dhicks

I had a plan over last summer to write a proper sync application for Windows file shares and Google Drive, but ran rather short of time. At the moment I'm trying out simply installing the Google Drive sync utility on a file server and copying over a bunch of files to see how well it handles them. The plan is to move over file share by file share, starting with one that only the network admins use so we can see what happens before we shift user files accross. We then plan to share each Windows file share as a shared folder in Google Drive - we'll see how well that works when we have the first file share synced. My plan is to share each user's home folder to just that user - we'll see how well that works, and how to go about automating it, shortly as well. We have around 4TB of files to copy around (we might also take the opportunity to prune some older files), so this is going to take a while to sync up to Google Drive.

Our Qnap box seems to have been reliable enough over the years, although I don't really have much experience of its software features as such, we're just using it as an ISCSI target for something else. We're syncing to Google Drive via a Windows file server with the idea that both user shares and Google Drive will wind up with synchronised files.

You get unlimited storage with a Google Apps for School domain, which is free, so you can use the Google Drive sync utility to sync a server's worth of files to Googlel Drive. This might take a while for 1.6TB of data, and download speed in case you need to replace the whole 1.6TB worth won't be great, either, but might make a good addition to your backup solution.

What age / specification / state of repair are the Macs in? Our music teacher seems to be getting on quite well with Soundtrap, a web-based audio editor - if you have a decent bandwidth / low latency Internet connection it might be suitible for you.

We're rather thinking the official Raspberry Pi display looks like just the thing: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/the-eagerly-awaited-raspberry-pi-display/ It neatly mounts the Raspberry Pi on the back, complete with power connections - if you're using Raspberry Pi 3s with built-in wireless you should only need the one cable plugged in to the wall for power. You can get / make dinky stands for it easily enough so they stand upright on the desk. My plan at the moment is for each child in the class to be assigned a Raspberry Pi, then log in to it with their standard AD username / password via our AccessNow RDP gateway. That way they can leave the Pi running overnight / the weekend and tinker with it from home if they want. As pointed out above, a Raspberry Pi in a classroom setting doesn't have much over a VM unless you're doing some physical I/O stuff with it, so I plan to configure the screen as a basic I/O device. Pupils will program on a separate console from the output that appears on the Raspberry Pi's display, then we can add further input / output devices as we go along.

If it's anything like our Panasonic camcorders, you need an adaptor that mounts in a slot at the back of the camcorder to mount standard hot / cold shoe equipment. We've tended to buy the second-from-cheapest model of Camcorder from Panasonic's range, figuringyou get a decent device for around £200. I've been quite pleased recently with my Kodak SP360 4k. You can just leave it running in a corner and capture everything going on in front of it - with a 235 degree field of view you don't need to worry about moving the camera around. Footage in equirectangular format is actually suprisingly viewable in a standard video player, too, although a proper 360-degree viewer would be better. The sound is quite acceptable, too - it should be able to pick up most sound from a small stage, for instance.

Yes, of course, along with users being logged out after, say, half an hour's inactivity, should reduce the runtime bill a fair bit. However, I can understand why Rollapp sets their pricing at a level that allows for people actually using the system for at least a whole working day. I've not done anything with Docker, but my guess is that you'd want a dedicated VM per user, with a decent amount of RAM, for responsivness when using a GUI. Handily, I happen to have a couple of cloud servers in the on-site server cupboard not doing very much at the moment, so I can try re-creating this kind of infrastructure myself and see how far I get. The cloud servers give me around 20 separate (single-vCPU) VMs with something like 4GB of RAM and a dedicated 64GB SSD each. My guess is that I should be able to write a login system that authenticates against Google Apps (or Azure, or Facebook, etc) and returns a connection token of some kind. Once a user is authenticated I can open an interactive GUI session on a VM with Ericom AccessNow, I just have to figure out how to use that connection token to connect up their Google Drive account in such a way that Linux sees it as the VM user's home folder. I'm not sure if google-drive-ocamlfuse can manage this: google-drive-ocamlfuse - A FUSE filesystem over Google Drive

Based on 50 concurrent users, around £800 a month. I've just run a few rough calculations based on a VM in Google Compute Engine, and 50 VMs running 24 hours a day would cost around £1,000 a month, so their pricing is actually quite competative compared with other cloud-based options at the moment. Practically, I think our best option is going to be to stick with on-site hardware to run VMs at the moment, I think it'll be a few years until prices come down enough to be a realistic option for us.

I've had a quick email conversation with RollApp, who proved very helpful and are willing to charge on a per-concurrent-user model. I think they're going to be a bit expensive for how much we would use them - we use Inkscape, but we're only a prep school, we probably can't really justify buying their package just to use Inkscape, but other schools might find them a better fit for their requirements.

If you're in London, the Oyster card is a Mifare card, so people can register and use those as their photocopier / door access / etc card - it makes them less likely to misplace their card. Even more so if they use their contactless bank card (which seem to be readable by most Mifare card readers, best to double-check the model in question before you buy, though) or phone - one less card for people to carry around, and makes them even less likely to misplace or lend their card to someone else.

When I sign in using our DEP login I get an error message saying that this ID can't be used. Is this simply the system not quite being ready yet, or am I doing something wrong?

Yes, we are. We've found them to be affordable and good-quality - they do proper 10-point multi-touch and Windows recognises them as a generic human input device, so there's no drivers to install, you just plug them in. They do also have an OPS slot for a suitible OPS PC that turns on with the single power button on the front of the screen, so you can have a completly self-contained unit with no external PC needed and no need for the teacher to have to remember to switch multiple devices on.

You can join a Linux machine to a Windows network with Samba, so you can have pupils log in with their usual usernames and password. You can even have it mount their home folder, if you want. Even basic hardware or a fairly minimal virtual machine should be able to handle 20 text-only logins, you aren't going to need any particarly fancy hardware.

Do you have a particular price range in mind? For basic camcorders, we've tended to buy Panasonic devices in the past - decent quality video for a reasonable price (£200-ish). I assume you want something you can plonk on a tripod in front of a show and leave to record for a couple of hours. With that in mind, budget for a basic tripod with bag, a small bag for the camcorder, a couple of the largest SD cards the camcorder will take (maybe up to 128GB) and an external battery power supply so you can have a stand-alone device with no wires trailing around the place. You can probably do that lot for under £500 off Amazon. For a bit more you could upgrade to a 4k camcorder (£800-ish). The advantage of 4k is that you can film on a static wide-angle shot and be left with enough detail to be able to zoom in during the editing process. I've tried with a 4k GoPro but the low-light performance part of things isn't so good, so a 4k camcorder is probably best. You'll then need something capable of editing 4k video, of course - I think Adobe Premier Elements supports 4k now (better check that before you buy anything) and probably has most of the capabilities you'd want for editing a video of a stage production. For the best in video quality, get a (full-frame) DSLR. You'll find that DSLRs are limited to recording half an hour of footage (I think this is an import restriction rather than an actual good reason, so you might be able to buy a DSLR in the US and import it). The solution used by some people is to use an external recorder that can record from the HDMI output of your DSLR. You're best using a DSLR that doesn't compress its HDMI signal. You're probably looking at around £2,000 - £3,000 in total for such a setup.

We're currently looking at Soundtrap for music editing and WeVideo for video editing. WeVideo charge around £200 per year for a 50-user license, which we consider not bad value. Both allow logins via users' Google accounts, so there's only the one set of details for users to remember. A suitibly scaleable solution running Inkscape on AWS would need some work - you'd need to integrate Google / Azure logins / Dropbox / Facebook logins and connect up to the relevant file APIs and so on, but that should be quite do-able. I'd go for a number-of-simultanious-users licensing model (with some degree of flexibility as hitting a hard limit right in the middle of a class doesn't go down well), with accounts being logged off after a certain time period of inactivity.

No, looks worth a look, though. I'm suitibly impressed with Ericom AccessNow, though - we're now using it for staff remote access, so they can just log in to a Windows remote desktop via a web browser window. Documentation and customisability is good enough that it was simple enough to write a basic bit of load-balancing code quickly in Javascript, and it's licensed per simultanious user as a one-off fee, so we pay around £800 for a dozen users to be logged on at the same time and that's all we pay. We have to pay yearly licensing fees to Microsoft on top of that for Windows, obviously, but using Linux-based servers instead would sort that issue.

Ooh, useful-looking. Are you using Rollapp yourself? Any idea if their group pricing is strictly per-user or per simultanious user? We're looking at putting Chromebooks / iPads into classrooms, and are considering what web-based applications we use along with those. The apps available via Rollapp cover several areas we would need, but the pricing is a bit high for us if we'd have to pay for each user on our system. Paying by number of simultanious users would be rather more affordable, though. Rollapp seems to be using Ericom's AccessNow or a similar product. That's licensed per simultanious user, not per total number of users. The software itself is open source, so the main ongoing cost would be providing a server to run on. Is anyone else hosting their own similar system, either on their own hosted hardware or on AWS or similar? A local authority, MAT or centralised IT support company, for instance?

We mostly have 450mm network cabinets, and our (HP) PoE switches only just fit, to the extent that we have to use right-angle power connectors to get them in at all. 600mm would definatly be better. Also, as we found out with a switch in a classroom, a typical PoE switch is quite noisy, with whizzing fans for cooling that extra power used. We wound up buying a sound-insulated cabinet for that classroom, but it might be an idea looking at those in general anyway as you can hear the switches whizzing away when you stand in the corridors sometimes, they are quite noisy.

An old tray-loading CD drive, mounted just the right distance away from the PC's power button, with a stick poking out the front.

A good point, and one which has me thinking that we could start to replace our aging hardware with cloud-based services, which are then paid for with a monthly fee rather than with a large fee every 3 / 5 / 7 years. Our servers are about the same age as localzuk's, it's time to start planning what our next upgrade is going to be. We are in central London, we have good access to high-speed internet, so running some / most of our server infrastructure on cloud system of some sort is a realistic option. Exactly what type of "cloud" is, of course, a question that will take a bit of thinking about.

Could add 360-degree rigs for the GoPros? 280-degree lenses for GoPros to enable 2 to be used for a 360-degree video setup, or a set of two Kodak SP360 4ks for 360 degree video? Wireless mics? Combination DI box / mixer / splitter for audio connections?

Promethean touch panels have a good combination of quality / price - proper 10-point multi-touch, designed for classroom use, come with warrenty. We've had one screen repaired under warrenty, and there was no problem or argument in getting the problem sorted. AVPartsMaster have 55" for £1,500, 65" for £3,000 (prices include VAT) - the price does seem to increase quite sharply as you increase in size. Depending on what setup you want, they will take an OPS slot PC, so you can have an all-in-one interactive panel and PC.

Depending on the people who'll be using the device, you might want to go for a decent "bridge" camera - like a DSLR, but without a removeable lens. A good DSLR will give you a choice of lenses that you can swap around and a large sensor size, allowing for a good depth-of-field when taking photos, but those considerations might be a bit irrelevant for most staff who just want to point a camera at something and take a photo. A bridge / superzoom camera generally gives you a good zoom length, plus there's one less removeable / loosable part for people to fiddle with. We currently have a Nikon D5100 DSLR for general use. One feature we've found particularly useful is a wireless link to upload pictures taken straight to the network. We use a separate Eye-Fi SD card for that, but I think you can now get the feature built-in to most new cameras. Get a camera bag and a spare battery and charger to go with the camera, and expect to loose a few SD cards as people always seem to be able to misplace them.

I don't know enough about music production software to be able to comment myself, but our music department seems quite impressed by Soundtrap - we've just bought a year's education license for use in the classroom.

Just for anyone else trying: the Kodak SP360 4k records 2880 x 2880 square aspect-ratio videos which need to be converted to an equirectangular projection for use with the Google's new plugin. For whatever reason, the video output from the Pixpro software for use with the SP360 doesn't seem to work with the Googlel plugin, although the video file itself plays okay if simply double-clicked in Windows explorer. It could well simply be my machine being rather old and slow, I haven't tried on any different machines yet. Re-encoding the .mp4 file to a new .mp4 file with the same resolution via Online Video Converter seemed to solve the problem, so maybe it's simply a codec issue of some kind. Also, the GoPro-style connector on the bottom of the various mounts provided with the SP360 are the wrong way around for mounting to a GoPro base - they are three-pronged rather than two-pronged. I've crafted (okay, bodged) an adaptor using a couple of lolly sticks with holes drilled in them, which seems to be holding quite steadily so far. If you mount via the standard camera-style 1/4" thread hole you block access to the SD card slot and power input, which is a problem if you want to run off an external power supply. I've got some test footage with the camera in "front" mode, then converted for use with the Google plugin, and it works well. Bear in mind that this time last year the best equivilent option (a GoPro black, with a backbone modified lens mount, plus a separate lens) was two or three times the price, the SP360 really is good value for money for what it does.