dhicks

Ah, right! Isn't that just decoration? Nice to have the computing hardware hidden away in the desk, but you could achive a very similar effect with an under-desk rackmount. Depending on the school, it looks like the kind of thing that would make a good GCSE DT final project - build a desk with built-in computer.

It's not something that's come up for us, that's something our children do outside of school. The table you linked to seems to have a screen embedded in the table surface itself, is that right? We've had a touchscreen version of that for several (7?) years, a standard front-of-classroom touch screen on a wheeled stand that can spin through 90 degrees to lay flat. I don't think it's ever actually been used flat, it just gets used in standard front-of-classroom mode. There doesn't seem to be much by way of dedicated content for flat-mode screens, and standard content on a large flat screen just means the top of the screen is rather far away and at an angle.

I recently spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why an email address was bouncing, carefully checking the domain name without noticing they were using .co.uk, not .com...

We have a Logitech K400 wireless all-in-one keyboard / mousepad in our main hall. You can use the arrow keys for slide presentations and it has media / volume control right on the keyboard, handy for adjusting the volume of videos.

Ah! Very handy to know, thankyou.

We don't at the moment, but it was something I was thinking about the other day when I was looking at what data we export to Wonde, so do please let us know how the conversation with Wonde goes. I got the impression access /to/ data is how they make their money, charging software companies for access, I'm not sure if they have pricing for schools to be able to read their own data back out.

This is what we've gone for - you can buy servers with certification / warrenty that they work with Storage Spaces. Our configuration is two small-ish / fast-ish disks on a RAID1 controller for the OS, several larger (8TB, half a dozen I think), slower drives on an HBA card and two NVME disks (also on the HBA controller, if I remember correctly). You install Windows on the OS RAID1 drive and hand it the collection of large disks and NVME disks as a cache and leave it to figure out how best to utilise them. A possible alternative is a similar set of disks as above but with the storage on a NAS. We have a Synology NAS, also with a bunch of slow, large disks and a couple of NVME disks, you put the drives in the device and leave it to configure them how it sees fit. You can then export the resultant high-capacity, large-cache storage volume via iSCISI, possibly via a dedicated 10GbE directly to your server. A suprisingly affordable option - around £1,000 for the physical NAS, plus whatever disks you want to populate it with, and possibly a touch more reliable / easy to set up than Windows Storage Spaces.

Some of the more interesting / useful bits seem like they might be ready early next year rather than right away - the new (more compact?) PoE adaptor and interface for M.2 harddrives, for instance, which (if I'm reading correctly) should both be compact enough to fit in the standard Pi 5 case. Power consumption looks like it will also be less - the Pi 4 is just a bit too power-hungry to be powered from a USB port on a smart TV, whereas the Pi 3 was okay, making for a handy all-in-one add-on.

We have our remote gateway behind Cloudflare's Zero-Trust product - handles Google (for us, several other providers supported) logins, which for our staff are all 2FA protected. You can have 50 users on their free tier, which is pretty generous - we might move our general staff remote gateway to that, too. There's also NGrok, which offers something similar - less users for free (3, I think), but more affordable per-monthly-user.

The University of Manchester are bound to do open days: https://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/about/history-and-heritage/

Less than 10 servers? I think you should be able to use the (free) Community Edition: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

A very similar thread here: /forums/cloud-services/234624-wasabi-some-quick-questions.html We use Backblaze's S3 (Amazon) compatible storage (i.e. like Amazon S3, but cheaper). $6 per TB per month (pricing is in US dollars, although they do have a EU-located storage facility). We do weekly full backups with daily incrementals, so storing a month's of backups will be around 3TB * 4 + a bit = maybe 15TB, so maybe around £70 a month? To protect against ransomeware attacks we use Backblaze's immutable storage feature, where you can set your storage to be immutable for a certain amount of time after being written, so malware (hopefully) can't overwrite your backups. From that other thread, @dmj mentiones Google's archive storage, which does look cheaper - I'll maybe have a look at that myself.

We use Backblaze's S3-compatible storage for offsite backup. Currently advertised as $5 per TB per month (so 25 * $5 * 12 months = $1,500 per year = around £1,200), although I seem to remember the UK-located data is going up in price ($6) at the end of this month. That sounds about right to me. For 6TB of live data, 25TB would give you 3 or 4 full backup checkpoints with incremental backups in between, and the price sounds about what we pay.

I think Tom means: unless you've added your filtering solution's own local HTTPS certificate to the 3 TVs so that you can examine their HTTPS traffic, most network traffic wouldn't even be examineable by your filtering solution these days. Something I've seen a few years ago, when Bing search was quite new: given a search term, Bing used to display the results, then do a background call to its server to pre-cache the results of the top-ten or so most popular results related to the current search. Even though the current search term was safe-search filtered, those top-ten results returned in the background weren't, but they still got seen as normal network traffic, so we got a bunch of reports of people using Bing who had searched for a nice, innocent term, then got that transformed into something less innocent. "Steam Inventories, Explicit searches, etc" sounds like it could be a similar top-ten-most-trending-searches or something that some web component on your TVs is refreshing somewhere in the background.

If the HR system has an API available, you can write (or pay someone else to write) scripts to sync the data. I notice some SaaS systems these days are offering Zapier / IFTTT inetegration as an alternative to someone writing a chunk of code to sync data.

If this is for a school with a Google Workspace domain, you can make ChromeOS Flex devices managed device for a one-off £30-ish fee, then you can put them in kiosk mode (with a filtering application, if you want) and just load a web browser or a specific website. If you want a Linux distribution that has good general hardware support, then the x86 version of Raspberry Pi OS is (perhapse surprisingly) a good choice - based on Debian, with a nice usable desktop, and can be put into kiosk mode to just load a browser quite easily.

If you're planning to accept donations from individuals, you'll wind up with a varied set of devices - managing which charger goes with which laptop can get complicated, although you could try and limit donations to USB-C charging devices only. You could look at asking for donations of sets of laptops from businesses, although most of those will already be going to a refurbished device supplier these days - ICT Direct, who are on this forum, provide that kind of hardware if you want.

Hmm - a decade(!) on, it's interesting to compare setups. We still have an all-in-one-ish PC, but that's now an Intel NUC with a 32" monitor - still used as a TV, but all via the internet connection now, no need for a physical arial. No local servers, that's all on cloud / remote servers. The iPad is a newer model, the scanner is still the same one. We still have a KVM setup, but it's more compact now it's HDMI rather than VGA. In the post-pandemic, work-from-home-capable setup, we now have a small console table with a power adaptors and a USB hub strapped to it to make for an easily-portable desk to use if we need another work-from-home desk. The oldest part of the setup is the 1985-era IBM Model M keyboard, which just keep on going.

Do you have those managed with Jamf or a similar management system, i.e. does Jamf (or similar) still work on these older machines? I have a (2017 model, I think) iMac that is just about to go out of support, one thing it can't run is GarageBand - can this mechanism get GarageBand (and iMovie) working on older machines, would you know?

Hmm, something to look at. I had a quick look at Google's Looker Studio at the ANME conference last week: https://lookerstudio.google.com It seems to be a quick way of getting data visulisations on to a shareable dashboard. In the case of iSAMS, you'd need to get that data out of iSAMS first, probably with an export to CSV via their API, so not as simple and one-step as iSAMS Central.

Interesting - I think you're talking about this project: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ It looks like it can keep older Macs running for longer, which is interesting. Logins: we're using Google's OpenLDAP service to provide logins for our MacOS machines - pupils have been using them for the last year with no issues (that anyone's reported). Users can log in with their usual Google username and password, although 2FA isn't supported (i.e. the logins just check username / password, even if 2FA is enabled on an account it isn't checked, but the user can still log in). Unlike using the GCPW Windows login component, the user isn't actually logging in to their cloud Google account, so login cookies aren't passed to Chrome after login (as they are on Windows with the GCPW). I'm guessing you could do the same with Azure AD (now "Microsoft Entra ID"?) accounts, if you can find some way of turning on an OpenLDAP (or plain / Microsoft LDAP?) service in Azure, or syncing from Azure to an OpenLDAP-capable service.

Transparent (so you can see what's inside) Gratnells trays, with lids if on a standard shelf or eithout if placed in Gratnells-compatible storage furniture. It's the same system as used in our classrooms, and the tubs are pretty robust. They are a bit more expensive than standard tubs, though, and it does mean classrooms can pinch them if we're not careful.

There's an article on the BBC website today about Hikvision cameras: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65975446 If I'm reading the article correctly, they had someone try and hack in to a "demo" Hikvision camera, possibly with out-of-the-box firmware from 2017 rather than a more up-to-date version with a specific, known vulnerability patched. That's probably a reasonably fair test, as I imagine there's a fair few installations of various CCTV cameras where they've been installed and simply left with no further updates since, although I don't think the article explains that very well. They did point out that they had to put the camera on a separate network as the standard network at the BBC was properly VLAN-ed, firewalled, etc. I suspect the replace-specific-brands-of-cameras solution is simply going to create the same problem in a few years time - CCTV system gets replaced with new install-and-forget system, system has security flaw discovered in a few years time, people can use that flaw to exploit un-patched out-of-date cameras.

If you need a secure internal website, both in the sense of having a valid SSL certificate and with authentication, I've found both Cloudflare's Zero Trust and ngrok's tunnel-with-authentication to work very well. Both offer (very) easy OAuth2 authentication, so you can host an internal website and limit the users to a subset of your Google / Microsoft / etc users. Limits apply for free acccounts - Cloudflare's free plan goes up to 50 monthly users, so suitible for smaller projects, ngrok gives you five free monthly users but pricing starts off a bit lower.

We are, possibly, having an Inventry system installed over the summer. What problems is the hardware supplied having? I understood their system works as a self-contained unit of some kind, as long as it can sit on our network okay and runs whatever it needs to run I wouldn't have thought hardware speed / age would be an issue, as long as spares are available in case of issues. I could be wrong there, are you finding specific issues that I could do with knowing about?