OS X Caching Service, iPads & N4L

[Regan Scarfe]

Hi

I am in the process of setting up 200 iPads. The process is going well but the OS X Caching Service seems a bit hit and miss. It seems that the iPads are using the caching service sometimes - the installations proceeds very quickly and if I reset the Caching Service cache it eventually restores itself to the original size. However, other iPads seem to install apps from the internet. It can take a very long time to install the same apps, our internet connect becomes slow and the Caching Service cache sometimes doesn't grow in size for quite sometime after being reset. The iPads often report that it cannot install an app too but are successful after a few retries.

I suspect that Network for Learning filtering solution is varying the external public IP address for connections to Apple. This would mean that the Caching Service isn't always on the same external public IP address as the iPads so they don't get redirected to the caching service. I also suspect that our iPads are trying to access another instance of the Caching Service at another school because the Caching Service reports that there are other peers with different private IP addresses to our internal range which we can't access.

At the moment it is literally taking hours for me to get a batch for eight or ten iPads to install the 27 apps that are being pushed down from Meraki. Except for the time it takes to install the apps, the process is working well. Thus, I would prefer to do over the air installation rather using the Configurator so that the apps can be managed by the teachers who get the iPads and I don't have to plug them into the Configurator to do updates. Does anyone have any tips on how to "encouraging" our iPads to use our instance of the Caching Service?

Thanks

Regan

[Tim Harper]

Hi Regan,

I've spoken directly to Clayton Hubbard at N4L and he is looking into this to see if there are any IP addressing changes that may be impacting on this.

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 443 1236
Fax 03 443 0491

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Techies for schools" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to techies-for-sch...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Clayton Hubbard]

Hi Regan,

I am happy to investigate this for you. 

We have previously had an issue with the OS X caching however this was resolved a while back. If you would like to contact me or our support desk (sup.....@n4l.co.nz) we will be able to look into this for you. 

If you are able to provide me with the log of the OSX server that would be great.

My contact details are below

Regards,

Clayton Hubbard 
Senior Engineer, The Network for Learning Ltd

D: 09 972 2906 | M: 022 043 0155 | W: http://www.n4l.co.nz
A: Suite 306, Geyser Building, 100 Parnell Road, Parnell, Auckland 1052
P: PO Box 37118, Parnell, Auckland 1151

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to techies-for-schools+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Regan Scarfe]

Thanks for passing this on, Tim. Clayton has been very helpful. I think we may have it sorted by using N4L's DNS servers rather than Google's. N4L's servers are configured to support their filtering tweaks.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to techies-for-schools+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Vern Dempster]

Hi Conrad  from isometrics passed this link over to me after I copied him in to an email I sent to N4L support.

Turning off my cache server has made the setup of an ipad now work and updates are downloading in half an hour compared with many hours while the caching server is on

Must be some issue with caching server plus N4L ( I was taking devices home to set them up as it was much faster on my VDSL connection)

Cheers

Vern Dempster

IT manager

Mahurangi College 

Warkworth