Tefters

Thanks Tom, will drop an email. Just when i thought things couldn't get any worse my colleague has passed me the below screenshot as he was doing some due diligence and checking the suspicious web URL's over the last few days. Apparently the Lightspeed filtering yesterday allowed this on a students iPad: How... I mean words cannot describe my current feelings here.

Morning Tom, Do Smoothwall offer a full cloud solution where iPads can be both filtered as well as safeguarding alerting take place? Essentially I have 3 boxes I need ticking: 1. I want all traffic through a cloud proxy, not coming back on-site through our internet pipe to go through an on-prem device and back out again. 2. Needs to be a competent filtering solution, not just a simple blacklist/whitelist. 3. Must be able to alert of key words/terms/phrases as mentioned above regardless of what search engine they are typed in on. If you can meet all these criteria then great!

Cheers, that's pretty much where my head is at now. Do you use your devices offsite also and if so what is the experience like? Is it captive portal or another app installed on the iPad? I have a love / hate view of Lightspeed at the moment (current supplier) as I love the fact you install the app on the iPad and everything is seamless to the end user regardless of location. Exa proposed an extension on my current Quantum filtering solution I use for the desktop estate to their Quantum+ which would cover devices off-prem but would involve a captive portal. Its something I am going to look into but I don't know how much i like the idea an end user experience of logging into a captive portal to surf the net and then by the sounds having to authenticate for the actual browser itself too? Will be interesting to see once I get some trials and testing running.

Cheers all or the input so far. As far as monitoring of words in other apps on an iPad I know it's impossible except for Microsoft apps that save online to OneDrive, SharePoint or Exchange as these can be picked up via other API hook in methods so ultimately it simply boils down to web browsing. Now there are many different providers and ways of doing web filtering which is the easy part. PAC file, DNS redirection and these can be utilised with a proxy app installed on the device or a captive portal when in unknown locations (off-prem). Where this all falls short is the alerting and it being hit and miss or bound to only 1 search provider. Some of this is down to the provider and some is down to Apple and their restrictions on what you can do on an iPad. The best I've seen and can think of is a custom web browser app which essentially logs everything you type in it and can then report on that regardless of the site. Go back 2 1/2 years ago I looked at Classroom.Cloud as they were the only people offering such a thing. It was ok at the time but had limitations on no third party authentication (Azure/Entrance) so required a login from its own system which just wasn't going to work. They also offered non authentication surfing which again was a big no no. I believe this has since changed and I need to review via another trial but the price point is a little disappointing for a web browser on an iPad that is just doing safeguarding keyword logging/reporting. I also need to fully test the product to make sure it can do what it says on the tin. Yes the product does and can offer a lot more but only on a PC/Mac level like all the others. I asked them about whether it could do web filtering also but the simple answer is only Whitelist/Blacklist so that's a non-runner especially with secondary school kids so I would need a separate filter still. I'm really hating iPads with a passion at this point in this scenario as I feel it's like trying to drive a square peg into a round hole. If it was a Windows or Mac device I could just install an agent/application and be done with it all. Maybe I'm being too safety conscious and web filtering is enough and alerting is not required, my major concern is that we are providing the devices for students to use externally from our 4 walls so that responsibility lies on us to proactively alert if children are trying to search up self harm even if they can't get to it? Go to Google and type in "how to sleep forever" and you get plastered with Samaritans and other support group sites/numbers for the results, I can see it in the test user web filtering search results logs but do you think I get an active alert for it from my current safeguarding provider, nope! These products are far superior on an actual computer and probably work all the time (can't comment, haven't tested) but the struggle is real to find a solution that just works on these fruit based slates.

If you get a chance / are able, can you do some searches around "overdose", "painless ways to die", "slit wrists" and see if you get any alerts.

Sweet! Time to pick my first victim server tomorrow and do an in-place upgrade overnight

And you are getting these alerts through web searches and not things typed into office 365 because this sounds completely different to our experience over the last 2 years. We've had engineers confirm everything in our setup is correct and even confirmation from their support that web searches show under the filtering but not through the alerting system.

Funnily enough they are the ones I am looking to leave after 2 years. The filtering works fine, the safeguard alerting, not so much... Do you have an on-prem rocket filter or whatever they call it nowadays that you send the iPads through or are you using their full cloud solution? I've been using their full cloud solution and the issue I have is that whenever I pull out an iPad (usually once every 3 months) and setup as a test student and start typing in such things as "how many paracetamol to overdose", "how to kill myself painlessly" or "how to slit my wrists" it is very hit and miss to whether it wants to alert or not. Every time I test I change the parameters i'm searchng for and majority of the time it misses and doesn't catch. On top of that it will only alert on anything searched via Google, use another search engine and it cannot alert. When was the last time you sat down and tested in iPad against it out of curiosity?

Afternoon all, Any secondary schools out there running a 1:1 iPad scheme? If so what products are you using for your filtering and safeguard alerting solutions. I'm ready to throw in the towel with our current provider as its just not working as advertised after 3 years. Only interest in iPads, if it was a laptop or MacBook then my life would be 10000x easier with an installed agent.

Praise jebus!

Evening @Andycat, A little late to the party but I am currently processing 3 SARs for the first time all in 1 day and am able to do it all in Purview for free? Not sure if you worked out how to do this now but if not let me know and I can give some advice.

Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes Unifi. We use to have a diverse fibre network that I had installed about 10 years ago on OM3, we have since made this our core network as we moved to 10gb backbone and the old fibre network was OM2 multiple 1gb links. Would cost us a fortune to re-run / replace so moved over to the diverse network. Due to the way out switching and Comms areas have panned out now we have had to branch off diverse links so some areas only have 1 fibre available. As for the rest of those DofE guidelines, lol... That's all best blue sky world, if only!

Cheers lads, PS Shutdown script will be my next hit. Dunno why my PowerShell scripts are hanging / inconsistent anymore, ran them for years and everything worked great.

Morning all, What are people currently using to shutdown their PC's every night? I previous used PowerShell scripts which read all the computers from AD and then sent a shutdown command to them from a DC but as of a year ago it has become rather unstable and hangs for no particular reason so curious about other methods.

Live Register. Fantastic team [emoji106]

Well spank my ass and call me Charlie, look what i accidentally stumbled across this afternoon: If some iCloud Data isn’t syncing when a student sets up a new device – Apple Support (UK) This is our issue and the workaround is what I worked out yesterday so that is the only solution. Looking at the published date it was only published recently too... Ho hum, problem solved i guess.

When i had the original problem before summer (i applied the Summer patch a few days after release), I was getting in the region of 60+ a day, mainly with Attendance Marks and Registers during tutor and afternoon as that's the main AM/PM register. After doing all the hoops with ESS and waiting an extortionate amount of time the NOLOCK patch was created specifically for us and we ran it in and have only had 2 complaints since and the XML logging shows roughly 10 a day now but as mentioned I do not know if the users are getting booted out of the client and just logging back in or not as teachers get bored or reporting things very quickly and expect you to crystal ball everything. Seems a little strange that it worked for me and 1 or 2 other users who reported on here that it helped them but then not others but looking at time lines and people posting on here it would seem they ran it after a few consolidated workstation patches were released after the summer update so wonder if something with them caused to patch to invalidate?! At this point its just guessing as we don't know their coding etc... but seeing as their own forums are lighting up and they have announced a major case if now open it will be an interesting follow. #popcorn

Let me know how bad yours looks, curious to see what its like on others.

Instructions for DB deadlock reporting: 1. Open SQL Management Studio against your SIMS server. 2. Left hand menu, go to Management > Extended Events and then right click on the Sessions folder and select New Session. 3. General Tab - Give it a name, Eg. "Deadlocks" > Events Tab - Use the search events field and look for "database_xml_deadlock_report" and push it to the right column > Data Storage - Choose event file as the target and specify a location, ours is set at maximum 1GB and rollover 5 files > Advance tab - Change nothing. 4. Once made you should see your created session under the sessions folder, right click on it and start. 5. Sit back and wait a day or 2 and let the deadlock events roll in, its handy to have your end users report deadlock client crashes to you and keep a spreadsheet with date, time, what they were doing in sims and error message (ID in particular). 6. Come back and check you session report by expanding the session name and you will see something underneath it that you can double click, has the wording of "package0.event.blablabla". 7. A list of deadlocks will open on the right side of SQL Management Studio, you left click once on each one and at the bottom will be a details pain of each event, the last field says "xml_report", double click that to get the real nitty gritty details in XML format. You can read the first major line "process id=" and scroll along to see the process ID, user logon, date and time. You can also scroll down through the details to see what part the process was in when it deadlocked to help marry up with end users. As per my previous post and screenshot you can then use this to count how many you are really getting a day. Yesterday I had 12 but no end users reported anything, I think mine have given up reporting to be honest so from our perspective its fixed but who knows... EDIT: Added screenshot for guidance.

I have raised a support ticket with Apple regarding this as I have managed to do some further testing. It would appear that old iPads are being remembered in students iCloud accounts along with some encrypted safari data!?! If you skip the previous passcode option on the OOBE to get the new iPad setup and then go to iCloud in settings and try re-sync when asked for the previous passcode again you can choose a "more information" button and it will tell you why, in the cases I am finding it's due to a few KB worth of encrypted safari data (F know why...). You then get a further option to wipe all the iCloud data and start again from fresh, choose this and all good but obviously if they have photos and other stuff in iCloud poof it's deleted too. I still don't think this is right so will see if I get anywhere with Apple Business Technical Support.

Pretty much. Sims ID / NextGen is all intertwined behind the scenes through Azure. Last time I bothered to mess around with NextGen which was about a year ago I managed to slip into Sims ID from the NextGen setup and end up in a rabbit hole of test resources, messed up redirects and all sorts. Dex the service that manages all of this uses SMS (Sims Service Manager) and has been unstable for a long time. They moved it from syncing every 20 minutes to pretty much live and with write back. Throw into the mix of other services that write back live such as Class charts etc... and you now have a very outdated SQL DB model being battered with transactions left right and center. The Summer release definitely made big changes behind the scenes that have made deadlocks a big problem or at least brought them to the surface more (end user client crashes). Our case was not taken very seriously at first and then escalated into weeks and months before we were thrown a patch. Many excuses ranging from isolated incident to patch can't be created due to cloud strike issues. I've mentioned before but looking at the release notes in the SQL code of the patches majority if not all the coding is now outsourced across the pond to a 3rd party so add that into the equation when reporting, monitoring, troubleshooting along with all the other intertwined write back and sync systems both with ESS and from 3rd parties. Now that more schools have finally run the summer patch, albeit a little late, it would appear that there are bigger issues a foot underneath and now the Sims forums are starting to light up like a Christmas tree too and ESS finally caving in to having a major case open. Problem is now that Sims on-prem is going through a bad patch and NextGen is in no way looking like a finished product anytime soon. I'm still shocked they are getting away with having all this data online available through a simple login method with no MFA, not even Microsoft account linked when it's all sitting in Azure! It's ok though because ESS asked schools to commit to 3 or 5 year contract renewals right. [emoji849]

So I just looked through my SQL deadlock report setup against the SIMS database and my receptionist got booted out trying to save Lesson Marks. Also still seeing a large amount of deadlocks behind the scenes but luckily not affecting end users, mainly its failures in the DEX service which is used for SIMS Online / NextGen. If I find some time in the next few hours I might write up some instructions on how you can setup an SQL report for Deadlocks to see how many you are getting and what area they are related to.

Be warned that if this happens during registers that your teachers will need to go back in and make sure marks are correct again. This issue is a lot more serious than ESS seem to be taking it as a whole. Funnily enough my receptionist just had a deadlock this morning for the first time since we were given the original fix just before summer and will investigate it in a moment.

I hear paperless is the future. Been hearing it for 10 years mind you but apparently it's the future...

Its possible that the patch has become incompatible due to other patches released since. As mentioned previously, code in the patch just makes the DB ignore deadlocks. Since having the patch we have not had any deadlocks but the patch was made for us back in August.