Ephelyon

That's another point; for what many of them would ask for, full Enterprise Admin access may not be needed and you may well be able to "get away" with an account that has local admin access to all workstations plus e.g. full control permissions cascaded downwards from the root of your file servers' data volumes.

We have a separate account (the domain's default Administrator account) with its password stored in the safe, but TBH I don't really class this as "giving SLT admin access". To my mind that would be more like what @Jamman960 is referring to.

Cheers for the info, it's something I'd wondered for a while. I doubt there'll be any pupils in at all in this case though...

What actually happens to school staff's jobs in a situation like this? Are they now unemployed or does "someone" continue to pay them some sort of retainer while the school is rebuilt so they don't have to hire all new staff as well?

Hehehe, apologies for off-topic post but I couldn't help noticing in the job spec: "Backing up of data for derisory recovery..." When restoring your server, you must be sure to sneer at it a lot.

If you're in the south, Crunk Juice is the way to go!

Donated - pob lwc!

Under User Configuration: Administrative Templates > Desktop > Active Directory > Maximum size of Active Directory searches Enable and set to 0.

From experience, the more worrying thing about the Network window is the exposure of the Search Active Directory button. You can't hide this but you can set a GPO setting to always limit the number of search results returned to 0, rendering its use as a nosey-parker's tools effectively null and void.

I'm assuming this has to be on a remote computer as you could just use runas if it's on the local machine. The syntax is: psexec \\computername command Switches (that I've used anyway): -accepteula (I always sling this in just in case, so you don't get any annoying prompts) -d (don't wait for the remote process to terminate) -i (run the process interactively such that it appears on the screen) -s (run the process as LocalSystem) -x (run the process on the WinLogon desktop - requires additional customisation to work properly) You can combine switches like this: psexec \\computername -accepteula -dis command So this will run the command as LocalSystem, it can interact with the desktop and PsExec on your end won't wait for it to complete before terminating (useful if iterating through a list of computers, where the command is guaranteed to succeed, in e.g. a batch script).

We apply subnet rules, such that the only device that can be accessed is the Internet gateway. That provides effective isolation without actually configuring isolation...

You still can't obviate the risk of cyberbullying by text, but this is an issue for the Safeguarding Lead, not the IT Manager. They are therefore the person who should be apprised (don't skimp on it).

Does sound like a potential automated brute-force then...

Did the event occur more than once?

D'oh! Just spotted one in the list anyway...

Perhaps for now, but if they're looking at doing it nationwide (way down the line) I'd imagine academies would have to be included as they're over half of schools now. Not that I really want to be seen to balk at an £800K grant, but one wonders to what extent NMs and tech teams could be sidelined during this process, if at all in fairness.

If you're still thinking of going down the Single Status route, I would write a letter outlining that you believe "your duties and responsibilities have altered significantly since your role was last reviewed" and requesting that the Head follows statutory LEA procedure to re-evaluate your role (point them in the direction of this if you can find it, check with County HR). In our LEA, if the Head says no, or doesn't respond within four weeks, there is a separate procedure to take the matter further yourself alongside the LEA if you wish to. Personally I take a rather old-fashioned view of this and believe that, just as the most senior officer on a military vessel is referred to as "Captain" regardless of their actual rank, so it should be with school IT technicians. The most senior of them will always be acting as the NM and should be on the NM job spec (and salary) for however long that scenario is anticipated to continue.

Just came across this on El Reg: Tech quango coughs £800k to hook your child up to Internet of Things The comment down the bottom is interesting (a potential national rollout)... anyone else paranoid enough to wonder whether this could lead to an attempt to cloudify us all by the back door?

The German system sounds similar to the American mindset of "school districts", then. I'm a Dutch-speaker myself and have limited experience of professional German & Afrikaans translation so I expect we could sort of understand one another... as @nephilim says, drunkenness might help there...

I think we should bear in mind that this is the view of an outside observer and the author's keyword here is "systematic". That to me implies standards around how things should be done because it could be viewed as the only means whereby an outside observer might be able to discern an overall picture of what's going on. And indeed, we don't really have any if we're being honest. Not that that has to be a bad thing in terms of the particular degree of flexibility that we all know is required in this sector. One of the problems around data analysis is that standardisation in this regard is almost universally viewed as negative, which is for understandable reasons considering that each school is unique and each of its pupils is unique again. For example, at this school I've suggested that when we're planning for targeted intervention at a whole-school level, we should make use of data analysis to identify potentially vulnerable cohorts, both for a snapshot picture now and to track progress over time. To that end, I've demonstrated to SLT how we can use SIMS Discover to generate a Venn diagram of pupils who have less than 95% attendance, are eligible for free school meals and have an additional need. That diagram contained 17 pupils at the centre the first time I ran it and 18 pupils the second time, a few months hence (probably the attendance factor that's changed). But this is all ad-hoc. You can't create standards around it for fear of constricting individual schools' ability to make the best use of data; but standards are a very viable vehicle for promoting awareness on the part of outside observers, without which we will no doubt see articles like this. All we can really hope for in that scenario is that they aren't taken too seriously by those who do actually understand what is being done, and have a vector for influencing it.

@crispinw and I have had a chat on the phone in the meantime. Out of that discussion arose a mutual interest in petitioning EduGeek – and perhaps also the FITS Foundation – to consider submitting members to form part of a working group to discuss these issues at a wider level, perhaps much in the way that EduGeek was preparing to submit members to the Wider Review Panel for the BSI's proposed PAS standard around child online safety. Certainly I believe that Crispin stands a good chance of success if relevant bodies such as ours can support the initiative. It may also provide an opportunity for EduGeek to make use of existing links with the BSI, BESA, the DfE etc, via this initiative, to participate in round-table discussions involving its own agenda as the widest body of technical professionals in education. I have also highlighted to Crispin where my own agenda (promoting recognition of, and standards of practice within, the profession, as can be found in many of my longer posts!) stands in respect of this and I believe they mesh well. Accordingly we agreed to e-mail @Dos_Box, @GrumbleDook and @TrevorGreenfield suggesting this, which has been done, and then to invite further discussion of the matter here on this thread from the community itself.

The fact is that a lot of what's demanded in that article is already in place. The claim that schools don't make use of "data analysis to track pupil progress" is laughable. We're also hoping that our new VLE will facilitate a lot of the methodology put forward in the article, if we wish to use it. Though it is useful in pointing out the fact that a single integrated approach to putting all of these technologies together, driven by an ambitious overall vision for how a learning environment of that nature and calibre would look, is still lacking in many schools, with too much of an ad-hoc approach to new technologies instead. Absolutely agree that money is still a major factor though, and always will be.

Congratulations to you all! =]

If a student domain admin were compromised, they may be able to do things like reverse trusts with the staff domain, which is a change.

Hence the need for a forest - perhaps someone in an Academy Federation can comment on how forests (or in fact trees at this level) have been implemented to simplify administration?