dhicks

Can you set up an on-site SMTP relay, accepting emails only from Sage and with GMail only accepting emails from your IP address? "Allow less secure apps" might be a per-account setting for GMail, so you might not have to set that for your whole domain, although if there's one account you'd think needed to be as secure as possible it would be the one used to send bills to parents. iSAMS have, very sensibly, recently forced a move to using 2FA for any account with access to home contact details / email addresses, and their mail services provider (SendGrid) requires 2FA on accounts, too. This is after some schools were targeted - compromise an account with access to send emails to parents, send a quick email to all parents along the lines of "Update - our bank details are now XYZ, please send payment...", even if only a couple fall for it it's a good amount of money for some.

It's available, but as a domain-wide setting only and you have to contact Google support to request it, so you'll need a paid-for account to be able to access support. This will stop any external user being able to even request to join a Meet session, so if you decide you do want to invite genuine external speakers you'll have to give them a temporary login on your domain.

Hardware: our most recent batch of Chromebooks are the Asus C213 - flip-book style, so you can bend the keyboard all the way round to turn the device into a tablet, complete with world-facing camera. They have built-in stylus support, too, so you can use them for handwriting. Those are a couple of years old now so there's probably a newer model now, although Chromebooks tend to be a bit tricky to get hold of right at the moment due to supply issues. As far as software goes, the nice thing about ChromeOS is that you don't really have to manage it much, it just gets on and keeps itself updated. Depending on what your daugter's school's setup is like, as soon as she logs on to the Chromebook with her school account she should get the school's setup - any filtering or installed apps should just sort themselves out, nothing for you to do.

The Hue cameras should be seen by any Windows / Mac / ChromeOS device as a simple generic USB camera, and should work with any camera software, including web-based if you like, with no special drivers or application needing to be installed. I'm not sure when Hue last updated their software but it might now not be the most up-to-date. Also, if you're using the handy desktop stand, I've found the USB port on the upright section can sometimes be a little loose / wobbly, creating connection issues with the camera - try plugging the camera-ona-stick part straight into the USB port and see if you get any better results.

I don't know what kind of size development team Techsoft has, but I'm guessing it's going to be on the smaller size and their knowledge and experience is going to be in building 2D Design for Windows. Building a from-scratch rewrite of 2D Design would pretty much be starting a whole new product. One possible solution would be for them to offer a hosted / streamed solution - run cloud-based instances of 2D design and make those available somehow in a web browser. Ideally, if 2D Design could run under Wine with little/no modification then you could use hosted Linux instances to run the application and Guacamole to provide the web-based access, possibly with OAuth integration so pupils could log in with their existing school accounts. The above would need a pricing model change, probably an annual subscription to a maximum-number-of-simultanious-users model. Current cost (based on purchase price split over three years and 60 home use licenses) is around £5 per user per year, which is pretty low for a cloud service.

Sorry, I'm not on a Mac at the moment, and it's been a while since I've dealt with Mac login scripts, but I seem to remember having to split functionality between the login script, which I think runs as some limited non-root user, and a deamon of some sort that runs as root and has access to do thing like remove folders. I seem to remember the login script having to trigger actions for the deamon to execute, which all got a little too complex for what was initially mean to be a quick login script. Edit: found a previous post with a few more details of what I did: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/196741-macros-using-symbolic-links-redirect-home-folders-network-drive.html#post1681482

For some reason, every drama studio / hall I've been involved in seems to have come without any lights or speakers, leaving us to buy stuff from Amazon, mostly in the rather cheaper range than what you're looking at. A couple of thing it might be handy to add to the quote: Portable staging - either as staging or as support for seating, it's handy to have stuff you can wheel out on a cart and set up. A selection of wired mics - you might already have a bunch, but I'd budget for some stage mics (SM58 or similar), maybe some instrument mics for micing up various musical instruments, plus also some DI boxes for pluggin instruments in to you mixer and possibly an additional rackmount mixer unit to provide enough inputs for however many people / instruments you'll have on stage. Maybe also a rackmount power conditioning unit for the mic inputs to try and avoid any issues with hum when you start plugging stuff in. Some sort of video conferecning camera setup - someone, at some point, is going to want to use your nice 8K projector to do a video conference call for an assembly or similar, having a camera or at least a handy place to mount one would be a good idea.

There are cheap (£10) mobile phone chest straps available on Amazon which might be handy for mounting a mobile phone like a camera pointing in front of you. Probably better than something head-mounted as I'm guessing that would wobble around too much, although I'd imagine watching an hour's lesson from a chest-mounted camera is going to be pretty tiring, too. I'd add a webcam with a standard camera mount thread on a goose-neck desk stand that could be stood on the worktop and pointed at whatever was going on, then pupils could switch between views as they wish. You could also add a wide-angle adaptor lense to the mobile phone - again, available cheap on Amazon, might give a wider-angle view of what's going on in front of you. If you can stretch to a GoPro I think the latest version can do software-based steadying of video, cutting down the uktra-wide view it takes to produce a slightly narrower angle but with all the wobble smoothed out. I'm not sure what compatability is like with Google Meet, thougth - you'd have to get the video into GoPros software for processing and then out as an emulated USB camera, probably. If you're buying kit, I'd add a couple of small LED lights that, again, can be positioned on a stand on the worktop to point at whatever is needed.

I remember our Exchange export was slow, but I don't think it was quite that slow. Can you give the Exchange server any more RAM or processing power (I'm assuming your Exchange server is running on a virtual machine)? Exchange seems to use up RAM, in particular.

Indeed - we've had a few classrooms have external users turn up and try and get in, our suspicion is that a pupil is posting a live URL to their friends. We've had a couple of external users manage to get in to lessons, probably by the teacher hitting the "accept" button by accident. There's a domain-wide setting to allow external users to try and join Meet sessions, now turned off by default, you have to request Google to turn it on for you. We could do with that being a per-OU setting that we have admin control over.

We're using Meets attached to Classrooms, which seem to work nicely - as you say, only domain members can use the nickname, so even if a pupil from outside the class gets hold of the nickname URL we'll be able to tell who it was. Pupils ejected from Meet sessions can't then re-join that session, they have to wait until the teacher closes the session and starts a new session. Sessions only seem to get terminated up to three minutes after the teacher (or last pupil) has left the live session, so more cunning pupils have been able to sneak back in for some un-supervised chat after the teacher has gone. Our advice to teachers has been to make sure all the pupils have left before closing, ejecting them at the end if neccesary, which has caused some confusion with pupils being ejected from live sessions and not being able to get back in, but that's just something for people to get the hang of.

Just checked - can't see any IP address or similar listed in the Meet Quality Tool for an external user, is it maybe recorded in some other logs somewhere?

I'm guessing you get an origin IP address logged if nothing else - are you then matching that up with known pupils? Are you finding the disruption is from your own pupils being silly or from external users?

We've had a couple of teachers reporting external users trying to join live Meet sessions. We're not quite sure how any external user is getting the session URL, my guess would be towards a pupil posting the URL to some freinds online to create a bit of disruption to a lesson. It's possible that a pupil / teacher has some kind of malware on a device that is leaking data somewhere. I've noticed we have rather a lot of Chrome extension "apps" installed on our domain, some I'm sifting through those at the moment and removing anything that looks questionable.

Background blur does seem to need a reasonable amount of client-side processing power, it's possible Meet is not showing the option if it has some way of telling it won't have the processing power to support it.

Here's a simple, basic page with a video preview component on, handy if you want to use a laptop / Chromebook as a monitor for a Raspberry Pi: https://www.sansay.co.uk/pi-view Documentation: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/pi-view

Ah, useful, thanks - we had a parent with a similar-sounding issue yesterday (trying to troubleshoot via phone, so still not quite sure what it was they were actually seeing on screen).

What user does the script (try to) get run as on login? I'm guessing not root, in which case you'll need to make sure the script is executable by the specific user (or just make it executable by all users). Also,if the script isn't running from the shell then the environment won't be populated, so things like $HOME might not be set.

If you've already got Office installed on machines, just install the Google File Streaming client on them and people can access their Google Drive files as they would any other local / network file. As pointed out earlier in this thread, GSuite will now directly edit Word / Excel files, so people can edit files on their desktop machine then carry on editing on GSuite.

It sounds like you have a scanner that simply emulates a keyboard - as far as any application is concerned, there's no difference between you scanning something with the scanner and you typing in a barcode on the keyboard, the computer simply thinks it has a second keyboard attached. Make sure you have the appropriate input box selected on whatever application / web page you're using, otherwise the computer will think you're giving it commands of some sort, possibly with an "enter" at the end.

I clicked on this thinking it might be something to do with binary blob releases for the Opera web browser, but was suitibly happy to discover that it was actually opera-singing blobs.

Two, slightly separate, issues: - The Drive File Stream client completes loading after the folder redirection happens. You can re-do folder redirection to point to Google-hosted folders, although it might need a Finder restart to take effect. - The first time a user logs in on a particular machine, they won't be logged in to the Google File Stream client. You need to be able to force the user to log in before they can do anything else. The tool you would think would solve the two above issues nicely is the Google login component for Windows, which lets you configure Windows to login with GSuite credentials. It doesn't, hwoever, pass crfedentials through to the Drive File Stream client. However, it does pass credentials to the Chrome web browser (if installed), and the File Stream client has an option to use Chrome for authentication, so if you configure File Stream client to use Chrome that should take care of that problem. My planned solution is to write something to replace the default Windows shell (Explorer), wait until the File Stream client is loaded up and logged in, then do the folder redirects and start up Explorer. Combine that with the GSuite Login component and a user should be able to log in to Windows with their GSuite credentials and see their Google Drive files as Windows folders.

Another discussion on this mentioned that ChromeOS updates might be being split up into Linux kernel updates and Chrome browser updates, so if hardware support ends you should still be able to get browser updates but not kernel updates. Not sure how accurate / practical that is, but it sounds like it would be useful, extending the useful life of hardware for a while. We've had no problems getting CloudReady installed on our older laptops, it's worked well on any hardware we've tried it on. From Google's point of view, I doubt they make any money off hardware sales, but they do charge for enterprise management licenses. CloudReady now have a pay-yearly option for that management license, so you pay a (reasonable) yearly fee to license both the enterprise-capable version of CloudReady and the Google management license. The home version is still free, though, which means you can install it on people's home devices if wanted.

Maybe the new Pi 400, the Raspberry Pi integrated into a keyboard? I don't know what the physical setup of the room is, but I'd vaugly guess benching with defined work areas. If that is the case, cheaper screens (£60-ish?) and Pi 400s with mice might be just the thing - the 400 has the standard Pi I/O pin accesible right on the back of the keyboard, so you'd have workstations you could plug stuff straight into.

What difference is there with the Bose headphones - can you hear the difference between the sound produced by those and the cheap Bluetooth ones? I have a reasonably nice mic setup, an Audio-Technica 2035 connected to a 3rd generation Focusrite Scarlett Solo, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm hearing all I should with my £50 headphones. As far as I can tell they work fine - I can plug them in with a standard 3.5mm stereo cable for direct monitoring straight from the Focusrite box, I seem to get a good sound from them. Is there a noticable difference with a £300 set of headphones?