As stated earlier this term, Manchester Children’s Services and MEWAN are continuing to monitor the situation in relation to the SparkleBox website. CEOP continue to have concerns regarding the associated SparkleBox Toolbar. As such a decision has been made to block access to SparkleBox again. This block applies to all MEWAN connected school sites. Non-MEWAN connected schools should consider whether SparkleBox should be blocked by your local Cache Box or request that your ISP block access. More information and support for schools will be available on the MEWAN website soon.

In coming weeks we will be upgrading the Cachepilots to the latest 5.2.5 code.  In this release the filtering screens have changed a bit.  You can now find the filters underneath the User Accounts->Groups.  For a full explanation of the changes in 5.2.5 click the link below for documentation from Equiinet.  If you need any help, give the helpdesk a call on 234 7787.

new-filtering-guide

UPDATE: This issue has now been resolved (it was actually resolved within about 3 hours of the problem being identified).  You should have full access to Google services again.

Due to a school host infected with malware Google has stopped automatically servicing our requests.  You may use alternative search engines like Bing or Yahoo while we deal with this issue.

We hope to restore proper google service as soon as humanly possible.  Incidents like this highlight the need for schools to ensure their systems have the latest anti-virus software and updates.  We supply Symantec software as part of your subscription for this purpose.

We’ve identified a fault on one of the mail servers.  The system is currently stable, but does need attention at the earliest opportunity.  We’ve scheduled tomorrow (Friday) from 3PM-5PM to do this work.  During that time, Squirrelmail will be completely unavailable.

Please NOTE: You will NOT lose any incoming email, and IMAP access to mail eg, from Blackberry’s will not be affected.

MEWAN provide timeservers for the providing accurate timestamps on the logs of MEWAN system’s and cachepilot’s.  The new cachepilot requires that your server’s time is in sync with the cachepilot’s in order to work.  If they are out by as little as 5 minutes, you will run into problems.  It is also important that logs kept at the school on the server contain accuracte, valid timestamps.  For one, you might need to use in legal evidence the timestamp of files or logs, and you need to be able to prove your timestamps are valid!

There is an easy way to configure your server to get it’s time from MEWAN’s time servers.  Simply download the file http://www.mewan.net/ntp.zip and run the visual basic script kept in there.  Your server (and all it’s clients on the domain) are now configured to use accurate time.

If you want to configure any device (such as a wireless router) to use our time servers, the server names are tick.mewan.net and tock.mewan.net.  You can use one, or ideally both.

PLEASE NOTE: YOU MUST HAVE YOUR DNS SETUP PROPERLY FOR THIS TO WORK! Follow the advice on this MEWAN blogpost, if you haven’t already.  http://www.mewan.net/techblog/?p=41

Symantec Corporation announces the End of Availability (EOA), End of Life (EOL), and End of Standard Support (EOSS) for Symantec AntiVirus 10.X and Symantec Client Security 3.X. This letter details the key dates that are of importance to you.

BT may be required to do some maintenance on one of our core links over at Alexander House.  The upshot is that there may be some disruption as of 4PM Thursday 10th December for up to one hour.  Affected are Eastserve schools e-mail access, e-mail from home, and for a very few schools there may be disrupted Internet Access.  If your access is disrupted, call us on 0161 234 7787 and we will arrange your traffic to be re-routed during the work.

In OTHER news, MEWAN Mail is so popular that the used space continues to grow at a fantastic rate.  This year we implemented a solution to avoid the brick wall we were heading for with disk space, effectively doubling available space -already this is now nearly full!

If you have emails you don’t want, please delete them!

We do of course wish to keep things on course without having to resort to quotas, but manually trimming your email will give us a little more breathing room as we add in extra storage facilities.  Your co-operation is much appreciated.

BT have identified a fault condition on one of our main links to the Internet.  They need to replace a part.  The work should not affect the majority of our schools, however Remote access to some services from home (for example e-portal, e-mail) and e-mail for Eastserve schools will be affected for that 1 hour.  In a very small number of cases, you may lose Internet/Email access, call us on 0161 234 7787 and we will switch you over to our other Internet connection.

The maintenance window will be a one hour period between 3pm and 4pm on Monday 30th November

In the next couple of weeks we will be doing a further upgrade of your Cachepilot, scheduled for the early hours of the morning that takes you from code revision 5.2.0 to 5.2.5.  The upshot of this is that it makes your system compatible with the new ReportPilot we’re attempting to roll out.  This upgrade shouldn’t have any impact on the availability of your system other than for a period of about 5 minutes between the hours of midnight and 4AM, but is a heads up just in case.  We will post a further update before the upgrade goes out.