School ICT News Bulletin No. 201 - 02/03/2012

Published by ICT Shared Services

e¹ and Report Writer unavailable due to planned upgrade on Thursday, 1st March 2012 from 19:00

e¹ and Report Writer will be unavailable from 19:00 hours on Thursday, 1^st March 2012 to enable an upgrade to take place. The systems will be available for all users later on in the evening.

Author: Richard Cornelius

Internet Performance Issues For Some Secondary Schools

Prior to the Half Term break, we were advised by some secondary schools that they had been experiencing recurrent periods of slow broadband performance.

The incident was initially raised with BT on 25 January 2012 and since this time:

The entire Schools Broadband infrastructure has been checked by BT and a number of changes have been made, unfortunately this has not resolved the problem.

• BT has confirmed that all links are on their primary circuits
• BT Engineers have visited a school and experienced the problem whilst on site
• BT has continued to monitor broadband performance and has identified that the problem generally occurs between 14:15 and 14:45 and appears to be the result of a number of clients across a number of schools making thousands of DNS requests

BT has now provided the IP addresses of a number of client machines that appear to be very active (10 to 20 times higher than average). It is hoped that, working in conjunction with the schools in which these machines reside, we can identify what they are doing and whether it is normal activity or not to help us reach a resolution.

Author: Richard Cornelius

Symantec Endpoint Protection

ICT Shared Services have just released updated pricing for Symantec Endpoint Protection for 2012–2013 and will be contacting schools with renewal information within the next few weeks.

Details of costs for Schools with a support package are as follows:

These costs include automated updates, which are deployed by ICT Shared Services remotely, to ensure the latest protection updates are applied.

Symantec Endpoint Protection is an enterprise software system which is continually updated to protect against persistently emerging threats to systems including those bought into the site from unprotected sources from home.

Please note that if you receive an e–mail from Symantec advising you to renew your maintenance contract with them it can be ignored as this will covered through the renewal notices we will be sending you directly.

If you have any questions or require any further advice please e–mail ict@norfolk.gov.uk.

Author: Gareth Bayliss