JRA

Phew, ok glad I've not done anything VERY dumb. Netgear looks like this, port 8 will be uplink: Had two cups of tea and even turned it off and on for a laugh. Still no VLANs.

Hi there - thanks for that. Details of that port below: Does seem to be all VLANS not working on the little Netgear I'm trying to connect to the Cisco, although as I mentioned it itself on the default VLAN is fine. Cisco switch is part of the main network itself and has phones and PCs etc in it and all those devices work ok tagged/untagged in their respective VLANs.

Morning everyone. Thought I had this predictable and nailed but it seems I'm really missing something. So, have Cisco switches here (I'm much more of and HP man) but, well, a VLAN is a VLAN after all. Bought myself a little Netgear for an office switch and not having much luck getting it doing VLANs, or VLANS down the pipe to it, one of them. Cisco side it goes into one copper gigabit port, that port is untagged on the default VLAN but tagged on every other one the little downstream switch is to receive. On the little Netgear port 8 is untagged on the default VLAN, that port also tagged on the same VLANs also (meaning all VLANs it's likely to be called upon to dish out to stuff.) Now the little switch has taken it's new IP address (moved off the default one to something more in line with the regular switch IPs around here) and that's fine; can administer it through the web gui ok on the new IP, but I can't seem to get phones etc to work on it. It is a PoE switch so no issues there. No network on anything. Phones run tagged and tagging a port on the netgear gets me no network to phones, untagging a different port for a PCs VLAN get no connectivity. Am I doing something silly or is there something Cisco-ey I'm not doing? Wondered even if ports need to be LAGs (of even one NIC) to do the passing of traffic. Had a tea and went home but it's Monday now and not magically working right over the weekend. Anyone know what I might be making a mess of?

Ahh memories! Yes I remember the Prit sticks etc in slots as pen emulators from back in the day. Takes me back... We have slightly newer looking ones with all-in-one trays like this: I'll see if aggressive restarts sort it, might also audition some other pens from elsewhere later on. Cheers both.

Good morning all, Just hoping to draw on anyone's experience of these out in the wild, not seen any SMART boards in over 10 years but there was one this morning. And it was doing a thing. Nothing glaringly wrong with it (no blutac on it etc) but had two black pens in the tray only, which is what it's always had apparently. So, the thing is stuck on some sort of drawing mode. As in, teacher typing with keyboard and mouse can't select anything in Powerpoint, because this draws a little blob where they click. Moving the cursor with the mouse button held down just draws a squiggly line rather than moving or selecting text/things. Unplugging the board and everything is fine, so something on the board itself that's gone bonkers. Somehow. I guess. Anyone ever had this and if so how did you un-break it?

Ok, starting to get to grips with things a bit. Mosyle sure is a learning curve when you really get into it. Next up is the classroom itself. Which, oddly enough, nobody thought about really they just bought more and more and more iPads... So, looks like we need: - OneDrive integration. This is a biggie. So teachers can stick work into and look at student work in particular student OneDrives for particular classes. Or indeed if all teachers could potentially get to all student OneDrives then that'd be fine. - Classroom control. Some sort of broadcasting to all the screens in a particular classroom would probably be it, plus ability to lock down iPads of any children gone totally rogue. - Some sort of way students would sign in and therefore not be able to mess with the OneDrive contents of the previous user. Staff have 1:1 iPads so no major need of this for them. - Some nice neat way classes and teachers and students can be updated, preferably from spreadsheets. Can already foresee direct exports from SIMS not being the way as there's always one more teacher needing to be bolted on to one more class for reasons or students moved around classes or included in multiple for other reasons. Don't mind managing this myself but some sort of spreadsheet import seems to be the thing. Sorry if this is so basic it's unreal but I'm literally scrabbling around in the dark here, and days and days of cartoon-ey sales pitches trying to research on my own have left me even more baffled than when I started. If anyone either uses or knows of anything that sounds vaguely like the above or if this is just not achievable with iPads please do let me know! And thanks for reading I do feel fairly lost at sea here.

Thanks for the recommendations all! Going with Wasabi, can't beat the price on that one.

Goodness that was swift! Thank you both much indeed. Daresay I think I even follow now what the Apple ID does! That's grand, thanks for this also. How have you set up Apple Classroom for authentication etc? We'll have shared iPads for the students but staff keep their own. Of course if there's a technical document out there I could read do point me at it. Again cheers both.

Good morning everyone. Started off at a new place and there's a lot of iPads here. I know so so little about these things and have had to piece together enough to get by at the last place with Mosyle and what have you, but it looks like we're getting more in now, and it's time to bite the bullet and actually try and understand a few things. Firstly, before I get onto the "real" issue, I still to this day don't understand why I as IT manager need an Apple ID. Or the school does. We have Mosyle to distribute apps etc, what function does the Apple ID of the IT manager/school actually solve, or do, sort of thing? Secondly, which is inevitably the bigger question, we're looking at getting something in that can allow teachers to both broadcast their own iPad to students, lock student iPads if needs be, and also have some sort on OneDrive integration. I think the ideal was students get shown worksheets for example on an iPad and then work from them. Might also be an advantage if the classroom PC can do that/some of that "control" aspect too but not a biggie if it can't. I do rather think hundreds of iPads were acquired before a use case was thought up for them, and now they're being shoehorned into classrooms where some justification is reached for long after the fact, but whatever their origins I'm determined to make this work as well as it can. Apple Classroom has been pitched, but it has some BAD reviews on it and a VERY poor rating. Keen to avoid that if there is better out there. Currently have no AD logons for individual students at all but we do have 365 logins for most pupils. I'd use those if I could but I guess I can make up AD accounts if we need. If anyone can make any sense out of the above in any respect and help me out with advice or opinions on it I'd be immensely grateful!

Would certainly be SIMS and FMS, probably the Veeam backups of the MIS server infact plus a few drives. <1Tb Wasabi looks VERY reasonable there!

Hello all, Just taken the helm at a new place, very tidy setup indeed. Looking to implement cloud backups for the school data as nothing in place yet. Anyone got any recommendations on who to go with? Would like, as I think most would, lots of storage and ultra-reliable/secure and really cheap too. Thanks for any and all suggestions.

Thanks both - I *think* it's gone away but I'm not sure; not heard anything about it in the last few days anyway. I was thinking Smoothie initially but not rummaged too hard yet. At least it's not only me though!

Morning all, this one has me truly baffled! Students back over half term and, although they can browse their Sharepoint files nicely they get 502 Bad Gateway messages come up when they try to access anything that isn't a PowerPoint. And I am legit sure I haven't the first clue why that is lol. Anyone got even the vaguest idea or seen this before at all? Thanks for any and all musings!

Found this, works a treat! https://pdfencrypt.net/ Thanks everyone.

Cheers, would have to avoid anything online though for the old GDPR.

Afternoon all, Just looking around for something that can apply a password to a .pdf. Has to be free, must be a locally installed bit of software and ideally would literally just install and be used to add passwords to existing .pdfs. Did think I'd 7zip them but that won't do. Anyone know a thing that'll do the thing? Thanks if anyone knows!

Got the info secondhand but the text of part of the reply was: Also kudos writing your own solution! Beyond me for sure.

Yep you can. It's more that the staff are unhappy doing it manually where we had something prior that would automatically assign late students a late mark when signing in. Must admin I'm not sure. However... ...that's magic thanks for that. Glad to know it's potentially on the way! Colleague emailed them and asked but they didn't want to commit to a timeframe specifically. Good to know it's in the works. Cheers everyone.

Thanks both. Yes SignInApp was the thing that worked previously when we had SIMS, now Arbor move and ofc not got that anymore. Arbor say they are working on it and it'll be available sometime, just wondered if anything was out there that filled the gap for now.

Good afternoon all, Looking for something that can in some way mark students as late in Arbor who sign in late. I'm *fairly* sure no feature exists within Arbor to achieve this, but thought I'd see if the collective knew of anything 3rd party that might! Thanks all.

Ah right, gotcha. Does your Smoothie appliance do the DHCP too for your VoIP phones? Cheers, actually it's legit all off-site, just need DHCP-ing and a route out to t'interweb for those. Simple enough in principle, so long as I can get my head around the Smoothie aspect ofc!

You have been a gent thank you. What's the charity you'd like? I think they've earned the tenner lol.

Morning all, today's networking quandry is upon me and I thought I'd ask, well, clever people on my thinking. Have need of a VoIP VLAN knocking up swiftly. The move to "proper" VLANs we'll tackle over the summer, but for now that's a little too much head scratching. So, we have the option of just a switch-to-switch VLAN. I'm thinking that, as we have a spare interface on the Smoothwall box, stick that in the new VoIP VLAN and just have that handle the DHCP and let that route go straight out. Seems to be do-able, but has anyone done this in this way? If so/If you had to, would you un-tag the port on the switch and stuff the cable in switch <-> Smoothwall, or would you tag that cable and have Smoothie do the un-tagging? Are the direct out rules for that subnet easy enough to set up in Smoothie? Thanks folks for any and all thinking!

Thanks much for writing all that! I'm not sure I follow all the way (though I have had the covid last week and I'm more than a little foggy!) The principles though I definitely see. LAN "normal" clients get IP addresses from your DHCP server/s, which are on the ip-helper addresses outside of their own subnet and VLAN.The "getting out to the internet" process seems to (from my slightly fuzzy-headed reading of things) rely on a couple of bits. One bit is the rule in the core switch that says "anything I myself, being the core switch, don't have a route for and which comes from any of my VLANs, I spit out to this other interface and hope that it handles it" <- that being the address of the firewall in the VLAN that only the firewall and the core switch share to to-and-fro on. This rule is set up with the next hop business (I'll have to read up on how to configure that bit.) The firewall has a static IP set of course so it can "be" that destination address. This is the only VLAN it sits in for the sake of passing traffic (prolly has another one for administration.) The destination network it "knows" because, although the network itself is 10.30.32.0 255.255.0.0, it passes any "stuff" for that range down the interface on 172.25.255.11 (again the VLAN the core switch and the firewall use for to-and-fro talking) and the core switch "sorts out" the destination of %packet% when it gets it. The wireless part I'll turn some thinking to when I get some brain back. I might be getting there you know but seriously thanks for taking the time to explain it all! I'm getting there for sure. I think lol!

Firstly thanks both for sticking with me on this one. I do have DHCP set that way indeed yes, but both server and client are on untagged ports in their respective VLANs. And until very recently I didn't use the term "SVI" at all and would have just called it "that gateway address thing bit that is the way out of the VLAN for stuff" but all the cool folks are saying "SVI" lol. Ah ok I'm with you on that I think. So, workstations and printers let's say (being good typical "internal wired" thingies) are sat on, say, a workstation VLAN 10 and a printers VLAN 20. VLANs 10 and 20 have SVIs set up on the core switch, with the IP helper address of the domain's DHCP server set there too. Hopefully I'm right so far! Servers in this scenario are on VLAN 30. VLAN 30 has it's gateway as a sub-interface of a NIC on the Smoothie box. Let's also say for fun there's just no DHCP on that range neither so everything has to be assigned a static address and config to do anything, to also mean I think we wouldn't need IP helpers anywhere on that VLAN. For VLAN 30 we have tagged packets all 'round. I must admit I am having some trouble braining this part. If you have some time, patience and sock puppets could you elaborate on that part? I think I understand that the Smoothie box in this scenario will handle the to-and-fro of server <> workstation traffic (accessing shared files and drives etc) but the "internet going in and out to things" aspect of it I'm not quite seeing. I'll promise £10 to the charity of your choice if you can get me my eureka moment lol! But thanks both much, I'm nearly there I hope.