Rob_D

A family friend was looking into a heat pump (and I think went for it in the end). He was really pushed to get all the radiators replaced which pushed the cost up a lot. In flats and tightly packed housing estates you'd have to think carefully about where the outside bit goes as it needs a fair bit of space to operate efficiently and (form what I've heard) isn't quiet. For flats the ideal solution would be to do the whole block on one big central system.

If you missed it (and can get on Tubi), the Nevers is being rebroadcast 1st - 3rd of March. Hopefully some time after that it will get some kind of international distribution (or a least land on a VOD platform), but I'm not holding my breath.

There are apparently flights from Manchester to London City for about £160. I guess it depends how much of the price difference is eaten up getting to Excel from Heathrow.

Straight up, the whole concept sounds like a recipe for trouble, on a classroom and behavior management level. Not to mention the potential problems around "othering" already at-risk kids if this happening in regular lessons where no-one else using their Chromebooks. I can't think this would fall foul of any broadcast licensing as it's individual users, one person listening on their own isn't even going to fall foul service end user agreements. Consider looking into Spotify Kids as it looks like you can use the "adult controls" to lock this down pretty hard. Or, if your webfiltering supports it, perhaps a YouTube playlist that you control. Then you don't need to worry about buying/licensing anything. If the school is willing to reimburse the parents then why not just get the school to buy the tracks off amazon themselves? Then there's no question of ownership, it's the school's music on the school's device. Also the school ends up building up a small library of music that might be useful elsewhere (or for other students in the future). If it were me, I'd probably be looking at something like this, https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01NGTNJWE/ Less to potentially go wrong, less chance of "othering" the student, not much they can to do get distracted on it, and less temptation to keep a copy of the music when they leave/the scheme ends (but some of that may just be me coming form a school without 1:1 devices).

Where are you looking? National Rail journey planner shows trains running fine on the Wednesday and Friday, but it also shows a full timetable on the Thursday and Saturday, so I'm dubious it's been updated to reflect potential strike disruption yet. Hopefully you're right as the team here is planning on going Wed and Friday.

We're pretty server heavy here. If you're using cloud then you could probably get away with less/less powerful on-site hardware. I was just watching a webinar on cloud that had an example school running all it's on-site provision on a single intel Nuc.

For a 1500 student secondary, we have: DPM (backup) server: sorry I don't have the spec to hand, but single CPU probably 8-16gb ram and about 20tb storage. domain controller Xeon 3.6Gb processor 8gb ram and 2*125gb SSD (in raid 1) 2 virtual hosts: 2*Xeon 2.20Gb processor 256Gb ram and about 23Tb storage (using MS storage tiering) The VMs host, SIMS server, 2nd DC, File server, print server, Biometrics/Cashless server, NPS/Radius, access control, helpdesk and RD servers.

What services and systems do you get through the LA? I mean the only thing you're missing from a simple, on-site network setup is storage (which you might not even need if you're using Office365/Google cloud storage for everything). I would say the first thing to do is to make a giant spreadsheet with all the things you currently get from the LA and then either how you would do them in-house or where you can get it from independently. That will give you a good idea of what extra servers you need.

We had something very similar with an S9 some years ago. The Smoothwall tech said it was to do with us having too many/too complex firewall rules.

Doesn't notebook sort-of-automagically-activate if your plugged into a modern Smartboard?

Please, that's not a CPU cooler. THIS is a CPU cooler! I've noticed a trend toward PSUs getting smaller (or at least SFF power supplies becoming more widespread).

For smaller orders I go to CCS Media and Softcat mostly. For any big tenders the BM will go with one of the LEA approved Frameworks.

With modern power saving techniques would data "at rest" like that consume much power? I don't see why something like MS Storage tiering couldn't have a "hardly ever accessed" data layer on parked mechanical drives that are essentially off until needed. Slightly off topic for schools, but what about the Cost of Netflix (and all the other streamers) servers vs the cost of making and shipping physical media?

I still use ABP at home. At work, the smoothwall is set block a lot of ads.

By the sounds of it you already have plenty of reasons to say no. But also, they're supposed to only place activities/pokemon in public spaces/rights of way. So there shouldn't be anything to do on school property. making it pretty pointless. I normally start these conversations with the question "How do you see this working?". Half the time they've thought of some completely different angle that's both workable and makes perfect sense, and they talk me around to supporting the idea.

Could you set up the router with VLANS? Then you could trunk both the NVR and regular network VLANs upstairs, and have a switch break them out to the different devices (although this would probably require a more expensive switch upstairs). Otherwise, either power line, trying to get the NAS on wifi (not my choice), or trying to get another cable up there. Maybe you could sacrifice the exsisting cable as a pull cord to get 2 new ones in?

We've got Gamma Horizon cloud PBX system.

Check out ManageEngine Helpdesk, it's got an integrated asset management module. We use helpdesk and it's all pretty easy enough to get working in a basic capacity. Not used the asset management but again it looks easy enough to get started with. We've got it synching with our local AD for staff accounts/contacts, and it emails through Office 365. I think it would be free for a single technician seat (we pay about £300 a year for 10 techs).

We've got it set up so users have to use MFA externally, but NOT from devices on our network (or more specifically devices connecting to 365 through our internet connection). Which I think is the same as you, right? In the MFA Policy, we have the school network (our external IP addresses because that's what 365 sees as "our network") set up as an exclusion. So login requests coming from school IP addresses are excluded from the policy and thus not prompted for MFA but requests from anywhere else are. Does that make sense.

Slightly different methodology, but it might give you somewhere to look or something else to try. We did it by setting up the school's external IPs as a named location in Azure>Conditional Access, and then having the location as an exclusion from the MFA policy.

Going into settings to clear the cache has worked for some of our users. And just got an email from Bromcom suggesting it too.

This isn't about "re-education", I read it as they're talking about genetic manipulation predator species to remove the biological need/drive to eat meat. If they can do that, then re-engineering of prey species to reduce birth rates isn't much more of a reach. You're just talking about the genetic manipulation of every species on the planet.

I got into the first episode of Blood Origin, but the second left me a bit cold and I haven't got around to the final 2 yet (will do at some point though). Has anyone checked out the National Treasure series on D+?

Presumably they will also be re-engineering the prey species to reduce birth rates to stop out of control population growth, and they have some sort of plan to increase plant growth to compensate for all the new herbivores. Also wasn't this a cut subplot in Zootopia?

It's a really old gen Promethean Activeboard (old enough that the ones we had used serial cables). We had them in the first school I worked in.