Rob_D

A while back I remember talk of a Dr Turner spinoff as well. I hope not, but talking about spinoffs and film versions makes me think they're planning to end the show.

When I was WFH during lockdowns a daylight bulb really helped me with that sort of thing.

No classroom AC here (apart from the ICT Suites) and for offices, the policy seems to have been that you only get AC if you don't have external windows (or are reception for some reason). I'm lucky though, my office faces west and is shaded out until about 2pm I'm in the new build that's surprisingly good at keeping cool. Our school weather station registered 30c yesterday, although it always seems to read high on temp and I'm not seeing AC tubes hanging out the upstairs windows along our street yet, so it can't be that bad. On the face of it, 22 seems quite warm for winter. I'm sure I read somewhere 18-21 is recommended for workplaces.

First thing I'd do is check the webfiltering logs to see if there's any random URLs that are being blocked when the messages fail to send. Could be it doesn't like SSL inspection, try adding a "Do not inspect" policy for watsapp in Guardian>SSL Inspection. Or could be firewall ports. It looks like you need to have TCP 80, 443, and 5222, and UDP 3478 open for basic messaging, with potentially more for media messaging. Again logs might help you here. How are you doing auth for the watsapp device (it might not like proxying or something)? See if you get similar problems using the browser version on a PC.

Or controlled assessment coursework.

It might not be a problem if it's not going above a handful of small schools, but the more the MAT expands (with a single tenant) the more chance you have of running up against Microsoft's storage limits.

At home I got a small UPS that covers my NASs and network gear, probably gives about 30 min uptime (up to about 2 hours if I spin down the NASs) some years back. Covered us for the normal, small power cuts great. Then more recently, we got a power-wall and now the UPS feels a little redundant although it does cover the networking stuff if the power-wall doesn't switch quickly enough in a power cut. I guess home (and maybe business) batteries and solar would probably go further in a "national extended power-cut" as without internet and broadcasts there would be little use for the TV and computers (which are probably the bigger daytime power draws - At least they are for us).

If it's local power outage our DR says to send everyone home and pivot to remote learning. But for something national (or even county-wide), I think you'd have to defer to central government, who I guess be communicating over the emergency broadcast system (for the 3 people with wind-up radios). Surely it would last a couple of hours? Maybe half a day?

Apparently it depends what licensing agreement you use. Our reseller says that the ESUs are available though (or at least visible for) EA or EES agreements, but there's no sign of them for CSP or OVS users yet.

Random question, but... A lot of the anti-AI stuff seems to be going on about increased water usage (I guess for cooling). But is it really that much of a problem? It's not like the water can't be used for other things after it's gone through the datacenter, right?

We put out own image on all new devices, but the Office install is licensed through our A3 (and AFAIK you can't license desktop office apps with an A1 anymore). As I said, interesting to know from my point of view, but perhaps not overly relevant for you.

It would be interesting to see how it works out if you factor in not needing the OVS Office licenses with the A3 (although I imagine your plan would still work out cheaper).

Back-to-backed the last episode of Adolescence and the second episode of The Last of Us (season 2) last night... I think we might go for something more lighthearted tonight.

All unauthenticated devices default to student level web filtering here, so we just keep them on the normal VLAN.

I'm sorry... What? How would that work? How would someone expect that to work? It's not like GPT can email the suppliers or have magical access to their price lists. Okay, so when I ask co-pilot "how much would I expect to pay for a 64gb memory stick?", the only problem with the answer was it only picked products from amazon US (despite giving me the price in £).

If you've not been using it previously and thus don't have everything set up to sideload all the QoL stuff and modern features there's a fair bit of setup and configuration. Is all that technician time going to cost less than £1 per machine? (I guess this depends how many machines you've got left) I asked our MS support about the licenses and they say the same. Apparently they've had a lot of schools asking about it, but haven't got any info from MS yet. My guess would be something will come out around August (either details of the extended licensing, or an announcement they're moving the ELO date back into '26)

pirate

The same could be said for server virtualization, that took us 4-5 months. You're still talking about formatting down and rebuilding the hosts, then migrating all the VMS across. I'm not saying it's not doable, or event that technically complex, but it's still a pretty big job.

So convert your infrastructure to linux? That's probably another barrier to entry in a lot of Edu where it's primarily windows domains. If I were rebuilding the system from the ground up then I'd be up for doing it. But I've only ever come close to that level of rebuild once in 15 years.

Is there any reason you can't just make an internal ISS IIS web server? (or add ISS IIS to a student facing server you already have)

Are you saying ZFS can be used as a backup solution?

I've had a couple of "robot Voice" phone calls asking me to add people on linked.

Visualizing the sheer volume of printing certainly doesn't help. My previous manager managed to get enough (mostly empty) paper boxes to cover how much we print a year and we stacked them up in the school hall for inset, and I've done a stack of our annual printing verses London landmarks (I can't find it now, but we beat Big Ben)

ZFS might have been around for a decade, but it's still way less known about than RAID. If you Google "disk redundancy" you'll see a lot of stuff about RAID and virtually none about ZFS. So it's one of those things that even in tech circles people don't know they don't know about it, and it's unlikely to cross their paths organically. That and the old "if it's working, why change it?"

We do that, and we still have one department that, on average, prints over 17,500 pages a month. I'd hate to think how bad it would be if we didn't. It does bring to mind my first school (many many years ago),who were very blasé about printing. Then the school got a fancy new MFD under a lease which purportedly included x number of "free" copies per year (based on average expected usage - I think you can see where this is going...), with what I assume were higher pay-as-go-costs if you overrun. They blew through the included copies in under a week. At which point we were asked to remove teacher's ability to print to the MFD, and staff had to request usage with the front office.