AlanD

This is beginning to sound like some random scatter gun approach...whack some stuff in - in the random hope that it might fix a problem. I don't use SCCM - but I'm sure I read somewhere that it is a pretty demanding application. Clearly 7K2 midline drives are going to have twice the latency as 15K drives - albeit at a fraction of the cost. Adding drives is not going to improve latency...and my guess - and yes its only a guess - is that the problem is lots of small writes/reads not about moving massive amounts of data... Yes you could experiment with turning write cache on - but I would either want a UPS on the server or a battery on my RAID card if I was making this permanent. As an experiment this will cost you nothing and is simple to try. (I'm guessing it won't make much difference)

Sorry, but that phrase is one which makes me boil....becuase I think its really misleading. It may be true (but not always of course) that in order to get something good you will need to pay more for it....but there is no logic which says that just becuase you are paying more you will get something better. Our oldest laptops are coming up to being 10 years old. They are Core 2 - duo processors - and have 2GB of RAM. Some had SSDs fitted a while ago. They cost £150 more than the budget "celeron" ones we were being urged to buy....as longevity wasn't consdered important as we were told they would be replaced every 5 years. Yes, today they are slow - well certainly sluggish booting up (now windows 7)...but they are then useable - and indeed used every day. For the first 5 years of their life everyone praised them for being lighteningly fast....and that alone encouraged teachers to make better use of ICT. Was that worth an extra £15 for each year - absolutely. But just paying more doesn't necessarily get you a physically more robust computer - with keys that don't drop off the keyboard - or power sockets that come unsoldered from the the motherboard....and its really difficult to know in advance and just by looking whether laptops will last the course. Although I have difficulty selling this vsision - I think the chrome books - which can still run Office 365 apps - represent excellent value for money and "do the job" that most staff require....and are much easier to manage than PC laptops. If you are going down the PC laptop route - you will need to think about how you will manage them. Yes you will want encryption...but argueably you will want something like "inTune" so that they can be remotely wiped if lost - or taken away by a colleague who leaves. And InTune wll allow you to deploy the apps you require - and to restrict the users from installing malware and stuff that you will end up sorting out later.

I read in Aerohive communities that “So recently ofcom opened up channels 149 - 165“ But can’t find confirmation of that on Ofcom’s site...although they proposed this some time ago...with a goal of getting up to six 80Mhz channels. I think that band was normally reserved for licences point to point links.... Anyone able to confirm this? Anyone have UK access points which have been updated to allow this?

Maybe "often more spindles = better performance".....but the best latency is with a single drive - as on average the latency is half the rotation time. If you had 10 disks the latency would be nearly twice that. Disk latency is critical for servers - which is why 15K drives make a difference....and SSDs would make even more difference. But yes - for large data applications (not necessarily SQL) you can get a bigger data block in one read with a large RAID. ...not that I'm recommending in single drive....but a mirror often gives best latency. A large chunk of RAM can help with SQL - and usually SQL will use as much as it can lay its hands on.....so I'd be looking at paging use. RAM is (relatively) cheap - so at least 16GB....and perhaps even 64GB or more might be something to aim for.

I dealt with a Public Sector Manager called Samuel Marriott [email protected]

510 is only 2x2. It tends to be 3x3 and 4x4 devices that need more power for all features to operate.

Dsyou MIS not include calendar features...so that events which affect timetabling rooiming and staffing are not integrated?

Well..you’d have to look at the small print for each manufacturer. They advertise their APs as 802.11af “compatible” but hide away the fact that using them with such power source cripples some of the features. So many have 2 Ethernet sockets to provide a resilience and the notional bandwidth required by “ac”...that is often sacrificed. Some have an extra radio to optimise channel selection etc..that can get disabled. Some can’t use all the streams that would be possible with a 802.11af supply. These things may not be important to to hide these details away because they know it puts customers off from buying them.

So if your requirement is up to 18w ...you will need poe+ or 802.11at capability...and most if not all of latest generation of “ac” accesspoints require this when fully featured....although most will work at reduced capacity with 802.11af.

Note that the prevent strategy requires you to monitor... And while filtering would almost certainly be appropriate... You need to do more than that. I would be using intune to manage such laptops to lock them down an use aproxy configuration to direct traffic via our smooth wall filter. I think most filtering/monitoring solutions have configurations to work with off site devices.. And should provide the monitoring schools are required to do.

You should see the link light on the switch....at each end. We warn contractors...as part of a document they get when arriving on site...that cutting fibre connections will result in them being responsible for their repair. And as a result we have twice saved the cost of an in-line repair. They even found contractors to do the job without us having to chase them...

It sure what you mean by “strategic” move... We ran a mixed site while we migrated...but our gpo have never allowed anything but minimal user control of profiles...certainly no desktop configuration or praenomen pining of shortcuts. Train...or at least email users well in advance ...explaining what differences they should expect. Most use win10 at home and have been for some years....but losing their “most recent” programs or files can lead to complaints of files not being on the new system. Edge, can also be a surprise for users. Boot and logon times are noticeably slower,especially on older machines without Ssd...and 2gb of ram is probably not enough for 64 bit versions as even opening a web browser can cause a lot of paging and tardiness compared to 3 or 4 gab machines. We moved to 64bit at the same time...so some 16bit stuff finally got ditched...and we had to update some printer drivers...

Smoothwall boxes will work as a redundant pair...usually this is at the same location..but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work at different locations...but I’ve no idea how this is set up. It might even be cheaper than two separate smoothwall licences. All your reporting would then be centralised. You still need to pipe both internet connections via vlans between the boxes to a load balancing pool on input to sw boxes. If either sw box fails...or an internet connection goes down no one would then notice. Be aware that depending on which boxes you have smoothwall maxes out around 300mb/s unless you have their very latest high end boxes...and lots of schools seem to be going for gigabit connections now. .

Depends on what you mean by a fair test. A single client with a single access point won't give you the same as 20 clients with an access point... Nor the same as 50 clients... Nor the same as 20 mixed ac and n clients... Nor the same as when one access is in the same room as the clients compared to outside in corridor. Nor will the results be the same in a busy classroom block with lots of neighbouring busy access points. So I would say pick what is for you a critical scenario.. Possibly 30 ac2 laptops in same room as access point... Possibly with a deliberately narrow channel if it's going to be in a busy block. I tend to pick client devices with fast ssd.. And put them in a loop loading a file from a fast ssd raid on a server. But let's be honest they all share one of two or possibly three chipsets...the same as in your clients... And they share same microcode that actually creates checks sends and receives packets. Do it's only the controlling and management software that is different.... And that makes little difference to performance although can make a difference to layer 7 visibility etc if you are not able to do this at your firewall/filter. An access point tweeted to perform well in one scenario won't necessarily win in a different scenario.

Ok...so given you are where you are....you will need to transport your internet connection from Crawford around to the smoothwall at Hatcham using a Vlan. Don’t know what your raw internet connection is at Crawford...but you may need to insert a router between it and smoothwall and use either NAT or routing (wih DMZ ) to separate incoming ip ranges into two subjects one for crawford router the other for Hatcham. Creare an LB pool on both smooth walls. Do same at Hatchford splitting incoming IP range into two sub nets with a router and create another VLan to bring one of the sub nets back to Crawford on incoming side of smoothwall there...so everything is mirrored. It then doesn’t really matter which smoothwall clients are pointing too...I assume you will use a proxy setting. You will probably point them at nearest one. The smoothwall boxes won’t be redundant...but you would be protected against losing an internet connection...and it would load balance automatically.... But it does seem a clumsy solution .but it should work. Oh..and your reporting would not be collated if that matters.

I don’t understand from any of discussions how you intend balancing the internet traffic. I can see how it might provide redundancy. I’m not sure about what the real world benefit of the the third additional leased line to complete a ring might bring...because in practice (unless you are paying for different physical external cabinets connections) you would be at the mercy of open reaches switches, and failure of one connection (unless it’s a local failure on one of your sites) would almost certainly mean a failure in the other.... The only way to balance traffic would be to allocate different gateways to different clients...and making this dynamic depending on demand would be impossible.

Ok, I would do things differently. Put both smoothwall boxes at Crawford set up as a redundant pair. Increase internet speed there, because one line at higher speed is always cheaper than two lines...and you should consider Virginzoom or FTTP which would give significantly higher speeds for less money...or keep what you have and add such a connection. Smoothwall will then hande all redundancy. Add a leased line between Hatcham and Crawford...keeping the knights to Crawford...but take away knights to Crawford...unless you want redundancy ... ..or it both smoothwall boxes at Crawford..and do it the other way...

Well...it depends on what kind of load balancing you are after....and no, you can’t simply add another gateway. You could allocate half the PCs with one gateway address and the other half to the other address...probably by creating static DHCP entries for each PC. That wouldn’t provide any fallback redundancy..You could put a loadbalancing proxy..like smoothwall..but it wouldn’t be cheap..but that would dynamically adjust sessions to balance by bandwidth...and provide auto fallover. Draytek routers will “load balance” and do fallback should one connection fail...but it wouldn’t dynamically share load automatically between two external routes.

Not putting lives at risk....well, actually I think it does....which is partly why the prevent strategy was put into place. If it’s not under the cover radicisation...it can be self harm..including encitement of suicide...and even sex sites potentially skew their minds ... No, sorry...there is serious risk. And I’m not sure that parents understand this...nor governments, despite putting prevent in place. I agree that excessive and intrusive filtering can get in the way of education...but filtering is not at the heart of prevent...but monitoring is. Personally, I’d like to see the age checks being forced on sex sites being extented to social media and or social media being forced to let parents and schools during the school day monitor traffic. It seems bizzare that we allow students a complete invisibility cloak And immunity to bully, commit sexting offences, etc. They don’t have developed minds..and need guidance an supervision. We should not walk our hands of the responsibility.

How are you complying with prevent strategy without any user authentication? Do you keep logs of who uses which I pad?

Most come with so much data ...and such high speeds...why would they want to connect to a restricted school wireless?

Perhaps someone will remind you of this in 20 years' time. For those of us of a certain age...we remember 54Kb/s dialup speeds and thought that was dizzy fast compared to the original 300b/s dialup speeds. I also remember someone saying something about RAM capacities never needing to be more than 640K.

Yes, I don't see a bright future for smoothwall...or Sophos or any such premium filter provider if clients are essentially going to be invisible. BYOD devices have been capable of the invisibility cloak of a VPN for some time....with many schools not even realising this.

It might be worth checking that your APs can do a UDP on port 12222 to the hivemanager. This might need some configuration of your switches....you check by Connecting to an AP using putty...and using command line .. capwap ping [HiveManager IP address or hostname] If Udp fails..it resorts to http which is not nearly so efficient...

Of course devices are listening and processing everything they hear. And there have been at least two cases when they been caught recording everything. Wileyfox released a phone with what they claimed was preinstalled software by a third party...and ai think it was one of the early Samsung TV sets that had voice control that was sending everything back...supposedly anonymised for analysis and for improving the technology. And even if the devices were not recording and using word recognition they could be capable of knowing what tv program you are watching, whether you are at the pub, bathing the baby or whatever. They will be capable of knowing who your family is..and like the facial recognition on social media will tie you to other device users. And it doesn’t stop with sound, a device can be using a camera to know whether you are driving a car because it can see the driving wheel and traffic movement, it knows if you are in a bathroom or bedroom and can make decisions based on what it sees...without actually recording pictures. Is it doing this now? Possibly not, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t doing some of it, and I’d be certain they are working on such stuff..and will be doing it. Just because we have microphone or camera slider turned to off to prevent apps using them to record sounds or take pictures doesn’t mean that information cannot be gathered and processed.