AngryTechnician

There are an awful lot of people out there, even in schools, who think we routinely get something for nothing. Remember, that's why its legal for us to install single-seat licences across the entire school and photocopy entire textbooks without charge. (I also remember the bemusement from our sports department last year when our head declared that he thought we'd be able to get a Team GB medallist to open our new sports centre without an appearance fee.)

In the comments on Dylan Reeve's blog there is a link to new app that intercepts auto-dialling and prompts you to confirm it, which helps mitigate the vulnerability: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gicode.android.autoresetblocker Requires no special permissions and works on my phone (which showed the IMEI in the above test).

Any technology 'scales' if you through enough effort and money at it. That doesn't mean you can describe it as scalable in an IT services context. At least we have VPP now; the ridiculous fudges everyone outside the US had to endure before then was a testament to how little Apple actually care about the education and enterprise market.

And what about all the network-locked devices that get their updates from the service provider, not direct from Samsung? On my last O2 phone it would be months before they trickled down, if at all. At least Samsung are finally doing OTA now. My wife's S2 can only be updated through her laptop using Samsung Keis, which is an awful POS.

I trialled Meraki vs. Ruckus for our deployment. I was impressed with both, but we eventually went with Ruckus, for a few reasons: 1. Our own on-site testing indicated Ruckus had a small but significant edge over Meraki in throughput and range. 2. Ruckus has higher capital costs but lower annual costs, while Meraki is the reverse. With the quotes we got they actually worked out to be similar in price over 3-5 years (Meraki being slightly cheaper), but finance preferred to pay more upfront. There was also some nervousness over the fact that if you stop paying your annual Meraki costs the APs become useless, whereas if you stop paying your annual Ruckus you just lose the support. It's not something we're considering doing, but it was a contributing factor. 3. We don't have a leased line (can't afford it) and our VDSL line does go down every so often. I wasn't too happy with the prospect of reduced functionality on Meraki when you lose connectivity to the cloud controller. 4. Ruckus has a wider range of APs and hardware features. For example, most of the Ruckus APs have additional ethernet access ports on the back, whereas only the cheapest and least capable of the Meraki APs has one. This was important in a few locations where I had to 'steal' an existing ethernet cable from a machine where it would have been cost prohibitive to run new cabling (even though that's my preferred option). We also have a few of the tiny ZoneFlex 7025 APs which I love for the fact you can fit them into a single-gang wall socket. That said, I did then select and Meraki for a smaller install at a different institution. The difference was that the other site has very little on-site equipment (not even a single comms rack!), has no on-site IT support, and is almost entirely BYOD. For this sort of deployment I think Meraki is better than Ruckus, because the self-service logon portal is better and the client monitoring you get through the cloud controller is superior to Ruckus. Meraki also has some set-and-forget firewalling built in; for example, in one click you can block almost all common P2P protocols, which is a lifesaver when you are trying to get a bunch of university students to share a single VDSL line. Final thought: I'd definitely take either of them over HP.

If that graph is an accurate representation (and I suspect it isn't), HP must have made some shocking advances with their wireless kit. It used to be awful, as well as expensive. If you import the file into Inkscape or another PDF editor, you can remove the amateur 'red square' redaction at the bottom left and reveal an HP logo underneath, suggesting this is originally from an HP slide deck. Not exactly an unbiased source.

I would wager that the redirected AppData is the problem. Adobe products have had problems with it intermittently for years: one version will work, the next version won't. Basically, they don't ever test their products in a redirected AppData environment. We were officially told by an Adobe support rep in 2009 that Adobe don't support the use of redirected AppData at all (may have changed now, but that was the case at the time). If you have any way of testing without redirection, try it.

The way leasing often works is that the school/business signs up to take a loan from the bank, but the principal is paid to the arranging company who then use it to supply the equipment. Our printer lease - which our accountant and Bursar went through with a fine tooth comb and are 100% certain is not a scam - works this way. We pay the lease repayments direct to the bank, not to the company who supplied the equipment. If that company goes under, the printers are still ours and we still make the repayments. The problem is when schools are told that someone else is making the repayments but then sign a document that says the opposite.

I think what mavhc meant was what software are using that uses the system time to enforce restrictions on the users?

Unfortunately since I've changed jobs I don't have access to the ticketing system where I would have recorded the answer. I seem to remember ProcMon did find the answer, so I'd make that your next port of call.

Agree, some are utterly clueless, many are OK, while others are excellent. Pretty much the same as the rest of the staff to be honest. The most extreme case of clue deficiency was in my last school when a recently qualified teacher (in his late 20s) called me to explain that he had been tabulating some grades in Excel, and wanted to know if it was possible to get Excel to add two grades together and put the result in a third column, as he was tired of adding them together with a calculator. There is no way he could have passed the ICT Skills part of QTS without cheating. I find it incredible that this test is no longer required for QTS despite the fact it is still sorely needed.

A lot of them use bots that don't care about the content of the site, they just look for vulnerabilities in whatever CMS is being used and then drop link spam or malware onto them automatically.

Also, in case you didn't read the release notes fully, if you are using local publishing in any form (SCUP or LUP), you will need to create a new signing certificate for your local updates and resign all your existing ones. Microsoft say this is because existing keys may be less than the 1024-bit length that is now required, but I had to regenerate my key even though the existing one was a 2048-bit key. If you don't do this, I found that existing local updates may still work, but new clients, new updates, and even new approvals on existing updates will not have any effect.

As an aside, Google Apps has a similar problem. The requirements aren't as strict (8 characters), but they are a problem for some younger pupils. Again, you can ignore them in the admin panel or by syncing a password hash using Google Apps Directory Sync, but if you try to set the password via the normal password change screen, or using the Provisioning API, you have to use 8 chars or more. The fact is that neither Office 365 nor Google Apps for Education are actually designed for schools. They are business services that happen to work well for higher education, but have issues in secondary and even more issues in primary.

2.5.6. If it had been anything less I'd have a proper strop on by now. Guess what I built our last website on 2 years ago?

Very little. Turns out the previous project manager wrote a really vague spec and it was never signed off. Yes, I know. This happened because I was clear form the beginning I thought the project was a waste of time and money, especially if it was MY time and money. So the money was given to marketing and I let them get on with it. I'm not entirely surprised its gone pear-shaped, but like most people here I am already far too busy with my own work to be worrying all the time about what other people are doing. However, sooner or later SMT are going to try and shove this my way so I'm trying to pre-empt that by having some options lined up that don't involve me telling them where to stick it, since I have become somewhat fond of being paid every month. I'm trying to avoid too many specifics at this stage as sooner or later I suspect the company involved will recognise themselves, and it will turn into a name-and-shame competition on both sides. As entertaining as that would be, I could do without any more drama at the moment.

There are nearly 200 modules. Just looked and there are about 100 plugins listed too. We don't have any documentation for the custom code and so far I've had no luck finding where the source files are to see if they are commented. @british_government has hit the nail on the head: it hasn't been well put together AND we've had little to no handover. Legal isn't off the cards but marketing are not keen to go down that route as they think both the site and our relationship with the company can be rescued. I'm not so sure, which is why I'm here. It's fair to say that our project manager has to share some of the blame for not keeping on top of the external developers, but the person in marketing who is now picking up the pieces is not the same person who started us down this road 6 months ago (staff change was unrelated to this project, FYI).

Yes, this is normal. OVS only supplies licences for current versions, but you get automatic downgrade rights. The real issue I have with Server 2012 licenses is that there is no Enterprise Licence, only Standard or Datacenter. Given that most of my Hyper-V hosts have 4 VMs on them, this has been a big PITA on renewal this year.

We just had a new Joomla-based public facing website designed by an external company, and frankly, I'm not happy about it. The entire project was managed by our marketing department, which didn't particular bother me as I saw it as a waste of money and wanted to stay out of it. However, I've since had to get involved at a late stage because the external company that has put the site together for us has been pretty atrocious. The project was delivered 6 months late and incomplete, and ever since then they have been dragging their heels on fixing anything because we have declined to sign a £4,000 pa service agreement. We have, unfortunately, paid them for the work they've done so far (which does not meet the spec they were given). So here's the situation we are in: the site is a mess of about 200 extensions (is that normal for Joomla??), is difficult to update the content, and given my relative inexperience with Joomla, is giving me the heebie jeebies whenever I think about having to apply security updates underneath the melange of custom code they've written (which I don't have much confidence in). I don't want to throw good money after bad by giving the muppets who built the site a contract to ignore us like they have done for the last year. Is there anyone out there I can turn to at this stage who could take over maintenance of the site and dig us out of the plague-infested hole we've been thrown into? Alternatively, what would you do about it (apart from hand your notice in)?

Sorry to be contrary, but in my book a good rule of thumb is to never rely on rules of thumb. I actually ran the numbers for our PC estate a little while ago, and the cost of our machines left running was much less than the sort of figures that get bandied around by people like Gartner and Microsoft. Not only are our electricity prices significantly lower than 11p/kWh, but our hours/day were lower too because we actually have power saving policies defined on all the machines. My advice is always to spend a few quid on a meter and do the measurements for your kit and setup. If you go with the sort of numbers that I see regularly on energy efficiency reports, you could end up with egg on your face when the actual savings come in at much less than what you've promised to your finance department.

I might be interested in getting one of the USFF machines for the school... who do I talk to?

I have about 300 of them, brand new in the baggies, and I haven't figured out what to do with mine either!

I'd just like to say that I'm very glad Microsoft are keen to get more involved with EduGeek again - I know there are a few bods on here already (particularly the Office 365 chaps) but it's certainly much quieter these days than it was a couple of years ago. Will post some feedback on the Top 5 thread later today. First couple of weeks of term are always pretty busy but will try to fit it in!

As per Apple's modus operandi of not giving any advance warning of a launch, the VPP finally arrived today after having languished in "coming soon" status for months. Apple (United Kingdom) - Education - Volume Purchase Programme Now available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, the United Kingdom and the US.

I haven't tried it with a regular 2510, but I have a 2510G-24 with a 4-port LACP trunk, and I am pushing 3 tagged VLANs over it just fine. I was under the impression they used very similar firmware so I'd be surprised if the 2510 can't do it.