Primus

Keep in mind you still ultimately need to replace the computers so you're paying to delay the inevitable.

Given we're also a former customer the rolling eyes emoji is particularly telling.

Do your research - read carefully the feedback on here from colleagues using services - every product will have the odd issue or person who doesn't like it but if there's a large number of people all complaining about a provider (cough Schools Broadband) then I'd be steering well clear.

Yes the shared drive "owns" the document and the sharing settings follow the drive. What permissions does the member of staff who wants to change the sharing settings have for the shared drive itself?

We also love the 5400R zl2s too, fantastic value for money although they cannot be far off their end of sale date now sadly - then it's 5 years and after that no more firmware updates or warranty (depending on when you bought yours and which warranty Aruba fancy applying to it!)

They're down to less than 50% market share, they're bleeding customers hand over fist and their cloud platform is a million miles away. IMHO SIMS is finished, get out before it gets messy.

That would be in breach of the licence agreement - do you just buy one Windows licence and use it across your entire fleet too as that's the equivalent.

On Chromebooks you can prevent them connecting to any other network if a managed network is in range - this can help with still having some flexibility with say Netflix at home but prevent students using a hotspot to watch Netflix in lessons.

KCSIE now says: protecting children from maltreatment, whether that is within or outside the home, including online

We use Smoothwall Cloud Filter and Smoothwall Monitor - it runs regardless of where the device is although we do allow access to sites like Netflix when not onsite. This operates 24/7 with a phone call from Monitor if something is sufficiently serious as to need an urgent response. We did anticipate an uptick in alerts and particularly out of hours alerts ahead of moving one of our schools to 1:1 with devices being taken home. We did quite a bit of work educating the students prior to their device being issued and immediately after such that we've not seen a dramatic difference in the number of alerts and out of hours alerts are relatively infrequent - I don't believe we've had an out of hours phone call as yet.

For a start - a change was requested to uplift resource allocation on August 26th, it wasn't approved until the early hours of Sunday September 1st - this is bizarre. I'm going to assume that Bromcom must be working across multiple timezones but first of all why the delay and second why would you make changes so close to the start of an academic year. The increased demand of the start of an academic year is well known and established, surely making changes in the early hours of a Sunday is bad time to be doing this.

That RCA has so many weird aspects I barely know where to start.

Have you logged it with support? Perhaps @tom_newton can help?

If you SSH into the Smoothwall and run top what's showing as causing the load? Also what's the spec of your Smoothwall - is it one of their appliances?

Your Chromebooks should be using the secret knock to bypass the Smoothwall so they shouldn't be causing any load - have you configured this? The only time I've ever seen a Smoothwall box go randomly high on load was when we were maxing out an old low bandwidth backup line.

What value would the hypothetical procurement be for?

Can your ISP supply stats on if you're maxing the connection out, if you've got 500 Chromebooks all active at the same time then 500mb is probably getting hit quite hard. Is that a leased line with symmetric upload speed?

We have about 2000 Chromebooks across our 5 schools on one WAN with 2 Internet break outs, we've used Cloud Filter for years and we've never seen that. What bandwidth is your Internet connection?

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We run the same WiFi networks across all our schools which include primaries and RADIUS authentication.

I'm not picking an argument, I'm pointing out that many suppliers bad-mouth products such as Unifi in an attempt to upsell. Had you restricted your post to suggestions on how to improve performance that would have been fine but your post went beyond that. Your posts on here carry your company name - from your website it's clear that you prefer other WiFi vendors so when you post on here with that company name making comments about how Unifi is "low end cheap kit with poor support" I commented to provide some balance.

Unifi isn't low end cheap kit at all. If you want support there are now a variety of options with UK-based providers or with Unifi themselves if you're using a cloud gateway (they've said they will launch this support for other deployments in the near future). Your advice on channels is strange - the opposite of what would normally be advised - 5GHz doesn't travel as far so overlapping channels are less critical than with 2.4GHz where it travels far further and so overlapping channels can be more of an issue. You go on to say auto doesn't work but advise they use it for 2.4GHz so which is it? I've seen plenty of suppliers on here and in many other places rubbish it in an attempt to upsell people to more expensive solutions where their margin is far greater, the fact is Unifi works very well and is a good fit for the majority of schools which is why we're seeing so many deploying APs and switches now. I note the Rezolution ICT Ltd website lists a number of manufacturers you sell but Unifi isn't one of them.

I'm honestly still not sure why the secret knocks cannot replicate - you replicate lots of other stuff like IDex.

Whilst there's a balance, moving from RADIUS which works fine with iOS and iPad OS to MAC address filtering is a massive step backwards.

Are you managing them or could they jailbreak them? Are they the only device ever used?