AlanD

Some (many?) of these "apps" don't just use web traffic ...they also need to be able to send data directly through your router/firewall - so you will need rules put there to allow this. Spotify...is one for example. Snapchat does most things through web ...except when you actually send a message....which needs a firewall rule again.

Is it possible that the coding actually has a fixed IP address? I know the error says "specified network name" - but I think it would say that if the name was an ip address. ..and id you have already used that IP address - for SQL1 you can always put 2 x IP addresses on the same network card.

BV-Tech POE-I100G Gigabit Single Port 30W PoE Injector - 4 Pack | eBay BV Tech ... from USA....They do 15.4W gigabit injectors and they also do 30W 802.11at ones for not much more....and they are cheaper if you buy them in packs...I think they do 4 , 6 and 8 packs. I've only used the 30W units - and they seem just fine. Take a good look - a really good look at the specs - for any wireless access points. Some sacrifice functional features like a second Ethernet port, or the 3 or 4th stream in order to keep the product within the 802.11af power limit. So if you want a full functioning access point you will need the 30W units....and indeed better PoE switches.....and possibly cat6 cabling...

...yes I think it goes via pay packet...I'll have to check...

...I'd agree with you ..that $500 annual licence fee is not cheap....but if you read these groups you will also know of one of the complaints about "mobile devices" is managing them...and while some MDM solutions go some way to achieving this....its probably fair to say Tabpilot takes you much further. I looked at it ...and thought....I'd really like this...especially if it could be used to manage our ipads (which it couldn't). We use G suite for a handful of android tablets used in our pre-school nursery section ...but I think I'd want something better for secondary students....but it may be OK. As you say - its free...

I hear what you say about the problems with 1:1 .... and many of those problems have solutions....printing, device management, etc ...and enforcing some case/cover can help mitigate against damage....and yes there needs to be (a lot) of staff support and encouragement because they can be reluctant if not not hostile to making good use of devices. BUT....and its a really important but....far too many students leave school with diabolically poor ICT skills (which are not the same as being able to take a picture and share it with snapchat...or for that matter composing a short piece of text on a word processor or presentation package). Asking any year 11 student to total a column of marks in a spreadsheet will convince you of that. Ask them to create a vocab test where english words are presented in one column and french words are typed in the next and a tick or cross is to automatically appear will almost certainly be beyond everyone - and that includes the most of the ICT teachers. Using computers needs to be part a parcel of each and every subject in school (a serious omission by those who designed the current "programming" based curriculum). And you can't haul classes off to ICT suites every time you need to use devices for 10 minutes in a lesson...nor indeed get them all out the front to collect and power up a device from a trolley. They need to be on the desks...and be a natural part of lessons.

OK - I understand a possible requirement for RAID 10 more clearly now...because you are going to get really good sequential write data rates in that arrangement....I assume there a quite a number of cameras. I think there are now drives which claim to "designed" for 24x7 video ...but maybe not 7 years ago. And I'm guessing its not "mission critical" so if you lose it all...it might be inconvenient...but not the end of the world - like losing your MIS data.... Sorry don't know how to do the consistency check as I'm not familiar with that system.

I can see 4x 2TB disks listed....I assume there are more out of screenshot....In fact if its RAID 10 - I assume you have 12 of them (...expletive deleted). The Hitachi drive Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 (I haven't bothered checking the rest) is not a disk designed for RAID use. If you don't use RAID (or enterprise disks) in your RAID you are asking for problems. When disks fail to read a sector - which might be a problem for a desktop drive - in a RAID - it needs to mark that sector as "bad" quickly and remap it (by copying the data from the mirror - or parity data) so that the user does not experience any problems. Desktop drives have firmware that "keep trying" to read the data - often causing the drives to run really hot....but firmware in enterprise disk moves on quickly to keep going. I'm not saying you can't use domestic and therefore cheaper drives in a RAID - but expect to get problems if you are using them 24x7 for enterprise applications. RAID controllers expect the drives used to remap a failed sector read rapidly - which doesn't happen with desktop drives and the result is often a failure of that disk in the RAID. And I'm not sure I would recommend such a large number of drives in a RAID 10 configuration ..I think I would be using RAID 6 (but perhaps the device does not support this) which would give better use of drive space and still give you good redundancy...I think RAID 5 would be risky - especially with non enterprise RAID drives in use. Some would argue for matched drives too...or at least matched pairs of drives for RAID 10.

In what way does the school want to move forward? Using Office 365 does not necessarily achieve anything in it self. You need to a clear answer about this - otherwise you are skilling users - possibly- to achieve nothing, Its not some panacea for all ills and once you use it all problems will disappear. Not sure from your post whether you already have a tenancy or and whether you have already set up DirSync (or whatever Microsoft now call it to provision users in the cloud and synchronise passwords. So I'm not sure if you are asking for training to set it up - or to support users using it. I've always thought its not much difference to using desktop versions...apart from there being no "save".

I'd be wary against using this disk ...mirrored or not ... for any critical data .... certainly not in a server. Once a disk has started to get problems its usually a downhill slide. CHKDSK can take a long time - especially with non enterprise disks as it does lots of retries on sectors before giving up and marking it as bad. If there is a whole cluster with bad sectors ... then CHKDSK takes even longer.

HMRC? Don't care - why would they? GDPR - is another thing. We will probably start insisting that nothing is stored locally....and only use the school's office 365 cloud storage. Teachers - even with a school laptop - might use their own PC/tablet/laptop to draft school statements/reports etc which might have student names etc so everyone will have to tighten up on making staff aware of what data is allowed to go where.

Does you MIS system not do room booking? Ideally any booking systems needs to be tied to the timetable/MIS so that if classes or teachers are moved, etc and room bookings made any student or teacher looking at this timetable will see the "actual" rooms he is in that day. A stand alone room booking system must mean that you are going to keep looking in two places all the time. ...Do other MIS systems really not do room booking?

We give £120 per member of staff every 4 or 5 years, but they then have to fund their own purchase and they need to show the receipt to get the money. This, therefore acknowledges that at least half of what they do is probably for their own use rather than school use. But we do have desktop PCs at every teacher desk in school as well as a cluster in the staff room. so they don't actually need those laptops to deliver lessons.

Forgot to mention....watch out for PoE when buying switches. Many access points claim to work of 802.11af ...what they often omit to tell you is that you don't get all the features working on 802.11af. So if you are planning on a wireless upgrade that might have 4 stream access points (...or maybe 8 stream access points when they start to appear) you will need 802.11at capability....and you don't really want to replace all your switches again.

Cloud management works well here..... 10 year guarantee.....Aerohve works brilliantly here......Meraki is fantastic there.....We only need 32 APs to cover our site....Had nothing but good vibes ever since we replaced our old kit with XXXX etc. I'm absolutely certain all the premier division kit works just fine - or better than fine - or at least its fine as long as you are not expecting more than wireless is capable of delivering in potentially dense deployments (It can also work badly - but that is usually a result of the installation rather than the kit itself ...) They are all capable for all the standard stuff (..whether the supplier wants or is able to set that up you need to be clear about) If you are going for a "managed" solution with annual costs you need to negotiate with all of the determination of our Brexit negotiators - because these costs add up over the years. And the value of "replacements" if APs fail has to be valued carefully - because if were not paying for this - you probably wouldn't buy the same replacement - because as better APs come out you would buy the better ones - so guarantees are often of questionable value. Get them to agree to replace any failed AP with latest type - not a like for like ..and if necessary pay the difference. You probably wont want the same access points in 10 years. You might not even want them after 5 years as new stuff rolls out. Take a really good look at those with no on going costs like Ubiuity.

Don't forget to consider PoE. Often access points will claim they work off 802.11af - which they will. What they don't always tell you - and some don't realise - is that you won't get all the performance with 802.11af. So you might only get 2 or 1 of the 3 (or 4) streams - or doesn't allow you to use LACP with the second Ethernet port (if it has one). These things may not matter - but if they do - replacing your PoE switches costs money you might not expect to spend. Ubiquity (I think) comes with lnline PoE adaptors for 802.11at provided you buy the individual units - but not if you buy the multi packs. (is that right?) And if you are going to allow BYOD use - that might have an impact on your router/firewall throughput capability and indeed your external internet bandwidth. I replaced some pre "n" wireless cards in old laptops with "n" ones for £2 each off Ebay - which at least made them almost useable. I could have bought "ac" cards but they were over £20 each which I thought wasn't a great investment in what was already old kit. Even with all the right access points and kit.... managing teacher/user expectations is important too. If teacher tell a class to get out laptops from a cabinet which might not have been off for several days - there is a change they will download virus updates and windows updates and GPOs so getting enough bandwidth for a class to logon before the end of the lesson can be a challenge. Make sure laptops in cabinets are powered on and updated before the cabinet is in the classroom and get the teacher to tell students to collect a laptop and login as they arrive - rather than "now all login" at some later point in the lesson.

Ruckus make a big deal out of their "Beamforming" technology. And - to be fair its good - you might get twice the data rate through a thick wall compared to other access points. BUT...and its a really big BUT..... 5Ghz does not go well through walls...its doesn't even go well through bodies in a classroom. All those high data rates disappear when going through a wall...even not such a thick wall. And while Ruckus might deliver twice the data rate getting 4Mb/s rather than 2Mb/s isn't much help because you need a lot more than 4Mb/s to deliver to a classroom of computers - you need 200Mb/s. You WILL need an access point in every classroom to support class sets of laptops. And you will need those access points ceiling mounted in the centre part of the room to maximize spatial separation of streams and avoid as many bodies as possible. And remember - while Ruckus does indeed deliver faster traffic through a wall - its only in one direction - as your clients don't have their beam forming technology so its only half the traffic at best that is quicker. Of course 2.4Ghz goes fine through a wall but you will struggle to support a class set of devices using narrow 20Mhz channels compared to the 80Mhz channel you (might) get with a new "ac" access point on 5Ghz.

Sorry, I rarely find myself able to agree with that statement. I'd be happier with the line that you get what you deserve from the effort put in to make your choice. Remember that all access points use the same chipsets and microcode that determines how 802.11 standard is implemented. The only thing that differentiates the products is the management layer. So you will not get wildly different performance speeds from one system compared to another. Be clear what you want to achieve. Suppliers will practically promise you anything and everything to get your custom. If you can only afford 1 AP per group of 4 classrooms they will produce this solution. But if you are using class sets of devices...especially domain laptops you are likely to find it frustratingly slow. To get the best data rates you will need an access point in every classroom - and they need to be centrally and ceiling mounted. And of course, it goes almost without saying that without good wireless clients new access points won't make much noticeable difference. Or at least no difference without getting out a stop watch. My mantra is to advise everyone to get in sample test kit ..from meraki, ruckus, aerohive...and of course ubiquiti. You might also consider Meru, now fortinet, because their single channel architecture is.....technically interesting, although I'm not convinced it is actually much better than other products now. Ubiquity is so cheap no one will lend you kit, but it's cheap enough to buy and sell on eBay where you will get the about the same price as you paid for it! Gigabit speeds of 800Mb/s or more are to be taken with a pinch of salt. Connection speeds reported by access points and wireless clients are a theoretical maximum for perfect conditions. Typically these figures are UDP traffic, and sending ACK packets take just as long so divide by 2 to start with. And by the time you have taken into account management, error correction and the rest you can divide by another 2. Sometimes these theoretical figures are based on 160Mhz channel. There are currently no wave2 or wave1 "ac" access points capable of 160Mhz channels ... and even if they were you could only use one ap in a building well distanced from any other part of the school like a sports hall. X2 and X3 streams only give around X1.5 improvement at best because they rely on spatial separation...in fact it's often more like X1.2 Oh, and in a dense block of classrooms access points will probably not use 80Mhz channels and fall back to 40Mhz so it's about the same as old n access points. So expect beaten 100 and 200Mb/s of real world wide data rates at the very best using latest clients. Nothing like the connection speed of a cable to gigabit switch. And while Mu-MIMO is a good thing don't imagine that picture they draw with an access point streaming simultaneously to 4 clients is representative of the real world. To start with one of those stream disappears entirely to manage the process. And the reset rely on spatial separation of 4 simultaneous transmissions on the same frequency. Like 4 people talking to you at once - you might gather more information tan a single conversation...but only just. They claim figures of up to x1.8 compared to a single stream. But "up to" is an advertising phrase. Think more like x1.2 compared to a single stream. Personally...I think meraki interface is brilliant...but value for money Ubiquity is hard to beat. Ruckus probably goes better through walls (but you don't want be going through walls you need an AP per classroom). I use Aerohive - but that is almost an accidental choice - and I don't pay for their cloud/annual support and manage them with command line. Don't take my word for it. ...don't take anyone else's word either. Get some kit in and test it. School need a Ford Modeo Solution, maybe even a one year old low mileage Mondeo - not a Rolls Royce solution. Do you get more for your money when you pay for a Rolls Royce - absolutely. But both travel at 70Mph on a motorway just fine. All business access points do load balancing, auto channel selection, signal strength control, band streering, QoS, Multi SSID, Vlans, Radius etc. Yes, some do some of these things neater than others but they basically all do the same job equally well - or equally badly.

We currently use a facility within Exchange to put a disclaimer and contact details at the bottom of every email sent out (externally). This does not contain html, or links, or pictures - because the email sent might be just text...and I'm not sure what would happen with HTML commands in that case...I suspect it would just make it look silly. Anyhow....I have now been asked if its possible to create a kind of "mandatory" skeleton template - either with personal details pre-entered or that they must enter. Is this possible? Via GPO? ...or can you import something into Outlook?

Sorry - but I think I'd need some kind of network plan and knowledge of your IP scheme for servers and DHCP, DNS setup. We use VLANs so all our switches have a "BYOD" wireless network trunked to all the wireless access points. If you want to keep your BYOD wireless traffic off the domain (and you do) I can't see any way to avoid using VLANs - unless you cable the wireless access points separately (as you only have 4). Then we create an SSID profile on the wireless access points so that those joining this SSID get their wireless traffic directed to the VLAN. The VLAN feeds in to smoothwall where we set up rules to control what is allowed for these users. The SSID uses smoothwall's inbuilt radius facility and DHCP. DNS requests forwarded to our domain DNS - except for a few that are handles separately by smoothwall. But of course it can be any router other than smoothwall - although ideally one in which you have either more than one physical "outlet" or an outlet that supports VLANs.

We currently use Symantec - but price increases of over 200% in last 3 years are making us look elsewhere now that renewal is due. To be honest - their email filter probably hasn't had any development for over 8 years - or only tiny largely cosmetic changes. I tried on to write a rule to detect those email spammers that send mail "on behalf of" and discovered it didn't work. Contacted their support and they agreed its not possible to detect that phrase as its not in the normal "sender" or "message" part of the email and so can't be used in any filter. Pathetic. But maybe other stuff is no better.

We are with plusnet. Don't think they are as good as "listening" as they used to be. ...but I've not seen that others are any better.

Yes - I'm always impressed with the whole concept of Chromebooks....and if it wasn't the perception (if the reality) that we still need to run some Windows software I would be racing down this path. I think it needs a "Vision" from senior management and an absolute commitment from a strong core set of users to make them work...and clearly some school have successfully done this.

I find that staff (secondary rather than primary) are very confused when they can search and find material that students can't...or indeed get to web pages that students get blocked. So if we allow anything extra for staff its always with a "soft block" so they realise that students probably can't get to it.

I always question the wisdom of buying budget second hand laptops. Often 2 years or more behind current generation of CPUs. They don't support the latest "ac" wireless standard so potentially perform poorly - especially in school which are increasingly replacing fixed ICT suites with dense mobile suites. You need to replace the HD with an SSD - and buy a new battery before you start - or soon after ....and then it appears you hang on to this device for a further 8 years. And then you wonder why staff are reluctant to promote and incorporate the use of ICT in their subjects. Still if you can move jobs before two years are up - they will remember you as someone who saved some money and curse the next incumbent who will get a deluge of complaints from staff who well tell them that the laptops worked fine for the first two years.