buzzard

@sammy42 nothing surprises me now with OCL, does anyone have access to pm me a copy at all?

I think you've no chance of geting these anytime soon! Do you think schools will get these by the end of the Month

You've summed it up really! Funny as that was one of the reasons the notice period was extended until the end of Jan so Schools could make an informed choice!!

Don't know if you've seen this press release - News : Lancashire County Council and BT Refresh Strategic Partnership tbh I can't see how they can go back to the way things where, most decent school "area" staff have left with a few hardcore decent people remaining, the rest, well I'd struggle to see how they could put things back together. We can only hope something gets sorted for the sake of taxpayers money. All this change and chaos doesn't help anyone!!

from my days with CoD and CoD2 servers, it doesn't need to be THAT beefy as all heavy stuff is done on peoples PC's.... what are the dedi server specs for the games?? It IS a few years since my kids made time for me to turn my gaming PC on though

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Interesting question, I should imagine though they'll need to loose the 800 odd schools they have for that to happen, especially as after the network convergence project both schools and council share the same infrastructure now

Cheers Andy

OK so from this blog here - https://meraki.cisco.com/blog/2013/03/a-few-new-features-in-systems-manager/ Meraki Systems Manger has supported a global http proxy since March 2013, I must be a numpty since I can't find any other reference to this setting.. anyone have this working at all?

They've (OCL) been told by schools forums that Schools who want to leave have to be able to make an informed choice so they have to have their SLA hence the Jan extension, I would hope that schools would then have it by this date. If your inet connection is on a BT Openreach Circuit, it shouldn't be a big job to swap it off the CLEO LLU and onto the new providers kit. If it needs a new line in then get one ordered ASAP! it's only a about £100 - £200 ish annually for a BT line

I've had a trial of Foldr, in fact I'm about to get another one, it is really easy to use and setup. When I inquired about a trial they just needed to know the FQDN and the hyper visor I used, then they just sent me a link. Cant remember the pricing but compared to the faff and messing around with others and then the supporting of the service, I thought it was worth the money.

Not sure if these people are any good for what you need, I use them myself using some polycom handsets and have had no issues - Business Phone Systems: VOIP Providers | Hosted IP-PBX Solutions - Coms

@Frazer has it come back at all?

One last question I ask, albeit a theoretical question is "Would you recommend our service to a friend/school" Speaks for itself

Agree with Tom here, don't add another one in here, either replace ISA/TMG with a solution or work with ISA, it isn't the best but it is what you've got, and I assume there isn't a budget to look for something new? There are/where 3rd party plugins for ISA that did the reporting bit better, but it is a while since I used it! You can pull per user out of ISA if as Tom mentions if you have auth on (which I'd have anyway to ensure it's that user) by (from that article I linked to)

If all your traffics going via ISA is that not logging already? I'm sure there was a built in report for Web Usage?? Quick google - http://www.isaserver.org/articles-tutorials/configuration-general/Logging-Reporting-ISA-Server-2006.html

I think that's what he's getting at, it is XP. If it's your PC I'd get a Linux Live CD, boot from that and recover what you need to a USB stick, chances are the HDD is on its way out if it's as old as the OS

Interesting bits in here, so if you do leave OCL for Broadband you need to a. Give notice b. swap DNS Tag to new ISP c. Change MX record? - would this not be swapped over with the nameservers/zone transfer d. why would mail still be hitting county hall?

I assume this quantity of PC's are from the Curric side of things? what data would be on there of any actual use to anyone? surely a wipe with DBAN would get rid of most of the data, meaning that the few blocks of data that might be missed is virtually meaningless, especially with what the actual data was in the first place?

Again a point to consider is fire regulations, if you go breaking holes through firewalls (the real ones not the IT Ones ) you need to ensure where the cables pass through the wall that they are sealed (think they're called fire pillows??). I fell foul of that running the odd cable when we where inspected by a Fire service inspection thingy. I wouldn't "extend" an existing run, i'd always run a new cable back to the nearest cab, and if you're pulling one cable pull another one whilst you're at it, it will always be used!

Wow that sophos one has quite a few hits...... also 2800 kids, fair enough I bet you've your hands full!!! Watching with interest where this ends up!

There does seem to be something amiss here, do you have any traffic management going on on the core network at all? where is all that traffic coming from? I'll see if I can look at my old place with SW setup to see what they have concurrently and compare to server performance, @tom_newton does SW have some metrics to compare this against?

Got rid of Laptops, too much of a headache (this was a few years ago) but a way to make sure they at least bring them in we found was using KMS, keep it off the network then it will stop working.

@tom_newton why is such a high spec machine required to do this job? I know when I've used SW and other filtering solutions it never needed such a beefy box? Has there been more features in SW recently or is it possible to turn off features not being used, I'm not disagreeing with your post, I'm just curious!

Just tried to look at the spec on the UTM3000 but gave up, wtf has happened to the smoothwall site! In one of my old posts (with about 1200 NOR) originally they had an RM Smartcache2 which ran well but was limited in capability, we then replaced it, but I'm struggling to remember with what, I have used Light speed and found it very good but there was another one we used.... hopefully it will come back to me! I have found Smoothwall the best all rounder, as I said I've only used that up to about 300-400 users but that ran on an old Dell Poweredge 840 again no reall issues on that, that (if i remember correctly) was a single quad core Xeon with about 8Gb Memory on a PERC5 controller (only one Intel 1Gbps NIC).? But it hardly taxed the system so I do struggle to see how/why your box is struggling so much, which I'd try a rebuild tbh, I did something similar to another smoothwall box because we couldn't work out a niggle, the rebuild and a restore of the config sorted out that issue.... If you're happy technically and have the time it's worth a try!