SVM

ICT Technician (Kidsgrove Secondary School) job with Shaw Education Trust | 155253 (wmjobs.co.uk)

Senior ICT Technician (Streethay Primary School) in Lichfield, Staffordshire, WS13 8FT - 153424 | WM Jobs Senior ICT Technician (Kidsgrove Secondary School) in Kidsgrove, Stoke-on-Trent - 153420 | WM Jobs

Senior ICT Technician - Shaw Education Trust in Based at SET Head Office, Stoke on Trent - 144823 | WM Jobs

I would be interested in recommendations for cloud based filtering providers that have had little downtime in the past 3 years, PM if preferred I find broadband lines do not go down and I find cloud based firewall do not go down either which just leaves the filtering and would prefer cloud if possible (have started installing onsite systems for smaller sites) but its easier to manage cloud and normally more cost effective

I am sure Dave from schools broadband jumped into Exas forum thread previously highlighting the lack of comms...

We have a list of recommended hardware/software that we think is cost effective but this is not forced onto schools for example we have an ISP with a WAN that is cost effective for secondaries but not for primary/special so we install SD WAN and local firewall/filtering even if it would be easier to manage everyone on the same ISP/WAN, yes we still need authorisation from school for hardware/software purchases as its their budget. We have not moved any existing techs over as yet, if they are in post they normally stay employed by school and we take on line management but will probably change in future to be employed by trust, new staff are employed by trust and then assigned to schools based on location. I like to think our trust is different to others where each school keeps autonomy (unless in financial debt) so they can make their own decisions rather than the trust forcing solutions, the basics we would do if a school signs up to our SLA is change servers to Hyper-V and add to our resource domain for backups, VMs will stay on their domain, put in SCCM DP for updates and imaging along with a VPN back to central servers and look at migrating to our Office635 tenant, other IT solutions we recommend and they can take it or leave it. Quite a few schools have different setups either because not cost effective to change or they do not want to use the recommended solution which is fine, if the tech spends their time fixing stuff that we can automate or make easier then this will be recommended but decision is the schools how they use the tech onsite (we do not have any schools that have not gone with most recommendations as it doesn't cost them (unless some new hardware is required) due to all projects completed in house as part of the SLA)

I think all schools are top sliced in a trust but for us IT doesn't get much if any, nearly everything needs to come from the SLAs except for trust pays 50% of IT Manager wages for the work done at trust level. The best model would be all infrastructure (broadband, switches, firewall, filtering, servers) along with the core software requirements, finance, hr, sims, Microsoft or Gsuite licenses etc and IT support are paid out of the top slice at cost so there are no arguments on what to spend on this as majority of headteachers are not interested in the support side, then on the curriculum side the schools can decide what they require as they are best placed (most of the time) to decide what is best for teaching and learning.

Trust pays for travel costs but this is also part of the charge to schools, it will be in with their on costs with the pension costs Trust pays for Laptop/Mobile as it belongs to the trust not the schools which is the same with all Trust employees All training is done in house by IT manager If a serious issues arises the IT manager would normally go to the school as part of the IT Manager SLA but our technician support SLA is that we will provide an onsite technician for the specified days requested but in certain circumstances schools need to be flexible and the technician may be required elsewhere and therefore another technician will help out remotely. If for example we need to re-image the whole school during hols and the time available for one technician is not enough we would offer another technician on PAYG at same day rates as normal.

We charge what it costs to provide the member of support staff as we are not here to make a profit or a loss which may happen charging per device/user, if you have a technician on 20k per year, add on the extra costs of pension etc then work out their day rate, if a school wants 2 days a week term time you can work it out from day rate IT Manager is slightly different as depends if projects are completed in house or they just use 3rd parties.

You can have 1 Azure AD Connect server that syncs multiple forests, as long as there is a VPN setup between sites as the DCs need comms to the Azure AD connect server, trusts not needed

Did you sort this ? checked a couple of sites and some work fine and some get content is not available from your location

Its not always the software, normally the implementation. Lightspeed suddenly become stable once schools started migrating over to Netsweeper...

There are issues with filtering as well as webadmin, there was another post with schools commenting about unfiltered access, we have experienced it as well at a couple of schools.

Netsweeper agent issues today as well, could not find IP therefore default filtering in random PCs, support said its a wider issue, web admin performance improved tho

Yes, constantly and has been around before they started having issues recently, have a ticket open but nothing has been done about it

Netsweeper Webadmin down for us, was working early this morning

Did this get sorted ? 2 sites tested and both are between 60mb to 80mb on 200mb connection, server bypassing filtering gets full speed

Indeed. There are estimates of recovery times in there. With different services clustered depending on importance. Eg. Getting a DC/DHCP/DNS server up and running, and SIMS servers is top of the list, other data next down the list, everything else "as and when possible". How do you find the 4g assure ? we are opening a new school and are putting in FTTP with 4g assure, curious how the 4g assure works, BT said its automatic etc but I have doubts, I was wondering if you pull the FTTC/FTTP cable out does it flick over to 4g straight away ?

It would depend on what services you are trying to have redundancy against, loss of internet onsite, loss of power onsite, loss of Azure VM etc but having a DC in the cloud does not offer much on its own, there are other ways to add in redundancy

In that case yes loss of broadband connectivity would still allow you to authenticate against local DC and access all your onsite services

Yes sorry bit confused - If you have a local power cut you wouldn't have access to servers with network shares / printing ? also would not have access to internet to access online services ? - but if its just your local DC has failed whilst other servers are running you would be able to logon via Azure DC as long as the vpn is still up to Azure If the Azure DC has issues then you would still authenticate against the local DC

P2P/EAD are based on distance at some point, for example one school is 57704 metres away from each other according to their calculator, BT will not quote on that distance as its out of range for EAD products, maybe once it goes through x amount of exchanges they do not quote for some reason. But yes it is mainly based on how many exchanges you run through for pricing

Thanks was curious if you had a DR plan that might include 4g as we are looking at this for some schools now for their backup line rather than traditional cabled backup. Insurance should be part of the DR plan, they should have estimates of when they get services back online, electric, heating, porta cabins, new servers etc - broadband normally never gets an estimate unfortunately

What happens in the event of a fire at your central school which makes the site unsafe or burns through the server room, instead of one school down you now have multiple schools down until insurance company gets thing back to normal. We had one recently and we were not allowed to do anything, everything had to go via insurance companies which took weeks for them to organise the recabling an important cabinet, if we were centralised at this site we would have lost access to 7000 users instead of the 800 at the local site (I would also be concerned if insurance would pay for redirection of all the EADs to another site ?)

Are you using Azure AD connect to sync to Office365 ? if so check what options you have enabled, if its password hash then a DC in Azure is not needed if purely down to having resillience if the site is down, if you have a power cut Office365 would not be affect as users get authenticated against Azure AD which is in the "cloud" If you are setup similar to DrCheese then you would need to setup 2 DCs with the agent on or I would suggest moving to password hash only, the only reason to keep with passthrough by the looks if it is security as its doesn't hash passwords to the cloud but then putting a DC in the cloud would probably defeat the extra security passthrough provides (probably mainly for banks etc)