howartp

Just had an IT Security Audit last month. Our staff policy was: 6 Characters Complex (3 from 4) No re-use in 12 30 attempts before lockout 30 minute lockout period 1 Day minimum age Expires every 30 days Yes, staff moaned about the complexity initially, but they're essentially fine about it now. The auditor suggested we reduce the lockout threshold down to 5 - ie 5 failed attempts will lock the account. Otherwise a hacker (or bot) can try one a minute every minute forever. We did this, but we're getting calls about lockouts at least once per hour. Now we don't believe this is users failing their passwords, so we're now looking into what is causing it - many of them use iPads, but it's happening too often to be staff that have changed their AD password but not updated their mail client, for example. Temporarily raised it back to 10 attempts whilst I investigate. (Just before going to Governors tonight to present the results of the IT Audit which did say 'we have met this objective by....' but is now a bag of lies!)

Have you already got pull-printing on the devices? If so, you probably don't need any further costs - just the basic MF package. If you don't already have, then some manufacturers (maybe all?) need further licenses from them, to 'switch on' certain functionality. Sharp needs OSA Embedded License for example. Peter

£1,000 for a watch? Are you quackers??

It's my primary text editor as well as coding - I only use notepad to quickly strip formatting from copied text as notepad fires up quicker.

UltraEdit Bought it years ago before lots of these others came out.

Thanks - I'm working with @Millgate and @VeryPC to get some designs to formulate a tender from. Tape library + SAN/Nas first, then I'll look at what £££ I've got left.

Interesting to see if patch 2 helps me then; my jobs just claim to have no response from the tape drive after about 1.5-2days (these are big jobs) then give up when the 4-hour non-response timeout elapses.

We offered parents choice of BYOD or subscribe to iPad lease scheme. 500 subscribed, 1200 are BYOD'ing. Only the lease iPads are on AirWatch. I haven't found an option to prevent apps being installed yet - you can create a blacklist of apps and create a compliance policy around it which does anything from alerting the user to wiping the device if you contravene it. I set this up this morning to report students to their HOY to deal with. I want to use Radius with our Smoothwall, but ( as per loads of threads on here) that don't work. I'm currently using a shared password on the student WLAN then captive portal to auth each day. Used ZeroIT for BYO mobile access for 12-18 months until we launched iPads before Easter. Works for 99% of iPads, 80% of Android, 10% of Windows Phone and 0% of Blackberry - or something like that. Having said that, I think there's an update in one of the recent updates that might help increase that. Peter

Hi Andyire, We're using Ruckus and Airwatch for our iPads on a lease scheme; we haven't put the BYOD's on because of the exhaustive cost of AirWatch to do so. Works absolutely fine as long as they haven't installed VPN apps - with the VPN active they can't access the Ruckus captive portal to authenticate; unfortunately once authenticated they can then turn the VPN back on again and off they go with unfiltered access. Peter

I wouldn't move FOR broadband, as people have said. However, if I was moving, I would not move anywhere that didn't have fibre broadband (ie only VirginMedia last time I researched, but I guess there are more now) available - I will not use an ADSL internet line regardless of the speeds it quotes. I'm paying little more for our VirginMedia 100mb line (and I get close to it on speed tests) than I was when I signed up for 1.5mb years ago - they just keep doubling it - and it's only been properly down maybe 5 times in that period. Peter

Use @Millgate for most of my kit of this nature now.

Yes, I was determined we could do a better job in-house with Avery labels, barcode font and software. Persevered for about a month then gave up when the Christmas backup failed because it couldn't read 3 of the barcode labels during the new-year shutdown period.

I use Netc Europe The Media Barcode Specialists for labels. Next day turn-around and very friendly, very good ordering and checking process. I used to do very much as you do, and it took me a long time to get away from the mindset of manually labelling tapes. Now that Veeam manages them, and tells me which media pool they're in, I don't worry any more. Yes, I put the five 'Nov 2015' tapes into one pile/box with a postit note and rubber band just to speed up finding them in the cupboard when I need to restore, but I don't label each tape. I'm just now looking at a Tape Library as my IBM autoloader is dying and I'm increasing my backup/archive storage - this will mean I rarely take most tapes out of the library, so I will always rely on the barcodes. LTO6 for VM images, and LTO5 for data backups. Peter

You've probably had your answer elsewhere by now, but the answer to this is to use barcode labels. I had the same query when I moved from BackupExec to Veeam a year or so ago, but now everything is barcoded everything just works.

Anyone?

Sorry, I mis-remembered the response from Capita - it wasn't the easily accessible release notes that we all read before deployment, it was the "Life without levels in Assessment" handbook which you access via the Documentation button in SIMS, then Exams & Assessment, then Performance & Analysis. Now why didn't I think of looking in there before raising a support call?

Is the /media a folder for media storage, or some media studies website/webpages? You can add a new virtual directory to IIS that points to d:\inetpub\wwwroot (or wherever you want), but that might have implications if you're embedding images/videos into a page on one website (c:) that are stored on another. I'd probably move the whole wwwroot to a bigger D: drive and either redirect the default c: website to it, or leave the default website empty and disabled, and create a new website for the whole of the content on d: Peter

Only primaries and all-through schools. (Those with kids from year 1 through to 13, ie primary and secondary combined)

Programmes of Study is only currently available to Primaries and all-through schools. I asked Capita last week and got a nice blunt pointer to the release notes explaining how to read before asking stupid questions.

Ditto, except from a regular supplier. Bought a netbook for using in cabs and small spaces (amongst other jobs) instead of lugging old laptop about.

Hi everyone. I'm reasonably ok with my live data storage needs, but I'm fighting a losing battle with backup storage, and I know I'm not keeping long enough archives. Server room (live storage) and DR location (disk and tape backup) are both on same site, but physically distant. How do you do yours? Our live storage is mainly on a SAN, with all the servers being VMware ESX. We use Veeam to backup to a 32TB disk array, which holds around 3 weeks of backups (weekly and daily), and I then back those up onto LTO6 tape. I suspect my tape drive/autoloader is dying, I know I've no capacity for DR restore of data if the server goes up, and I only hold about 18 months of archive. Do I get a big tape library (eg http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/products/tape-automation/product-detail.html?oid=5386662#!tab=features) which will sort my archive needs out for good, but won't help when it comes to DR because you can't run VMs from tape. Do I get another SAN and/or bunches of disk trays, which will sort out data capacity for DR, but is still on the network and thus susceptible to virus attack. Do I use Veeam's WAN facility to duplicate my backups to a local school over the county WAN, which still doesn't give me local storage for running VMs in DR unless I physically bring the server/storage back from the local school. Any thoughts? Peter

Neither myself or @timbo have got this working either despite several attempts including Smoothwall and Ruckus.

A sports hall I saw somewhere a couple of years ago had projector inside a box at high ceiling height - it was motorised to drop-down to viewing height when needed. No idea where I saw it or who did it.

If you do struggle with Solus3 failing tolerance levels on the database - check you've enough disk space for the automatic backup to take place. The actual failure reason is hidden in a log file but I keep banging my head on a brick wall over it till I work it out. Hopefully it's now drilled in my head enough to remember next time. Re upgrading SOLUS, I couldn't get SOLUS to upgrade itself from 3.7.x as the SOLUS database wasn't at a certain level (it was!) - so I downloaded the msi's from Capita and put it on manually.

Web companies love me when they foolishly send me a plaintext password - I make sure their IT team know how bad this is! (Particularly when the email title is 'your new username and password' and the email contains both your username and your password)