dhicks

We currently backup local file servers and an Exchange Server to AWS, costing around £120 a month. That's around 4TB of files and getting on for a TB of mailboxes being backed up with grandfather / father / son backups.

Two issues, subtly different: logins and timetable (or "rostering") data. Logins should, ideally, be handled from a central database of some kind - OAuth (easiest), or via SAML, or some kind of system that doesn't involve having a separate username / password for each site. I'm seeing more sites offer GSuite integrations now, with a few offering O365. After a user has logged in, in a school setting you generally need some way of knowing what class / group / etc they are in. GSuite (and O365) can hold this information in Google Classroom (Microsoft Classroom for O365), but I can understand some applications wanting a wider set of data about a pupil. Actually, you could potentially use wildcard matching on usernames to decide which users see which features / exercises / etc, but that probably only works in some cases. Like yourself, I'd be quite happy with a solution that gave us a nice secure HTTPS endpoint (encrypted, plus a unique API key to identify our school) to periodically upload a CSV file to. Then I can have a script run from our MIS server overnight (or maybe even trigger on updates), generate an up-to-date list of users and upload it to the various services as needed. As you point out above, a decent system should support unique identifiers for users and accept amendments to records (name changes, etc). Rather than each site support API access to individual schools (with each individual school making mistakes in setups and so forth and needing support), it makes sense for sites to use trusted services that provide the data from schools in a consistent manner. This might mean integrating directly with the school's MIS, or using a service such as Clever.com (seems to be mostly in the US) or Wonde / Groupcall / etc in the UK. Wonde seems the most impressive I've seen so far from a technical point of view, offering a properly-documented GraphQL-based API.

Each pupil in years 4,5,6,7 and 8 is assigned an individual Chromebook - they stay on site, stored in charging cabinets in classrooms that charge them overnight. Devices were bought by the school, not by parents. Battery life seems okay so far, devices are about 18 months old. Wireless seems okay on our 5-year-old Ruckus system, although that's something we know we could probably do with upgrading soonish.

Just checked - yes, I reckon you're right, their 12" portable unit looks just right.

It's a good point, and when I phoned Studio Spares today the chap on the phone reckoned they manage to co-exist with WiFi systems with no problem. In this particular case we should be okay as the hall should hopefully just have the one point-to-point wireless link over to the main school which is then linked to a wired network.

The specification for which, I now notice, says that you can use 8 channels out of an available 16. Okay, 8 channels is still better than 4, but I was looking forward to being able to wire a whole class (private school) up with mics in one go.

Good point - I phoned Studio Spares today, I didn't ask the chap who answered the phone if they were fixed arials, it's something to check up on.

Another update to this thread: 5 years on and the wireless mics are still working just fine, but we have a new stage area to kit out and the drama teacher fancies having more channels available. I've just seen these on the Studio Spares website: https://www.studiospares.com/new-in/Studiospares-dual-wireless-systems.htm That would seem to be around £1,500 for a 16-mic setup - does that seem right?

Hello All, We have a new stage to kit out with sound equipment. Not the main speakers, those are already set up, but what we could do with is a portable, self-contained, speaker of some sort that can be used by itself for small lessons but also act as a handy input point and monitor speaker for the larger speaker system. We currently have a number of these from Studio Spares: https://www.studiospares.com/Headphones-and-Speakers/Portable-PA/Trojan-iPA800-Portable-PA-System_250210.htm (Studio Spares brand their own version of the above, I've seen the same bit of hardware in several other places). They've lasted pretty well, but are starting to show their age a bit - in particular, we could do with something with built-in Bluetooth so people can connect iPhones and similar up without having to plug in cables (which they have a habit of breaking off in the input ports). I've seen this on the Studio Spares site: https://www.studiospares.com/Headphones-and-Speakers/Portable-PA/Studiospares-iPA8-Portable-PA_250280.htm Which seems to be this year's version, and it looks great except it doesn't have a line-out port at the back, which we find very handy. Does anyone know of anything similar to the above but with a line-out?

Has that cell been set to show the formula rather than the result of the calculation?: https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2016/01/13/show-formulas-excel/ The keyboard shortcut for display-formulas is Ctrl + ' - could it be you're accidently hittingthat shortcut somewhere along the way?

We're using a pretty much hyper-converged solution, yes, although it wasn't called that when we set it up (it's that old) - we use DRBD as an underlying block replication method to replicate storage accross three nodes running XenServer. They are interlinked via a dedicated switch - a couple of 7-year-old Dell servers and one slightly newer one, we also have a fourth 5-year-old HP server as part of the pool (but not sharing storage). The servers are all random devices bought for other purposes and at some point smooshed together into a virtualisation setup. We had some very useful help and advice at the time we were upgrading the hardware from VeryPC, who provided things like more RAM and new RAID cards and disks for the servers. We have our eye on Stone's Equinox system - basically a nice all-in-one drop-in solution, I gather a two node solution should be somewhere under £20,000 (that's with VAT). Other companies provide similar systems based on Windows Server 2016 / Hyper-V with a tiered storage solution (Storage Spaces). We had a look at Starwind too, I think it came out about the same price as Stone's system in the end.

I'm pretty sure there'll be API access to create / change forms - I wonder if there's a facility to add the choice eliminator add-on via API?

What is it he wants to teach - does it actually need a whole desktop VM to remote into, or would a command-line do, or a specific service? PythonAnywhere do a nice ready-to-go Python setup (Python, plus pretty much any library you can think of pre-installed), something like that might be appropriate.

We do the same - we have an MSI that gets installed at machine imaging time, which we update maybe every 6 months, but otherwise we just leave Chrome to do its own thing with background updates, which it seems to do extremly well.

Serif's Affinity software instead? They always used to provide pretty reasonable home-licensing options, and their site license is rather more affordable than Adobe's.

As in: you are composing a document in Google Docs, and want to share that document with a limited set of trusted readers, all of which are identified by email addresses, but not all those users neccesarily have a GSuite account associated with that email address. Can you require your users (are they parents? staff?) to sign up to GSuite with the associated email address? If not, can you require them to sign up to some kind of OAuth-supporting service with that email address?

I might have got a bit over-excited when I saw the "like a keyboard" bit - I imagined something like a cheap barcode scanner, where you can plug one into an available USB port and start scanning barcodes, with the device acting as a "fake" keyboard and sending data to the computer as if someone was sitting typing characters in. That would make it very easy to write something to read data from a sensor, there would be no specialised library needed, you could just use basic "read keyboard input" functions in whatever language you had to hand. I phoned LogIt yesterday and had a very useful conversation with support (who, somewhat refreshingly for an educational IT company, actually know their stuff), who explained that just because the USB device is seen as a HID device it doesn't mean it acts as a keyboard. However, with a bit more research it turns out that Chrome actually has an API to read / write data from USB devices, the specific example given being "data logging devices in an educational setting": https://wicg.github.io/webusb/#app-edu-devices

Hello All, I've just seen a request go past from the science teacher for some sensing equipment, specifically some LogIt Voyager units. Just searching for information about them, I came accross this post: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/bett-2018/130486-science-equipment.html#post1114702 @pete - can I just check that, am I right in thinking you can just plug a sensor into a USB port and it'll start logging data like a keyboard? Does the software only work on client-side devices (Windows, MacOS X, Linux), or is there something newer and web-based available? What happens when you plug two devices in?

I'm on Relish broadband at home, entirely 4G-based - a separate 4G network from the phone system, so probably not comparable from a tariff point of view. It works fine from a technical point of view, although latency time is probably a fair bit greater than most other broadband provision, and that (I think) can affect VPN usage and SSH connections - I've found that SSH connections seem to stop working if I don't type anything for a few minutes.

We find this an issue, too - we have the ESET client install at re-imaging time, so as soon as a machine is re-imaged it should have up-to-date antivirus on it. There doesn't seem to be a sensible way to get the actual antivirus client to do a silent install, you have to install the management client, then wait for that to update in the background before carrying on and installing anything else. We hold up our base software install until antivirus is installed, so when the client version changes and doesn't update on the console, our imaging process freezes at the ESET install stage.

It sounds like we are all spending time writing solutions for the exact same problem - hauling data from an MIS and shovling it somewhere else, with different sets of bugs occuring along the way to trip us and our users up.

Do you use some kind of phone system, so one external number and several internal phones? Our internal phone PBX has slots for 4 incoming physical connections, some of which can be mobile phones if you place a SIM card in the PBX. It lets us do text-to-email from that number, too. That might be a solution, depending on what phone system / hardware you use.

Agreed - also, error handling, which takes some thought if you're passing errors in some way from script to script. I have one script here that extracts data from the MIS, then another separate script that creates new user accounts and disables existing accounts if users are no longer active. The first script conked out halfway through due to a character encoding issue (a new child joined with Belgian-style punctuation in their name...) and didn't finish producing the list of currently active pupils, at which point the second script decided it was time to disable the pupils it didn't know about, with hilarious consequences.

:-) But if you're inclined to look at scripting solutions anyway, there's way more fun / useful / interesting stuff that you could be doing with that time and ability. Someone else, for a reasonable fee, will take care of the user syncing, which all schools need to deal with, then you can get on with the stuff that's specific to your school (or even specific subjects / lessons / teachers / pupils).

Is this something that you need to write yourself? Salamander Soft, Wonde, Groupcall (?) and others have existing tools to do exactly this - Wonde's service starts at £15 a month, which is probably about what it costs the school to hire you for an hour, so if it takes you more than about a day's work in total to sort this (including future maintaianance and updating) it's probably cheaper overall just to pay for the service and use your time for something more interesting.