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Our school's broadband is coming up for renewal in the next 6 months. We haven't had a horrible experience with our current provider, but I thought I would see what's out there. Can anyone recommend anything good in south east?

Does anyone have a free method of doing the above? Apparently the little darlings are allowed to use the suite unsupervised (for the main part) at lunch, but they don't want them to have internet access. So far the best solution I can come up with is: Create a generic "Lunch" user who can log on at lunch time and in the suite only and who has no internet access Disallow student logons over the lunch break Turn off machines at start and end of lunch to force log off of and students (or "Lunch" users) logged in (end of lunch will also have the advantage of encouraging the lingerers back to class)

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Hello all, Long time reader, but first time poster! I'm a teacher in a primary school but also do a lot of the technical support and advise on ICT decisions. We currently get our internet through the local authority as well as our Smoothwall proxy / filtering. Unfortunately our internet is diabolically slow (4MB/s - 8MB/s for the whole school...). From what a governor has told me, it is also extremley expensive (£1000s). Is there anything stopping us from moving to a normal consumer ISP such as Virgin and getting Fibre / Cable with speeds of 60-100MB/s? I assume we would lose access to our proxy/filtering, but can this easily be replaced through other options? Thanks for your help!

So I am currently in a battle of an affordable serverless solution for schools, that will happily run with Google Workspace or M365. Azure AD, Teams, OneDrive, Intune, Google Drive etc... Printing solution: Printix or Papercut Hive, although apparently Printix teachers can not release student prints from a photocopier or PC? Apparently? My real issue is DHCP/DNS Services.... Now I dont see a need for a local DNS in a standard primary school unless their is a specific piece of hardware or software that requires it. Which leaves me with DHCP..... I have had several ideas.... a couple of schools have nice Meraki L3 switches thanks to Connect the Classroom project, others are running a standard HP Switch managed switch (some L3 some not) however the DHCP on HP Switches I am far from impressed with. The schools feed is provided by our local county and sits behind a central firewall and filtering is provided centrally from the provider. I have thought about Unifi Dream Machine Pro, Intel NUC running Linux etc.... what are people using out there in the world?

Hello, we're two primary schools, 1 is a single form entry and the other (4 miles away) is 2 form entry. Officially it is 1 school and they are linked by a 100Mbps P2P. We pay the LA £2,200 x 2 for Internet provision (10Mbps) for both sites and a few thousand for the P2P. We think we are paying too much and really just wanted some opinion? Also if we wanted to break from the LA what do we need to take into consideration?

Hi All, Just thought I would drop a quick posting on here to firstly say hello, and secondly explain a little about Exa and why we chose to sponsor the *nix forum. So first things first, "Hello". my name is Mark Cowgill, I am the co-founder and director of Exa. Exa is an Internet Service Provider, that caters primarily to education, and we look after thousands of schools throughout the UK; and secondly to the business market. We do not have a home user division. As an ISP we have been providing our services in to schools for over a decade now, covering everything from connectivity, content filtering, email, hosting and security through to more bespoke solutions. If you are interested in any of the services we offer feel free to PM me any time, if you would like to speak to any of our schools for references or you just have a general question on Exa, again just PM me, or of course you could just ring the office too, we are nice people I promise, and we never hard sell. Okay, enough about that side, so why the *nix forum. For one someone else was already doing the Internet one but being more serious; as well as being an ISP we are a software development house; we develop and run our services primarily on *nix platforms. Our in house systems team and R&D teams have been working on *nix platforms for far longer than any of us care to remember, and we do consider ourselves to be somewhat experienced in this field, and we thought it would be good to share some of that experience and expertise with anyone else interested in developing on, or running *nix platforms. We also have a good track record of developing lots of opensource projects including software such as ExaProxy and ExaBGP. In fact some of the biggest companies in the world including Microsoft and Facebook use our opensource software. So if you have any questions on running *nix servers or developing for the platform(s) pm me or any of my colleagues that you will see on here from time to time and we will do our best to help. Please bear in mind if we don't come back to you immediately it is not that we are ignoring you, it's just we all have the full time job of running and developing for Exa and keeping all our customers happy too! Look forward to chatting with many of you over the years to come.

Link: The Internet in Real Time: Web Usage Stats Per Second

Hello everyone, I've a target to hit with one of my carriers so for the first lucky 10 customers that get in touch with me via Edugeek can have 100Mbit Leased line 1:1 contention ratio Lightspeed Filtering Lightspeed Mobile Device Management Licences Fortigate Security Free install Also comes with everything else in out standard platinum package. (see Internet Connectivity for Primary Schools Schools Broadband ) The above is for primary schools only and per annum. Order must be signed by 1st November Install fee subject to site survey Grad yourself a bargain and an extremely fast Internet connection to boot!!!!!! PM me if interested. Above is available to 90% of the country. Dave

All, I have been trying to reduce unneeded internet traffic at our site of late, due to poor speeds on the connection I noted a lot of traffic to Office online help – specifically officeimg.vo.msecnd.net Doing a bit of digging and it seems office 2010 and 2013 connect to this address automatically at startup and download stuff. At our site it was roughly 1 – 1.5 Gig a day! Changing the Office 2010 registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Internet\UseOnlineContent Or Office 2013 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Internet\UseOnlineContent To REG_DWORD value 0 Disables this and frees up that bit more bandwith I’ve pushed this out via Group Policy preferences, but you could just as easily use a login script or modify mandatory profiles. Hope this is helpful

Hi All, Just a quick question (hopefully!) On my network we have one DHCP server; the ip address starts at 192.168.0.1 and ends at 192.168.1.254 with a subnet mask of 255.255.254.0. Any machine that connects with an ip address in the 192.168.0. range can connect to the internet with no problems, however any machine that is assigned an ip in the 192.168.1. range cannot access the internet at all. I cannot ping 8.8.8.8 or bbc.co.uk or even perform a tracert. I can however ping the router at 192.168.1.254. I have spoken to the internet providers and they have assured me that the router is set to the same 255.255.254.0 range. Any advice would be much appreciated as we are constantly running our of room on the DHCP Scope. cheers guys!!

Hi all, This is my first post so please excuse any mistakes or obvious questions etc. I am a fairly inexperienced technician so I am in learning a lot each day. My current problem is that in a school the business administrators PC is struggling to connect to websites and just hangs a lot of the time and is very slow. This happens intermittently. I have tried pinging pc's on our network and they are fine but when I tried pinging websites I found that I am losing up to 75% of packets. Any ideas? Thanks

Hi, we currently use an isa 2004 server to bridge the gap between our domain (172.16.*.*) and the cachepilot (10.8.160.*). we are using the isa firewall client to configure our clients for Proxy. in the past before the isa we could use the following details in the proxy IE settings to browse the net. 10.8.160.4 port 3128. but since the isa we cannot access it or ping it? but we can browse the web management page. therefore is there a way of allowing normal everyday access to the cachepilot without having to go via the isa firewall client route? thanks, ITHelp

Looks like the new faster EduGeek could not have been better timed, Google has just started using page load times as one of the metrics for its PageRank system. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking For the moment speed is not too heavily weighted and affects only about 1% of the sites that are crawled but it is Google's aim to speed up the web so this may change depending on their results.

Has anyone any experience of using the BrowseAloud screen reader software? Does it read sites effectively and have you experienced any problems with deployment or disrupting other processes? I assume it installs a BHO to go with the client software- does this break anything else? Any and all feedback will be useful. Secondly, from what I can tell sites must be explicitly enabled to run this search - i.e. have paid the software makers to enable screen reading on their site. Are any useful sites actually enabled and what sort of percentage of sites your students need to access actually work with the service? Are there any alternatives you use for accessibility with visually impaired students and those with learning disabilities?

I have something of a conundrum. And it's got to do with cost and static IPs. I currently have two campuses that I have to manage. One has a 512k Uncapped connection shared between about 40 people and two labs and the other has a 384k capped (3GB transfer allowed per month) line shared between about 30 people and one lab. With the 512k uncapped account I get 5 static IP addresses of which I use two - one for my mail server breakout and one for my proxy server breakout. As things stand, the internet is (as you'd imagine) helluva slow when people are using it. I can upgrade both sites to a 4Mb uncapped connection for the same price as what I'm paying now. BUT I lose the static IPs. Now, I have a dedicated server that I could host our mail server on and I could easily run the proxy (squid) through a normal 4Mb connection. What would your advice be? Do I: a) Host my own mail server and stick with 512k b) Host an internal mail server, forward it to my Dedicated server and move to 4Mb c) Try to find some ISP that provides a static IP and mix both solutions tl/dr: Choose A, B or C.

I thought I'd open this problem up to hopefully get some different perspectives. The problem is as follows: As a school we support our primary cluster in their ICT and for a significant period of time now they have had to authenticate against our GFL proxy to gain internet access. It has always been a problem to the teachers in the primary's to try and get young children to remember the log on details, and the initial concept of authenticating was to track users browsing habits. This never materialised though and is now used for filtering. I'm looking for ideas really how I can get rid of the secondary authentication for internet access. The primary schools log on to the computers within school, all have Windows Server 2003 DC. The secondary authentication then ties into the GFL Smoothwall filtering and I do not think that an ISA server in each school is a viable option as they would then require local filtering also which is unpractical. Google throws up interesting options such as ADFS but haven't really found any references to using it in a situation such as this. Just wanted to get the opinion of others to see if they've encountered this issue and/or solved it. I appreciate any replies.

Hi, I work in an International School and I am commencing negotiations with our ISP to try to reduce our internet costs. I am trying to research what other schools are paying for their internet but ISP do not seem to publish this data on their websites. I would be interested in getting any feed back that I could use, such as the cost of the internet and what speed you have signed up for. I appreciate that sometimes the actual speed may vary. Cheers James