PotNoodleTech

I do agree it has a lot to do with how the school is run we've always spent whatever money is needed on fixing roofs etc but other schools down the road have left things to completely rot and then ended up getting new buildings/extensions/whole new schools eventually. We're stuck with the 1960s school as it's not bad enough to demolish so are we shooting ourselves (and our pupils) in the foot by trying to keep everything maintained should we just give up and wait for the LEA to get involved? It's a sad state of affairs when strategically, long term, we're better off doing a really bad job rather than a really good one :/

I was just gonna apply but then I realised I don't have US Citizenship!

Veeam and a third party cloud provider for off site.

https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/classcharts-login-problems-due-national-9051705

Oh Dear - that's not good! I guess maybe they only want to deal in Tier 1 manufacturers which are easy to sell, Dell, Hp, etc? Better off selling them to a school by the look of it!

That's scrap price really. Try Techbuyer Europe they gave me a good deal buying my old network switches etc.

I'm leaving the my DPO and the LEA Legal /DPO team deal with it now. Adding classcharts / TES to the list of companies that don't take Data Protection seriously and are not trustworthy with our data. Whether we drop classcharts is another matter through, one higher than my pay grade! (not hard..)

Hi we lost your data but it's not a data breech don't worry.

Hey dude I've run into a problem - all my fibre and SFPs are 10gig now and thinking about it this network tester is years and years old - I am assuming it only supports 1 gig to be honest so may not be any use for testing my building links from now on. Cant get any activity using the 10 gig SFPs i have, cisco, HP/aruba or unifi. (Can still test 1 gig ethernet desktop runs though so still useful to me) but maybe not worth buying one unless you can get them to confirm it works with 10 gig fibre etc. Sorry!

After classcharts behavior the last 2 days I'd drop em like a sack of the proverbial if you are in a position to do so. Sadly were still sims so we still need classcharts.

I mean a GTX 1030 is barely worth fitting for these types of tasks- about 10% of the processing power that a more modern card has? I think you'd be better off overall just going for better CPUs across the board if possible. Do some testing on one or two test machines and see what difference budget cards make to your workload. The Quadro should be better but they are orders of magnitude more expensive for that power than the desktop cards.

My office is a portacabin from circa 1960. We've kept it in good repair, no leaks etc, but it it costs a fortune to heat etc. Got 4 portacabins in total - 3 of them are electrically heated. *sobs*

Just my 2p but I see you mention 300e - We won't be buying touchscreens ever again - we have many hundreds of 300e and you can't get parts or screens for them so any mishap renders them almost unrepairable. We are now ordering 100e across the board as the touchscreen wasn't used much and has ended up costing us thousands (replacement 100e non touchscreens you can get for 25 quid).

Yes I had that email saying "There is no evidence of a malicious attack or data breach." The fact that they appear to be trying to back pedal and cover this data breech up is worrying given the amount of data schools trust them with. They also don't appear to have notified the ICO judging by their language. I'll leave the rest up to my DPO.

Sorry to say it all comes down to classroom management and strong SLT support (consequences) - if you don't have one, or have neither than it doesn't matter what devices you buy they'll still get smashed up just the same. I do think you get less vandalism with 1:1 devices as the pupils generally understand that if they rip the keys off their own keyboard they will be the one that can't type properly - but at the same time you so get more accidental damage (bags dropped etc) so it's courses for courses. Expect 10% fleet damage within 3-5 years as a norm (anyone else suffering any less than that please tell me how, you wizards!!!!)

Tick other and type in whole school responsibility

Looks like Millgate has had a data breech. Unknown type of data from unknown number of customers currently. "We are reaching out to inform you of a recent security incident at Millgate. On 15th January 2024, we discovered that some of our internal systems were impacted by a cyber incident. We understand the seriousness of this situation and have taken steps to address it."

Ooh can it? *installing now* Is it easy(ish)?

We have not been contacted by them nor were were instructed to take any specific action on the classcharts system when we initially reported it. Interesting that the banner is no longer on the home page.

Yes can confirm we had a parent report seeing totally different pupils from totally different schools. Rung classcharts and they confirmed a 15 minute long technical issue that caused this and that it is likely to be considered a data breech. They asked me to email in the fact that we are reporting this and they said they will be drafting an email to all schools affected. Considering this a possible data breech (assuming that if our parent could see other school data that some other parents in the UK could have seen some of our pupil data??) not good!

Not typically double? Well - it sure isn't single! I've never seen a fault tolerant single device. Again all comes down to budget. Some schools have a single server with 5 VMs on. Some school have 3 VM hosts with 50VMs on 2 SANS and 2 Fibre switches 2 xUPS diesel backup generator etc etc

I guess it depends if you are able to get the funding to double/triple up on servers/switches/storage etc. Don't forget a cluster that uses just one storage tray or just one fibre switch or just one UPS etc etc is not fault tolerant.

I guess what it's angling at is, do you have plans and the equipment in place to minimize downtime because of hardware failure? if you have one server and you skimped on it so it only has 1 power supply and it goes down your whole network may be down for a day or two whilst a power supply is sent to you - is that acceptible? What about if it was the motherboard and the downtime now edges up to 4-5 days? What about if the server was unrepairable and you did not have it in warranty and had to order another server then transfer everything - what if the downtime edged up to 5-10 days? Would the school be able to be open with no access to IT or MIS or possible heating/building/gates/door access etc etc? If SLT pick a number of down time it is wiling to accept - say 2 days, then that means you need to get more than one server operating maybe in a cluster, and keep power supplies, hard disk and fans in stock, possible have a same/next day warranty, etc etc. So the number of days SLT pick - entirely dictates the kind of hardware and software setup and the cost you need to absorb to get all this reliability?

Out of interest have you done any maths on whether it is actually worth the cost of these services versus the number of repairs that are completed per year for example as £37,500 per 3 years per 500 ipads strikes me as being a lot to spend on "what if it breaks" when you could put that £37,500 towards just buying 50 brand new ipads a year and using those to cover bad breakages?

If veeam is pricing you out might be worth looking at other options - I think Synology has got some really cool backup options now so if you happen to have any of their nas/sans that might be the way forward?