dhicks

Hmm - I thought File Stream was "files on demand" but with some kind of cache, so recently-accessed data would be cached locally. I don't know if that is correct or not, or if it is if you can control the size of the cache used per user.

You can get wireless keyboards with trackpads - we tend to buy the Logitech K400, about £30, has a simple (and very small) USB dongle that plugs in to any computer and acts as a standard keyboard and mouse. You're maybe thinking of a a bigger trackpad, though, I guess.

Hello All, Just came accross this annoucement from Ubiquiti in relation to their NVR software: https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Video-Products-End-of-Life-Announcement/dc529d39-0e58-43cc-96f0-8f0eed0d002c It seems they'll be discontinuing their stand-alone installable NVR software from the end of this year. Not a huge issue - you can still use other NVR software with Ubiquiti cameras, or you can use their supported hardware device (which, at around £300, looks pretty good), just handy to know, especially if you're planning on working on your CCTV setup over the summer.

We seem to be getting on okay with a Daikin unit fitted and serviced twice a year by AirTech. Daikin tend to be one of the more expensive brands but seem to be well-regarded when it comes to reliable devices that need to run 24 hours, rather than on/off units for home comfort cooling. If you want a cheaper option, then we have a floor-standing unit from Argos as a back up. It actually handles the load quite well, and when our previous wall-mount unit conked out it stood in for several weeks until we got a new unit sorted. The fiddly part from our point of view was dealing with the exhaust air and water (we had to duct-tape up the air outlet to the window and have buckets swapped around to drain the water), but if you're somewhere you can drill a couple of holes in an external wall to lead stuff away they actually work surprisingly well.

You get better quality if you can rotate the camera preceisly around the camera, rather than yourself. From experience, Lego (with the possible addition of duct tape and/or Blu Tak) is quite handy for knocking together something that will let you stand a phone on a tripod and rotate it around the camera.

Are you sure you need any software / drivers? The Hue HD camera was recognised on all the computers I've tried it in (OS X, Windows 10 and ChromeOS) as a generic USB camera. Some of our older machines did struggle to recognise the camera the first time it was plugged in, but I think that might have been an issue with the base stand, possibly related to power draw - plugging just the camera-ona-stick bit in seemed to work okay.

Thanks, I'll take a look - if nothing else, looks like we've found 2020's winner for "most confusing product name"!

"Self hosted" doesn't have to mean run locally on a physical machine in your school building these days, Moodle should run on a hosted server for under £20 a month. There are also third-party companies that offer support and setup for Moodle, I don't know if any of those are eligable for any part of the £2,000 grant available for VLE setups at the moment. Otherwise, if you're choosing between O365 and GSuite, I'd go for GSuite, just because there tends to be better support on third-party education-related resource sites for Google OAuth logins - not everything has to be hosted within your VLE, but a seemless link between a VLE resources page and whereever the resource is you want pupils to use saves a lot of admin overhead.

As a one-off thing, or something that will be done reguarly? I'm doing something similar today for our printable school diary, combining a couple of DOCX files and an existing PDF into one PDF document. This is something that will be updated nightly (using up-to-date calendar data from an iCal file), so this is something I'll be running as a schedualed task of some kind from a command line. I plan to use Pandoc: https://pandoc.org/

So is each pupil being logged in with a personal, Active Directory account, or are they using per-class AD accounts or something? If your GSuite domain name matches your AD domain name then there might be some confusion - Windows will see a [email protected] as "username", logging in to the "yourschool.com" domain. I guess there might be some conflict between the standard Windows login handler and the new Google one both trying to be the default handler?

I haven't tried the GCPW with a domain-joined PC. If half your users aren't using a Google account, what are they using instead - generic logins of some sort? You could just re-create those in GSuite. I /think/ Windows might even let you auto-login a PC with a generic username / password to a Google account, might be worth trying.

I'd go for running SIMS as a hosted service, with a web-based gateway to a bunch of RDP servers running SIMS instances. There'd be some work to do to get some functionality integrated with the gateway part of things, but no need to re-write the core functionality or the user interface.

You could probably get a Pi 4, 8GB to act as both a network bridge and Plex server if you wanted - add a USB 3 harddrive and you should have a decent amount of storage. More of a project to learn as you go along rather than the simplest solution available, but might redude the number / size of devices you have floating around the place.

We've found Sugru quite useful for similar kinds of things (although we've not tried fixing keyboards with it specificially) - it's a bit like Blutak, but is silicone-based and hardens into a more solid bond.

During the current lockdown, we've had all yeargroups (in our case, Nursery up to Year 8) using GSuite from home. Parents, of course, will be doing most of the switching on / logging in bits for KS1, but by the time you get to Year 3 or so some children have got the hang of usernames and passwords. We set individual default passwords for each user at account creation time, similar to those generated by http://www.dinopass.com ("HotStoat43", "BraveIguana37", etc). Pupils (or their parents) can set their own passwords from Year 3, and for lower yeargroups we can give teachers and TAs a printed list of usernames / passwords for those children on site. The above works okay for our school - I know some schools use login barcode cards for younger pupils. Wonde support them, I think, and they seem like a really good idea. If you're doing any sort of bulk operations in GSuite, make sure you have GAM set up and ready to go. We have it set up on a server that we can remote into so we're not limited to running commands from just one workstation. It does take a little bit of setting up as there's several steps to go through to get everything set up and authorised, but it's worth taking the time (set aside a couple of hours) to go through the setup and make sure everything is working properly before you do much else. If you want to use GSuite logins to log in to Windows laptops, you now can, as of a few weeks ago - Google have relased a Windows login component that integrates GSuite logins with Windows. Again, worth setting some time aside to get a test machine set up. I had no problems getting it working on a freshly-images Windows 10 machine, you might want to avoid using a laptop you aren't willing to re-image if needed. Looking at how the component works, it basically creates a local Windows profile for each unique GSuite user that logs in. I suspect, although I haven't tried it yet, you might be able to have it auto-login a Google user if you wanted, which you can't do on a Chromebook - best to try and get people into the habit of using their own unique logins, though, rather than a shared account. You can, of course, reimage laptops with CloudReady - bascially, ChromeOS but installable on older laptops. There's a cost involved if you want to make those domain-managed devices, but it's not hige and the home-use version is free for testing.

We've had some similar reports this morning, although they're a bit vauge on details. Any idea what version of Chrome everyone is running? The very latest version, released on Monday, is 83.0.4103.106 - I'm wondering if amking sure everyone is on that same version might sort some connection issues?

Depends on if there's a branch nearby (although they do online orders too), but we generally simply recommend John Lewis - their prices are okay (sometimes, actually, very good, and they sometimes do returns for cheap), you get good customer service and after-sales care and you can have a cup of tea and a scone while you're considering you're purchase.

Hmm - Google rolled out a bunch of updates yesterday (15th of June), latest Chrome version is now 83.0.4103.106. That update probably hasn't made it round to all devices yet (we've just had someone report their machine has just auto-updated to 83.0.4103.97, which I think is the previous update from 3 weeks ago) - it might be worth having people check for ChromeOS updates and see if that improves anything. At least part of the update seems to have been related to Meet as the Meet settings in the Google Admin domain control panel now have their own new dedicated settings section.

Ah - interesting, just had one helpdesk ticket arrive telling of Meet quality / performance issues and another ticket about YouTube. I'll get the user to try with a non-domain-logged-in browser and see if there's any change.

We've had Meet work just fine on cheap-when-we-bought-them laptops from 9 years ago reimaged with ChromeOS (CloudReady), so hardware shouldn't be a huge issue. There are reports from last night / this morning of "large scale" DDoS attacks on services in the US, which might be affecting various systems and available bandwidth. It's possibly more likely to simply be an issue with one service that has then had a cascade effect on other services, rather like the Amazon outage a few years ago where someone accidently added an extra zero to a command-line option and took down 50% of hardware for maintanance instead of 5%...

RemoteFX is no longer supported for new installations from Server 2019, so we've had to look at other solutions. Nutanix looks pretty good - a remote-access server, logins via various methods including OAuth if wanted, seems to have the graphical performance to run graphics/video editing applications (i.e. Creative Cloud). Cost (per year, over 3 to 5 years) for on-site hardware capable of hosting 50 simultanious logins is around £18,000, which includes licensing for Nutanix itself and hardware. That doesn't include Windows RDS user CALs, which we pay for as part of our Microsoft license agreement, or, of course, licensing for Crearive Cloud itself (around £3,000 for our school of around 400 pupils, last time I checked). I'm hoping to avoid the need to run Creative Cloud in the first place - there are very good options available for web-based audio and video editing, both together costing under £1,000 a year, and I can sort out an OAuth-authorised gateway for Windows remote desktop using Guacamole which should be fine for non graphics-intensive applications - even Photoshop should be fine, just not video applications.

Ah - so we can deploy per-user licensed copies of Creative Cloud, we'd just need a solution which provided each user with their own virtual Windows instance?

This is going to depend on your setup and your own preferences, but for SSL services in general I've found the simplest solution to be to use an Nginx instance on a separate VM as a reverse proxy. You can put several different services behind one SSL-enabled gateway if wanted (https://services.yourschool.com/3cx, https://services.yourschool.com/cctv, etc) and Let's Encrypt have a nice auto-configuring setup for Nginx.

Oh, good point - yes, that would be simpler.

Ah - I'd missed that bit. I've been sizing up remote desktop hardware to potentially run Photoshop for if we needed it when we start our senior school curriculum (we're currently a prep school, starting to expand up to Year 11 from September). Running as a remote solution would be perfect - pupil opens a web browser, logs in to the Windows remote desktop with their Google login, runs Photoshop (or even Premier if we buy capable enough server-side hardware). They could do that from school or from home, and in a nice managed environment where we can back up their files and all that kind of thing. A cheap Chromebook (£300) is all they'd need to have to run it, too, no expensive (£800) Windows / Mac to deal with.