broadld

@SIMS_Customer_Support Is this an update that will take SIMS offline to apply a database patch? I feel quite uncomfortable rushing through a patch which will have had little testing done on it in the middle of a school day. Have ESS been in touch with the DFE regarding the CENSUS return?

I have organised a trial for this so we will see if it works any better than last time we tried it.

The safeguarding side seemed to just work in v1. But the broadcast of screens and locking screens was very hit and miss. Like other have said if they got this sorted it would be great. Hoping someone can test and see if it works any better in v2.

If you can let me know if this improves the deadlocks that would be great.

Has anyone applied Patch 20352 yet and has it improved the lockouts?

That's great so literally we can get rid of the open port and the connector does it all. I suppose the good thing about doing it this way, is the user is authenticated before they even get to your system!

I presume after it is configured you have to configure your firewall to only accept traffic from Azure? Otherwise someone would still be able to access the RDWeb server directly if they got your external IP address and browsed to it.

Do you need any additional licensing in Office 365 to run an app proxy?

Hope you got this sorted. If not you need to put the vhdx file on shared storage. Shared storage in a HyperV Failocver Cluster should display in c:\clusterstorage\. There may be multiple volumes if you have different tiers of storage setup. You need to create a VM in Failocver Cluster Manager and attach the disk. If you have already created the VM in HyperV you can protect it with Cluster Manager after. Have a look at this guide from Papercut which covers quite a lot of it. It will also explain it a lot better! https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/ng-mf/common/cluster-server-2012-2016/#:~:text=In%20the%20Failover%20Cluster%20Manager,the%20virtual%20machine%20up%20on.

Good evening, Just wondering what people's experiences are with protecting RDWeb RDS servers. Only port 443 is port forwarded from the firewall. We have user account lockouts in place, MFA configured, Geo Blocking and have evlwatcher to block IP addresses with failed logins. We are looking to buy RDP guard. Is there anything else we can do? I have been considering also looking at an azure app proxy.

Not received anything from them other than them confirming they were looking into the issue yesterday morning.

Same reply that we got from support. Not sure why they don't have a status page or send an email out to let people know.

The relay is only used for WOL. The Sensor client is meant to keep traffic on the local network. Only should use the internet if you are connecting from outside your network. However from our testing a few months ago the safeguarding screenshot system worked fine. But broadcasting your screen and locking students screens was so intermittent. It would miss big chunks of the class. Support couldn't resolve it and said no one else was having issues like it. But just from reading forums lots of people are having exactly the same issues.

What access control system do you use? We recently had an issue with Paxton Net2 where it would intermittently connect and then disconnect for some time. We troubleshooted it for a number of days and found it was Defender AV causing the issue. We added an exception to the on access scanning for the Net2 database and the issue instantly went away.

It is only because we had a ticket open with them about the deadlock issues.

We have been told by our SIMS support provider that a patch 30262 is now available. This is the email from SIMS support:- Good morning, We are pleased to advise that SIMS database patch 30262 is now available. This patch is designed to address issues that result in an increased frequency of deadlock errors occurring when working within various areas of SIMS. Please note, this patch is only applicable to the SIMS Summer 2024 release. If the patch is applied and the school then upgrades to Autumn 2024 the changes will, unfortunately, not persist post-upgrade. A further patch to address the issue in the SIMS Autumn 2024 release is under development as a priority and will be issued to all affected customers once available. It is worth noting that this patch will primarily address issues that result in a deadlock error presenting within the SIMS user application. Sites may continue to see deadlocks occurring within the SQL database when running deadlock reports via SQL Management Studio, however this is considered to be expected behaviour. Patch 30262 has been released to your site via SOLUS3 and should be available within your Updated Library following a Get Updates check. To run this check please navigate to Settings | SOLUS3 | Updates and click the Get Updates button. A further update will be provided as soon as the new patch for Autumn 2024 is made available. Kind regards, SIMS Support You would have thought that they would include the fix in the Autumn update. Very strange. I haven't applied this yet as it was only released 2 days ago, so wanted to wait a week or two to see if they pull the update for any reasons because of issues.

We are on workstation patch 4 and we are still having the deadlock issue. Its seems to mainly happen when taking registers. I can't even think of a time when we have got to workstation patch 5! We seem to be forever updating SIMS.

We had the patch released to us. Tried installing it this evening and it looks like ESS may have recalled it for some reason. When I ran it the error said the following updates are no longer authorised.

We have been having deadlock issues with the SIMS client crashing mainly when teachers are trying to save registers. Has anyone else applied this patch and it has resolved the deadlocks? We may need to get this patch scheduled in if it does resolve or at least works around the issue.

Yes it looks like they have fixed the issue now.

They have been working on it all day and failed to provide any updates to their status page!

Is anyone else having issues signing into CPOMS today? We get a 504 Gateway error when trying to login. On their status page it says they have issues and I logged a ticket this morning at 09:30 and it took until 13:48 to get the response of we are looking into it. So i am guessing their support is rather busy. Just wondering how many people this is affecting?

This is quite an interesting thread. We have been having a trial of Senso over the last couple of weeks. The feedback we got from teachers is that the broadcast function is very temperamental. I have done quite a lot of testing on this and can't get it to work consistently. Sometimes it works on all PCs in a suite. Sometimes it misses 10+ machines out of a suite of 30. The first time you broadcast it seems to sit for 40 seconds on a black screen then starts the broadcast. Then subsequent broadcasts seem to be much quicker. We have been in touch with their support and they are trying to say it is an internal network issue and other customers aren't facing this issue. Which is obviously not true finding this thread. Our network is monitored for throughput and latency on all our switches and uplinks and had no spikes or latency. I am certain I haven't missed any ports, URL or HTTPS inspection exemptions as I have checked them multiple times. If I get anything from their support that is of any use I will let you know. They have said they are working on a V2 of Senso but unsure of a release date yet. If the broadcast worked consistently from our testing all the other features just seemed to work.

Did you managed to get this sorted? Or did you just stop using UEV? We have the same issue and have been thinking it is related to UEV. It isn't a big issue it is just annoying for students.

Good morning all, We keep on having strange issues like this. Does this only seem to affect one make / model of PC's? We look in the event logs of an affected machine and it is like it can't access the sysvol folder. Try to browse to the sysvol folder \\domain\sysvol and it says access denied! The strange thing is it affects PC's randomly. One minute they are working fine and applying GPO's the next they don't. If you browse to this individually on each domain controller it works fine. We do have UEV configured so may test switching this off to see if our issues dissapear.