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dhicks

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Everything posted by dhicks

  1. dhicks
    I'd be surpised if there were any outgoing port restrictions on traffic imposed by your school ISP, which (if I understand correctly) is all the Ubiquiti Cloudkey needs - it opens an outgoing connection to their servers, you connect to it from there to interact with their console. Might be worth checking if there's any outgoing URL / IP address blocking going on from the school's / ISP end - the URL the Cloudkey is trying to connect to might be blocked somewhere along the way.
  2. dhicks
    Do you mean the ISP for the site, or your own home ISP? Is the site you're talking about a school, do you know how the internet connection is provided? I don't have a problem connecting to the Cloudkey at our school, which is sitting behind a local firewall with an otherwise unfiltered fibre-to-the-premisis internet connection. That's from both my remote office, again on a fibre-to-the-premisis connection, and from home, which is on a Three 5G broadband connection, complete with home filtering at the ISP end, which doesn't seem to cause any issues. At one point long-running SSH connections from the home connection tended to get dropped, but that doesn't seem to happen now.
  3. dhicks
    Have you tried doing a reset-to-factory-settings already? It should be seen by the NVR as a new, un-managed device.
  4. dhicks
    With the newer Google Drive client, yes. There used to be a split between the home and business versions, with the home version doing file syncing and the bsuiness version doing file streaming, but the two are now combined. There is likely to be an upload speed limit - more likely an API speed limitation at Google's end.
  5. dhicks
    How large are the file shares - over 1TB? The standard Google Drive Windows client should be fine, although for a really big file share you might run out of local cache space if you try and copy over the whole thing in one go. You quite possibly want whoever's file shares they are to have a sort out beforehand anyway - we've been moving our 11TB (!) of local file shares up to Google Drive, and after we had the admin staff sort through those files that's gone down to around 5TB (and that still includes the 3TB photo / video archive).
  6. dhicks
    A coiled AC cable will tend to heat up - this is why newer mains extension reels now come with a current rating for when both coiled and uncoiled, and a thermal cutout for if they overheat. I think the problem is less with DC cables, I'd guess you'd be okay with a single loop as shown in the image.
  7. dhicks
    We currently have a Google Slides slideshow, updated by the admin staff whenever wanted. We're aiming to add another display screen in the front lobby and are thinking about what content we want on there. As we'll be adding a new access control system over the summer, I'm currently looking at how to get live updates from that to render a page of staff-currently-in-the-building.
  8. dhicks
    Does it support retriving data in CSV format? If so, what you describe is pretty much just a file access - a web-accesible CSV file might be all you need.
  9. dhicks
    If your visulizers can work as standard USB cameras then pretty much anything that can take video input from a USB camera device should work, including a basic video element on a web page: https://www.sansay.co.uk/pi-view/
  10. dhicks
    Ah - we're looking at a Synology RackStation RS2423+ for Google Drive backup. That has an AMD Ryzen V1780B processor - do you mean there's some feature we won't have compared to the Intel version of the hardware?
  11. dhicks
    If you have the Google Credential Provider for Windows (GCPW) installed, any users that log on via that will have Google authentication cookies passed on to Google Chrome. That does make the whole setting-up-Google-Drive process a bit more streamlined, although the Drive client still has to ask the user for additional permissions (i.e. permissions to access their Drive, not just for logon). The firstRun executable is added as a startup item for all users because that's the only way I could figure out to get it to run the first time a user logs on when it actually needs to. The other times it will just quit. The Drive mounting application (starter.exe) is run for each user the same time as Windows Explorer starts up - it promptly stops Explorer, waits for Drive to start and be available (typically takes a few seconds, hence the slight additional pause now when a user logs in), then mounts the (per user) G: drive and restarts Explorer.
  12. dhicks
    I've made some changes to the way the Google Drive client mounts "G:" drive - each user's Google Drive is now mounted in "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Google Drive" and each individual user's G: drive is then pointed at that mount point. This is instead of the default behaviour, where Google Drive simply mounts as the system-wide "G:" drive, meaning if you're on a shared machine (remote desktop) only one user gets a working Google Drive. I've tested this on a new Windows Server 2022 remote desktop setup, again further testing is needed.
  13. dhicks
    If I was building a new school I'd still aim to put both ceiling-height and skirting-board-height network ports in rooms, just to cover possible future changes. We use a wired port in each classroom for a PoE phone, for instance, which also doubles as the tannoy system. If you really only need a smaller server with minimal storage capacity to run a few local services you could aim for something optimised for power consumption / heat dissipation rather than size - rather than a 1U server that requires air conditioning, maybe get a 4U rackmount case and all solid-state storage - you'll probably be able to keep the aircon usage to a minimum. Has anyone tried running Pearson's exam software via a remote desktop connection? You could potentially run that away on a remote server somewhere if you wanted to further reduce the amount of on-site applications a bit further.
  14. dhicks
    WeVideo - web based, not free (although there's a free trial period to try out), starts at around $10(US) per user per year for 30 users, prices per-user probably drop for larger groups. I used it myself recently for some video editing work - it works well, it's pretty full-featured, and suites the kind of thing a class of students is going to be doing.
  15. dhicks

    New server

    dhicks replied to Jawloms's topic in Hardware

    For Hyper-V, we bought a server with HBA rather than RAID (although we still have a separate 2-disk mirrored RAID array for the boot drive), 2 x 1TB mSATA drives and a bunch of slower high-capacity drives that were then placed into a Windows Storage Spaces array, with the extra-fast mSATA drives as the performance layer and the slower high-capacity drives as the capacity layer. This was through VeryPC, who I can recommend as being very helpful when it comes to discussing this kind of thing.
  16. dhicks
    Set up a test machine (please, don't try this on a machine you don't want to loose), start a command prompt as administrator, and run: powershell -command "& {&'Invoke-WebRequest' -Uri https://www.sansay.co.uk/application-starter/install.bat -OutFile install.bat}" && install.bat && erase install.bat Hopefully, that should be all you need - any issues, do please let me know as I've only been able to try this out on our school's specific setup.
  17. dhicks
    For hardware, I've found a Raspberry Pi 3 (specifically the 3, not the 4, as the 4 needs more power over USB) powered by the USB port of a modern smart TV to be a pretty simple / affordable solution - you turn the TV on, the Pi turns on and boots and away you go. We have a couple on timers in our front lobby - we switched to mechanical timers in the end as the TVs own built-in timer function didn't seem to be very reliable. For setup, I have a simple script available that can configure a fresh install of Raspberry Pi OS as a kiosk machine, with Chrome loading a supplied URL: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/device-config For content, we use Google Slides, with the publish-to-web option to give us a URL we can point Chrome at - it's nice and simple to give other users edit access as needed.
  18. dhicks
    Okay: basic application written, although not extensivly tested yet: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/application-starter Further explanation and installation instructions are given at the above URL, but basically a small application that allows a user to log in to a Windows machine, connect to their Google Drive account and have their desktop redirected to that Google Drive account. This should work for both existing users and new users of a machine. I've not tried this out on an already-used machine, only a freshly-installed Windows 11 test device. It should (I think) also work on Windows 10, although again that would be something more to test.
  19. dhicks
    PoE IP phones: do often have "pass-through" network ports - we have some classrooms with only 2 network ports where we want a wired connection for PC, phone and wireless access point, so we've used one port for the phone and passed through to the desktop. Phones tended to have 100mbps connections, although newer models tend to be better - fine for connecting a desktop machine, and might actually be okay for a wireless access point as long as you know you might get limited bandwidth. If you're running a new cable yourself, you could look at pre-terminated fibre and a small fibre-capable switch - I think Ubiquiti do an 8 or 16 port switch that can be connected via fibre.
  20. dhicks
    We use ExamWritePad - this is our school's first year doing GCSEs, we're just getting 4 laptops set up with ExamWritePad on at the moment. I'm really mostly replying to this thread just to say thankyou to @ass17 - as pointed out above, similar solutions are £2,000 per year, but ExamWritePad is both free and excellent. It actually solves the exact things we need to be able to (turn off/on-able spellcheck, text-to-speech, etc), and really is a solid, comprehensive bit of software.
  21. dhicks
    Place child on scooter, tie dog to scooter, shout "Squirrel!" and point down the road. Should keep both dog and child out of trouble (or, at least, out of your way) for several hours.
  22. dhicks
    Watching and/or taking part in various live comedy shows - a mixture of long/short improvised, stand-up and sketch. Rather dropped off during Covid, so do need to make more of an effort to get back into it a bit more.
  23. dhicks
    And several hundred horses. I figure somewhere at the back of that parade must have been a couple of Westminster borough council street sweeper carts with additional shovels.
  24. dhicks
    As has been pointed already in this thread, the whole point of work-issued mobile phones would be that they can be managed, so any photos / other content produced or used on them could be tracked. The concern might be that people can't tell the difference between work and personal mobiles, so with mobile phones usage around the school normalised, people might be using personal phones. My solution would be to make it obvious which phones are work ones - maybe a bright, obvious custom phone case with the school logo on.
  25. dhicks
    So: GCPW (I think) hands login tokens over to the user's instance of Chrome - great, you log in to Windows with your Google account, then when you start up Chrome you're already logged in. I'm trying ot set up the Windows Google Drive client so it's a nice and seemless experience for the user. What I think I've now got working is that the user logs in and, if Drive isn't confugred yet, it hands the user over to Chrome (which should already be logged in as the user) to allow Drive access. Currently, the sticking point is that, on startup, Google Drive starts after Windows Explorer, so if you try and redirect a user's home / Desktop folders the user gets an error message pop up on screen. Therefore, I'm trying to write (what I originally thought was) a simple, small application that loads Google Drive, then starts up Windows Explorer. The way Windows handles how explorer.exe starts up is proving to be a bit fiddly, so this has got a bit more compelx that I was hoping it would be, but I hope to have a solution sorted soon.
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