Aprice

I've been through Xibo and Screenly, both were easy enough to get going but then ended up not getting used, because the admin teams found it too complicated. A few years down the line they decide to start using it again and then the same thing happens! I colleague has been using Chromecasts or Chromeboxes I gather with some success, I believe just casting the Slides to it.

With this sort of issue I just send the DSL or head an email and leave it up to them, then archive the email away / attach it to ticket should anything ever come of it. Personally I think Youtube kids is probably a distraction rather than a safeguarding issue, but leave that decision to the powers that be. Means your not the bad guy if the answers no. Also you can't have I want it unblocked for this lesson and blocked for that one, it just isn't manageable. I've had that suggestion a few times before.

Edugeek bread crawl?

I believe what you need to look at is global proxy or mobile proxy, Smoothwall has an article on each: https://help.smoothwall.net/FilterFirewall/Content/8WebProxy/4Mobileproxy/Mobileproxy.htm https://help.smoothwall.net/FilterFirewall/Content/8WebProxy/5GlobalProxy/GlobalProxy.htm Alex

ED-UK or Eurocomms

There's always the free version, we managed thousands of iPads on that!

IP Schema

I would add them to Mosyle in a shared cart with no restrictions, then they are protected at least You can go down the route of GDPR, if the devices are lost with student data / photos on you can't remotely disable or wipe them. Unless they take them when they leave employment these are not personal devices and shouldn't be treated that way. Or make something up about compatibility with the network, certificates or something!

In my experience facilities typically have access to comms / server rooms, however I would say your points are valid. Unfortunately I think this is one of those where a compromise is necessary. Facilities must have a reason to go in there each time, and you should be notified prior, unless in an emergency. The fire evacuation point I would say they need access, while nobody should be in there someone could be in there. Equally if someone has an accident and is locked in there. I have found it annoying in the past where facilities have let people in to my office and then unlocked the server room for them when they have no reason to be in there. I would suggest a camera goes in that notifies the IT team if motion is detected, and racks are locked if they can be.

Yes, should be possible. Which switch vendor are you using?

I think Ubiquiti would be fine for that situation, both platforms can be remotely managed (depending on how it is setup - Ubiquiti) Meraki is a good product, if it wasn't for the constant licence fees it would be my first choice. But for your situation once it is in place it shouldn't require constant intervention maybe the odd firmware update every couple of months. We've run much bigger and smaller installs of Ubiquiti with few issues, and as your IT supplier is responsible I would go with it and leave them to take care of it.

Yeah, Hikvision now do Intercom stations as well - (wall mounted tablet basically) that can just connect over the network to a IP camera. POE powered as well.

I've got the gas one, which I think is more convenient than the wood burner one? Seems to work alright, I've just not got the dough quite right yet

One thing worth bearing in mind is that you can have multiple NVRs connected to one IP camera, which is what we did so the reception desk could get a feed of the cameras on gates. We had a central NVR that did all recording in the server room and then just a HIK 7604 under the reception desk that was just view only, no recording setup. I would advise against running coax now, especially in schools / business, maybe in homes where there is a really tight budget and not much to gain using IP cameras.

Shared iPads always seemed like a cool prospect, but I don't think it ever really added much value where we put it in. In the primaries we trialed creating 'class' accounts so that it stood a chance of caching all the accounts, in fairness this worked quite well.

+1 for Mosyle, used the free one working for a previous MSP. Probably managed 3000+ devices across a couple of accounts and didn't pay a penny. They don't ask for card details either so shouldn't be a finance issue:) Really great product, the paid version is great if you can justify the cost but we just didn't really need it. Also it makes sense to get the devices enrolled through Apple school manager, so the profiles can't just be removed by the kids Alex

Default gateway on the switch that you can't ping?

Really.... Would it not be against the T&C's of the platform to create 'fake' business accounts on them? Secondly, I don't see how you could filter the usage of these accounts should something inappropriate be sent to a student. What then happens if the student accesses the account that school instructed them to setup at home and then something happens. I would be really surprised if an exam board required this, it sounds more like a teacher wanting to do it as a practical exercise not having considered some of the 'complications involved', and if they do insist on it being a requirement then get it in writing from the exam board that students must sign up to Facebook / Instagram as part of the course. I suspect the exam board really want something more like mockup posts made in publisher, PPT e.t.c rather than kids signing up to social networks.

Liked the newer Toshiba e studio ones and worked with some really old Kyocera's that just seemed to keep going. Thanks, Alex

Funnily enough one of our customers had exactly the same thing happen this morning, SFXextractor.exe in the Netsupport folder was detected and quarantined, which has broken NetSupport by the looks of it. Alex

Not sure entirely on this one, But I think if you plug the SAS ports straight in to a HBA it will just pass all the disks through individually. So what you really have is just a drive shelf presented to the server as JBOD. The limitation being Windows is running RAID, and the drive shelf becomes unmanageable. Has something gone weird on yours then? Cheers, Alex

I don't believe so, it may have some console access though the service port. However often these are just for manufacturer access and don't really let us do anything. I presume you have these direct connected then?

BenQ just does what it says on the tin. I've had problems with SMARTs Clevertouches. The IIyamas were ok I guess apart from one that needed unplugging for 5 mins every hour. Viewsonic seemed to be just as good as the BenQ's if you can get one cheaper than the other. Alex

Assuming that the sensors work in the same way as a lot of the biometric readers, the data stored is totally useless for recreating a face only verifying a face matches some attributes. Some of the biometric readers we've worked with don't let the print template leave the reader and associate each print with an ID and then only share the ID with the PC or Access Control unit. Having said all this your average parent won't understand any of that, and it's not surprising it's headline raising. With schools and biometrics I do question if it is really worth the eyebrow raises that inevitably come with it and just go with RFID cards.

Hi, You can set a DNS record to point it to the cloud key, but if your APs are adopting already then this is unlikely to help resolve any issues. Some of these problems may be down to your network, might be time to start looking at VLANs to segregate your traffic. We've had issues on noisy networks with Unifi dropping heartbeats and some other oddities. A management VLAN for the AP generally gets around a lot of this. You would of course need switches managed switches that support this. Do you have a guest network broadcast from them as well? If so it is probably worth sorting VLANs out as you really want to keep that traffic away from the secure networks with your devices on. Thanks, Alex