> MySQL5.6, did you flip to MariaDB and is there any guides or notes that helped? Also if there are any gotcha's or stuff to watch out for that would be great. (Part of not renewing the contract is that most departments have jumped to Teams/SharePoint so Moodle is only used by a handful of people so it may be canned anyway after this year.) Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Has anyone had any experience of working dealing with RuckusWorks.co.uk (they are a subgroup of Virtual Graffiti Ltd)? We have a competitive quote from them for a system - I thought I picked them up from a recommendation here but I cant find any threads now and I can't dig up much else about them. Anything good/bad/indifferent?

I was asked to look into this last year - the only way I found software wise was https://www.codetwo.com/blog/a-ban-o...r-work-emails/ but it was £600 or something a year. It blew over and we didnt do anything with it, I feel it should just be a policy to everyone that they are not expected to check email at that time, and make it clear. It was only the teachers anyway as SLT, IT, Estates etc needed out of hours notifications.

Another one for https://signinapp.com/ Cheap, does the job expandable if needed. We bought just the software from them and did the rest ourselves.

We have been told by RM that there is a issue with going between machines with 1803 and previous versions having a similar affect if that helps. We're still looking into it.

This has just popped up here - although I agree its a staff choice issue rather that being a technical one, I've done a bit of research and this claims to do it: https://www.codetwo.com/blog/a-ban-on-after-work-emails/ Not too expensive if you only license staff (assuming you can just target groups) I am suprised that O365 doesnt have some sort of time based rule enforcement (unless Im being blind!)

We used these guys - always seemed great with us: https://www.radioactivecomms.co.uk

There was a free plugin called TeacherDesk (if i remember correctly) that claimed to do this. We started looking at it but didnt get that far with it. Might be worth a look. Edit - Sorry TeacherDashboard Teacher Dashboard for Microsoft Office 365

We have the IpEvo Ziggis throughout - the best ones we've used so far £82 via amazon.

Thanks for this info Timo343 - MLS having been doing the hard sell on us to go Hosted (keep calling up,not getting anywhere with me so calling other people in the school, offering discounts etc) and reading this gives me a proper view of the system (which apparently "works well in all but a handful of school - and that was their network"). From this thread and others it appears that the Hosted system has some issues, MLS had support problems and it appears they are more interested in flogging a troubled system that fixing or supporting it. Think I'll hold off until the support runs out or they fix hosted properly! Be interested to see how you go with them or if you decide to jump elsewhere...

Sorry to pull this back from the dead, but did you find a solution etc to this? I've just come across this where staff's personal emails addresses are appearing as autocomplete suggestions for users who have not emailed them previously (and more worryingly students)?

Plus how demanding your staff are and SLT expectations. Someplaces having a machine / system down for a day is no drama, but in many having one down for and hour is an issue due to loss of teaching potential. As people have pointed out many of these stats only consider techs to PCs and laptops in the ratio. In reality with wifi points, switches, digital displays, telephones, AV equipment etc there is alot more too it. The running joke here (and in most places I'd imagine) is that if it has a battery or a plug it comes our way.

One of my projects this year - a load of 50" TVS + IntelCompute Sticks: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-STK1AW32SC-Compute-Stick-Black/dp/B01AZC4NHS/ref=dp_ob_title_ce We're using RiseVision (free) to do the content, did use Xibo and the way it works is very similar but Rise didnt need an onsite server, its all cloud based. https://apps.risevision.com

It depends what your after - we have a paxton system - the core system (door locks and nodes) was installed by ADT but all the bits (card printer, lanyards, cards etc) we buy from Essentra: https://www.essentrasecurity.com

+1 here as well!

We didnt went near HWB once we saw how it was being implemented. We did our own O365 install. No problems but your domain might be held by your LEA so it could be an issue. I know of a school in Cardiff that setup their own O365 with the LEA help (LEA did the DNS record changes etc) and that didnt cause any problems. As for GAFE vs O365 its just preference, both are very good and have their pros' and cons. We went O365 due to its stronger Office products and option to download a local version of office for free, but then Google have unlimited storage (o365 is 1tB) and Classsroom (O365 had classroom but dropped it and lumped it into Teams - just started looking at it now) so that could sway the decision. O365 has powershell which can make admin tasks easier but some people prefer the more straight forward GUI of GAFE. The poster above had a good idea about doing both and making the call, but I would personally hold some sway in it from admin perspective (i.e. they may want product A, but if its a massive drain on your time then that is a big factor). Edit: Techradar have done an updated review of both, mainly from a business perspective, dated 3 days ago. Gafe 4 stars and O365 4.5 stars out of 5. Could be worth a read.

if you go to Outlook.com/<> rather than login.microsoft.com it seems to be ok.

Hope they dont coff(ee) up the ransom money, it could land them in hot water and leave them in tea-rs.