pete

Just checked and the last thing we got was Patch 26417 for dietary reports on 30/04/21. For filesets I only see 1801 from 12/04/21.

That would be my guess too. For a 15GB database with ~100GB of documents, the cleanup routine likely* hasn't been run for a long time. It can take a while on a relatively well-maintained document server. *I mean, provided no-one's attaching large word docs full of photographic evidence to student records.

Bit of a strange one - anyone seen this? Affects two people so far in the same department, working from different accounts. Example at the bottom: Email with attachment open in OWA on Office 365, using Google Chrome on Win 10 20H2 Attachment contents visible on the left side of the screen, email body on the right. Person clicks "forward message" Selects subject line contents and begins to overtype them with more accurate subject Subject line is typed correctly, just from right > left (etep) rather than left > right (pete) Selecting reversed subject line contents and typing again works correctly (left > right) To/CC/ fields unaffected Message body unaffected Doesn't always happen No clear trigger Display languages set to UK English or US English. No Chrome extensions installed

Active Networks are good and travel all over. https://www.activenetworks-it.co.uk/ (though their website has been terrible for years)

As is often the case, people wave brochures at me, this time for SIMS Schoolview, which could be useful as a dashboard across our SIMS-using schools. Is anyone using Schoolview currently and does your trust find it useful enough to justify the faff / cost of implementation? My lot are used to SISRA as a comparison point.

We're likely to need a few hardware tokens for some staff. What (if anything) are you using? I'm looking at Token2's programmable options (https://www.token2.com/shop/product/token2-c301-i-programmable-hardware-token-iphone-compatible, for example) currently as I'd prefer not to have "OK, is the token plugged in?" support calls with Yubikey options.

The admin team have a Frama Matrix F12 that appears to be stuck in an inspection loop (prompts for inspection on login, inspection succeeds, prompts for inspection again). Choosing "no" to the inpection (since it succeeded at least twice today) shows a "locked" message. Checking the websites (subdomains of frama.com) it accesses, everything appears correct and using the "test connection to Frama online" option reports success. (And yes, we've power cycled it a couple of times).

In 1U? 6300. If you can spare 4U, pick a 5406zl chassis and fill the bay modules until you have sufficient SFP+ ports?

Yup. The school owns the domain. You may have two issues: US-based companies (or at least their helldesks) often need a tutorial on how UK schools DNS works (school.region.sch.uk) or they'll assume your domain name is region.sch.uk and break things. Doubly so if they're automatically generating certs. Registrar automated billing / domain expiry systems may not handle "costs nothing / never expires" well, with knock-on effects in cPanel / Plesk / etc.

Take over the management (move it to your other registrar). Just ask them whether their automated systems/routines (especially billing) are setup to handle .sch.uk domains beforehand.

UniFi have broken DHCP in multiple firmwares in the past. We have a "canary" AP to test firmware on before pushing site-wide.

I assume swapping to 4G updates the parent's dashboard immediately and consistently through the day? But student phones are by default on BYOD and so favour WiFi? Does running a packet capture on the Smoothwall (SSH in, tcpdump -i any host PHONEIPADDRESS -s 0 -w /tmp/glucosemon-date.pcap), running the app on the phone for a few minutes and then sftp the .pcap file to a desktop and look through in wireshark) shed any light on it? We've had a few things (looking at you eSafe) cause Smoothwall to choke in ways only really visible from a packet capture. SW support were* happy to walk customers through doing it the first time. *many years ago, policies may have changed.

....and also personal data - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/807381/UPN_Guide_1.2.pdf (page 6) which you would be publishing for all to see: GDPR considers the UPN as personal data, as the UPN falls within the scope of ‘identification number’ within the GDPR definition of personal data. As such, UPNs held with, or without, other data items remain within the scope of GDPR and must be protected accordingly Admission numbers are sufficiently unique (and incremental) that you should never have overlap between students.

Agreed, but our MAT broadband bill is £1,600/yr for 4 sites (2x 100/100, 1x 20/100 & 1x80d/27u). It's likely to be a significant multiple of that after the contract ends.

Your headteacher and/or possibly chair of governors will have had an email this morning from Lincolnshire County Council mentioning that: LCC's contract with emPSN ends on 31st October 2022 From then on, schools will be paying for broadband from their budgets. Can schools indicate whether they're interested in a group buy from emPSN orchestrated by LCC or if they're likely to go their own way. I understand the need for a binary option for 3, but the real answer will be "it depends".

Yeah, I'm looking into Freshdesk for MAT-wide IT tickets (consolidating 3 ticketing systems) and trying to shoehorn what finance would like (keep using shared mailbox and bolt-on a finance-visible audit trail) with what's feasible and I'm willing to support. Have you got any non-IT people using Service Desk Plus? How was migrating them from shared mailbox habits to a ticketing system?

Going forward, running extra cabling is the plan. Right now I don't have the option to open up the ceilings to run it so I need a stop-gap.

We tried one of those and it experienced similar problems. Opening it up, a couple of pins weren't connected, nor was the braided cable shield, so it may have been a dodgy unit.

Recently we've bought 10 or so Epson classroom projectors (X49* etc) and found they're a bit more particular about the brand of HDMI > VGA adaptors being used (after eliminating other causes such as bad cables and drivers). Can anyone running a fleet of Epson projectors recommend a HDMI > VGA adaptor brand that works reliably(before I play the "order a few different types, see what works" game)? *which will eventually have HDMI run to the faceplates, but it hasn't happened yet.

If your MAT has a shared financeteam@ mailbox for suppliers to send invoices etc to, what (if anything) have you / finance put in place so they (specifically them, not IT doing audit searches in O365) have an audit trail from: Email in ---> Opened & Actioned ---> Archived ? I have suggested a ticketing system (email > aggressive spam filter config > ticket), but they're grumbling about that.

What's your retention timescale for work done by student leavers generally? What does your retention and destruction policy say? For Office 365, our retention is 180 days (all data). If the student account is deleted, the files are restorable for 180 days afterwards by IT staff. I'm not sure how it affects submitted assignments for the deleted pupil (how the submitted work is displayed to the team owner).

For those of you using single domains across the trust, are computer names asset IDs or service tags? Or do you prefix names with site initials?

Schoolcloud may have changed their implementation since October 2020, but at the time it definitely didn't work via SW on an emPSN network. We verified using the various WebRTC test tools - https://networktest.twilio.com/ UDP 3478 wasn't mentioned in the documentation back then either and the note about UDP generally only appeared 2 weeks into our trial, so we made the bulk port changes (outbound only + related inbound). We asked KCOM to sanity check the Schoolcloud instructions, but they were OK to make the change. It's on the "revisit once we're back in" list, but at the time we discovered the UDP problem ~5 days before the first live parent's evening so....

We're also in Lincolnshire and found that in-school video connectivity required UDP enabled if the ISP was emPSN. The video link would never establish if one person was in-school (test parent or test teacher). Most of our staff are happy to conduct parent's evenings on the sofa in their slippers, but a few staff with excessively noisy children at home have opted to stay in-school.

Yeah, already running it, typing from memory up-thread.