supportman

Mosyle is very cheap and works well, I've been impressed since we rolled it out for all our iPads. Previously used Jamf but its horribly expensive and not as nice an interface.

Just set this up myself, is there any way to check its working easily?

Surely just a 5G modem with a sim card is enough as a temporary backup? Would love a starlink as well, but buying on a credit card is very hard in schools for regular payments.

I just don't think its that important any more. We removed all icons from student desktops and left the start menu by default. All their apps are cloud based and we link them from a SharePoint student home page.

No account manager that I know of, we've had Bromcom since covid so pretty much bedded in now and doing what it should. Staff are used to it and no real complaints on usability like you describe. As mentioned our teachers heavily use the app for registers and student lookups on their phones or iPads. Other than the speed and stability issues of recent times its been a great improvement. To keep this on topic... I read their major outage investigation report of what happened on the first day of term. Not great planning changing their azure capacity so close to term start even if it was well intentioned, but at least they acknowledge it so hopefully won't happen again. Can't always blame Azure if you only give 48hrs to fix it!!

Good point, exactly the kind of critical thinking I was hoping for to find the flaws They are personal 1:1 iPad devices in our 6th form. Mostly iPad 10's but some 9's also. Hopefully not jailbreakable but yet but its definitely something I hadn't thought of. I think its important to note as well, we are not working for Mi5 here. If a student decides to try and get around the rules we simply detect and sort it out with the student. One other thing is I limited the vlan IP range of the devices to never go over our limit of maximum devices expected. I doubt it will actually make any difference but its another useful took as well as the Unify client bandwidth limiter.

So how would you spoof a MAC address on an iPad then to break the security? I'm genuinely interested. Our whitelist only allows specific Wi-Fi addresses linked to the students name, and model number. I get what your saying, but there is no way to set a specific MAC address on an iPad. The apple setting "Private Wi-Fi address" is random and has no config that I can see. I just tested it on an iPad myself and as soon as I enable it the device is blocked from our network again

That doesnt work, that just uses a randomized MAC which will also not be authenticated. We use a whitelist. There is no way to spoof an ipad mac that I know of. And even if there was it would be spotted instantly by our monitoring.

Easily picked up in the Unify backend under settings >> Wi-fi >> student SSID >> clients. Also not been an issue for us in 10 years on our main network. Lastly most BYOD users are iPads in our school, not trivial at all to set a new MAC address. Private Wifi Address feature is no good either.

Yeh, It's a big problem as your Radius server would need a public certificate to work. I'm not even sure if that's possible! Its only going to get worse as more users upgrade their android OS. In the previous versions of android you could bypass the certificate, but not latest. It wasn't ideal anyway as the setting confused users. There are some commercial solutions out there like SecureW2 | Complete Platform for Passwordless Security Personally we are in the process of moving to MAC address authentication for our student BYOD users inside unify. This has the advantage of not needing them to sign in or any extra servers, but also restricting the BYOD system to a single device. We register those devices with a simple Microsoft form and copy the MAC address list in batch to a text file which you can upload to unify. Seems to work very smoothly now! wish I had done it sooner rather than messing with Radius servers for years 😂

The UI has been out for a while I think, you can set it in config >> systems settings >> Allow users to switch between new and old user interface We had a few complaints at first but teachers got used to it. I really would recommend allowing teachers use the app though on their phones, works much quicker and streamlines the registration process.

I've just sent out 500 MCAS emails with no issue. It really is the most reliable way. Using exchange server in 2024 seems pretty crazy to me.

Use the Bromcom inbuilt SMTP, it works very well.

Nice and fast today. Working well for the last few days.

Gave up with their foreign call centers years ago...

Nice! That's actually really useful. Great support!

Starlink is the answer!

Just a thread bump from a google search, is there no need to create apple ID's at all for teachers? Currently I've rolled out a base image with lots of apps, just wondering what best practice is when deploying to teachers on a 1:1 basis.

Maybe they need to get a rate limiter on the API

Degraded again :/

Bromcom broken yesterday, but seems fine today. Microsoft teams appears to have a display error when you add distro lists to class teams. It only shows 1 student even though they are all added. Causing lots of It tickets!! arghh...

Yep Salamander just synced, thank god!

Fast this morning, but damn an entire day of downtime yesterday. That's just not acceptable. They really need to look at capacity and redundancy planning. Splitting services or server locations would seem like an obvious first step. The monolith isn't always the best model these days!!

I'm just trying to set this up on smoothwall and getting a bit lost. Do you have a basic guide on how you did it? I've seen you can define a new interface as a VLAN but get stuck after that in terms of setting up the DHCP and scope.

Feels more like a capacity issue to me, too many people using it and not enough resources. Azure issues might be a red herring? EDIT: Bit more testing and a tracert of the web server is responding fast, but the backend database seems to be having latency issues.