Nexarius

Thanks all for your input. We looked at Smoothwall but were massively put off by their requirement for us to share details on leads and register deals with them before they would give us even indicative pricing. The convoluted sales process seemed a real step backwards compared to others. Senso was clearer on the sales/pricing side but technical details of the filtering product seemed sparse and I don't think it would have done what we needed it to do - it felt like a bolt-on for their classroom management product rather than a main focus. We've ended up sticking with Securly - to be fair they stepped up the support and escalated the long-running issues which are now getting sorted on their end. 95% of the schools we use Securly with 'just work' and we don't need to get support, it's the 5% where things are complicated (multiple schools sharing a Google tenancy etc) that we've had issues but the main issues are now fixed.

Hi Tom, I've just filled out the partner application form, would be great if we could get some options as we have a number of imminent Securly renewals that I would like to switch for something more fit for purpose!

We're a education-focused MSP with around 20 schools on the Securly Filter platform and the support is just getting worse and worse - time to resolution is now measured in weeks and often takes over a month to get things fixed. The school's won't tolerate this any more and it's become embarrassing recommending them, so looking for alternatives. Senso looks like it might be fairly similar and have better support? I've spoken to them and it sounds like their support team is much easier to communicate wiht (Securly have removed telephone support and it's tickets only, no way to get immediate help any more...) Our requirements are fairly simple - need to be able to filter ChromeOS and Windows devices with transparent auth (whether by user-injected PAC like Securly or deploying an agent) and basic DNS filtering for guest users. Needs to sync to Google for users and needs to be KCSIE-compliant.... oh and needs to not be significantly more expensive than Securly. Open to any suggestions! Thanks!

Our experience with deploying Securly to several schools as an MSP has been similar. The sales people are decent, but the onboarding session promised is non-existent and there's a bunch of settings that you have to go through support to change which is not helpful when doing a migration over a weekend. Expected more for the cost really...

I had this problem and tried all the usual fixes to no avail. Just when I was about to launch the computer through the window, I noticed that it only affected users with mandatory profiles (ie, all our student accounts!). Without the profiles the logon scripts ran, with them they didn't. It turned out to be a permissions problem on the registry hive on the mandatory profile. I'd already set it so that Authenticated Users had permissions over the hive, but I hadn't propagated that change through the hive in the usual NTFS-y way. I did that with regedit and now the scripts run - Hooray!

Hi All, Currently running Moodle 1.9 as an experiment, and using the windows share web client thing to give remote access to home directories and shared areas. It works nicely, and gives people 1-click access to the folders as authentication has already been done (LDAP auth). Looking at upgrading to 2.0, though, and 1.9 plugins don't work in 2.0! Has anybody seen a way for users' home directories to be made accessible using Moodle 2.0? This is a primary school so it has to be very straight forward... for the *teachers* to understand it!

We have 2003, and we're beginning to get issues with the kids all having 2007/2010 at home and being confused by the 2003 interface. I've looked at the cost of upgrading and it is substantial! What do people think, is it worth upgrading to 2010 for familiarity's sake, or should I stick with 2003 which does the job and which the teachers understand!

Yes, I'm sure they would be better. I'm currently discussing this with one of the sales droids, hopefully she'll come back with something appealing!

We're a small primary school with only 200 pupils, so our requirements are really quite basic. Sophos meets the Becta standards and from talking to another techie who's used it at schools, it seems to mostly do the job. I know it won't be as flexible as Smoothwall, but we don't need anything fancy!

I do indeed mean content filtering as well as anti-virus. I do like the look of Smoothwall, but it is *considerably* more expensive than the Sophos option. And I mean considerably - the annual licensing fee for Smoothwall is 3 times that of the Sophos solution! Our LEA is offering their centralised basic filtering package (which wouldn't allow us any control whatsoever) for £180/year, so if I'm going to persuade them the school to choose local filtering instead then it needs to be cheap!

Hi All, Currently getting quotes for a new filtering system as our LEA is kindly withdrawing our current Websense server. Has anyone any experience of the Sophos appliances (WS100, WS500 etc)? The licensing appears to be considerably cheaper than Smoothwall!

We are tied into a county arrangement (Oxfordshire) paying £2600/year for a 2mbit SDSL link. This does not include filtering, we have to either pay the county extra to use theirs, or provide our own (but it has to be BECTA-compliant...) Does anyone else think this is excessive? We only have 200 pupils, so a maximum of about 20 people using the connection at the same time. I reckon straightforward ADSL would be faster!

All 5 of our older boards, bought in 2006, do *exactly* the same thing, though they're SB680s rather than 660s. The newer SB680 R2 is perfect. Driving myself and the teachers crazy!

It was, but I believe you had to register them within a certain timeframe and foolishly I didn't. It's weird. The R1 boards seem to just randomly lose their alignment, but the R2 board we have is completely fine...

Hi All, We have a number of ageing 600-series Smartboards which are all begining to lose their accurary around the edges and lose their alignment and generally p*ss the teachers off. They are 4 years old and thus out of warranty, and nobody seems to repair the damned things, so I am considering replacing them. Has anybody had any experience with the Smart 685ix widescreen board? I like the concept of widescreen because it will improve their suitability for watching DVDs etc, but I'm unsure about the Unifi projector. We have a Hitachi ultra-short-throw projector already which is amazing and I'm not sure the Unifi would match it... Does anybody have any experience of these boards? (or of places that recondition older boards!) Cheers, Matt

There is a reason I gave you those laptops, Jack ;-) They are awful. I suggest that you either install a mini-PCI card, use a USB one, or ask me nicely and I'll post you another laptop. It's probably cheaper than having them properly disposed off...

To clarify, it's for a primary school. I'm not sure they know what they want them for, but more that they should probably get some because they're The Shiny New Thing and other people said we should. The Easi-View looks impressive, do you have experience of using them?

So, I have been tasked with buying some visualisers to go with our existing interactive whiteboard setups. It would seem they are "The New Shiny Thing™". I've seen a lot about the AverMedia range and very little about anything else. Searching this forum reveals not a lot in the last few months. Does anybody have any advice as to what to get? I am looking at spending as little money as possible and therefore only really interested in the lower end. Thanks!

I had looked at those already. It's not the EMF problem affecting horizontal lines. One of the boards has been recently moved but the other hasn't. I'm beginning to think it might defective boards (which are 3 years old and thus I think out of warranty).

I have a problem with a couple of first-generation SB680 boards involving the right hand side of the board not orienting properly. The problem is as seen on the attachment - vertical lines. I am using the latest version of the drivers/notebook and the boards have all had firmware updates recently. It is affecting at least 2 of them. Anybody got any ideas as to what might be causing this? Incorrect mounting? Defective boards? Dodgy firmware?

The Dell C3110cn is a really good printer. Cheaper than the HP 2600n it replaced, and it uses normal PCL/Postscript drivers without any host-side processing. Its quick, it has a good web-based interface, and it's OS-independant. I also look after a C3115cn which is the same printer but fax/scan facilities. This is quite a bit more expensive but also really good. It can even scan to email or network file shares!

Mmm, the 2007WFP. Best monitor I've ever used! Lovely S-IPS panel!

AG Neovo 19"ers are very good monitors. I have one. They still make them, and they go new for around £200. They are by far the best hard glass screens I've come across!

I was finding having to authenticate against AD every time I booted into RIS was becoming a pain, so I had a look at how the menu system works, and it turns out to be a very simple form of markup language. So with a 10 minute hack I was able to preset a build username/password into the RIS client, so all I have to do to each client is press enter lots. Nowadays I only use RIS as a network launcher for Ghostcast though. Ghost has several significant advantages over RIS, like it can be made to work over many HALs, and you can multicast the image across the network making it much faster to rebuild whole rooms. !!

Most schools use Volume Licensed versions of XP, which don't require product activation. Do you not have Volume Licensed media to install it from?