pete

^Yup, the amount of pupils who haven't had money on their account has risen from one or two to sufficient that SLT are noticing. Should the parents have RTFCN*? Yes. Do end-users typically RTFCN? Nope. *Change Notification.

^ Shift-based though, so (assuming they don't have their heads up their bum) you won't get calls at stupid o'clock. That job description is a bit too generic. Is IT shouting "we need more warm bodies" at HR because.......? Second line looks more interesting, but the pay's identical to first line. General support + Engineering techs also looks interesting with more scope for growth.

The cynic in me says "the old way meant they couldn't earn interest on funds stashed with them".

1) Have a schedule for when updates are released 2) Publish this information 3) Release updates according to that schedule (unless there's a 0-day flash vuln, for example) 4) Ignore the whining from people who didn't read the copious notices and failed to plan around it for example Our "Patch Day" is Thursday. Updates are released at midday and set to not install (unless the person initiates it) until 4pm and even then they can delay it by choosing "shut down without installing updates". We rarely force installs with deadlines for laptops. We rarely deviate from this schedule unless it would a) affect public exams or b) 0-day vuln. Thursday was chosen because any problems missed in testing would be detected on the Friday and could be fixed over the weekend. Midday was chosen to ensure everything's had a chance to download patches before it's taken home/powered off. 4pm was chosen because it's after the main school day but before the auto-shutdowns kick in.

Parentpay have changed the "add funds" routine recently. It's gone from: 1) add item to basket 2) card transaction 3) done to: 1) add funds to top up pot 2) card transaction 3) allocate those funds to items 4) done. Since most of our parents are used to the previous way of doing things, they're missing the "allocate those funds to items" step and a fair amount of kids don't have any cash for lunch. Judging by how long our finance dept are on hold when trying to get hold of them, we're not the only school thinking this is a backwards step. If you could schedule "ensure Bob's meal account has £20 in it every Monday if there's money in the top-level pot", I could see it might be useful - but there's no way to do that.

Well, you're 14 short for a caffeine molecule. As in, actually use it for your day-to-day work or "demonstrate an IT topic using this prop"? If they're the squeezable type - hand exercises to prevent RSI.

For my sins I'm on the eSafety committee here. I, either directly or via the DSL, get an endless stream of "why not sign up for our random scheme to keep kids safe and you'll get a shiny badge" communications. They're all regurgitating the same bumpf and there's a small amount giving what I (with my "works in IT" hat on) would label advice of questionable accuracy/utility. Is there a list of "eSafety accreditations from people that don't have their pants on their head and aren't just trying to make a quick profit" anywhere? My DSL is less cynical than I and likes to sign up for All The Things.

So far..... Network and fibre work to support building refurbishment. New PCs ~80-odd. New EES agreement Windows 10 rollout Office 2016 rollout (once I've gone through the terrible software list to see what breaks) New copiers across the site. Hypervisor upgrade Possible Hypervisor move to Hyper-V (if I can get a sensible window to do it in) and many things I'm probably forgetting...

Is the Meru controller acting as the RADIUS server or is it talking to a Windows server hosting that role? I'd have those logs open and then attempt to connect a couple of times with a known-bad laptop to see if it can be a bit more verbose.

We lean towards picking one or two "experts" in the dept/office and giving them formal training (usually online, sometimes one-on-one) and then they train the rest of the office and act as a local resource. It does rely on the office/dept being sane and on good terms with each other, but it generally works. I'd bill whichever dept hired them without checking they met the basic job requirements.

^ If it were viable (breaks even), we'd be open on set days for external candidates (likely Tues/Wed evenings from 6pm > 10pm). We wouldn't be staffing the centre 9-5/5. I suspect it's not viable. We also looked into becoming a literacy and numeracy centre (for adult learners), thinking "ok, we're a school - we can do that", but instead there's a whole faff-load of new accreditation/audit frameworks because it's coming from the Skills & Funding Agency rather than the EFA.

Yup, I did miss the VGA part - we've still got a lot of VGA/Displayport workstations and VGA/HDMI monitors. The cost of doing it would be pulled from Ad Ed funding, but I'm not convinced there'd be enough demand (city nearby with testing centres). Regarding CCTV, I'd lean towards a HD HikVision camera in-room with x days retention sent to a dedicated box. Giving random invigilators access to whole-school CCTV would make ICO very unhappy. The sticking point for us would be the dedicated Internet connection for the exam room. Our broadband contract (emPSN) explicitly forbids a second connection into emPSN, so I'd end up having to air-gap the room and sling in a business ADSL/Fibre line. Implementation wouldn't be cheap and maintenance would be annoying.

We've done a fair bit of adult education for a while and someone's floated the idea of becoming a Pearson test centre. Leaving aside the terrible software (BTDT, both as the person taking the tests and the person cursed with administering it), has anyone done this? I've looked at the technical requirements and interpreted it as roughly: 15 (or less) PCs = workstation setup Dedicated physical server (no virtual environments supported) for more than 15 PCs Only 2008 & 2008R2 supported on server (which can't be virtual) for 15+ PCs Dedicated Internet connection for the room Fixed partitions between PCs Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 (10 prohibited) Local admin rights for people taking, administering or proctoring the tests Lockable storage for belongings CCTV in-room or invigilator in-room Room layout so in-room proctor can view everyone's hands Exam workstations with 128MB dedicated video ram as a minimum - not entirely sure if an integrated card using a BIOS setting counts Is that about right? So far the cost/benefit ratio is swinging a bit too far towards "cost".

I block adverts mostly for malware prevention (same reason Flash and other plugins are set as click-to-run). That and the whole "popover advert that can't be closed without zooming out on a mobile device because the close button is off-screen". If you're running a website and using an outsourced ad bureau that doesn't vet content for appropriateness (hello Outbrain*) or whether it contains malware (adtech.de, for a recent example), expect to be blocked. *and anecdotally, even when you do tell Outbrain "stop running inappropriate adverts on our site" they do a terrible job of it.

We had no traffic from our site (in Lincolnshire) via HTTP or HTTPS from circa 17:00 to 23:00 on the 26th May. Just around when our exams officer was submitting info to exam boards. DNS was fine, as was querying external Google DNS directly. KCOM could connect to our router and verify all looked well. Our internal proxy was fine (though we took it out of the loop while diagnosing just in case). Sites hosted within EMBC were available, but anything on the wider Internet wasn't available. Kier weren't aware of anything and promised to call back (didn't happen). I've chased them again this morning.

Nexus 5 on 6.0.1 with May 2016 security patches. No problems.

^ That. IIRC the Avast techs are building a custom .msi on the fly for customers who request them.

Live migrate (DC stays running with a very brief interruption for clients) or actually shutdown and move? I've done the former lots of times without issue, I tend to avoid the latter during the working day unless I have no other option.

@elsiegee40 Yes, but the IT team need that decision it in writing* to prevent RGE when the finger-pointing starts. The problems occur when everyone's ad-libbing. *set out in the Safeguarding / eSafety / Child Protection / WhateverYouCallIT policy.

We've spoken to some present and past Arena customers (and poked around on here for pros / cons) and we've seen a mix of responses. Some of you I've spoken to privately. That said, who's currently using the Arena Group for copier rental and maintenance? PM if you don't want to air laundry in public. What do they do well? What do they do poorly? What made you pick them vs the other candidates? All other things being equal, would you use them again? Arena Group people reading this - we're already talking to you directly.

Just finished* The Solus Project and for a game where the only** other lifeforms are growling tribbles, suspiciously non-carnivorous plants and the inescapable feeling someone's following you, it's pretty good. *in so far as available content goes - final few hours are out in June. ** OK, not strictly true, but trying to keep it spoiler-free.

IIRC that's roughly Dell list price for a 6/i

The short version is "if you can find a security vulnerability in the version of the firmware you're running, Cisco usually provide a firmware version that fixes it". I've used this in the past and simply supplied serial number and the URL of the vulnerability. See here, for example: https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20160504-openssl

^ Solus 2 is still supported for the Spring 2016 release (last one it's supported on). Call SIMS and explain the situation. Provided your SIMS is in a decent state it shouldn't take long. Did the LEA leave any documentation lying around about what they've put in place to make updates go smoothly?

Our AUP has a very explicit "school equipment should not be used to run a private business" instruction. If you want to do work on the side, you do it on your own time using your own computer.