dhicks

We had a problem a couple of weeks after we'd first got set up where half-a-dozen Macs dropped off the domain. It was simple enough to fix, simply have them disjoin and rejoin the domain in the Mac OS settings. It turns out the Computer objects had disapeared from the Active Directory OU they should have been in - not sure why, if it was something to do with the Macs or something to do with our AD. We don't seem to have had a problem since, so it's not something I've investigated any further. Yes, although it's an all-or-nothing setup - you can either redirect a user's folder or not, you can't redirect folders inside that folder - so if you want to redirect to a network Documents folder (sensible) you also have to redirect the application data folder where things like iMovie store large files (not good if the whole class is doing video editing or similar). Our pupils don't use Windows machines now anyway, so we have the Macs mounting Google Drive instead.

Did a child assume it was a touch screen and, on getting no response, poked harder?

We went for the "Binding Computers To Active Directory" option: https://docs.jamf.com/jamf-school/deploy-guide-docs/Binding_Computers_to_Active_Directory_or_Open_Directory.html This was nice and easy to set up - pretty much a case of plug the appropriate details in and away we went. Looking at that documentation page, I've just seen the "Google Sign-In" option - is that new? I've tended to use a login script to get past any limitations with the settings available. We can deploy software via the App Store, or sometimes via a .PKG distributed via the MDM (although this tends to be variable), otherwise we deploy by having a login script check for the software and running a silent install if needed. We've also installed Homebrew, for packages (e.g. Python) that installs that way.

For a recent hardware upgrade, we went for a SuperMicro server with 96GB of RAM and an HBA storage controller and disks all certified as being suitible for use with Windows Storage Spaces. We went for a tiered storage setup, with 2 x 1TB NVMe SSDs and some larger (8TB, I think) spinning disks. This gives us a single server with plenty of processing power, RAM and disk space to fit in all the VMs and file storage we need, with all the most common file access being to/from the SSD layer (haven't got usage statistics yet as we're still moving VMs over as yet). We then set up one of our existing, older servers as a fail-over device, replicating VMs with Veeam, ready to take over in case of hardware failure. We spent about £10,000 on the main server and another £5,000 on some more storage and Veeam and so on for the older server, just for an idea of rough costs. We used VeryPC, who gave us good advice throughout the process.

Depending on the size of the room involved, a simple projection clock might be suitible - from about £12 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=projection+clocks If you do want to configure a Raspberry Pi or old PC / laptop as a dedicated device that just displays a clock, try my device configuration script, available on Github: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/device-config You will first need a device with a basic install of Raspbian set up and connected to your local network via wired or wireless network. You can clone the above project with Git and run the "config.py" script via sudo, or use this handy single-line command: curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dhicks6345789/device-config/master/config.py > config.py; sudo python3 config.py; rm config.py You will be presented with a couple of menu options - select option 2 ("Client Environments") and then option 4 ("Exam Clock"). The setup will run and the system will reboot. Note: running the above setup will result in a Raspbian system that does nothing but load up dclock - there will be no desktop visible or anything like that. Don't run this script on any device you do anything else with.

A Raspberry Pi set up to automatically boot, log in and bring up, say, dclock, in full-screen mode? The Raspberry Pi is small enough to blutack / velcro / etc to the side of a portable projector if needed, and some projectors might even be able to provide enough power via USB to run the Pi without having to use a separate power brick (the Pi 3 might do better at that, with lower power requirements). I have an existing Python script that does an all-in-one-go configuration of a Raspberry Pi to be set up for various uses, I could see about adding a "clock" setup if that would be useful.

GOV.UK also do a whole design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ This is a set of HTML / Javascript / CSS templates and components set up for a GOV.UK - style website, but the content is open and useable for other sites. I'm currently using it to run a (non-school) Jekyll statically-generated site, with content editing being done in GSuite / O365. GOV.UK's websites have won various awards for design / clarity / accesibility, and they have put proper effort into making sure their system works with things like screen readers.

Just another recommendation for Stage Electrics. We've actually dealt mostly with their hire branch, SLX (just looked them up and found out that's now a separate business), who were excellent - we felt they provided the right kind of solution for the budget we had, and had the right amount of organisation and professionalism to make sure the setup happened as it was supposed to.

This was our requirement, too, and seems to have worked well - we've set up a Google Slides document and granted access to the appropriate admin staff, now information screen content gets updated on a regular basis and I don't think we've had to do anything or change any settings for the last 6 months. About the only way the URL to view the slideshow could get public is if people start emailing it around (because a lot of people are currently used to emailing an Office document to someone for editing, then getting a copy emailed back, etc), so I would suggest not telling / showing anyone at the school the public URL bit, just get them used straight away to sharing documents via Google's "share" facility - much easier to keep tabs on.

We use FUSE for Mac OS X to mount Google Drive folders (via rclone), which seems to be working okay in production (been running in our IT lab for the past term), there's an NTFS module as well: https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/List-of-fuse-for-os-x-file-systems

We have our larger UPS serviced / tested annually - that checks if the batteries are holding enough charge as well as checking everything is operating safely. The secondary, smaller UPS is visually checked as part of the annual PAT testing, but not connected to a testing machine. The UPS itself runs a daily self-test anyway.

I think I've used one or the other of these in the past: https://www.canva.com/tools/logo-maker-q1 https://www.freelogodesign.org/

Your best option for an OS might be something like FreeNAS: https://www.freenas.org/ That should have sensible defaukts for dealing with large disk arrays. How do you plan to have Veeam use the storage? We wound up connecting our NAS storage via ISCSI to the Windows server running Veeam and formatting it as ReFS, which Veeam can seemingly make good use of. If you have a Windows server running Veeam, might an option be to move that server to the new hardware you are building, so it simply has direct access to the disk array?

We went for a QNAP TS-1232XU-RP-4G - a 2U rack-mount device with 12 2.5" slots at the front and built-in support for NVMe RAM SSDs that QNAP's software can use as a tiered storage layer. This is connected via a 10Gbe ISCSI connection to a server running Veeam, with the volume managed by the QNAP device formatted as a ReFS volume for Veeam to use. If we hadn't already have had the server to run Veeam on I would have probably looked at getting a single server to both run Windows Server and Veeam and host the disks - using a ReFS volume seems to provide performance / space-saving features over any other kind of volume Veeam can use.

We've just been through a similar process - moving to new hardware running Server 2019 with local storage. Our original plan was to set up a cluster for instant failover if needed, but it wound up a fair bit cheaper for us to buy just the one new server and re-use a second one as a backup / failover server. We have replicas copied across from the live server to the backup server nightly via Veeam, so if the main server fails we can start up the replicas on the backup servers. Those servers will be a day out of date, but we figure that doesn't matter too much - we could increase the replication period to several times a day. We have Veeam handling both backup and replication of VMs, seems to be working fine so far. Local storage on the main server is a Server 2019 Storage Spaces array including two fast NVMe SSDs. The backup server is linked to a storage unit with a bunch of 12TB drives in RAID6, giving us 70TB of backup space. VeryPC specified the main server for us, complete with warranty and hardware certified to work with Windows Storage Spaces.

I haven't used a storage heater in a while - do electric companies still do separate Economy 7 tarrifs, or is everything on one circuit now? I used to live in a very un-insulated top-of-block flat (basically the converted roofspace of an older house), and found that the storage heater at least brought the background heat level up to a reasonable level, although I then had a fan heater which I could point at wherever I was sat. It's the kind of thing you'd think would be ripe for a smart-home makeover - have a storage heater than could get the next 24 hour's worth of weather and temperature predictions, plus maybe the flexible price of electricity and store / release heat accordingly. I don't know if there are such products available now - all the smart home stuff I've seen advertised seems to be the kind of thing someone living in California would think of, i.e. mostly concerned with whole-house air conditioning or central heating.

With a storage heater, you can use electricity when it's a bit cheaper (overnight / offpeak hours) and have the heat available when you want it. Storage heaters used to be installed on a separate electrical circuit on a timer, complete with different billing, but you'd think there'd be a more modern option by now with an app-controlled timer or something. Ideally, you'd want something that could take in weather forcasts for the next day to predict how warm you might want the room - you do have to plan ahead a little when deciding how much to turn the heater on. In practice, you often wind up with a storage heater providing general background heat and a small on-demand heater for when you want it. The most efficient electrical-based method of heating is going to be a heat pump - you could try sticking a portable air conditioning unit in backwards. If this is your building to modify as you wish, you could look at better insulating the walls - possibly try pumping insulation in to the gap between the inner and outer walls.

We use WeVideo for Chromebook video editing: https://www.wevideo.com/ If you want to do video conversion, you could set up a script that mounted a Google Drive folder and periodically checked it for new video files, running a conversion utility on any that needed coverting.

A few years ago, we set up a bunch of cheap stills cameras with wireless SD cards to automatically sync any pictures taken with a shared folder on the network - something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Share-Speed-Wireless-Class10-Adapter/dp/B00Q2K47HY The software provided that did the syncing wasn't designed for a school / corporate environment, so it's the kind of thing we had to have a VM running logged-in the whole time to run the software, but after a bit of set-up time it did all work okay. The cheaper end of the stills camera market doesn't seem to have changed much over the last 5 years - these look very similar in price and specification to what we bought maybe 5 years ago: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Easypix-DF000165-W1024-I-Aquapix-Digital/dp/B007B7ZC30 I think everyone is putting effort in to tablet / phone cameras these days.

Most filtering solutions should be able to block by domain name - so you could block the whole of, say, youtube.com - but you can't allow a domain and block specific URLs - youtube.com/videoID=123456.

Ah, good to know - I've always wondered what the limit for Google Drive traffic might be. We're just setting up Veeam now in what sounds like a similar way, my plan is to sync from our local backups to Backblaze using RClone. I've set up a separate Veeam backup for each VM we want to backup, that way we get a separate .vbk file for each VM. If we do ever need to restore from the cloud backup we can then at least prioratise which VMs we restore first, rather than having to try and download one huge backup file all in one go.

Is this for people with difficulty seeing, or for dyslexia support? The solutions used seem to be different - this page, although a couple of years old now, would seem to give a reasonable summary to start with: https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/01/results-of-the-2016-gov-uk-assistive-technology-survey/ The top "screen reader" would seem to be JAWS, while the top "reading solution" would seem to be TextHelp's Read & Write. The latter is for dyslexia support - we've just purchased a school-wide license (which includes all users and workstations, including ChromeOS if I remember correctly) for around £1,000. The top speech-to-text solution is Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is the speech engine used for Siri (or at least it was, I don't know if the two products still share any resources).

In theory, yes - I think in those machines you can replace the motherboards, keeping the power supply and monitor. However, those machines must be getting on somewhat now, so if a power supply or monitor goes you'll have trouble getting hold of an appropriate spare part. Also, 19" here looks like it might mean 4:3 ratio, whereas most modern screens (including any large touch screens you buy, now or in the future) will be wide-screen. We bought 22" monitors for our staffroom for general use (these are thin clients running on Raspberry Pis), and most of our classroom workstations have similar-size monitors / all-in-ones. Some of the admin staff have 27" screens to better fit larger spreadsheets and similar on, and the person handling timetabling has just upgraded to a 32" 4k monitor.

The Raspberry Pi 4 supports 4k output - I haven't tried one on a 4k monitor yet, so I'm not sure what performance might be like. It actually supports dual monitor output, although I'm guessing it would struggle to produce 4k on two monitors at the same time. At under £50, it should be affordable to get one and give it a try.

For our Reception classrooms, we've tended to buy boards with OPS slots to fit an OPS slot PC - the device comes on along with the board, so as far as the user is concerned they switch the board on and a standard PC loads up. We've most recently bought the Smart 65" board (around £2,500, if I remember correctly - that's with installation and includes VAT), and I think the OPS slot PCs we bought were around £800 - that was for a device with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD running Windows, you could get something cheaper and/or running something different, depending on what you wanted to do. We bought ours from VeryPC - they sell both the board and the OPS PC together, so they are warrantied to work together.