PotNoodleTech

Surely everything in SIMS should have been migrated to bromcom if access was required? Keeping things ad hoc for 30 years won't work as inevitably things will go wrong technicians might change, passwords maybe lost or misplaced, the vm image itself might deteriorate/ get lost or the physical hardware it's on die/be recycled. It seems an awfully risky way of keeping data rather than just having it in your MIS ready for action.

Got same problem with one ipad here - it's not picking up the wifi so it's not even getting the unlock command - and hey presto you can't add a new wifi connection as.....it's locked!!! Fantastic!!

Two UPS's split across the server PSUs is the best way to do it as you still have mains filtering and protection on all connections - but can tolerate one UPS failing in an emergency, and you double your average runtime to boot. Been running 2 x UPS on 2 x different power phases for over a decade. (we've had situation before where one entire phase has gone down across the whole school which completely took out the server room. That won't happen again.)

To be fair having tried setting up MFA on an ipad with the authenticator app on an ipad which needs the authenticator app on the ipad working to set up mfa on the ipad......I can kinda see where your staff are coming from. MS need to do a little bit of logic checking where it says "oh right the poor user is doing the entire authentication chain on one device, I will make it a bit easier for them"

Thanks all this is just what we need.

Hi All How do you deal with totally unreasonable SAR requests I.e someone just wants all data , no date range, no reason or specific information required - just everything. Asking for a friend who's Business Manager is off. Thanks

Was the content accessed on the ipad at school or at home though?

That's an interesting strategy. It's a bit like saying students do not get enough real world experience of learning how dangerous working on 240v/400v electric can be so instead of locking up all the electrical cupboards in the school safely, let's leave them all open and take the front covers off so that the student can have some real exposure and learn how dangerous they are for themselves. (few of them may get electrocuted but hey ho..as long as we have accurate reports of who got electrocuted and when, we should be covered right?).

This is worrying.

I think you need to get out it if at all humanly possible. Frankly if it was me I would even sell the house just to get out of it. People haven't had to endure the life sapping neverding hell of an 18% apr mortgage since the recession in the 70s! (Or so I thought!) I can't believe the position you are in

Moved from Groupcall to Wonde now - so much better, easier and more reliable. Now the first question I asked of any random overprice educational software is "does it use Wonde?"

Is the server joined to the domain? i.e is it recognising your account as a local administrator? Only local admins / domain admins can view the drive c$

Moved from APC to Eaton never looked back. Got 2 x 5000 units gives an hour uptime to the server cab.

Consolidated from a Mixture of 50 laserjet/deskjet 10+ years ago to 10 Ricoh MFD refreshed every 5 years and never looked back. Saved a fortune, printers are 99.9% uptime, pop a toner in a month and feed with paper - hey presto. Would never go back to the old days of spending all day piddling around with ink carts.

True enough. I actually use Raid 5 myself as I am all SSD storage and Raid 5 stays fast, and reduces unnecessary writes (compared to Mirroring) which should theoretically improve the lifespan of the array! I still use Raid 6 on spinning rust disks for veeam backup and TBH have never had any issue with write speeds.

Does it have the 4 x SFP ports if I remember? What about using a 4 x 1GB trunk (assuming you have enough ports at the 5406zl end)? Back before 10GB was affordable, used trunked 1gb a lot for servers and uplinks.

Yes I've never quite understood the obsession with spending £20k-£50k plus licence fees plus high recurring support costs on a single point of failure which is on average less reliable due to over-complexity than just a bog standard server with 20 disks in Raid6. But hey ho. I wanted to go Vmware Vsan 10 years ago but when VMware changed their licences they wrote themselves out of the education market (well, in Wales anyway) and so will be trying Hyperconverged on the next refresh. I've only bought refurbished dell PowerEdge's over the last 10 years. 100% uptime............................. ................(now I've said that, I am probably screwed...........)

I think this is key really isn't it.

I guess the tighter and more accurate your SIMS data the smoother the migration will go.

Yeh I cancelled mine this year as I never watch TV. I've had a bout 20 threatening letters. It's disgusting behaviour.

Rather than spending £15 per plug to save 10 pence a day - I just literally turn all the plugs off at the wall when I am not using them. TV/Hifi Kitchen stuff Oven All off until I need them. And totally free! I've got so used to it now it's automatic.

Yeh it's slightly renamed. "URL blocking" and then you have to click it to get more settings.

Nothing is given out before start date here as they are not your employees before their start date and all the background checks etc may not have been completed. Your school is taking a gamble - would end up in big strife if you had a data breech from a member of staff who wasn't officially a member of staff yet and turned out to have faked their qualified teacher status, or to be a convicted offender for example. Totally not worth the risk. We create the accounts up front so that departments can pre-email/share info with the new member of staff ready, but they don't actually get the login/pass or any equipment till their first day. Saying that it's interesting to see how other schools do it, and some good ideas re: limited access to training etc.

I think I've got a 5600x and 16gb ram and mobo lying around if you need it. Might also have a basic 1080p capable graphics card or two. If you want to do it on a tight budget that is.

Good thread we've got exactly this dilemma. Interesting to see people swinging both ways.