BrotherSidious

We are looking to appoint one and possibly two people to this role. Applicants will become part of a 4 person team responsible for providing ICT Support to staff and students at a single Secondary School located in Wolverhampton. Salary range is NJC SCP 7-11 which equates to £22,369 - £24,054). The starting salary is negotiable dependant on the skills and knowledge (experience) that the applicant can bring to the role. If anyone has any questions in relation to this then please feel free to message me as I head up the current department and will be part of the interview panel. Details in relation to the vacancy can be found here : https://www.st-thomasmore.walsall.sch.uk/ict-technician/

ICT Technician required, full time, all year round. Further details here https://www.st-thomasmore.walsall.sch.uk/ict-technician/ Closing date has been extended. If anyone wishes to discuss this in more detail then please drop me a message as I will be on the interview panel.

Anyone else having issues. Ours started yesterday evening and still not working correctly. Users either can't login or when they do, it is slow and getting gateway timeout issues. Emails to support wont get responded to until Monday neither does their phone line (left a voicemail). No idea now to alert them to the fact we are having issues. Their status page is indicating there are no current issues.

Thanks for your assistance Dave, all sorted now.

@SchoolsBroadband The IP addressing issue occurred when we first joined Schools Broadband and at the time you were using Lightspeed and I believe it was an issue with the Rocket, this was something we were not advised about. As you say, it may no longer be an issue with NetSweeper but it was an issue for us. While you're on here Dave, we put in a request a week ago with regards to moving our DNS and are still no further forward with it. Any chance you could have a look at what the delay is please? If you need a ticket reference its : 422123 and dates back to June when we made an initial request to clarify where our DNS was hosted.

Coming to the end of our 5 year contract. Won't be renewing and based on our experience I can't recommend. Others may have a different experience and some comments above suggest a good experience but that's not me. My Personal experience/opinion : I wanted to move away from Netsweeper which is why I went to Schools Broadband as they were using Lightspeed. Got moved back to Netsweeper with no consultation or choice. Personally feel Netsweeper is inferior to Lightspeed. Wasn't told that if we were on a shared resource with another school those schools cannot use the same IP addresses, even if private, so had to re-address our entire site and reconfigure all our internal switches and routers which wasn't a 5 minute job. Several other issues and found support lacking. Poor to no communication. On two occasions we were wrongly identified as a different school and changes made which broke them and us. On one call I sent a screenshot with our school identifier on it to argue my point and they still changed the wrong school after assurances from the previous incident that it wouldn't happen again. Hidden shared lists updated with no notice to open up sites for other schools as a lot of them wanted to access certain sites and they couldn't be bothered to unblock at each individual school. This opened up sites which were previously blocked for us and allowed student access. Happened more than once. There is more but felt this is enough to justify to the OP my reasoning. On a plus point, there are always improvements and enhancements coming.

SBB are not the only ones to quote metrics so this part is not aimed solely at them but uptimes, stability, failovers, degradation versus failure and whatever other metric is flavour of the month; in the words of Shania Twain "that don't impress me much". The only metric I care about is the simple one that says: when needed, did the broadband connection allow for the school administration to function as expected and did it allow for the delivery of the curriculum as expected. Now I fully understand that ISP's are not in a position to provide such metrics, however, they are the only metrics that staff and students care about. They have no time for fancy names, graphs, technical explanations or anything else. They have a very basic expectation, that it works consistently. When you have changed nothing internal to your network and suddenly your broadband connection stops working, questions are rightly asked. Unfortunately answers, such as; X has changed and is better than Y, Z may have had a problem but W has been rock solid or B failed but not for everyone and the other time it was C and affected different people means zero to staff and students. I appreciate these responses are technical in their nature and aimed at us as support staff but our non-technical response to staff and students when they ask whose fault it is will be "our ISP". Now an ISP may pass the buck on to its partners or other services that they work with but I'm afraid the ISP chooses those partners and services so from our point of view, we bought our broadband/ filtering package from you so the buck stops with you. If the fault is with partners/services then pick better partner/services. It is also somewhat concerning that on discovering an issue, the stock answer tends to be that ‘we are not seeing any issues our end.’ Why does my free monitoring software pick up issues with an internet connection within seconds of it going down yet the ISP cannot ‘see anything?’ It goes back to the point of expectations, I am not concerned about whether X or Y is working but simply does my internet connection and the level of filtering that as a school we are obliged to provide, work. There comes a point when it is out of the technicians hands, as I feel it should be, and our customers (staff and students) get to vocalize their concern. They ask for change because regardless of the provider's metrics they are not happy, their lessons are being disrupted, admin functions cannot be completed, paid for online resources cannot be accessed etc. Over the last 12 months, the feedback from staff and students is that our broadband connection has become less reliable. Rightly so, we have to answer to them. We are, after all, service providers ourselves. As such, I would imagine that at the end of our current contract we will not be renewing with SBB as the only real metric we care about, that it is working as expected, is not being met consistently enough. The perception is that it has been getting progressively worse despite statements that it is better and more stable. Yesterday we experienced another outage which only serves to reinforce that perception. Now, 60 minutes may be insignificant to an ISP's metric but that has a major impact on schools, especially at the moment with all of the home working and the remote accessing of resources going on by staff and students. It is already a stressful time for staff and students without us adding to it. Whatever these enhancements and improvements are, whatever these updates and patches are and whatever new systems and hardware is being bought online is of zero interest to staff and students and they get the deciding vote. I may well get to say where we go next but they definitely get to say enough is enough. Regardless of this, to any and all reading this post I hope that you stay well, be safe and take care

We are back now but apparently SBB didn't see any issues at their end. Nice to hear we weren't the only ones that went down as you start to doubt yourself (not good that you were down too though). I guess you did nothing like us and it suddenly fixed itself. Not really sure which magic elves to thank for fixing it as it wasn't us and apparently not SBB either.

Anyone else have issues. We lost our connection around 2pm this afternoon?

We are working fine as far as I can tell. Sorry to hear others are having issues.

Our live logs are all over the place. Currently have 10:28 and 11:20 depending on which record comes through.

I appreciate openness and honesty as much as the next person. I also appreciate everyone working hard to resolve issues, escalating them and having discussions with NetSweeper but ultimately what my SLT wants is a reliable, filtered and available connection to the internet to support the delivery of the school curriculum and the school's admin functions. In all of the previous instances, there have been explanations and fixes and patches and I am sure things are moving forwards but what teachers and students see is disruption. They do not see the progress that is discussed. What they see is what was once a reliable and stable internet connection is becoming more and more unreliable. They remember every single disrupted lesson due to the sudden on the fly replanning or adjustment that may require. As support staff, we get inundated with calls from multiple classrooms when the internet goes down or slows to the point of being unusable and we frequently have to appease them and can offer no real comfort in terms of when things will be resolved, how long the outage will be and will the issue occur again. As much as Schools Broadband may be working to improve things and maybe improving their communication with us, unfortunately, the discontented voices of staff continue to rise and feedback to SLT so it surely cannot come as a surprise that we are asked to look at alternatives when our current contract comes to an end. Realistically I can offer them no reason to stay as "Netsweeper is better then lightspeed", "NetSweeper is looking to improve things", "new hardware is going in", etc is of no interest to them whatsoever. They are completely uninterested. All they want is a reliable internet connection so that they can deliver the lessons they have planned. As much as I applaud Schools Broadband honesty with regards to what has happened and what they are doing we are not looking for a broadband supplier who is "getting there" we are looking for one that has arrived at a reliable and stable solution. When staff are complaining that their home broadband is more reliable you know you're in trouble!

Cunninghams offered us the same extortionate fee to upgrade our 3 revals at a per machine cost some years ago (we have the red ones that are upgradeable). We sourced a £15 cable off the internet from a company that also supplied the files needed to program that notereader. We removed the notereader, hooked it up to a power supply from science and a laptop and did them ourselves. Now looking to change provider.

Absolutely zero information has been forthcoming about this latest outage which has disrupted the entire day. This lack of communication is both disappointing and disturbing. Very unlikely to renew our contract on expiry now as repeatedly told things will improve but outages feel as if they are more frequent now and the total lack of communication has eroded any confidence I may have had that things would improve.

When your the one on site, everyone looks to you for resolution. Fortunately our staff were supportive of the fact that we couldn't do any more than we were doing but it was frustrating for both us and them. The service is now stable for us and I appreciated the post above from @SchoolsBroadband as it does shed some light on the situation and does give me information to pass up the chain so to speak. Hopefully things are learn't from this experience such as the importance of a daily update, the acknowledgement of support tickets and followup of those tickets, this forum should not be the place where customers feel they have to go to get support. I appreciate that Dave Tindall takes the time to monitor and reply to posts here but it must be a concern that people feel this is now their routine place to have to come rather than a place of last resort which indicates some overhaul of the SBB support process is needed. I would encourage others to post up constructive comments in relation to improvements they would recommend so that as SBB look into ways to improve after this incident they can not only take into analysis of their own procedures and policies but can also take not of concerns and suggestions from customers. Ultimately you may choose to stay with SBB, look to leave early or choose not to renew as that is your choice and you are entitled to your opinion on it but for anyone staying with them for any period of time, there is no harm in putting suggestions up here in the hope that things can be improved going forwards. Personally, I would like on online status page where we can see whats happening and daily updates could be posted when issues such as this occur as I think that would fundamentally improve communication and even when there are outages, we would all be less in the dark about them which for me would be a good start.

May I ask if there is anything that identifies the subset of customers that were affected. Were they using a setting in common or is it just a random subset of customers.

Yes, good luck with that.

Hi, you may be experiencing the same issue that we were. SBB have a hidden shared list which blocks all of the decrypt urls except for the exceptions they have put in there so you will need to expressly allow it in one of your own lists. We have had to do the same for securesuite as the SBB hidden list was blocking our finance department from making purchases and transactions until we put an explicit allow for this in to one of our shared lists. We asked SBB and were told they would not amend their hidden list and if we wanted access to the site we would have to add in our own allow entry.

Getting very disillusioned here. We went for a managed service to reduce the time and effort our onsite techs would have to spend on this but for the last three days this is all two of them have been dealing with. The list of issues goes on. Inaccessible console, loss of filtering, contradicting information, lack of communication, inconsistencies, things stated but not sure if followed up. To be fair to David Tindall, if I message him on here I get a prompt response but he is not technical support and should not be our first line of support but there seem to be many customers exasperated with first line support and a general lack of communication. We have been moved without warning, were migrated without warning - they arbitrarily moved part of our network from Lightspeed to NetSweeper without telling us leaving our BYOD WiFi network dead in the water for three days. Personally, I can wait for a full and detailed report into the issues but I would like a daily update on progress so I at least have something to say to SLT rather than "I may have some information in due cause". SLT want answers as to why all of our Adobe products stopped working affecting the curriculum, why online resources we have paid for were suddenly unavailable for nearly two days again impacting the curriculum. Why finance suddenly could not make payments and why could our onsite caterers not order food in for the students meals. Complete nightmare and even though we are now back up (to a degree) we are still having to manually unblock sites which we had previously unblocked. All of this we hoped to avoid and why we choose managed rather than onsite but onsite is now looking like it would actually put less load on my department!

We've had over a week now of issues accessing the NetSweeper management console reliably. Its awful and all we are being told is it's a "NetSweeper" issue. No idea when it will be resolved or what the cause is.

Prior to the six weeks break we had access to a number of websites via our NetSweeper filtering and thought (as all these sites were working) we were finally there with regards to getting things sorted. Since our return we are getting calls on a daily basis from staff who can no longer access websites they and students could happily access prior to the break. We changed absolutely nothing on our filtering over this period but somebody somewhere most definitely has! Finance were unable to log in to previously accessible bank sites, staff couldn't access online sites to place orders, pinterest would not allow access, goggle maps broke and this morning I walk into a HelpDesk ticket that bingmaps.com is no longer working. We are slowly resolving these on a site by site basis but this is extremely frustrating as all these sites worked perfectly before. Is anyone aware of an underlying change that could have affected multiple websites? It truly sucks to believe that your filtering was all correctly configured ready for the start of the academic years only to find out on day 1 that your department would be spending half its time trying to make previously accessible websites accessible again. Not a happy bunny !

It appears to have been working OK for us since Friday

When we contacted SB last week we had the same response. Not sure how long this is going to take to resolve.

We have had google issues since last week. Students having to use Bing at the moment.

We had a call late yesterday afternoon to say the issue was resolved. Apparently the NOC team made a change and it sorted the issue (I was unable to find out what that change was). We have removed the temporary entries we made in the default list to get round the issue yesterday and these sites now appear to be working as expected.