Primus

Yup, we've used Aspire for years, they're top notch.

Yup - school 1 has an S14 main and an S10 failover and our other school a pair of S10s. We've got redundant Internet connections and redundancy in the switching so the UTM was a definite single point of potential failure.

Yes from Amazon delivered earlier.

On the other hand Bromcom will have be involved in lots of bids and tenders for schools and MATs and they're suing this MAT. If they'd sued every school that chose not to go with them you'd have a point but they will regularly lose out. If your tender process is correct and you follow that process then you have nothing to fear. If you discount a supplier outwith of your tender process you're going to find yourself in trouble for not following the process.

They're suing because they allege the rules weren't followed. The attitude on here to the legal action is getting ridiculous. No large company commences legal action without substantial legal advice and evidence of potential wrongdoing. If the school followed the rules they have nothing to fear and will completely recover their legal costs from Bromcom. If you ran a company selling a product that was strongly focused on schools and you found schools weren't following procurement regulations and legislation to your detriment what would you do? The sensible approach is not to rush to judgement but to wait and see what happens.

All switches are on a UPS here.

You don't think most schools now have a symmetrical connection? I'd think most do tbh.

Shock - union where the majority of members are teachers has an article discussing issues relating to the majority of members. The article points out the health risks to ALL staff and how photocopying is not something teaching staff can be directed to do.

That's really disappointing - can someone from Smoothwall comment? It doesn't yet support IPv6 AFAIK so surely they're going to have to add support for that at least?

If you're using the global proxy and sending everything back via your on premise appliance then no, you don't.

Yes, I do.

No, they're built to run fanless.

There's a lot of examples of devices that are fanless and have no issues with longevity. Most of the time students need something that's quick to boot, has good battery life, a decent keyboard and screen (a nice trackpad is a big one for me). They don't need a Core i9 with 32Gb of RAM. Passively cooled laptops are absolutely fine provided they're from a reputable manufacturer - we always extend our warranties to 3 years NDB onsite for peace of mind but rarely if ever have to use it.

Yes you can find the WPA2 key on a Chromebook - there's guides online on how to do it. Yeah unboxing etc can be time consuming but if students are bringing their devices in you could quickly enroll them. You could actually get the class to do it for you if you put the creds on the board (change them before and after obviously) and stand at the front guiding them through it - boom class done in minutes

I'm not sure what you don't understand? If you're using RADIUS using their user credentials then yes they'd be able to connect with other devices. My point was that if you're managing them then you can control all of this. You said you don't want students to be able to connect any other devices but now you're saying they're going to connect to open wifi (hopefully you mean a RADIUS protected SSID) and authenticate using their username and password. Eg. if you manage them they could all connect to an SSID dedicated to them using a PSK that only you know, or RADIUS creds that only you know. But if you don't manage them then they need to be able to join the WiFi and at this point you're going to struggle to prevent them joining other devices. 20 minutes per device? Takes us about 2 minutes per device to enrol them. Long story short - if they're coming on site you need to manage them, the myriad of issues you'll have if you don't is huge - eg. they log on with a personal account and use a VPN extension which is hard to block to completely bypass filtering. If it was managed they wouldn't be able to do this.

If you connect their personal Chromebook to your WiFi then they are likely going to be able to get the Chromebook to tell them the credentials and you will no longer be able to prevent them from connecting personal devices to your WiFi. You will also struggle to filter them effectively as you will need to push an extension but if they can log on with a personal Google account which they could then the extension wouldn't be pushed out. To properly use them in school you want them managed - you can designated hours and days when they can be unmanaged for use at home etc. It is a lot more complicated because parents have bought them rather than the school but you should be able to find something that works for everyone and allows you to manage them.

Ours are all Chromebooks so we didn't need to worry about that.

In the past we took the view if we supplied a device only it was up to the parent to filter it as required. If we provided a connection too then we would always provide filtering. However the DfE have issued devices in their first offer that had filtering applied regardless of whether they were using their own Internet or a connection provided by DfE or us. Therefore we have now moved to filtering all school devices on premise and off premise so that we are not out of step with what the DfE seems to deem to be best practice.

The law hasn't yet passed through the HoC but my understanding is that that game of football would certainly be against the guidance and is very likely to be against the law. I may be wrong however.

I don't think it can go ahead.

This is my thing - I've been looking at CrowdStrike but the same nagging doubt in my head - we've (touch wood) had no issues so far running Defender and managing it using SCCM.

That doesn't marry up with our many experiences of PHE - all the advice we've had boils down to virtually no one needs to isolate - they'll do their level best to exclude anyone they can from isolation.

No because the licence only covers you if you're using it with the Promethean board. Just having some boards in storage isn't sufficient.

It does mention monitoring. Read it again!

The first paragraph says: Governing bodies and proprietors should be doing all that they reasonably can to limit children’s exposure to the above risks from the school’s or college’s IT system. As part of this process, governing bodies and proprietors should ensure their school or college has appropriate filters and monitoring systems in place. Allowing staff or visitors to view content that is unsuitable risks children also seeing it, hence the need to filter and report on staff, visitors and children. It also calls into question their suitability to be members of staff or visitors under the broader safeguarding duty on schools - if someone on site is viewing inappropriate content using your Internet connection then you ought to know about it in order to be able to take action. There is also the obvious issue with shoulder surfing and students obtaining access to accounts they shouldn't - eg. a rogue visitor sharing their log on details or students seeing it written down on a visitor's information pack or similar.