supra21

Hi Noohad, Nope, this is still an on-going issue after all the investigation I've done the originating mail server IP's are Google's and they are on blacklists. This was the last response from Google Support: As of yesterday they have now requested another phone call for an update which I am currently in the process of scheduling. However based on the fact they have not responded with a solution I expect the phone call is to inform me they are still looking into it.... Have you created a support ticket with Google yet?

Google support did do a header test from an email and said all looked good. However I did run that Mail Tester you linked and it came back with this: Which is interesting as its the first one that has shown a google mail server on a black list.

Forgot to add, yes we do have an SPF record in place as well.

We started getting reports from about a month ago of parents not receiving emails from the school. We then also got reports of the same from our HR dept trying to contact potential candidates via email not getting responses. In both instances we asked them to check their spam and the email's were there. Initially we thought the issue was only affecting external Gmail inboxes but some who have Hotmail addresses have also reported the issue as well. We ran a test with my colleagues personal gmail account and it did go straight to spam but prior to a month or so ago this was not the case. If he then marked any email that we sent as part of the tests as "not spam" the mails would then start going straight to inbox as expected. What we cannot figure out is what changed to make certain inboxes start marking emails from our domain as spam? We have tried all manner of variations (with / without subject, titles, signatures). What is odd is this did not affect emails going to my personal gmail or hotmail accounts and does no seem to be wide spread, but enough that is causing issues. I have raised a ticket with Google and after a back and forth suggested we change our eternal facing IP as it maybe blacklisted. However I have checked our external facing IP's and our domain name with MXtoolbox and others all come back with none being blacklisted. They said that it's going to be something the recipient will need to resolve. Which does not help us as if we are emailing someone we have not emailed before and the email happens to be marked as spam we then have to go through calling them and asking them to check their spam, not the ideal scenario. What we do know is a handful of parents who were getting emails from school in the past to their inbox, now goes to spam until they go into their spam folder and mark any emails from over a month ago from our domain as not spam. We have sent out an SMS message to all parents to check their spam to at least make sure it's working for them. However as it stands this issue does still seem to be affecting random external gmail and hotmail inboxes that we may or may not have emailed before. We have not got reports of other services yet, but this could just mean they are not informing me. I have also setup the Google postmaster tools but is currently still blank (it's only been running for over a week, so I assume I will need to wait longer). I can confirm we have SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place (policy currently set to pass, Quarantine/Reject policy not enabled). Does anyone have any ideas?

Great information, thanks to all that replied. The bios version of the hosts are pretty old and I need to update iLO5 for both as well. Will look to do that at some point prior to upgrade. We use Veeam as our backup solution, which I will be upgrading to v12 over the Easter break.

I will be looking to carry out the upgrade of 6.7 to 7.0 over the summer break this year. We have x2 HP DL360 Gen 10 hosts and a MSA2062 SAN. We have vCenter appliance as a VM on one of the hosts. So far as I understand I will need to upgrade vCenter first then the hosts. In terms of the version can I go straight to 7.0U3? I've never carried out a VMware ESXi upgrade before so just posting on here to get any tips or advice. Thanks.

Can't recall the exact version number, but here is a link to all the drivers we used: https://we.tl/t-nkoh4hOxwU I would still strongly recommend you do a re-image with new drivers.

Can confirm this resolved the issue. So not using the drivers from directly from dell was the solution.

This time we did a clean install of windows 10 and let windows update install all drivers sound was working fine. Then pulled the drivers out and added them to RMMC and re-imaged. After imaging was completed checked to see all devices installed correctly. We have now put that pc back in the classroom yesterday, as of yet have not had any issues reported. Will give it until the end of the week. Fingers crossed...

We have ran a Bios update on all of them, also ran the sound test through the bios utility and completed with no errors. In regard to plugging in headphones, my technician tells me he has attempted to plug in speakers into the headphone jack and unplug when the issue has manifested and still no change. I did raise a support ticket with Dell, after a lot of back and forth the final conclusion was to re-image the machine, which we have not done yet but, but at this point they are out of ideas or are not aware of a potential firmware issue.

So we have quite a few new Dell 3280 AIO computers around the school and for the most part they are great. However recently we have been encountering an issue which we just cannot find the cause or solution. The sound randomly will stop working for the teacher, there does not seem to be any specific cause just happens. Today for example out of the x20 classrooms that have this model of computer x2 had the sound issue. The only quick fix is to reboot the computer and its working again. I looked at one today and checked to see that the devices were enabled and working in device manager, the sound was set to output to the interactive board via the display port (switching to the internal speakers also does not work). We have tried running dell command to get latest drivers, have downloaded and installed the drivers separately from Dell's website. Have tried using intel's latest IGFX driver from Intel's website, yet the issue still occurs. Even re-installing the sound drivers when issue is present does not resolve the issue, it only starts working again after a full reboot. We are an RM School running latest RM build of Win 10 (Nov 2021 21H2 10.0.19044.2251) on all the computers. The computers are connected to Avacor interactive boards using a startech DP to HDMI adaptor (we have tried unplugging and plugging back in, no change) the internal speakers also do not work when the issue has manifested and have also had a report of this happening with a standard set of 2.1 speakers plugged into audio jack. Makes no sense, audio just stops outputting through any output (internal / 3.5 jack / dp). Has anyone had this issue, because we have no idea what it could be. Thanks.

Yes all on same VLAN and tagged on the uplink.

Yep that's exactly what I had to do in the end, ran a fibre from the switch which had 2 gates and intercoms to the switch which had the other gates and doors the receptionists needed to be able to see and open from the paxton handsets in the main reception. Other than that all I can suggest (if you haven't already) is ensure your Paxton ACU's are on their own independent VLAN. I have since replaced the Zyxel core switch with an Aruba 6300M and everything is working. To be honest Zyxel was having alot of issues aside from the paxton ipv6 stuff.

Can't give a % but it has been increasing and yes it is a nightmare as the amount of the laptops actually available is never taken into account.

Was not aware of ExamWritePad, this looks great. Even if it is only 30 seconds every little helps with this situation...

Oh yes, unfortunately I have experienced this many times as well, add to that the few that do save the file do not name the document with any reference to their name......

Sounds like you were working with a pro-active invigilator. The ones we have worked with do not see any of it as their responsibility. Even when they have apparently been told they just ignore and wait for someone from IT to arrive and do it for them. To be clear I am not expecting them to know it all, but the basics of logging in and opening a blank word doc / opening exam software and putting a clock on the board, that's all.

This has been going on for a while at the school I work at where the invigilators seemingly have no IT competency. We are called for pretty much every exam to help "login" to the computers and "open word". These are things that they apparently do not know how to do. We are sometimes asked to bring up a clock on the board the Invigilator does not have a link to which one they usually use. When exams are over computers, projector / board are left on and logged in. No matter how many times I bring this up my team and I are ignored. Anyone else experiencing this?

Yeah I spoke to Smoothwall a while back and they suggested it was an issue at my end. I just find it odd that just changing the IP makes the ping responses and internet speeds return to normal, no changes to pc, cable, switch, port.

We had a report of a desktop PC with this issue this morning. I pinged our core switch and responses were <1ms, I then did a continuous ping to the smoothwall box and response times were all over the place sometimes dropping out. We then gave it a new IP from the same range/vlan and internet speed and ping responses were normal again. So does seem to be a switch issue.

I doubt it's a different ap as the IP changes made to the device are done in the same location as where the issue is exhibiting itself. Also we have other devices in the same location with internet speeds performing as expected. If it were to be a switching/VLAN issue where would be a good place to check? This issue does also occur on windows pc's cabled in but it's more of a rare occurrence with those.

At the moment the most common device having this issue are our chromebooks. I had one a few minutes ago, we set the DNS servers to google's and still super slow (150-300kbps). After giving it a new IP address internet speed is now 30mbps. The chromebooks do have their own VLAN.

Yes we have tried adding the IP address in question to exceptions section in Smoothwall to bypass filtering issue still remains. When the device is brought to us it's so slow it can take minutes to resolve the gmail inbox or a google search. Going to fast.com shows speeds of 100kbps to 1mbps before we change the ip. After the device gets a new address speeds go to 35-45mbps on wifi and 500-800mbps cabled in (we have a BT 1gbps connection).

Yes we initially try this but issue remains until device gets a new ip address.

We have had this problem on and off for a long time but could never find a solution to it. Sometimes we will get reports of slow internet speeds on wired or wireless devices of any type. After doing the normal troubleshooting steps the final step we now do is delete the ip address of the reported device from dhcp then exclude that ip from distribution. We then renew the ip on the device so it gets a new one and the internet speeds are back to normal. The odd thing is after a long time has passed we have tried using that the excluded ip by assigning it statically to another device and the internet speed is fine....it really baffles me. We have: Zyxel switches across the school RM network (cc4.5) Windows Server 2019 Smoothwall We do not have any bandwidth limiters in place either, so I am really not sure where the problem would lie. Any suggestions would be great.