jthompson

From what I remember of doing this, the response will include a 'next page' token of some kind, such that you can do a while/do loop to process any and all pages of the response until there are no more pages. IIRC when fetching student details from Wonde I think you need to specify an 'updated since' parameter so that only student records updated since then are included in the response. If you want all of the students then you just need to specify that as being far enough back to cover them all. Happy to share what I've written for this, although it's written in Google Apps Script.

If it was an in-place upgrade, test whether you get the same error after a clean install of 24H2. If the clean install is okay, then I don't think you don't need to worry about fiddling with AD.

I feel like the Corvette brand would have had better cut through outside the US, but then having GM involved is just part of the creeping Americanisation of F1. When I think of Cadillac, I just think of an American's idea of what a nice car looks like (i.e. a bland lump with obligatory shiny art deco detailing) rather than anything remotely aligned with F1. Still, more cars on the grid is good, since that means more seats available for drivers, which can only be good.

Mmmm. "Saturd".

Just overwrite them. For your mixed environment, consider creating some WMI filters so that you can target GPOs at a particular version of Windows if required. For instance, you might want to do this if you've got a GPO for configuring the Start menu for Windows 10, but don't want that being applied to Windows 11 machines. You might also need this for setting up Windows Update policies differently for different Windows versions. We have our WMI filters set like these - https://www.der-windows-papst.de/2024/01/25/a-list-of-gpo-wmi-filters/

This is something that's been on my project ideas list for a while. We also collect timestamps into text files from each logon and logoff, but don't have any reporting layer over it. I've often wondered whether RRDtool could be of use (it would be a good excuse to learn the basics of it!) but I think that assumes datapoints coming it at regular time intervals, which for 100s computers is going to be quite burdonsome. There's also the issue of multiple concurrent user sessions: someone who has left themselves signed in might muddy your data. If it were me I'd begin by putting together some scriting that totals up the session duration for each computer each day from the log files, and add those to the computers' running totals for the current week/month/term as held in a spreadsheet (current week/month rather than the last 7/30 days, since that's simpler without needing a proper database).

In a PowerShell prompt: Ctrl+R to search your command history. Useful for when you kinda know what you typed earlier but either can't remember or be bothered to type the whole thing again. In this example, Ctrl+R is followed by typing "bde" to surface a previously entered command that includes that string. Also: "h" will present a numbered history of your commands "r" will re-run the most recent "r X" will re-run the Xth command (e.g. "r 13" to re-run command #13 from the history).

Even our Windows PC based support staff are working primarily in Google Workspace. Windows users signed in to Chrome and Google Drive for Desktop. Office apps are present, but I think there's been an organic normalisation of using Sheets, Docs, Drive, etc. because we've been using Gmail for about a decade now. Had we been using Outlook365 all of that time then I suspect it would have been Office365 that experienced that network effect instead.

Whatever headaches running both might create, I should think they're outweighed by being able to use the strengths of each over the other (Chrome OS, Classroom, Apps Script and Gmail spam filtering on the Google side vs external contacts feeling more comfortable being sent a Word doc or Teams invitation on the M365 side*). * admittedly, I'm selling M365 a bit short there, but you get the point.

Every day's a school day!

Here's an interesting concept. An IDE running in a VM that's running in browser memory. So literally browser-based, not cloud-based. https://apptron.dev/

In spite of my post earlier citing public health risks, I've created myself a Bluesky account to see whether I can get anything meaningful out of social media (I don't use any others). I'm still perplexed as to the whole point of social media, so I'm basically approaching it from the perspective of using it a bit like as RSS reader. Only with lower information density, the list of my subscriptions being necessarily public and lots of words being attached to stuff from random people I neither know or care about. Bluesky is interesting from a technicaly perspective: the decentralisation idea ("protocols over platforms") and being able to use a domain name as a handle are neat ideas. I've noticed that there is a official EduGeek account, so is using "edugeek.net" as a handle something that's planned? Ultimately, I just don't really care enough about random other people's posts/replies, etc. to put up with it! I'm not one for playing online games against randoms, so I guess this is just that in another form.

IIRC they're user-specific, so if you're using a dedicated user account for running the software, then no. If your candidates are running the software under their regular user accounts, then you may need to consider reverting things afterwards.

IME, it's the onboarding process of T-OTP authenticator apps which really seems to throw people. It's not helped when some services direct users to install and use their proprietary authenticator app (Pearson!!), or when a well-known generic one isn't quite as generic as it should be and manages to completely mangle the UX and instill confusion (*cough* Microsoft *cough*).

Well, it's another account for the end user to know about and remember.

It's probably a good idea to make a distinction between SLT not wanting to require the use of USB security keys (such as the Titan key), versus not wanting to allow them where users may have a preference for it. Without either a hardware [uSB] security key or a phone-based method (authenticator apps, passkeys, notification prompts, etc.) then I think you're either looking at hardware code generators or a password manager application on the computer. The password manager on the computer would need to not be reliant on the Google account at all. Various options on that front, but all of them arguably quite thorny to guide 100s of end users through, compared to handing out USB security keys.

I'm deploying a captured custom image. Not much customisation, though: removing unwanted AppX packages, installing Office, enabling .NET 3.5 and then Windows updates for the month. To get up and running, far easier to not bother with build&capture and instead just deploy a vanilla image and use Group Policy to take care of app deployments and customisations afterwards.

Using an MDT database to automatically set the computer name during imaging - https://4sysops.com/archives/windows-8-deployment-part-8-the-mdt-database/

Really? Does MS Lists give you mailbox monitoring, auto responses, templates, cope with CC's, etc.? I haven't looked as MS Lists for ages and so hadn't even considered it as a viable email-based helpdesk option.

If only our computers didn't suffer power cuts and lots of ungraceful shutdowns, we'd need to reimage them less often.

I think we will too, but I'm planning on jumping out and doing a cool superhero landing in the moments before MDT thumps itself into the ground behind me (tldr: I'm prepping MCM).

Glad I'm not the only one so surprised about USB install media being used so much. I like having clients being up to date with their monthlies straight out of the gate (i.e. the deployment image itself being kept up to date), without having a chance to muddy my compliance stats. When I first started in this line of work, we were using Norton Ghost with a golden image spread across about 5 CDs. I thought it was very clever that we could have a production line of up to 5 computers being imaged at the same time with only one set of discs!

With Gmail you can send a password in a confidential mode email with a short expiry. That limits the potential exposure of the password. But essentially, password protecting file attachments is not as essential as it may seem.

Our DMARC records already specify one of our own mailboxes for delivery of aggregate reports alongside the addresses for the NCSC and Postmark reporting services, so we've been merrily collecting the reports and doing nothing with them. Time for a bit of Apps Script fun!

Just received an email from NCSC stating that they've decided to shut down their DMARC aggregate reporting service (part of their MailCheck service) on 24th March 2025. It's a shame because that was a great free option. I'm tempted to have a crack at writing something myself that can parse incoming reports and feed a simple database.