Aprice

Do you know if they use Net2 or switch2 at their site? could be that they are using the standalone products rather than Net2. Not sure if the fobs are fully forward compatible with Net2.

In my experience in some schools it just doesn't work. The number of emails we've sent out asking staff to not take laptops out of the room with the trolley. We're finding them on window sills, random cupboards, and just about everywhere else. Then find a stack in someone's classroom 'that hasn't worked for ages' because they're flat, and when one goes flat they just go and find another one. Got a phone call to say that there's only one left in a trolley the other day. We've put stickers on them with the trolley they're from, which just get ripped off. I've set backgrounds for each trolley saying where they're from, still doesn't work. Unless someone keeps that set and personally looks after them, I don't think it works. Once the situation starts to get bad everyone looses interest and it then just escalates and gets progressively worse. I'd love to say please stop buying laptops as it's just not workable, but the school has so few IT suites.

I'd normally not use Smoothwall to do our inter-vlan routing, however I've never rated Unifi as a L3 solution. Trunking all the VLANs to the Smoothwall will probably be easier in your instance.

+1 for virtualised, just makes everything easier. Migration, Backup & Restore e.t.c.

Injectors should work with pretty much anything, it's just putting power over the pairs. The switch will be oblivious to the POE

usually, sometimes we would put a Mikrotik or ngfw upstream to act as the firewall.

We have all ours in line, Core switch handles all inter-VLAN traffic, just using the Smoothie as the default route out to the internet. Only issue we have with the Smoothwall boxes is they all seem to have a habit of locking up every now and again and needing the power cable pulling out and putting in again. Might have a bit more of a look into how the secret knock works, wondering if it's something we can implement into Mikrotik using address lists.

Been happy with Zen but renewed with Amvia, also using Amvia with some other customers. Love the fact you can pick up the phone and it's answered by an engineer.

I do think support is starting to improve again. We've just started rolling cloud filter out, so far it's been OK, only issue was knocking out developer tools caused some issues with an application we're using that uses edge in the background. Thankfully we've been using them for years so support requests we generally do log are fairly few. Recently had an hour long call with a really good engineer troubleshooting a really odd issue that was affecting the whole site's internet (long story short it was DNS, returning different names to the name on website certificates). As it was a whole site down they did get back to us really quickly and was left happy at the end of it. For filtering in edu, I do think Smoothwall probably is the most comprehensive solution, a lot of the others are really solid firewalls with bolt on filtering that's more designed for enterprise. I don't really consider Smoothwall a next-gen firewall but it is a fairly solid filter. We've looked at other products lately, but a lot don't do content filtering on the fly like Smoothwall does so solely rely on blocklists. Anything uncategorised is just blocked or allowed depending on which you choose. The secret knock function I quite like, knowing that if a device hasn't got the agent on it won't just get unfiltered internet.

There's some guidance here: https://consult.education.gov.uk/capital/bb101-school-design-iaq-comfort-and-ventilation/supporting_documents/DfE%20Ventilation%20guide%20consultation%20draft%2029%2006%202016.pdf Top of Page 27 Air extraction rate of 20 L/s per machine. + additional if an operator is in the room.

Yeah, wouldn't be happy with this. If you own the device I would have reservations about the school enrolling it in their MDM.

Problem being that Inventry runs an executable on client devices using a mapped drive. In an ideal world I'd isolate it completely, however that's not possible. Also annoyed that the setup instructions we've been given instruct us to set registry keys on our client devices to insecure settings. The product hasn't been designed with security really considered.

I think it's a good product, but I'd have thought its usage in schools is probably quite low. I can't really see any reason why any of our schools would use it, unless it was free or really low cost (maybe computing / ICT)

Umbrella is really DNS filtering, it might do the job mostly, but I wouldn't say it's an alternative to Smoothwall. In the corporate space I wouldn't take issue with it, but in education I wouldn't be as confident with just Umbrella.

It's probably 'OK' but I'd at least get some cable clips on it, and soften the bend anyway.

+1 for enviroelectronics. We get loads of calls about recycling, eventually called one of them back, discussed what we had and then was told it would cost X. Ended the call at that and phoned up good old enviro

Posted about this sort of thing this morning in another thread. It's simply poor that these sorts of things are still happening in 2024. Default passwords that we all seem to know, Firewall Profile off totally, Concerning RegKeys, Defender real time protection disabled. Windows update also not working as it had run out of space. If schools are paying for this hardware to be maintained, then they need some pro-active monitoring. RMM should be alerting them that the disk is nearly full, or that Windows updates aren't working. /forums/security/236920-inventry-vulnerability.html

We use Caterlink with an aging and not great Biostore system, that's likely to be kept as it's pretty cheap compared to replacing it. They have a kitchen PC that's provided by the school.

Under Reports Tab - > Safeguarding -> Notifications Either add a new one or use existing then within the rule 'Select Safeguarding Ruleset' - All or the specific category to trigger.

Veeam here, we resell PeaSoup. We effectively pay per TB and then get the licensing bundled with it. Pretty sure the last time we looked at it was basically cheaper buying it from them with cloud storage than just buying the licensing. Also helps that the support is from Peasoup, and they're really good. I've used Altaro a few times but was unimpressed, lots of support tickets and problems. Didn't seem to be great for Hyper-V.

We've had a pair of Roomba ones for years. One slightly older than the other. Both do a great job.

I don't think it matters, we've got some newer titaniums and some older version (not sure which) but the same pens seem to work on all of them.

I think a 5 year plan is always a good start, as others have said not to be stuck to rigidly. I start with an asset register, rating each device a score on Health (Usability) and priority for replacement, or not to be replaced.

Doubt there's going to be enough market share left in 6 years to warrant the effort.

A4 Colour 10p per side A4 B&W 2P per side A3 - Same rate as above. Sixth Formers balances are restored to £2 on the first of the month. Not the best charging model in the world, no incentives for duplex. and any colour printing they do virtually takes all their credit. But it fits the very simple brief given to us by leadership. Staff are billed at the same rates however aside from a bit of reporting I don't believe anything really gets done about their costs, previous schools I've worked with have billed back to departments.