This is somewhat overdue, and we apologise for that.  A number of you have reported issues with the old remote access solution over the last few months.  We’ve thought long and hard about it, and we’ve decided to upgrade remote access.

When we wrote the current version of Remote Access Solution in 2008 it was never really designed to be serving the needs of the entire school, every night.  As a rough set of statistics, here’s what the current version of Remote Access is serving, per day, in excess of:

• 8700 unique requests
• 2000 directory listing
• 400 file downloads, which account for 275MB of data being downloaded through the system
• 143 unique users

Scaling that up, that’s looking at in excess of 3 million requests per year.  As things have gone along, it’s started creaking as we’ve run into more and more weird issues.  We clearly had to do something. So we have….

The basic interface

The new version of Remote Access Solution is available at https://access.kegs.org.uk – yes, it’s a new web address (and that’s where it’s staying).  We are still working on it, it will have a few rough edges for now and there’s a few features that aren’t yet available because we’ve not worked out entirely how to implement them. However, it will have Cut/Copy/Paste, Create Directory, and a few other basic explorer-like features.

The default display version is the “basic” interface.  This is designed to be supported on all browsers, tablets, mobiles, etc.  If you are using Google Chrome or modern versions of Firefox then you may be able to make use of the “Advanced Desktop”, which supports multiple browser windows, etc.

Any issues with anything in the new version, please do let us know by sending an email to us.  We’ve also turned on additional logging of errors on our side, so if something goes a bit awry our side we’ll usually get notified.