dhicks

Right, checked my notes: as of around 8th of May, if I read the Barclays.net website correctly, we need to have Gemalto e-Signer v6.6. We currently have 6.0.02 installed, and Barclays only had 6.4 available for download at the time. This is to provide support for Firefox ESR 60 (released on the 9th of May) - we are currently using the next most recent version, 52.5.0. Barclays are advising not to upgrade to ESR 60 until you have e-Signer 6.6 installed. I haven't checked for a couple fo weeks, hopefully there's now a link somewhere to v6.6 of Gemalto e-Signer.

Is this for Barclays bank? We had this set up with the 32-bit ESR version of Firefox - version 52, with specific support for older plugins: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ Handily, we found that the 32-bit version could be installed alongside the proper up-to-date 64-bit version, so the bursar only has to use this specific version for bank access, with a special shortcut on their desktop. Barclays are updating their system in some way, and now require us to move to an updated version of the plugin. However, when I last looked (a week or so ago), they didn't have a link available on their website to actually download the version they said was required. I need to check again this week to see if the download has been updated.

...reasons for cancelling outside events can include excess rain, snow, or paparazzi.

You know you work in a really rural school when the school stays open even during the heaviest of snow / storms because, due to power cuts and supply issues, it'll be the one place where children will be guaranteed to be warm and get a cooked meal...

I've just had this issue (for screens) for an Asus device, turns out their official parts supplier is Zand parts: zandparts Home They're based in Sweden, with pricing in Swedish Kroner by default, but it turns out you can change that to GBP and pay by credit card or Paypal with no problem. I only ordered the part today, so I don't know how reliable delivery and so forth is yet.

I know this is an older thread, but worth updating: we've found the sound-proofed switch cabinet in our IT room (which has its own HP 2920 switch) to be an excellent solution. The switch is in no way silent, but you really don't notice the sound with the cabinet door closed. That's been running since probably just after this thread was created, so a reasonably good reliability test.

Your post remindd me to check Insync - looks like the new version is out that supports Team Drives: https://www.insynchq.com/ I plan to install this and see how well it works.

No, this is BT - they assure us that the phone line over to a room in a secondary building was cancelled four years ago, despite ADSL services still having worked on it for most of that time. We seem to have been paying for the ADSL services, but not the phone line. We think the only reason ADSL suddenly stopped working is that someone else on the same exchange had a new phone line installed and used the phone connection.

Not, actually, a bad idea - have a document rendered as an image server-side, then cut it up into sigle-line strips that you display on screen for the user as they move the mouse pointer down the screen. As people have pointed out, that's not going to stop a determined user with a camera / screen grabbing software, but it might stop a good percentage of users in some situations. Actually, that machanism has uses other than just anti-copying - it might make quite a nice screen-reading utility for learners who just need to concentrate on one line at a time, or you could add text-to-speech as well. For anti-copying purposes, you could consider adding watermarking to your documents. It would mean you'd have to share a separate copy with each user, but if you did find copies around (either printed or in physical form) you could trace the source. That still doesn't stop someone running, say, a PDF document through an OCR utility, though.

Here's my post from 5 years ago: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/av-multimedia-related/113765-rackmount-wireless-microphone-set.html The Chord mics we bought have lasted well all that time - four mics, with an all-in-one rackmount receiver that we've mounted inside a solid stage box for lugging around. Uses Channel 70, which has occasionally clashed with another bit of kit plugged in in the same place, but no interference from outside, and we're in central London, with black cabs and delivery lorries going past the whole time. As I pointed out at the end of that thread, I'd consider getting the 6-mic version. I understand that might actually be a digital version of the same hardware, cramming a few more channels into the available radio frequency, which if anything might help avoid interference from other sources.

...provide a decent amount of time to evaluate the product, preferably by having a free tier of basic usage, with paid-for subscriptions featuring more functionality (actually, that probably applies to most SaaS products). Schools, especially, have limited time to evaluate products, and expecting them to setup, install and comprehensivly test and compare your product to others inside, say, a week is unrealistic - other stuff comes up the whole time, it might be a couple of months until I get back to looking at your product.

We're looking at GoGuardian at the moment: https://www.goguardian.com/ This is for ChromeOS management only at the moment, but it does seem to at least handle OAuth logins in a sensible manner - just seeing what it's facilities are now for syncing user data.

No, simpler than that - allow people to login to your system via OAuth "Login with..." Google / O365 / Twitter / Facebook / GitHub / etc buttons you see on some websites. The school network administrator doesn't have to do anything (or get involved or, really, know anything) about it, and it removes a barrier of entry for people using your system. Schools will take care of syncing user logins to Office 365 or Google, you don't have to integrate with Azure AD. Saying that, matching class / other pupil data up to teacher logins is a separate issue, that's where those third-party services might come in more useful. Or, of course, you could go by group membership in Office 365 / GSuite. I've not tried integrating anything with those third parties yet, although Wonde looks pretty comprehensive.

Features implemented poorly: working client-side software for all platforms. To be fair, probably likly to be the main bulk of any software development project, and tricky to debug cross-platform code for a client that's likly going to need very platform-specific hooks for every different deployment, but you can't really have a decent classroom management system without supporting every client a school might use (Windows, Mac, iPad, Android, ChromeOS). Features that tend to be missing from most educational software: OAuth-based logins (via at least Google and Office 365, which most schools these days will at least be planning to use one or the other of) and syncing of data directly from a school's MIS or third-party system (Clever.com, Wonde, Salamander, etc). I want teachers to be able to sign in to a management console with their usual Google/O365 logins and instantly be presented with information on the children they actually teach, not to have to set that up manually. Schools tend towards GPO for installing software on Windows clients (or install software on reimaging a PC), or simply walk round and install stuff manually. Most schools who deploy some kind of mobile devices (iOS / Android / ChromeOS) would use a Mobile Device Management (MDM) system of some kind, or Google's admin console for Android / ChromeOS devices. I would think that very few schools would be using Puppet, Chef or Ansible - the DevOps mindset hasn't really made to the education sector yet. As pointed out above, Internet connectivity might be a concern. For us, it probably isn't - I'd be happy with a web-based management console and no onsite hardware or VM to manage, but I can imagine other schools wanting on-site provision. As this sounds like something you haven't actually written yet, it might be an idea to arcitect your system so an on-site install is as easy to set up and manage as a cloud-based setup. That might even mean that you install and configure a VM on-premisis for a school, with the school having no direct access to the VM itself, just the management console. The school has peace-of-mind in case of an Internet outage, and you know that no grubby oik of a network manager has been tinkering with any settings.

Google Sheets has (of course) a REST API: https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/reference/rest/ As, seemingly, does progresson: https://progresso.docs.apiary.io/#reference/employees-collection/employee-basic-records/create-learner If you can write something to sit in the middle and pass data between the two then that might do what you're aiming to. Sorry, I don't have any experience with Progresso, so I can't picture what you're aiming for, although in my experience Google Sheets' API is easy enough to use (I have a Python script sycning data from Spiceworks' API to a Google Sheets spreadsheet).

I think you might be answering a different point (good answer, mind). I think the original post meant that you, the vendor, can whitelist the school's domain / IP address. So, for a school with the domain name myschool.sch.uk, they pay a yearly all-users subscription, now anyone who logs in to your system with an email address ending in myschool.sch.uk is seen as a registered user, no more setup needed. If you're using Google OAuth, you can get the domain membership separatly from the user's email address at the very lowest level of user data access (so you record just a Google ID number and the domain membership), meaning you don't need to record any personal data about the user at all (not even their email address). Some sites also skip having to have logins at all, going on the IP address of the request (does it come from a fixed IP address that someone's registered as the school's?) or the domain of the refering link (so schools can put a link to the site on their VLE that takes users straight, no separate login needed). In answer to your question above, most schools certainly should find it easy enough to make sure that Auth0.com / Okta / etc are reachable through filters, although you might want to check and test whichever service you pick to make sure there's nothing too fiddly involved in a school unblocking it. What sort of thing does your product do? I'm currently spending two days a week working on a tool to allow batch job scripts to be easily run on files in assorted online file storage services - not just for schools, but certainly likely to initially have more schools-related functionality. It might be an idea to compare notes / ideas - send me a PM at some point.

Not a laptop, no. We've put CloudReady on a bunch of older small VESA-mountable PCs for use as kiosk and digital signage devices, which work very well. For lower-end laptops, useable as a portable, device, by the time you've bought a CloudReady license, a ChromeOS management license, possibly an SSD and, probably, a new battery for the laptop you might as well have spent £200 on a brand-new ChromeOS device usable as a tablet. It might be a good option for more powerful laptops, though - ChromeOS devices with faster CPUs and larger amounts of RAM are still rather expensive, so CloudReady on such a device might be a better idea.

As a one-off operation or on a schedule? Once you've got SSH access to your server you could just copy-and-paste the text from the CSV file open in Windows directly to a text editor open on the terminal.

Good point - also worth thinking about organising who has access to the CCTV system and making sure everyone involved knows the process for getting footage from it, both in the how-to-work-the-software sense and in the what-paperwork-needs-filling-in sense. We're in central London, and the police have obviously realised we have reasonable-quality CCTV available so we get several requests coming in for footage. It shouldn't be a problem, but it's woth ensuring that such requests can be dealt with quickly and easily by whoever needs to deal with it, not just by the IT department, otherwise it becomes yet another rush job for IT to become a botleneck with.

As in you've got just one cable going from your core to a location around where you might want several cameras? We have a couple of places like that - we could have added extra cable runs, but the cheaper option was to buy one of Ubiquiti's mini PoE switches (around £150, I think), and small enough to be bolted reasonably unobtrousivly to a wall / ceiling. As long as you have somewhere to plug the switch into mains, you can run 4 or 8 PoE CCTV cameras from the one switch. The switches themselves are managable from Ubiquiti's software, too, so you can have one server to deal with both cameras and associated switches. You could even add a cheap, small UPS (£50 - £100) to power the switch and keep the cameras up in case of a power cut.

Ubiquiti / Hikvision cameras are maybe £150 each. What you need to spend on top of that depends on how your network is currently set up. A new server with some decent-sized harddrives for storage might cost around £1,000 (probably a bit cheaper, you don't need anything fancy, or you might already have a suitible device around). If you already have PoE-capable edge switches and cat5 cable runs to your camera locations then you just need to plug them in, otherwise you'll need to run cables to each location (which might involve external labour costs, or might simply be something you do yourself, with say £100 worth of tools and cable). Most of the cameras actually tend to come with PoE adaptors, so thye might be easier to plug in to power at the switch end rather than adding a separate power supply at the camera end.

I'd go for at least 32GB, if not more if you can - even if you don't do anything fancy, just assign any spare RAM to the file server and Windows will use any otherwise unused RAM as a cache.

The network manager you'll be working alongside is me, so if anyone has any specific questions about the role then do please feel free to ask in this thread or send me a private message. The school is a private prep school, with 400 pupils from 4 to 13 (Nursery to Year 8), located in central London (just round the corner from Harrods). The role involves being the main point of contact for helping teaching staff with day-to-day IT queries, and dealing with the general day-to-day business of keeping the various systems in classrooms and around the school up and running. We currently have an on-site server facility, but aim to start moving more services to the cloud in the future. We have 260 Chromebook devices deployed around classrooms, with teachers having an iPad each. We have around 40 classrooms, with most having some kind of large front-of-classroom display of some kind and a Windows PC for the teacher, and various offices and a staffroom. The IT suite has a set of iMacs. The role will also involve using the AV equipment in the main hall (a large-screen projector, lighting and sound system) and helping with setting up AV equipment at some outside locations on occasion. The building is on 5 floors with a fair few stairs, so we'll need someone reasonably sprightly and capable of carrying reasonable amounts of equipment around the place.

It's the reduced latency part of fibre connections that I find potentially interesting - with near-local response times, you can offload the computing part of things to cloud-based hardware (see https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/blade-shadow-cloud-gaming-could-make-your-pc-obsolete, for example). The actual bandwidth needed for a 4k streaming cloud-provisioned computer is around 15Mb/s per connection, so on a 10Gb/s connection you could (in theory) fit around 650 connections, which should be enough for most schools to offload their classroom / office workstations into the cloud.

What the above instructions are trying to do is replace the Downloads, etc, folders in your home folder with soft links to folders over on your new SSD (we use the same approach for network folders on our school's Macs). I would avoid the "rm -rf" commands - they delete everything in a folder, I'd recommend moving those folders elsewhere instead so you have a backup in case something goes wrong. Once you've replaced folders with links, you'll need to reload Finder - a reboot should sort this out for you.