Tefters

Of course not, who wants to advise their customers that full DR recovery in a Windows virtual environment is not possible?

Update from Redstor: Restoring to date before August will be fine, there is currently an issue we dealing with where the latest accumulative security updates from Microsoft will cause corruption of the filesystem. So once you have restores the server be sure to stop windows updates from deploying to that server. This is particular to vdhx restores and windows 2019 and above. Development is currently working on a resolution but unfortunately it will not be a quick fix. I do apologise for the inconvenience this will cause, I ask the guys to keep you up to date with the progress as we work trough this problem. So lets hope no-one has to restore any virtual servers in Hyper-V or Azure hey! 🤬

Afternoon all, Big warning for all Redstor customers: I currently have a server down and did a full server restore from Redstor on Thursday to VHDX and the OS C:\ drive was corrupt (NTFS), I managed to do a fix and get it up and running and everything seemed OK for 36 hours until I came in this morning and the server is dead and I cannot recover from the NTFS corruption a second time. Got a ticket raised with Redstor and this is what I got as a response: Thank you for providing the server operating system. As the affected server is running Windows Server 2019 or later, this is a known issue affecting VHDX restores on these versions of Windows. Our Machines team is currently investigating the issue. I am checking with them for the latest findings and will provide an update as soon as I have further information. So that means I cannot do any full server restores at present in case of DR, pretty big f**k up if you ask me! Now frantically looking at building a whole new server OS and re-installing everything from scratch with all apps, configs, schedules and tweaks. Need to find out who the head of the UK education division for Redstor is and start claiming compensation. Not what i needed at the start of a new term!

Signed up, but if this ends up being used for marketing reach-outs, it will get blacklisted.

Heads up for anyone going down the iPad route and are considering Lightspeed for filtering and safeguard alerting: https://theradcliffeschool-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/a_smith_radcliffeschool_org_uk/IQCpKdfdx3caSoOMxWmlfp42AWtnBs0Qn82cs5TtwYnZKhA?e=ecE6Kt Sick to death of them fobbing me off so its full disclosure time to the public. They apparently cannot replicate this issue their end...

We are also a secondary school / sixth form so i speak from that perspective. Lightsh*t at present, non-stop issues over 5 years, latest one being URL shorteners being incorrectly categorized and also allowing them to blocked sites because its filtering on the shortener URL not the redirected one. They cant replicate the issue though and apparently it's only our tenant (I call BS on that). Then you have Smoothwall, which i am trialling for a second time after 2 years of the initial trial, and I am also having problems, which I am awaiting feedback on... 🤪

We are a 1:1 school, iPads. Yes, it is a sh*t show; filtering and safeguarding companies simply cannot meet all their promises when it comes to iPads. Students' iPads are filled with selfies, memes and stupid imagery. Breakages are through the roof; parents don't/won't pay for repairs. A good 20% to 30% of iPads being used by students have broken screens with shards of glass everywhere. Year 7's now also have them, 11 years old, i didn't let my daughters have mobile phones until they were 12, going on 13, but the school will give them iPads. I look at reports daily, and the majority of the surfing is junk, and students are using them at ungodly hours. All this was pushed as an idea from the school... Students don't know how to use a computer anymore: word processing documents, presentation skills, spreadsheet data and graphs.... Skills that are all gone. The funniest part to me was why they wanted to push them onto the Year 7 cohort earlier this year, answer, to help them with reading and maths. The results for these areas, compared to 10 years ago, are a joke, and the real reason is the devices that they think are the solution, on top of lazy/lack of parenting, but they don't want to upset the parents by actually telling them how it is, so instead £80k per year on iPads, cases, chargers and licensing is spent. I have to just turn my brain off and go into Zombie mode when it comes to these devices; otherwise, you drive yourself mad just thinking about "why" and "what are we actually achieving other than ticking a box" because it sure as hell isn't helping the kids of today.

Example of what we are seeing on mass: All of these are going to various websites, the majority of which are normally blocked if going to the URL direct. Top Example: http://omniwebkit.com/s/5sUJTN = Snapchat on the web Now, obviously, if they need to browse to another page on the site after the redirect, it gets blocked because they are now on the true URL. However, they then take that URL and run it through a shortener again to get a new link to the next page. Don't even get me started on the fact that the URL path has "URL-Shortener" in the name and the page itself has URL shortener written on it, which I would have thought should be picked up on a simple text search? I'm unsure what methods are being used nowadays to detect and identify these from web filtering providers.

Which product is this with?

Yeah, our SIMS server was on the same spec as yours and we were seeing high CPU loads about 6 weeks ago so I just went nuts and assigned a ton more CPU proessors as its a VM and we had a fair few to spare.

Problem I had with yourselves however was the safeguarding portion of your product going back 2 years ago with a trial and then no-one ever coming back to me with answers at the time, including yourself.

I hear you say should but does it actually? I'm trying to work out if this is a limitation in what Apple allow you to do within their Framework or just a failure within the solution offered by Lightspeed. On a normal PC I know its a simple HTTP 301 / 302 redirect handle and thats picked up as a second request as you mention but this is iPads on cloud filters from any location. 1:1 device schemes on non PC devices, the joys!

Lightspeed.

How many processors/cores have you got on the box?

If you're not using SIMS Nextgen disable this one: I would try this before a reboot, personally.

Have you tried disabling different services within SSM to see if any particular sub service is causing the issue?

This could be due to more significant pushes within SIMS to Nextgen and the greater reliance on SSM for pushing data out via DEX. I noticed this week they have now forced Registers to Nextgen, which my end users are thrilled over. Using Nextgen is not the issue at present its the logging in and shoddy auth which is awful. I'm unable to get the MS integration to work for normal end users, although it works for admins. I'm waiting for the ParentPay Group login front-end change, which is forthcoming. I recently threw a lot of resources at our SIMS server also to stop complaints of performance from a system level so anything from here on in is purely DB indexing:

Morning all, Anyone running iPads with cloud-based Web Filtering (must be cloud-based in order to cover home use), and if so, can they do me a test using a URL shortener to try and bypass a blocked site due to the redirect. EG. Using the likes of bitly.com to create a URL for tiktok.com and then using that to bypass the filtering. I have both URL shorteners and social media blocked but there are a million URL shorteners out there that students are finding and using these for the redirects as the web filtering on an iPad only scans the initial domain and not the forwarded redirect like a normal PC (HTTP 301/302).

Just a blip on my DB then!

Anyone else get Restrcited_User_Mode on their SIMS DB this morning, thanks to the Summer update? Flipped the DB back to Multi_User this morning and everything appears OK, case logged with ESS just to do a sanity check.

The mind boggles. Why would you not just implement an Azure application ID and let that manage both the logon auth and MFA.

Owww yeah... HA! So they abandoned an Azure tenant link for individual Microsoft account links.

Do they? Please do tell. Last time I looked at this nearly a year ago there was some partial setup in the SIMS ID management side but i just couldn't get it to work properly.

Morning all, Anyone out there running SIMS Nextgen at the moment and got the Office 365 / Azure integration working ?

Havent touched it in years to be honest but when i did check it on Friday the global BCL was set at 5. I have changed it to 7 to see what happens.