dmj

It occurred to me that if schools were any good at contract negotiation; Bromcom would become top of the list for paying 'kickbacks' for breach of contract everytime they violate their uptime SLA's. Sadly, none of this ever seems to get negotiated into the contracts and we just put up with random slowness with no recourse whatsoever.

... or sue us

Add the old addresses as an alias so they carry on working. Switching BOTH provider AND email addresses is quite high risk. I would do one, then the other as separate tasks TBH.,

Hypocrisy at it's finest. Bromcom literally employing a PR team to spread s**t about their competitors for spending money on councils.

For ansible you could send a WOL packet and wait on boot, have a callback on boot to a tower/awx server, or adopt an eventual consistency model. There are options. I think the biggest strength of puppets model over ansible is for offsite machines, that can update configurations over the internet. It's a lot harder to do that with a push model if you don't control the ingress for the network the machine resides on.

Free configuration management systems to look at puppet and ansible I'm sure both would work with chocolatey Edit: I should add that puppet uses a pull model where a client is installed and the client pulls updates, whereas ansible uses a push model where a server pushes config changes to the client.

Nice work if you can get it!

You could self host an online editor with Jupyter notebooks if the server load for VDI is too high. Jupyter notebooks is used a lot in industry, especially with data scientists. They are particularly well suited to education because the notebooks contain runable code, along with explanations, diagrams etc which you don't get with other editors. Test it out for free https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub

Everywhere I've done it with free software, never paid a penny except for my time. The ongoing maintenance is next to zero* *notwithstanding blastradius which sounds like an issue with the protocol, as it is so old.

Does look like it comes down to tech time/ability.

.. or plain old remote access dial in, but I very much doubt anyone is using that anymore! - - - Updated - - - Switch/network equipment auth is another common one.

? There's entire threads on this forum dedicated to using 802.1x, which is (almost) always setup using RADIUS

It's pretty much a de-facto standard since the 1990's - you find it everywhere, I don't think site size has much to do with it's usefulness.

I was reading the HN comments about this; that the license they released it under is in violation of Github's ToS. Wonder how long it will stay there? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41636804

depends how much time you have to set it up. Jira free version isn't very restricted and can allow 10 users - It can do a really good job of helpdesk as well as agile, but is a massive headache to setup as it is very flexible. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing

We did BYOD did back in the day, 6 or 10 yrs ago - I think the school is still doing it. This was before external SIM devices were commonplace though so I guess that's just a lot harder to deal with now. This was my original point - that the schools that are banning phones are in fact banning computers. personally I'd ban the SIM cards, but that just harder to police.

My handheld games console works nicely as a desktop computer, and I don't think phones are far behind that. ultimately, as laptops and "phones" (aka computers) merge into a single device it's going to boil down to 'no computers' unless the govt work out how to make a 'learning safe' filter for all under 18's devices.

You're only allowed a computer if it's bigger than a book! If it doesn't sound ridiculous now, it certainly will in a few years. Surely it's the unfiltered access that needs to be challenged, not the size of the device.

Do any of the UK MIS provider fit the description of reputable organisations?

What's wrong with SAML? It was specifically designed for education, it's a free to use open format that's been around for 20+ yrs, supported by all the major identity provider vendors. Why is having local logins even a 'thing' ?

We used to have fortinet back in the day. We found certain configurations could be extremely sensitive to out of date wifi drives on client devices. It wasn't a problem for school owned devices where we could manage the wifi drivers, but was a huge issue with BYOD. A single out of date client driver could prevent an entire area from connecting, including devices that were updated. Check your wifi drivers are upto date would be my experience.

Checks service returns 200 - all good and we don't have to pay out on our SLA's

Ridiculous. The first post in this thread is a link to ESS saying that they are aware of schools using database backups for migration and that's why they were banning it.

They also have a decent api for automatically creating records, firewall rules etc so it's really simple to automate.

Sounds like the api or web interface you are using might be broken if it's not even adding the record to their own nameservers. nah, we use an acme system to certify hundreds of wildcard certs every year. Besides, if you only have a few you could probably just add the SAN to them.