andyt57

That worked. Thanks very much.

I had found the first setting, but not the second. I've now set it and see what happens. Thanks. Andrew

One of my schools has about 90 Chromebooks and is having a problem. The children have worked out that if they open a new tab in Google Chrome then an icon appears at the bottom right entitled "Customise Chrome". This enables them to change the colours on the screen and play around instead of doing the work that they should be doing. I have searched but I can't find any way of disabling this in the Google Admin console. Does anyone know how to disable it? Andy

I've tried that, without any luck. The problem appears to be on the motherboard, and since a replacement motherboard is 2/3 of the cost of a new Chromebook it's just not worth replacing it. Andrew

One of my schools has retired its old server. To get printing to work afterwards I had to install the printer driver on each of the teacher Windows laptops. The printer is a multifunction device so I also went into the settings and enabled AirPrint for Apple devices and Cloud Print for the Chromebooks. DNS and DHCP are provided by the router. SWGfL/RM provide SafetyNet filtering. Andy

One of my schools has 55 Lenovo Chromebook 100e 2nd Gen MTK. Of these 10 have currently died and will not charge. I'm not impressed and will recommend that they buy Dell Chromebooks to replace them. Has anyone else had problems with this model? Andrew

I used Fing to determine the IP addresses and then used SSH to reset them. Unfortunately the school can't afford to replace them, but we're hoping to get some money from the Connect the Classroom initiative. Andy

It's hosted online. There is no local MIS. Andrew

An update. The school reported 3 more failed devices in the last fortnight. Two won't charge and the third has the ChromeOS missing failure. Another failed earlier when the wi-fi stopped working. Andrew

One of my schools has 4 x Ubiquiti Unifi AP AC (the square ones). There are being managed using Unifi Controller 5.6.42. The server was recently upgraded from Microsoft Server 2012 R2 and I foolishly omitted to take a backup of the Ubiquiti data. The upshot is that I need to reset the devices so that I can re-adopt them. The devices were installed before I took over the school, and I have not come across the square ones before. My question is, how do I get them off their mountings so that I can reset them? Andy

As I said the Server is currently providing DHCP and DNS as well as print services. The staff log on to all their machines (which are running Windows 10 Professional) with their Office A3 or A1 accounts so there are no GPOs or logon scripts. The staff use MSOffice/OneDrive and there isn't really any choice as documents that come from the council and academy come in Microsoft format. The academy made the school go down the Google Classroom route during the lockdown and, with Chromebooks is the classroom, that made sense. I have manually installed the printer driver on recently arrived machines, along with other specific software that is required. As I said it's a small school so it's just as easy to go to each machine rather than using remote access software.

Thanks for that. I have a Synology DS 218+ on my home network and am impressed with its functionality. The school doesn't currently use PaperCut, but with just one MFD it shouldn't be too expensive. Andy

I have recently taken over a small primary school which has a server running Microsoft Server 2012 R2 and which is only used for DHCP, DNS and print services. The school previously changed to using Microsoft Office 365 A3 licences for all the teachers and office staff and A1 licences for all other staff. All data is stored on One Drive. The children all use Chromebooks. So there is no requirement for AD. Since Microsoft are withdrawing support for Server 2012 R2 in October 2023 I am considering how to replace the server. We no longer require a large server with loads of storage as everything is stored in the cloud. Would something like an HP Microserver with the latest version of Microsoft Server do the job? Or should I consider using a Linux server to provide DHCP, DNS and print services? Has anyone else gone down this route? Andy

In one of my schools we have 5 dead 100e 2nd Gen MTK Chromebooks. The symptom is that they initially show the ChromeOS is missing or damaged error screen and then just die. They won't take a charge and won't start up. In one of my other schools one device in a class set of 30 has just done the same aftter about 3 months of use. We have some old Dell 11 Chromebooks that are time expired so have GalliumOS installed on them and are still going fine after about 5 years. I'm not too impressed with Lenovo at the moment.

That worked! Thanks very much. RWEverying portable is definitely going on my USB stick! Andy

Yes, they did. See 100e laptop (2nd Gen) | 11" Windows device for students | Lenovo UK I just took over the school 6 months ago and they are in a right state. They are buying Office 365 for Education A3 for the teachers and admin staff, and use A1 free for everyone else. So staff login with their email address. And each device is registered with its own licence key. There is an old server running Windows Server 2012, but it's only used as a print and file server. When I first checked it there we over 2 years of updates to be installed. But they don't store their data there, they store it on Google Drive! That's because they are part of an Academy which said that they must use Google Classroom during the lockdown instead of Microsoft Teams, which would have been more logical. Oh, and they had an influx of Chromebooks from the Academy and DFE but the old wifi system can't cope.

Whenever parents complain about accessing Google Classroom on a phone or tablet we offer to loan them a Chromebook - but very few of them take it up. One family did, and we later found that they had sold it on for drugs. Andy

But the silver sticker on the base says Microsoft Windows for Education. Bring back proper licence key stickers! Andy

One of my schools has been issued with 4 Lenovo 100e 2nd Gen Windows laptops. They are pretty hopeless, with a 1.1GHz Celeron N4120, 4Gb RAM and a 57.6Gb drive. Anyway I wiped one and installed Windows 10 Education 21H2. Despite having a Microsoft Windows for Education sticker underneath Windows is not activated and it's complaining that it can't connect to an activation server. The school does not have a Microsoft Licensing agreement so I do not have access to a MAK key. How can I get Windows to activate, or should I just throw it in the bin? Andy

I've resolved the problem at last. I employed the last resort - RTFM - and downloaded the B140i manual. I now have successfully installed Server 2019 on a RAID 1 array with the two SSDs and a further 2 data drives in another RAID 1 array.

I did download the latest driver with 2019 support, but during install it still couldn't find the driver.

This is getting annoying. I disabled the B140i RAID, rebooted into AHCI SATA and successfully installed Server 2019 on the first SSD. But I can't now install the B140i RAID driver because it is not enabled! And if I re-enable B140i RAID then the system won't boot properly but goes straight into system recovery mode! Andrew

No, that doesn't work. If I browse to the folder it just returns "No signed device drivers were found." There doesn't seem to be any way to force it to install a driver. Andrew

One of my schools has recently purchased a refurbished HP Proliant ML30 Gen 9 server on which I have so far totally failed to install Microsoft Server 2019. The server has 4 drive bays and I have populated the first 2 drives bays with Crucial 250Gb SSDs and set them up with the Dynamic Smart Array B140i RAID utility as RAID 1. I have two 3Gb Seagate Ironwolf drives for the other two slots but haven't installed them yet. I downloaded the latest version of Server 2019 and used Rufus to install it to a USB drive, in GPT, UEFI (non CSM) and NTFS mode. Following the Rufus instructions I went into the server BIOS and disabled secure boot. Using the USB stick the server boots into the Windows Server 2019 install screens until I get to the "Where do you want to install Windows?" screen and the RAID drive is not listed as drive 1. If I then cancel the installation and select Repair your computer and access DiskPart through the command prompt the RAID disk is not listed, only drive 0 (the USB drive). So I rebooted the server using a live Ubuntu USB stick. Using Gparted I could access the RAID drive which was unallocated. So I created a GPT partition on the drive and formatted it in NTFS. I could then see the drive in Ubuntu. I then rebooted the server using the Microsoft Server 2019 USB drive and when I got to the "Where do you want to install Windows?" screen I still couldn't see the RAID drive and neither could DiskPart. How do I get Server 2019 installed on this machine? Should I just disable the Dynamic Smart Array B140i RAID and use Server 2019 software RAID instead? Andrew

One of my schools uses Microsoft Office 365 but is part of an academy which has decided that all its schools should be using Google. I am therefore migrating all the accounts from Office 365 to Google using Google Admin's migration tool. All of the user's mail has transferred across, apart from one account which continually gives Internal Server Error 11028. For this error, Google's explanation is: Internal server error because the source server is busy. This error is temporary.If the issue persists, it might be the data migration service is operating at a rate that exceeds the limits of the source system. To resolve this, adjust the migration speed. Make sure the source server can handle the number of connections you select. I have tried changing the migration speed form the default 100 to 10 and to 1000 with no effect. I still get the same error for this one account. Does anyone have any idea how to get the account to migrate? Andrew