dhicks

Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition. I have it running as its own VM (so making for 3 VMs in your case), just to keep everything separated out.

No, US-East, US-West and "EU-Central" - Amsterdam, Netherlands. You have to select a region when setting up an account, I don't think you can switch afterwards, either.

We pay £6 per TB per month with Backblaze, with no minimum charge - I use it for my own servers too, and am paying around 90p per month.

Ah! Good to know, thanks - I think I saw the same error message on one of our new machines with a new Windows 11 build as it was shutting down, I was thinking I might have to investigate further. Darn - before I even read to the end of your sentence I was thinking "Hmm, maybe if I turn off Bluetooth...".

Yes, I'm using it to back up my own servers - a basic Windows Server 2019 host with 3 VMs. The Community Edition handles the backups to local storage very nicely, but doesn't have the snazzy integrated scale-out repository facilities where it can integrate with cloud-based storage. However, I find a simple scheduled batch file that does a rclone sync once a day works just fine - I have my backups being synced to BackBlaze's S3-compatible storage, complete with 30-day immutability, and the 3 VM setup is costing around 90p a month to backup. I've found Veeam's pricing for their full version to be quite fair and transparent. I tried to compare with other backup solutions of a similar feature-set and found I couldn't actually get pricing for any of them without registering / getting a formal quote / talking to sales. Veeam have their pricing right on their website. No backup solution, of course, is any use unless tested, and we've found that we can restore individual files easily enough (although it's always fiddly searching for the exact file you want) and whole VMs (one of our local file server managed to get deleted during a server re-arrange, we restored from Veeam with no problem, if rather slowly due to the size of the file server). Admitedly, our future strategy would be to move away from using Veeam, but that's mainly because I'd quite like to get a simple all-in-one solution like one of the Synology devices that can handle both VM hosting and backups all on one dedicated bit of hardware. We currently have a Synology device backing up our Google Workspace instance, which seems to work well - we've used that recently to restore individual files and a whole user profile.

If I understand correctly, laser printers work by putting a layer of ground-up plastic on to the surface of the paper, then heating it to fuse it with the paper. Thinner paper tends to work best for this (less to heat) - we've used 75GSM in our printers with no issues. A few months ago we switched to 100% recycled paper which we found difficult to get in bright white for a reasonable price (Image Recycled 100% Recycled, 80GSM). We now use the cheaper slightly-off-white (Steinbeis No.1 100% Recycled, 80GSM) instead. Our art department, who we thought might be the main one with issues, seem to prefer it anyway, so that's worked quite well. For certificates and similar to be handed out in assemblies (we're a prep / primary school, there's weekly well-done-in-this-subject certificates to be done) we use 160GSM paper / card - thick enough that people can tell it's fancier than the daily use stuff, but still (just about) thin enough to go through the printers okay. Heavier than that (250GSM) can be put through the printers but with care / attention to which paper tray you are using, which our staff find too fiddly. At one point we did try Ricoh's printable plastic "paper" - it made for a nice-looking printed sheet, and was tough (difficult to tear) and waterproof. We didn't have a way of keeping it separate from standard paper, though, so it tended to get mixed up with everything else and lost, but it might be worth a try. If you don't do photos / certificates that often, you could look at online printing services which will do your high-quality printing for you. I noticed at BETT that Canva are pushing their print shop - design stuff in Canva, possibly using a template (handy for certificates), then hit "print" and it arrives a few days later in the post.

Just to add (in case people don't already know) - each instance of Timetabler has its own timetable database, you don't open / save a "timetabler" document as you would with Word or similar. Timetabler will quite happily run multiple instances on a single machine, though, you just need to run the installer again and give it a different folder to install into. That way, you can have a timetable to tinker / play with rather than doing that with your live timetable.

If this is a teacher in front of a class, then a voice amplification system like Lightspeed might be the solution: https://lightspeed-tek.com/ If re-recording the material isn't an option, then possibly one of the snazzy new AI-based voice cloning systems might be worth a try - OpenVoice can supposidly re-create a voice with a few seconds of original source material to work on: https://huggingface.co/myshell-ai/OpenVoice

If the PowerBI and data files are still around, could you try copying them to the local harddrive and opening them from there? Windows / PowerBI might possibly be seeing that the files are on a shared drive and trying to do something with them that it then has to wait for a timeout period. You could have a script do a copy-the-files-locally sync set up as a shortcut to run before PowerBI runs - it might be worth trying if you want to use your snazzy PowerBI setup. Otherwise, you could of course build the snazzy graphs / charts using a Javascript library instead, that would be more portable / self-hostable than PowerBI.

I didn't get past the "having a quick look at what's available" stage 6 months or so ago. A quick search now for "2x2 HDMI" turns up a good list, including some very affordable-looking (£130 / £180) options: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bewinner-Controller-Display-Splicing-Support-UK/dp/B0B8DZ5LMH/ref=sr_1_12 https://www.amazon.co.uk/NINGKANGSHENG-Controller-3840x2160-Compliant-Processor/dp/B0BZQ9Z49G/ref=sr_1_10 You do see 1x4 displays fairly often now in fast food places and similar, so it's the kind of thing that's come down in price quite nicely.

Hmm. Just starting to roll out a new Windows 11 image and SMART Notebook 23.2 - we have 3 classrooms (out of around 40) on it so far. Thinking I should maybe stay on v22 for now?

I had a bit of a check / consider of prices last summer when it turned out we had 4 x 75" TVs spare - I had a look at how we could join them into one display. Not actually that difficult (from the looks of things, not actually tried) - you need a controller, maybe £500-ish from Amazon, that can take standard HDMI input and drive 4 screens from that (or 9 screens, for the larger / more expensive version). Better, of course, if you can get (again, more expensive) frameless displays. I didn't look any further into it in the end as the screen area we use has a space behind that we use for storage, hence we've gone for a motorised up-and-down screen and projector as a fixed screen wasn't going to be practical for us.

That's what one of my projects does: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/web-console Can sit behind a simple proxy server or a snazzy ingress-with-authentication system such as Cloudflare Zero Trust or Ngrok. Provides a simple web-based interface for the user - very simple, a large green button with "Run" on it.

Are pupils going to be logging in to the server to administer / tinker with it? For headless (console / SSH-only access) machines I generally use Debian, for anything that needs a nice graphical user interface I find the Raspberry Pi version of Debian for x86 / AMD64 pretty reliable - it looks and works (mostly) the same as the Raspberry Pi version, and there's plenty of documentation around to show users how to do stuff.

Probably best to plan for flexibility rather than for a fixed design - whatever requirement you have now will change in a couple of years time. It can be handy to have storage space in your office, but don't go over the top - there's a temptation for your "office" to turn in to a storage cupboard. We get on quite nicely with standard Gratnells tray storage furniture handily available from school suppliers, and the trays are interchangeable with classroom ones. We get the clear plastic versions with lids so we can easily see what's inside. Space for a decent-sized monitor is always a good idea (our boss has a 42" 4K monitor, which I would find a little too large), and desk / bench space for another PC / monitor to be worked on. Depending on your setup, we're finding our on-site server requirement is getting fairly minimal, sooner or later we'll be able to fit everything in a decent-sized network cabinet and not bother with a separate server rack / cupboard.

...or, depending on your exact orbit, quite possibly all three pretty much at once - relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2883/

We're backing up our Google Workspace data to a local Synology device, I think their devices handle Microsoft Teams / OneDrive in much the same way. Quite affordable (£2,000-ish?) as a one-off fee for a device that will sit in a cupboard somewhere on-site an give you a local backup of your cloud data. We also use Veeam to back up our remaining on-site servers, but we're reducing the number of those. For my own (home, less than 10 VMs to backup) setup I'm using Veeam's free community edition. That doesn't support the nice scale-out features of the full version, but I find I can simply sync the local backup files to Backblaze's S3-compatible storage cloud (with 30 days immutability) with rsync - it's currently costing around 90p a month to backup the whole of my home server setup.

Yes, exactly. Actually, I think I must have been using Google Authenticator on my mobile when I was testing a Windows build with GCPW, not realising that I'd need to test it with a USB 2FA key until I tried it on a different machine. Ventoy is actually for the building a USB-based Windows installer part of things, I've found it very handy - you can build a USB stick with the appropriate Windows ISO plus unattend.xml and any scripts / setup files you want and it handles making all that bootable. I have a server-side script build the set of setup / config files, so if I lose the bootable USB I can easily create another one.

Right: turns out that no Windows Credential Providers can handle USB-based 2FA keys as the Credential Provider seems to be sandboxed away from the USB interface - also discussed a bit in this other thread: /forums/data-protection-information-handling/235945-2fa-schools-4.html#post2020109 Therefore, we've looked at a different solution, using pGina to have Windows machines authenticate against Google's LDAP service. Users should be able to log in to a Windows machine using their Google username and password - any 2FA steps won't be done at that stage, and there's no OAuth login token generated, so users will have to re-authenticate when they load up a browser / log in to the Google Drive client, but that's similar as to what would happen with a standard Windows domain account. So far, I've got a Windows 11 installer set up using Ventoy with a suitible unattend.xml file, I've managed to get the pGina Credential Provider installed and am figuring out the configuration setup.

To add to the comments about choosing an MIS with a good API: for data analysis, it's probably going to be better to export the data you want from your MIS to a data analysis tool - Microsoft PowerBI might be a good place to start, although a third-party tool that already provides education-related analysis might save you some setup time / work. Getting data out of an MIS via an API is often a lot easier than getting it in, so exporting your data and hooking up an analysis tool should be the easier of the two operations.

Ah - I've just got my new 8GB Pi 5 set up as a desktop machine as well, just with an SD card at the moment, I didn't know the NVME adapter was available. It seems to work well as a desktop - I have it running both Firefox and Chromeium at the same timem, it seems to cope okay.

I like that our current MIS (iSAMS) is modular, so to some extent we can pick-and-choose the features we want to use (and pay for). That's what I like about Wonde - it gives a platform for developers to develope applications on top of, giving us (as a school) a good choice of modules / apps to choose from. What might be interesting / useful at some point would be if there were a minimal-functionality MIS system that supported just the data structures defined by Wonde's API, with all other functionality being carried out by our choice of apps.

We've found deliverability to classes-worth (or yeargroups-worth) of parent emails from a standard email client (Gmail, in our case) to be poor - emails like that tend to get marked as spam too easily. There's also the issue of managing groups - having each teacher manage a set of email addresses doesn't work well, that sort of thing should be handled centrally by the MIS. Our MIS (iSAMS) handles emailing groups of parents (classs, yeargroups, etc) okay, if the MIS involved here doesn't do that then we've found Mailchimp to be a good option for sending group emails (we use it for our newsletter). At lower volumes you might be able to manage with their free tier. I have a script syncing data from our MIS to Mailchimp, it's the sort of thing you can get set up once and pretty much leave to run. £2,000 per year for a good platform, with support, to handle the features described here doesn't sound unreasonable.

If it's any help, the company we have examining our network security (which then feeds in to what we get charged for cyber insurance) don't seem to have flagged workstation-installed IDEs and code executation as being a problem. Our pupil machines in the ICT Room running IDEs (a local Python install along with Idle, plus PyCharm) are Macs and are using Google Workspace logins, so not quite the same setup as others described on this thread. We also monitor the incoming / outgoing internet traffic for unusual activity, we would (hopefully) spot a dodgy script prertty quickly, and our pupils are quite closly supervised when in the ICT Room. This is the approach taken by PythonAnywhere for their free accounts - users can sign up, run applications, access the internet for things like Python repositories and a few well-known services, but network traffic to other sites is blocked.

Actually, PostSript is Turing-complete, you should be able to compute anything that is computable on the printer itself... For network security, does your managed WiFi system have a guest network feature that provides users with a network-isolated internet connection - they can connect to the internet, but not other devices on the network? Might that be the easiest-to-manage solution?