Chockster

I sometimes use ABC-Update for this sort of thing. Find it here.

We just had to redo ours after a whole heap of firewall/exchange/certificate changes recently. Ours is now set to smtp.office365.com port 587, with a dedicated alerts email account to send/receive from. More details here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/mail-flow-best-practices/how-to-set-up-a-multifunction-device-or-application-to-send-email-using-office-3 Good luck!

We've gone to PSF. They keep using the word "Cloud". You're right, they're just running a server for you that you can remote into.

Sorry - not much help here from me I'm afraid, just a note that we're suffering a similar thing at the mo. The most obvious symptom for us is the inability to contact our proxy because of it, so no internet. Obviously with it just popping up, a windows 10 update may be the cuplrit. We're on still on 1709 at the moment, deploying cumulative updates via SCCM, so it's harder to say what's changed. I'm also nosing around this as a possible cause, but we're scratching our heads.

Thanks for that - the primary school stuff looks really interesting. I'll have a read through the case study and maybe come back with a few questions...

It's that time again. Our Virgin Connection is up for renewal, and despite the fact it's only been down twice in three years, and never for more than a couple of hours, financial pressures are causing us to look elsewhere for better value. As part of our staff development our NM has asked me to have a look around for some alternatives, but I'm not sure what's around at the moment. We've got gigabit up and down, 14 external IPs and do all firewall filtering on our own smoothwall. A simple bare connection is all we really need, but we've taken over a couple of primary schools this year, so if we could do something fancy with them (they're currently on standard BT business fibre, which is pretty terrible) that'd be nice, as our current VPN setup works, but feels a bit fragile. Has anyone got any suggestions of other companies we can look at please? Thanks in advance...

I use remote desktop manager. There are free and paid versions available. I love it.

Sorry, should have specifically said Picasa for Windows. Batch editing, geotagging, and nice backup features were all lost. For me, Now isn't nearly as useful as an RSS reader, but I guess I'm old school.

I was a user of picasa, reader and notebook. All sadly missed. Dreading the inevitable gmail cancellation day - I've had that as my main address from when it was invite-only. For RSS I use newsblur, and I'm happy to pay for the premium version. It's been great, and handles no-content feeds quite well. It tries to fetch artiicles to display inline, and works for the vast majority of feeds.

I was skeptical, but when we had our recording studio redone a few weeks ago I said it could have done with having a specialist acoustically treated door fitted. An hour later I was treated to an advert for specialist acoustic doors in my app timeline. I've turned off mic access to facebook and messenger, and am seriously thinking about dropping them both.

Totally clear, thank you. I also fully understand the legal obligations and I'm not addressing the fundamental nature of the request or even your motives for making it, but as GrumbleDook pointed out earlier in the thread, the method you have chosen to use wastes time and money above and beyond the initial gathering and processing of data that could be put to other use, including, dare I say, improvement of their parent record keeping procedures.

Neither do schools.

We had a few episodes of this the other week. Turned out someone had managed to install the amazon assistant onto a few machines. It was trying to talk to amazon before the PC had the proxy information and the user authenticated with smoothwall. May be worth having a look for toolbars and extensions.

I banged my head against this brick wall a while back. Was sure it was firewall based to start with, but it turned out that my habit of plugging a laptop into a wired connection when sorting stuff out was the culprit. It was still on the wireless as well and the two connections seemed to be the issue. Ran into the same problem when we bought some all-in-ones for the office. Making sure a machine was only connected via one of WLAN or LAN solved the problem. An ipconfig /flushdns on the server will help speed things along too.

The vegas deal is great. I've used it since the sonic foundry days. If you've ever been asked to "knock out a quick video for the website" it'll do the job and loads more.

We didn't trust one of our suppliers to do this and ultimately said no. We've got two providers for photocopiers (long story) and one of the pros the supplier mentioned was the "opportunity to reduce costs for our other copiers and printers". They've got a web reporting tool and the finance office use that instead.

As SamDavis said Chamsys MagicHD would be cool for this. We've been looking at vmix for our new hall setup; might be worth checking out too.

We've got everything for the two new schools setup in our office at the moment, and the noise level is really good. They're not under much load at the moment though, so will report back.

We've just bought two of those and an non-poe 48 for our two new primary schools. First impressions are very good. We got a couple of cloudkeys to manage them, although the controller could have sat on one of the servers just as easily. I quite like the fact that I've got a webpage open here showing all the details of what's going on in two remote schools with very little work needed on our part. We've got 1gb fibre between two of them using a couple of old HP sfp modules we had lying around, but have ordered the 10gb ones partly because they were so cheap. We've gone for the wireless too but haven't really done much more than configure an AP for each school as a test. First impressions are also good. Fingers crossed for september...

You shouldn't have any trouble with a longer cable. Might be worth getting a terminator for the end of the run (the last light in the chain) if there's not one there already.

As localzuk and pete have said, OBS would be good for this. We're also having a very long look at Vmix. It's really nicely done; the NDI camera stuff is pretty cool.

I'd definitely try the PC meter software, as that'll confirm your smoothwall setup. To be honest, ours is pretty much in a dmz right now. We could see traffic floating around, but much like you, nothing was happening on the machine. One minor thing to check - according to some help documentation we found you're not meant to use a network cable longer than 5 metres with it. The problem is our data point is at least 10 metres from the cab, so even a 50cm patch cable to the wall won't help. It may be worth a try if you can get it close to your switch though.

We've got a Pitney Bowes as well. (Actually we have two, there's a bricked one in a box our main reception that should have been picked up before Christmas). It's awful. It refuses to connect over the lan despite smoothwall being fully up to date with their firewall demands - and there are lot of demands. The only way we can use is it is by having a laptop next to it with their PC Meter Connect software running via a usb connection. It's turned on when postage is added, or the monthly reports are uploaded. The model we have has a dirt-cheap usb network adapter instead of a dedicated lan port, so I've come to the conclusion that it's that piece of crap that's causing the problem. They did insist it was "our network", but I pointed out that if that was the case the laptop wouldn't connect either... The only thing that's stopped us buying a different is that the business manager rightly argues that if it works, and cost £1500, then we should try and keep going with it for as long as we can, despite us having had three of them in six months. It's been the source of the vast majority of my support calls from the office since September and is pretty much the bane of my school life at the moment.

I can recommended KE Handsworth as a place to work. I loved my time there. Can't testify to the current job conditions, as I left in 2012, but it was a very pleasant place to be at the time. It'd be top of my list if I still lived in the midlands.

I'm just hoping that some of the 22159 issues don't hit us. While it's unlikely, this is the sort of thing that worries our exams and data people. Fingers crossed!