truebluesteve

Hi All Has anyone here got any experience of the new Smartboard M680? I need to replace a few SB680's that are worn out or damaged and was considering trying one of these. Thanks Steve

We've had this here a few times - it is feedback and related to the microphone. If you disable it the problem will disappear!

Just a note if you are using a RADIUS server to authenticate users. We had an issue where we used our smoothwall to authenticate our BYOD users - however when they went to another WLAN they could couldn't get out onto the internet although everything appeared fine. Turns out we had to set up an accounting server (also pointing to the Smoothwall box) to let it know that it had switched WLANS

I had this a couple of years ago and it turned out to be the assistant bursars PC - she had opened a file attachment from "Royal Mail" in Outlook. In the end it didn't take too long to find - it was just a case of watching the SMTP traffic on the Smoothwall box when it was quiet and tracking down the source IP address. It is a pain but the advice above is all good!

Sorry about the long delay in getting back to you about this - I completely missed the mention alert! Anyway, to answer you question I am not particularly impressed with webanywhere or their products. I have posted a couple of times on here about the issues I and my web admin have had and it never seems to get any better. We still have some very annoying issues that have yet to be resolved and every time they release an update or patch something else breaks. I certainly couldn't recommend them particularly given how much they charged us for the system. I hope this helps, but I'm happy to answer any questions! Cheers Steve

We have BYOD and Guest wlans working on our Ruckus/Smoothwall setup and it's fine but it does require the use of VLANs. A very good guide was written by someone on here - and I apologise to him profusely for remembering his name, but it did take a bit of time and patience. As for the self provisioning - it works on iOS devices but you need to 'forget' the provisioning WLAN as others have said. I couldn't get it to work on Android devices at all, although that was quite a few months ago and it may be better now.

We had a CTouch on trial all last week and was well received by the staff that used it. I had a look at the BenQ at BETT as well as couple of others and there wasn't a huge amount to choose between them. For us I think it will come down to price and and whether we can get the smart notebook resources to work with it!

I'm not a big fan of Moodle - it maybe open source and free but the interface is pretty clunky and dated. Having said that, I haven't looked at Frog for a long while so I don't know if its any better! If you do decide on Moodle, then don't use WebAnywhere to implement it!

Hi All We are about to take our payroll and HR systems in house and we (or rather they) have shortlisted 2 systems -- chris21 (yes a very odd name) iTrent Has anyone got any experience of either of these and able provide some feedback? Thanks

I'm about to do the same thing. I have had a quote for a Netgear ReadyNAS 2120 8TB (expandable) which has a 5 year warranty for just over a grand. Seems to have had a few good reviews so I'm going to order it once our entire finance department come back from being off sick!

We've just bought some Dell Venue 8 tablets and they are running 8.1 but the equivalent to the Home Edition of Windows 7. This means you can't join a domain but can run Windows programs, which is what our Science department are doing (Data Harvest, Picoscope etc). They were about £190 and so far we have been pretty impressed - it also comes with Office 2013. They do an 11" version which runs can run 8.1 Pro and comes with different processor options. The Atom version is £459.00 Cheers Steve

Bit late I know but for what it's worth I wouldn't use them Last year they installed migrated our existing Moodle setup onto their box and did all the SIMS and portal/gateway stuff. The project was hugely expensive and the final product is pretty poor IMHO. It was also delivered 6 months late with constant excuses and bits of the site not working or forever being bug fixed. Even now there are still things they haven't sorted out. As you can tell I'm not too impressed by them! Unfortunately I wasn't involved in the decision to use them and there were better, cheaper options available. It's also rubbish when used with mobile devices. The ongoing support is ok although bug fixes take an age to get resolved. Hope this helps Steve

I have to say I suspected this would lead to a bit of RM bashing (makes a change from Apple and Microsoft I guess) but as a school that uses RM I was concerned when I heard of all the changes that were happening. However having spoken to various people in the company - including the CEO on Friday I feel somewhat easier about the situation. Their decision to exit the hardware market is not entirely surprising as the margins are very small and other companies have done the same. Software services is a growing and profitable market so it's also no surprise that they have chosen that route. It's still a shame though, as the RM One is still the most robust of all the all-in-one PCs I have used. I do get the impression that there is a certain amount of tech snobbery here at times i.e if you use a product like CC4 and don't spend lots of time running powershell scripts or manually editing GPO's then you aren't a 'real' network manager or technician. Using CC4 forms a small part our day and there are many other tools that we use to compliment them. However what it does do it does very well IMHO particularly in a very large school like ours. It's not everyone's cup of tea and for some schools is probably overkill and a waste of money. If you like spending the time fiddling around with GPOs and have the time to do it, then knock yourself out! As for more network managers coming into schools from industry - I'm not sure why as quite frankly you'll earn better money and get less grief staying where you are! Finally I should say that I'm not a spokesperson for RM and they do get things wrong but they are no different from any other company in that respect

Hi All I'm currently looking at our backup processes and at the moment we are using a combination of cloud based backups (Redstor) and D2D2T via Backup Exec 12.5 and its agents. I'm not a huge fan of BE and I've heard a lot of good stuff about VEEAM on here, and given that most of our server environment is virtualised would seem like the ideal product so.... 1. What sort of costs are we looking at 2. Any limitations I should be aware of 3. Can I use my existing tape hardware with it (Overland Neo 2000) Answers to any of the above would be gratefully received! Cheers Steve

It may well be that although according to Smoothwalls own website, it shouldn't be. It certainly is the case for Windows 7 computers. Its a shame nothing in life - or rather IT, is simple!

Hi Folks We have set up a BYOD WLAN on our Ruckus system using Smoothwall as a RADIUS and DHCP server. This is working fine for all our devices except the lone Windows 8 Mobile device we have (MS Surface RT). It will connect to the WLAN and prompt for credentials and then issue a message about a certificate. Clicking continue brings up a message saying that it cannot connect the WLAN and that's it. Has anyone got a similar setup that works with W8 mobile devices? I have Google'd the problem but it hasn't been a lot of help. Thanks Steve

It works well on IOS devices but we've had issues trying to get it to work with Android ones. The problem was being looked at by Ruckus but we've used an alternative method instead which uses our Smoothwall box to provided authentication and thus access. For guest access we use GuestPass which works very well and easy to use.

Done lots of software related updates across the site including deploying a new virus protection client on all machines and laptops. Have completed the upgrade of our wireless network to Ruckus and switched the old system off. However we have an entire building that has been refurbished and hasn't been wired completely yet. it also needs new fibres as existing ones have been cut or are too short to reach the new comms room that has been created. There's an awful lot of work and only 2 weeks left to do it in and I'm off on holiday to Corfu for a week tomorrow! Oh and we scrapped about 30 very old laptops which are being replaced by nice shiny new ones. The new ones arrived last week and we quickly found that they had US keyboards. So they are being collected on Monday to be replaced on Thursday! I feel that the last few days of the holidays are going to be very stressful!

Glad you sorted it - it's easy to miss things with vlans. Something I found out last week!

The Guardian article isn't exactly news is it? iPads are simply the netbooks/laptops of a few years ago and the same questions apply about does it improve and enhance learning etc - and grades of course ! A large secondary school near me decided to go down the iPad Mini for every student route and parents would pay for them. However they would only go ahead with the project if at least 80% of parents agreed to it, and by that I mean agreed to "buy" one. I have just looked at their website and I think the scheme is going ahead although it is a little vague. They have a "10 reasons why iPads will help students" PDF just in case you couldn't think of any yourself! I'm not convinced about the value of these schemes yet and neither have I seen any independent evidence to show their benefits. I'm happy to be proved wrong of course!

Do you host this yourself or is it cloud based? I'm looking at updating ours and looking at this one. What sort of money did you pay? Thanks

I've set mine up in a similar way to yours and it seems to me that there is a VLAN issue here. I would start simple at first. Put all the APs on your default VLAN to ensure they can reach the DHCP server and create a WLAN on the default on too. Once you have them working then you can start tweaking it. PM me if you need any tips!

I think you are running the risk of selecting a product and finding solutions to make it work for you. As others have said do you really want to be tied in to one vendor - not me. Apple don't discount hardware for education in the way other suppliers do and even the ones they do offer are tiny. The hardware itself is no more reliable than PC hardware and in my experience less so and far more expensive to repair. If the logic board fails on a 2 year old iMac you might as well throw the whole thing away. I'm not against Apple kit - I have an iMac at home and 60 iPads at school but I do have choices and I have been asked to trial some Windows tablets which I'm looking forward to!

Sorry about the delayed reply - have been a bit over run with work! The new iPads (although this does seem to have happened to some existing ones too) certainly appear in DHCP for the main VLAN. I've had Smoothwall support take a look at the issue and is seems that ports 80 and 443 are being blocked for these devices even though there doesn't seem to be any blocking going on at all for them. I've tried assigning static IPs but this doesn't seem to make any difference - is it be blocked by MAC address perhaps? It's doing my head in!

Hi all I have a really strange and very annoying problem which I cannot seem to solve and would really like some ideas where to go with it next. Its all a bit confusing so bear with me while I explain... So we have about 50 staff iPads that have been working just fine on our Trapeze wireless network where we have a mac address based WLAN just for them. We are moving over to a Ruckus ZD system and have a created a WLAN on it that is also only for them (it has access to Emerge on our SIMS server) and have been joining the iPads to it. The iPads roam between the various WLANS depending on where they are in the school. This has all worked fine until last week.... We added a couple of new iPads to the system and connected them to the Ruckus iPad WLAN which was fine until we tried to get onto the web. As soon as you try to go to a web page Safari says it could not connect to the web server and Chrome pretty much the same. I checked the WLAN settings and it has picked up a valid IP address from our DHCP server and the proxy details are all correct. Interestingly I was able to use Emerge which is internal but uses HTTP I think. I then connected them to the Trapeze WLAN and I get a similar problem only this time the browsers complain that they can't connect to the proxy server. Again the iPad gets a valid IP address (the same one as it gets when connected to the Ruckus WLAN) and the proxy settings are correct. Finally I connect it to our Ruckus BYOD WLAN and it works fine. The only difference with this WLAN is that it is on a separate VLAN and gets its IP address from our smoothwall box which is acting as a DHCP on a virtual port. The really confusing part of this that many of the iPads work fine with both WLANs and I have one in front of me that I use to test and have had no problems. I have tried resetting the iPad to factory defaults and removing all profiles but it makes no difference. Any suggestions very gratefully received and apologies in advance if its in the wrong forum...I just couldn't decide which one was most appropriate! Steve