MrEprise

Bard Boys Clockwiser Fast Timers at Ridgemont High

Running Scarred Stranger Days

Fiercer Creatures The Da Vinci Coder Six Days, Severn Nights Patriot Gamers

WarGamers Brig Kindergarten Crop

Homer Alone (which incidentally is the name of a Simpsons episode.) Planers, Trains and Automobiles

Had an issue recently on our second sign-in screen where the SSD had failed (Phison controller issue where the drive ID's as SATAFIRM S11 and it's essentially bricked at that point) and I had no backup image of it so I contacted Inventry support. My initial call was met with the usual customer support engineer with language barrier issues but as long as I concentrated hard and had no background noise, I could just about get the gist of what he was saying. "The unit has just gone out of warranty" he tells me. Oh really, that seems convenient... Anyway, as I tell him about the issue, how I have no system image of it (why would I ordinarily?) and how irritated I was since you'd not normally expect something like this to happen and then be stranded without any means of getting back up and running, he then proceeded to escalate the ticket up the chain. It eventually ended up with a manager who agreed that we shouldn't be left stranded despite being out of warranty so approved an out-of-warranty repair at no extra charge which was nice. However it took them 3 weeks to get to this point and this was apparently due to it being a secondary screen where the primary was still working and they deem this a lower priority. They might see it this way but our SLT don't since we have 2 entrances that Staff use for signing in and some of our Staff weren't bothering to go out of their way to sign in. This became more of an issue when we had a Fire evacuation recently and a few Staff members couldn't be easily accounted for as there was no record of them being onsite. It then took a further week when they told me that someone from their scheduling team would be in contact shortly and it turned out that they wouldn't have contacted me if I hadn't chased it up. Finally a whole month later they had an engineer booked in to come and fit a new SSD with the OS and Inventry software preloaded and then configure it to connect back to our primary terminal. This went fine. While he was here, I asked him if there was a way of setting the Console shortcut to auto select "Site 1" when we open the console as it gets a bit annoying to select this every time the console is opened as we only have the one site. This is where he tells me he needs to move 1 file out of the Console's program directory and it'll stop asking. So we were configured for multi-site 2 years ago when we didn't need it? He was surprised we were set up in this way if we were only ever going to be one site. Sounds typical for Inventry if you ask me. In the end, we were sorted but it did take a bit longer than I think it should have.

Yeah, I'm not sure if some sites might be generating new images on the fly when you search for AI imagery.

I've just tried an image search myself. Although the majority of pictures were harmless fun, I did get one of Santa Claus in a red gimp suit so always better to err on the side of caution.

Microsoft 365 Apps for Faculty/Students would give you the necessary licences for local installs and they're supposed to be a free addon. In fact I'm waiting for my Year 3 renewal to be processed so that I get them as a replacement to the A1 Plus licences we have/had.

This isn't looking good for Cloudflare. How long before Businesses start flocking to other providers for the services they offer?

As long as your licencing allows, yes they should still be able to login, download and install Office 365 Apps. The usual caveats apply i.e. when they leave the School/Trust that their copy will de-activate and they'll need to fund re-activation themselves.

I recall you can do some element of traditional Group Policy in Intune, as I also thought there was a policy that allowed individual blocking of settings pages. This does mean you'd have to allow the System top-level page and block all the other settings pages within System.

Could you maybe allow access to ms-settings:nightlight and then provide Students a shortcut to that somewhere?

We were with Cunninghams just until recently. They were good to a point and everything worked fine, it was just a tad on the expensive side. We've now moved to Pebble which is significantly cheaper. Initially it looks okay and it uses iPads in secure cages/stands instead of dedicated POS touchscreen PCs but time will tell if it ends up being better for us in the long term.

I'm trying to get my head around adding a bunch of email addresses we use here for sending out things like Voicemail messages, Scans and notifications from PaperCut as well as emails from our Helpdesk software, but I can't get my head around the 'Spoofed senders' section in 'Tenant Allow/Block Lists' just to allow messages from these email addresses (basically [email protected], [email protected] & [email protected]). We were using Barracuda for our email protection/security but for reasons outside my control, we've moved away from this and are now using Microsoft Defender for all of this... but I found Barracuda easier to figure out whereas Microsoft don't always make it easy to configure stuff like this and I'm stuck as all these emails keep ending up in quarantine flagged as "phish" and I've no idea how to set these as an exception. Is there anyone who understands this better than me who can help?

Yes I believe Jamf hosts on AWS.

Do you have a header tank with the silica gel bag? Apparently these can break open, releasing silica gel balls into the cooling system and potentially cause blockages and other issues.

Yep, this happens quite frequently and randomly as it's never any specific computers that fail to load the Impero services, it can be any of them at any time. For me, I have an asset spreadsheet with a VBA script that can restart the Impero services on any computer I pick from a list, so it's not such an issue but still quite irritating all the same.

In our case, "Organisation restricted" usually means that the seller can't provide a VAT invoice. Our experience so far with the "more expensive" USB-C docks is if you have the choice, buy new rather than used/second-hand/refurbished ones. We have a large number of "refurbished" HP USB-C Dock G4's and the primary issues we see with ours ranges from USB-C cable failure to the DisplayPorts suddenly ceasing to work. Sometimes the docks will sometimes just stop working and requires either a power cycle or unplugging/replugging the USB-C cable from the dock end while plugged into a laptop. One of the issues we have with ours is that because they're refurbished/second-user devices, most of them came with the original type-c cables but many did not so sometimes you find yourself changing out cables until you find one that works and often the cables that didn't work on one unit, might work fine on another despite being visually identical (methinks some of these are different revisions.) Having detachable USB-C cables has its good points as well as bad i.e. you can replace it if it should go bad but there are of course many downsides to this such as people walking off with the cable when it should remain with the dock for example. Our docks also have a USB-C port on the front which also means that when Staff try to self-diagnose connection issues, they usually plug the cable into the front and this won't work. It's the same if rooms are left unlocked, some Students have worked out they can sabotage lessons by moving the USB-C cable to the front and the Teachers - despite being told that this port can't be used in this way - still seem oblivious to the cable having been moved and then I get called to sort it out. Fine when they work but not without issues unfortunately. If I was doing it all again I'd go for docks with some sort of integrated USB cable (like the G5 docks where it can still be removed if needed but cannot be removed easily) and new ones too. There is the added disadvantage that docks with a hardwired cable means that you'd need to replace the dock if the USB-C cable goes bad... but for a couple here, I've simply added a USB-C extension to at least prevent jack damage, though just note these are not covered in the spec so all USB-C extensions are not official and not certified.

Feel like mentioning this - when we migrated to Arbor in February/March, we ran into the same user permissions issue, or at least I did. In SIMS I had the sysadmin role as well as a bunch of others. Three other people, 2 within SLT and 1 in Admin also had the same role. When we migrated over to the dummy site, I had lost the sysadmin role and ended up with the most basic permissions you can possibly get in Arbor yet the other aforementioned members of staff all retained their relevant roles. I had to request the relevant access from one of those members of Staff in order to be able to do anything. Even though I was known to Arbor to be the "IT Manager" involved with the migration, they were not prepared to give me the required access at the other end for "security reasons", bar API access. I did flag this up as I thought this is likely to happen again when we do the final migration and someone was going to look into it. Obviously, when we did the final migration, the same thing happened again and I had to get the correct permissions from a member of staff here. In my opinion, I think Arbor's migration process favours staff in a non-IT role i.e. in Primary schools where you might not have a specific IT person on site and then when it gets to staff in an IT role, it then doesn't know what permissions to apply to them. Then of course when you come to assigning the relevant permissions, you're walking through a minefield of permissions that either don't make sense or don't seem to let you do what's required, despite what each permission description says. I still have issues now where hovering over items in Arbor will produce a pop-up saying that I don't have permissions for that. Yes SIMS was terrible for a lot of things but setting permissions seemed to be easier there than in Arbor.

If it was supposed to work, it really didn't for my Mum and I. My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy A52 5G (which also supports 4G) and nothing happened. My Mum has a relatively new-ish Galaxy S which also supports 4G and that didn't get the alert either. These are set to use any available network standard where possible so I don't understand why they didn't work. We're not opted out of the alerts either. I also have an older Nokia 6.1 knocking around which I can't bear to be rid of and this has LTE rather than full 4G. It did receive the alert, but because it was set to vibrate, all it did was vibrate when the alert came in. Come 'Global Thermonuclear War' and we'll be entirely oblivious to it!

I've heard many go on about how inept Openreach is, yet my recent experience upgrading the school's internet from 500/500 to 1000/1000 (both FTTP) showed that there are a few engineers who definitely know their stuff over the majority who don't have a clue. The day after I put the order in, 2 engineers turned up, identified an older existing feed which they thought would be fine, put a tester on it to check, went back to the exchange to find the other end and put a tester on that end, they were back within the hour to say that the cable was more than suitable, installed the NTE (which subsequently showed a green light on the connection) and they were gone after about 2 hours. Next day I received an email from the provider to say that Openreach would be in contact after 7-10 working days to book a visit to set our new connection up! I ended up emailing them back to say that Openreach has already been in and gone and they thought that must have been for something else (we were also getting a connection put in for a new backup connection at the same time so assumed it be this). Day after got a notification from the provider to say that Openreach has given the green light and they can continue moving us over to the new connection. Guy I ended up speaking to couldn't believe that Openreach could be that quick and efficient. In regards to the backup line, the independent contractor who came to install the connection didn't quite have much of a clue, couldn't find any usable lines and ended up referring the job back to Openreach. The engineer we got next day from Openreach was also a local resident and knew the infrastructure like the back of his hand. He'd also managed to sort a working connection for us same day!

I'm actually surprised they gave you W11 compatible hardware as our setup went in about a couple of years ago and what they gave us was already out-of-date and not W11 compatible in the slightest! That it also runs a client OS isn't much good either, especially if numerous staff members are supposed to be using the Console application as Windows 10/11 has a connection limit and this is used up pretty quickly, especially if you have 2 or more terminals. I had to try and figure out how to run the Console app from one of our servers and share it out to staff that way. Bit of a clunky way of doing it but it seems to work. We have a utility that backs the database onto one of our servers but no backups of the OS itself so if that goes on one of the terminals, I can imagine that'll be a costly support call. To me, it is a very clunky mess (much like SIMS .net) that should be avoided where possible as there are much better alternatives out there.

When I was kitting out the IT for a local business I did voluntary support for, I got one of these when they moved from portakabins to a proper-built building. I liked that it also included the network management card (something APC often charges extra for) & a free screwdriver so you could put it all together with relative ease. It was easy to set up and nice enough when it worked but unfortunately died towards the end of its first year of operation (charging fault). It's also a good lesson to have another one for redundancy, which I didn't have and caused a bit of controversy there as I couldn't drop what I was doing to go sort it all out When I did get to troubleshooting it, Eaton's support was really good. They asked me to try a few things and pull off the logs to send to them, after which they decided to send me a whole new boxed unit complete with batteries, brackets, cables, screws, network management card and another screwdriver! I fully expected them to send a courier to pick up the old unit but they didn't, so I've still got the old 5PX knocking around somewhere, complete with all its accessories. Not sure why I've still got it though I'm holding out hope it might be repairable. EDIT: forgot to add that the replacement they sent worked fine and the above happened about 9 or 10 years ago so it's been going strong since!

I've just noticed an odd issue when searching from the front page in that if you're trying to search the forums from there, it picks the front page as the current article to search under rather than the whole site. Could it possibly be changed (if at all?) as it may confuse some, as it did for me for 10 minutes?! Or maybe it's just something I need to remember for next time.