klawd

Hello We have recently setup a FreePBX server in house to replace our aging old PBX system, but we are having a few issues. It is the common one way audio problem. Currently our setup is running through a backup FFTC line with a low spec router, with a few ports forward, all very simple, and everything works as it should. No audio issues, very clear. No problems at all when using this connection. However, our problems start when we try to use our Leased line with our higher spec firewall. We get a range of issues, including: 1. Can hear incoming calls OK, no problems with two way audio 2. Can dial out and hear the other end, but they cant hear us 3. Can dial out, but can't hear the other end, but they can hear us ...and a mixture of 2 and 3. It seems very inconsistent. All googling points towards "NAT" related issues. As it works on our FFTC but not our leased line, it seems the problem is obviously the way we have our firewall rules configured. I have tried numerous combinations of opening ports, but nothing seems to solve all the problems in one go. The firewall Appliance is a Stormshield SN510. We have setup a seperate VLAN and a seperate IP range on the interface. The FreePBX uses this as the default gateway. We are using voiptalk/TeleAppliant as the SIP trunk provider. They have told us we have to open a range of ports 5060-5065, 10000-20000, which we have done. I am tearing my hair out here, for what seems like a very simple issue. I am wondering if there is anyone with experience of configuring FreePBX and or/a stormshield might be able to help us resolve this issue. Thank you

I am in the process of evaluating "reggie" here. A few comments: 1. The android app does not currently work as it is supposed to - I don't know whether the iOS version works. You can take registers but there is lots of broken functionality. I have raised these issues. 2. It is simple, which I prefer over the emerge app, we only want to take registers. 3. I am waiting for news of updates on the bug fixes, and as yet have had no timeframe for when/if these will be implemented 4. I suspect the software is very new as we were able to get a very good price quote compared to emerge, however if it doesn't work properly, then we won't be buying it anyway. 5. There are a few oddities and UI issues. I think it has real promise, but is not quite there yet. msg me if you want specifics on any of the above

We use Axis 216FD POE cameras here. Expensive but great quality. Software was expensive and hardware intensive, so we created our own lightweight app that just starts and stops recording MP4 stream at specific times. Never tried wireless, so can't comment on that.

We are looking to replace our HP workstations with new machines. The HPs have been great quality and reliable (DX2200s), but when it comes to quoting, HP are not able to get anywhere near the spec DELL are offering for a good price. So I am seriously considering switching to DELL. However, after talking to some other schools I am getting reports about design issues with this DELL model, that allow students to remove the floppy blanking plate and remove the memory. I would like to ask you guys if any of you have experienced this issue, whether it is a real issue or overblown in your view, any solutions to it, or even if you didn't find it to be an issue at all. DELL tell me the problem was with machines a few years ago, but rather than rely on their bias, I'd be interested in other's experiences.

I don't suppose you could give me a link to a document stating this, please? We are looking to implement our own setup and want to be 100% about the requirements, which even the LA don't seem to be sure about. Thanks

The photos are stored in a column in the database. PM me if you want a PHP script to export them.

I get that feeling sometimes. Others replies are correct about the problems associated with new technology. But there is something to be said for organizations that recognise the value of IT and the investment needed to provide a robust system. I would love to have a proper SAN and virtual servers to be able to provide something truly redundant, and fast. However the kind of money needed to do that, just can't be justified. I think education is disconnected from the real world in many ways, and to expect it to keep pace with the private sector is unrealistic. I just try to keep up with other technology outside of the job, and have several friends in the private sector who keep me updated with all the wonderful new kit that they are playing with, so I can learn about whats out in the field.

Thanks for the responses. Very interesting. How do people handle email retention and archiving? There has been an incident here, which has referred to correspondence via email between staff and parent, which took place some time ago (over 6 months), for evidence purposes. Just wondering how others deal with this.

We host our own email system and had a similar problem. If you can get ports opened etc, you can tell outlook to query the LDAP of the other organization (and the GAL) I believe. In our cases we couldnt get ports opened, and ended up creating a hack together job, that downloads the GAL, syncs it to a database and then removes/creates any contacts for the other ORG's users in our AD.

We have been reviewing policy and procedure in the school, and something which has cropped up as a potentially serious issue, is the one of data retention. I'm told that currently all data about children must be held in our establishment for 5 years. This lead to questions regarding email retention. We host our own email using exchange 2003, and have "limited" measures in place for email archiving. I was wondering how other schools handle long term data archiving (software and hardware), especially email archiving, and what systems they have in place to process requests under the FOI act.

I dont think you can, at least not without hacking away at code. I believe this is by design, since the GAL is created dynamically from the Active Directory, and having users pull it up, close it, refresh etc, would put strain on the DC's and also waste bandwith. In OWA 2007, they introduced a browsable GAL which is one of the reasons I wanted to upgrade, you can buy similar functionality for OWA 2003 from messagelabs, but last time I checked it was too expensive to justify. Maybe this will do what you want? Plus Pack | Turn Outlook Web Access into Microsoft Outlook

We are using a combination of HP and 3Com GBICS in a 3com 4200G, and 3COM GBIC in Allied Telesis switch Some 3COM gbics in a HP 1800G switch, and 3COM gbic in a DLINK POE switch. Allied Telesyn GBIC in Netgear FSM switch. All work no problem.

I had the same problem as you, and decided to phase out the DV Tape cams. We have got a few of these, DCR-SR55E (DCRSR55E) : Camcorders : Sony Pretty much idiot proof, touch screen, hard drive. Training takes about 2 minutes, after, you can just plug it into the USB and copy off the mpg4 files as if using a memory stick.

I think you have a good point, we were waiting for the LA to get something together, which seems to be taking forever, and since they don't appear to be that bothered in implementing, neither were we. There are data protection and access issues I would rather someone else deal with, with direct access to information. On its own that information is not very useful. What happened to the other 20 days? Context is important. I'm not 100% sure. But I can see real issues with how realtime data would be collected. I have seen nothing yet that convinces me this would be possible on a large scale. (Our SIMS server is slow enough with 20 users, let alone access by possibly 1000+) The problem of "parental engagement" is not a technological one however, and making a mountain on information available is unlikely to solve that. One thing I have noticed, is that the way schools report and what they report seems to vary quite a lot. When you have teachers arguing over what a level or sub level means, I find it hard to imagine a parent accepting or understanding a particular grade. Of course, this happens now to some extent, but opening up the data, also opens the floodgates to parents asking for justification on every point of data. I can't see teachers having the time or inclination to explain such details. I can see the value in making reports available online (scrapping paper copies etc), and its something we hope do, in a very reduced format. But making things such as behaviour records available is a total no-go. Those records are not intended for parents direct consumption. "Timely" and "Accurate" and not something I see teachers that worried about.

1. We will likely write our own system, if forced 2. Confident it is inaccurate 3. Will publish nothing that has not been already "Processed" into a sensible format - We feel providing information without context is inviting problems. As far as I read, the requirement for realtime access was scrapped. I also suspect the whole initiative may be dropped, or at least made not mandatory. These things tend to dissapear on their own, if you hang back and let other schools/orgs spend the money and end up with a costly mess.

Few things you can try: 1. Using telnet on your exchange server, try and connect to an external mail server on port 25. 2. Do the reverse - outside your LAN, check you can telnet into your mail server on port 25. 3. Check whether you need to have your ISP setup as your SMTP host/gateway (here we have our own exchange server, but send mail to nildram (Our ISP) in exchange 4. Using nslookup, check that the MX records point to your exchange server external IP eg, by typing nslookup set type=mx somedomain.com It should give you the IP address of your exchange box/firewall The checks above will show if there is actually a route insideand out for smtp email, if they fail you should check your firewall/IP setup.

We had a similar (same?) problem. In our case the problem was because the clipart URL word uses has "app=msword.exe" embedded in it, and our filter blocks attempts to download exe files.

When you say stored in outlook, I am assuming you mean it lives on an exchange server, is it a public calendar? I have written a php app that integrates a users calendar events from their exchange mail account into our portal. It uses webdav to talk to the exchange server. If you have webdav access to the exchange server, then you could extract the events that way. I dont mind sharing the code if interested, drop me a PM.

Profiles: Mandatory for both staff and pupils - no reason to have any other way since we lock things down heavily with GPOs, and redirect common folders. Mandatory profiles also make a huge difference to logon times. Email: We host our own exchange 2003 server. Some staff use full Outlook (admin usually), most use OWA, pupils have no email accounts. Past experience has shown email to be a huge time waster among our age pupils (middle school), so we stopped providing it.

As far as I can see thats for at least two reasons: 1. sites using fronter are not very presentable or configurable 2. few have produced anything with it that doesnt look like a geocities home page circa 1996. The rollout of fronter in our LA (not norfolk btw..) was not ....well handled, with seemingly many schools still not committed to using it, (after rollout almost 8 months ago) and otherwise accepting it as just another initiative that will fade away. I don't think it helps that already, the LA appear to be giving signals that they have plans to replace Fronter when the contract expires with a completely different VLE. If they dont show commitment, hardly surprising teachers wont buy into it.

Totally agree. This level of spending was never sustainable. The plan has been scaled back progressively ever since it was brought in. Headteachers now understand the lack of control and find it unacceptable. Phases have been put back, some companies are pulling out of contracts, and others are not willing to take the financial risk. I suspect the whole thing will quietly be shelved, having already cost hundreds of millions. Typical public sector waste. Just hang in there...

We have: 14xAxis 216FD Cameras, recording from 8AM to 6PM, 5 days a week. Footage is recorded as MPEG4 (MJPG is way too much overhead) Uses approximately 30GB of storage per day. Footage is cycled every 5 days purged). Bandwith use is around 12MB/s total. Small Form PC (DC5750) running Windows XP, custom recording software, that streams out to viewing clients (4 of). Memory is 2GB. Processor is AMD64 4200. CPU usage is around 60%. I would 100% recommend DIY, if your needs are not hugely sophisticated (such as behaviour pattern detection etc). If we need to scale up past 16 cams, I will just get another DC5750 and add the cameras on. I thought the software licensing was a huge rip off, and since we setup a schedule of rebooting the cameras every 24 hours. We have never had a problem. Our system is more efficient, easier to use, and even more reliable than the original Camera station software we wasted money on.

Our SQL server has decided to take a massive dump today. The raid is gone, the SCSI card is kaput and our backups have apparently been quite happily creating garbage backup files for the past 4 days. Going back to the most recent backup, the full server backup, (bkf) file is corrupted. We do have the latest sims db backup (created using dbattach), and were wondering if we rebuilt the server, reinstalled sql + sims, and FMS, if copying back and reattaching the lastest sims db backup would be enough. We were migrated to SQL FMS a few months ago. Does the backup created using dbattach, backup the FMS information as well? Also, if someone could point me towards some SIMS install documents, that would be really appreciated. Thank you

You are more likely to have bandwith, and cpu problems rather than disk speed issues. Bear in mind, depending on the cameras you buy, you might not be able to get more than 8 cameras on one server anyway. Here we use cheap dual core workstations, with mirrored HDs in.

We use JEP(s) with great results here. JEP(S) | Proxmea