Rob_D

Wouldn't Air-air/HVAC style system require a lot of ducting that I imagine would a pain to retrofit into a UK house. (I'm imagining a US style "central air" HVAC system)

I'd be surprised if this hasn't been done before, but who here enables MFA for students?

It looks similar to our system where 1 is the expansion tank for the central heating loop and the other is to provide additional head pressure for the hot water (water goes from the tank to the immersion/hot water cylinder where it's heated before going to the taps). In some systems it's also used to feed the upstairs (bathroom) cold taps. [Edit: Here's a diagram that makes it all clear as mud] https://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age11-14/Heat%20energy/Transfer%20of%20heat%20energy/text/Hot_water_system/index.html

Have you got SSL decryption set to "decrypt an inspect" for the dafont domain?

Have you checked for DNS/IP problems? We had an issue recently where computers would keep looking for a decommissioned DNS server.

That's pretty ingenious. Don't the monitors come back to standby after being turned off at the wall? Doesn't that cause faffing while the kids work out how to turn them back on?

Netsupport here. It's always been pretty good and when we have had problems their tech support is always great.

We've used manageengine for both the ICT and site teams for over 10 years now, works great for us. The only thing I don't like is how early they start trying to push our renewals through (our license renews in November, but their sales guys are sending us renewal quotes from about June).

Our response is always: The school does not condone the downloading of YouTube videos as it would breach the YouTube Terms of Service (below), and if you're doing it without the permission of the original content creator could be in breach of copyright. If you want to obtain an offline copy of the video you would have to contact the original content creator and ask. https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=GB&template=terms

No outside/unmanaged devices doesn't sound's like a reasonable thing for a school to say, I mean how many places have actual BYDO setups? I don't see why the norm couldn't become: At school/work you use the school's/company's device to do your work, at home you use your own device for whatever you want. Personally, I'd rather that than national level filtering for all kids (if that's what you're talking about).

Nothing to do with the size of the device. Another way to look at it would be "you can use anything you want as long it doesn't have a celular connection" It still biols down to "no phones".

Some years back, we cracked down on mobile use during the school day because the new year 7s weren't socialising with each other and forming friendship groups. We tried some half-measures like "not inside the school building", but the students just took the mick, so we went for "turned off/on silent and in your bag or it gets confiscated". Parents broadly supported it and we've not had any issues.

Hi, We keep having a problem with our new Win11 build where the taskbar keeps freezing. Has anyone seen this before or know what might be causing it?

Similar here, except we've got an S10 as failover and a newer S9 as primary. Maybe it's old school thinking, but I like my firewalls to be a physical box between the local network and the internet.

Wasn't there a Windows 11 bug that caused either OD sync to try and pull everything down (filling the drive) or Windows to think the placeholders are full files and showing the drive as full. We had a couple of instances of this. Either deleting the user's local profile or just running the "free up space" option in OD Sync worked for us, and installing the latest windows updates seems to have stopped it coming back.

What's up with the Bromcom helpdesk being closed at 3pm on a Friday when their stated opening hours are 8:00-5:00?

The only shortcut redirect that works for us is to "snippingtool.exe". Other "workaround" (if you can call it that) is the fact that our "Suppress default start menu" GPO doesn't seem to work properly in Win11 so staff can find the working one from the default start if they scroll down far enough (but it just doesn't show up in searches). Or Windows+Shift+S works fine here.

Are you using redirected start menus? We've noticed that despite being installed snipping tool will not work from the redirected shortcut.

I've successfully bought DELLs from OX-IT, Softcat and CCS Media.

In Hyper-V you can right click on the VM and go to settings > Processors and you can change the number of v-cores from there, but the VM will have to be turned off while you do this. (If you're not using Hyper-V then it will probably be similar). If the "main DC" is your virtual host, then assigning more processing power to the VM could have an impact on the host, as the VM can use more of the available processing power (meaning it can't be used by other local processes). I think by the end, our SIMS server had 8 cores and something like 20gig of ram (but we had 100 or so staff using it all at once).

What do you need it to do? Or what is your ideal setup? My vision of the simplest option (not using NPS), is have a business SSID for domain/company owned devices (probably using some flavor of WPA) on your main PC VLAN, and a visitor/BYOD SSID (using captive portal) on it's own isolated VLAN with only internet access. I think Unifi has built in visitor portal and VLANing options (at least it did the last time I used it).

True. It got talked about during our Cunninghams sales pitch back in May, but they weren't pushing it super hard.

AFAIK Cunninghams still offer facial recognition, and I don't see why it would be that hard a sell. You're storing it in an on-site server behind your firewalls, facial rec data never leaves the cashless VLAN. From a DP standpoint, I don't see it's any more of a risk than fingerprints which has been pretty common in schools. If done right, with the DPI and opt-in consent, I don't see why it should be a problem. The main benefits would be speed, contactless, and (over a card) the inability to loose one's face.

I'm sure that AV glitch in the main hall that we've been unable to replicate all summer will come back just as the head's giving her inset presentation.

Might be an expectation that most primaries will still be using their county.sch.uk domains while most secondaries have moved to schoolname.org.uk/co.uk/com