apinnard

How easy is it to leave the EMBC? The teachers, students, senior leadership team and myself here have all had enough of the diabolical service that the EMBC are "providing" us. We have had intermittent internet connectivity for near on six weeks now, and we keep getting passed from pillar to post between Synetrix and Affiniti. I am aware that the EMBC are having major problems at the moment, but I thought that after several months of bedding in time they have had their chance to prove themselves and have done abysmally. I think it's about time to look elsewhere for a corporate provider and look at ditching the EMBC. At least we will have our own control over our own connection and filtering (something we have very limited control of at the moment.)

Our CC3 setup is quite poor in terms of performance to be honest. We are looking to upgrade or ditch it as before the school had full time ICT techs ike myself, they relied on DotICT to come in once a week and do work. Unfortunately these guys are a band of monkeys and messed things right up which we have been piecing back together ever since! Also - our teachers have got wind of the extra features in CC4 and are very interested to say the least.

We at Latimer Arts College are looking at upgrading our CC3 to CC4. Aaron and myself have been to a demo of CC4 but as this was provided by RM it all "went well." We are wondering if any schools in and around the Northants area have adopted CC4 and can either give us some feedback or let us come and have a look for ourselves? Our current CC3 setup is four DC's (all under 1.5 years old), one exchange server, one RM Terminal server, and a few other member servers of our own. We have around 200 student PC's and 250 laptops (staff and student.) All our workstations, including school admin staff, are on our CC3 network as we ditched the "admin" network years ago. Any feedback gratefully received!

We have just bought Eclipse.net for our librarians. They were wowed by the online demo. Setting up is easy, migrating from Alice not so bad if you know a little of SQL. The only problem is that the current fines do not migrate from Alice. Since installing it we have noticed the following problems: - Fines are not calculated, even for new books issues AFTER the migration - Books are not recognised when scanned, the masks do not work. Apart from that it's quite a shiny system. Feel free to arrange with Aaron if you want to come and have a look. Alex

We purchased 35 Satellite Pro A100's to replace old Fujitsu-Siemens E8020's that we got off the LEA a few years back. The Fujitsu's were good workhorses - wicked battery life and very durable. The replacement Toshiba's have been a nightmare: We have had three that have deveolped a straight green/yellow line down the LCD screen which have needed warranty repair. Three more have had AC adapters that have died, and in general they are falling to bits after only a year. The batteries last a maximum of an hour even with Tosh power saver installed. All in all there have been about 8 warranty returns out of those 35, and every time Toshiba take two days to send a courier, then we don't see the unit(s) back for another 10 days - 2 weeks plus! We also purchased 6 Toshiba Sat Pro P100's for the senior leadership team - and all of these have developed cracks along the hinges on the lids. We complained to Tosh who have said we need to send all 6 away for a replacement lid under warranty as it's "a known fault with this model." What a joke. We have just bought 30 Dell Latitude D530's out of the last of our budget for the year and we are very satisfied with the durability, battery life and build quality. Only time will tell.......

Woohaaaa website now working. Just gotta get the RDP server working although this is in hand aparantely.

Yep still no website. I have been told that affiniti are dealing with it, but they wont elaborate.

Yep collecting POP3 email from third party providers here too! At bloody last!!

Hi Kim We have an unrestricted group that we setup ourselves in NetSweeper that basically has the blacklist setting, with everything unticked. We use that for myself and Aaron, assigning it to only our two static IP machines. We have tried contacting the RMPLC email server from one of these machines, but it is still not connecting. Regarding this problem, and our url http://www.latimer.org.uk... I have at last got through to Synetrix who have told me that it is a firewall problem and will need to be escalated to "affinity" for them to look at.

Yea I am trying to get through to them as we speak. I can't get anybody to pick up the phone at the moment! It's quite critical too, as the head uses it and it's the main contact email address that is printed on our website and all our headed letters! As a side - our url http://www.latimer.org.uk still doesn't point to our internal web server either!

We have some staff who use POP3 email with RM Plc. The POP3 server is mail.rmplc.co.uk port 110. This POP3 server does not support SSL port 995 so it has to remain as 110. This is currently not working (being blocked I think.) Is this something that I need to wait to be fixed, or will it be a job to log with Synetrix? Cheers.

Yep - I really should have read the docs first! Not having a portal account kind of makes that a bit difficult though Changing the relay to relay.embc.uk.com has worked for us. Now I just need to get Synetrix to point http://www.latimer.org.uk to our internal web server again! Happy days! Alex

Thanks Kev, much apreciated. I do not have the docs available but I will give this a shot. Will let you know how it goes.

In the smart host section of the connectors tab in exchange 2003 we just have "forward all mail trhrough this connector to the following smart hosts: smtp.embc.uk.com". There is no area for credentials. It all worked before thursday evening fine. Basically we dont use the silly .northants.sch.uk domain at all, (took some arguing with Brenda Scoble about two years ago to get this! So for instance I am [email protected], but I have no portal login and no .northants.sch.uk email account either. The same goes for all 1200 of our students and staff. We are receiving emails fine, however sending is saying that we are not authenticated. I have just logged a call with Synetrix, the guy on the phone said it was probably something at their end.

Hi Kim Yes, https://mail.latimer.org.uk (OWA) is now working fine. http://www.latimer.org.uk however is not. I am smart hosting to smtp.embc.uk.com and there are no credentials in there. We don't use the EMBC mail here at all, it's all [email protected]. Nobody (except the head/senco/bursar) has EMBC email accounts

I have changed the deny page to the system default and now this is working fine. Points 2 and 3 are still valid though!

A couple of things I have noticed this morning: 1) When a user goes to a "blocked" page (i.e: Bebo.com) instead of the NetSweeper warning, they get the EMBC login page. We don't have users login here so I am not sure why this is appearing! 2) Our website (http://www.latimer.org.uk) and mail server are still unavailable externally. This is actually hosted internally by us but the domain is done by EMBC. 3) We send email from our own exchange box mail.latimer.org.uk with the email addresses [email protected] but whenever we send external emails this morning it bounces back saying "You do not have permission to send to this recipient. For assistance, contact your system administrator." Apart from that, not bad for first thing in the morning!

Fine by me. I couldn't be arsed to remote work this weekend anyway. Too many chocolate eggs to wade through.

We are using our own web server in-house which has an external IP assigned by the EMBC. Our domain name (latimer.org.uk) is also tagged by EMBC and a domain whois today suggests that this has now gone over to Synetrix: Name servers: ns1.embc.uk.com ns2.embc.uk.com We also have our own Exchange 2003 box which has is setup to smart host to EMBC. At the moment I can't get on to this either. I read somewhere that the external IP's will not be changing until summer. Our website at the moment is unavailabe as is our exchange server so I am guessing this is due to the weekend maintenance. Will I need to change the smart host in exchange 2003, if so can anybody tell me what it needs to change to... and when?! Cheers.