dmj

Qnap business range looks good https://www.qnap.com/solution/qnap-zfs/en-us/

ZFS is usually used to host VM's! it will probably work. Definitely do this for testing and use a raw disk. ZFS is quite memory intensive compared to other filesystems, so be sure to scale the storage and memory requirements together. Normally I'd recommend using BSD based ZFS but I suspect hyper-v support for BSD is limited and I'd go for a linux based truenas in this case.

Anything that uses ZFS. Do try TrueNAS before buying something, it will run on fairly old hardware you can always pay them for the HA if you're flush. Unfortunately i think Synology is Btrfs

It's probably not the wire speed being the limiting factor. You can always test this by setting up a trueNAS on some old hardware and measure how much improvement you see.

You obviously need photoshop pro. It's the industry standard donchyaknow

There's an automated alert on leaked passwords: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9104586?hl=en#zippy=

Cool glad you got a workable solution. The irony is that the likes of Jupyter notebooks are just so straightforward to deploy and use. These computing teachers really need to learn a bit about IT like it's not the early 2000's!

Disable the account and remove any keys/tokens. Then delete after 12months was our policy.

Doesn't Ofsted give an instant "inadequate" to the whole organisation if they don't have safeguarding information protected from third parties, ie people not covered by a contract? Seems the word 'policy' is quite flexible here. Give them the export and send them on their way: https://support.google.com/a/answer/100458?hl=en

It looks like (in VSCode at least) that the IDE invokes the python binary so specifically blocking python from network access should work. You'll need to check if the exam board spec requires anything like access to databases or websites. Yes this would work if the drives are already mounted.

Restricting python from accessing the network seems to be the best way forward (as the school have already discounted solutions that will actually work). How would it work with access to students network shares though? It's not going to be very long until a student works out the INode limit on the server hosting their files and suddenly the whole shared drive is out of action for everyone as some kid written a one liner that writes 5bn empty files and crashes the filesystem. Perhaps you could get a demo together for SLT. An example of LogoFail would be a good one!

Online ide's absolutely can and do write files to a filesystem. I was using one today and part of the project was to read and write a pandas data frame out as a compressed CSV. Which I did in a jupyter notebook. Jupyter isn't an ide in the technical sense but it is a platform for doing exactly what you are asking afaict.

Crazy situation. Does your contract have a clause about network security? If it does it's effectively constructive dismissal IMO. Could you get a union rep or someone from the LA or trust involved to perhaps educate them about what they are asking you to do.

No, you'd still need the source code to recompile it for a mac kernel. You could feasibly run it in a linux container though (which is technically inside a VM)

I'm still not quite sure what the requirement is to help with a solution. I'm writing an ai app for a multinational, in python via a web app (jupyter) why isn't this 'proper' python?

I've never seen a version of python that can't write data to a file. All web implementations fulfill this requirement.

That's an incredibly hard ask. Will they accept network isolation or are they genuinely suggesting that any pupil can run any random code they choose to on the same network?

Could you expand on this a bit? ie what's the barrier to using a VM to host a platform? setup/maintenance costs? I'd argue that those are at worst equal to and at best cheaper than running a system on multiple machines.

There was a blog post from Papercut like three years ago about running in Docker: https://www.papercut.com/blog/print_basics/the-power-of-docker-and-containerization/ That's probably the way forward if you are self-hosting in the cloud

Been there. Same experience. The wine solution looks good though.

I guess there's too many free ones for them to be competitive. We're using Jupyter, along with some big name companies (Google,Microsoft,Oracle,IBM). It's free, opensource and you can host a multiuser environment yourself. It's not really 'focused' on education rather professional developers, but I'm pretty sure a teacher could make some nice interactive notebooks for it (there's probably a lot available, I've not looked). https://jupyter.org/ If you're hosting yourself there's plugins for auth to Google,Azure etc and there's howto's about hosting here: https://jupyter.org/hub There's also Anaconda, but I've not much experience with that https://www.anaconda.com/open-source

A raspberry pi would be overkill for this application IMO, something like an ESP32 would be far better suited - and far cheaper. You should be able to get the whole project wrapped up for £30. It would be a good project to get some kids onto. https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-email-alert-temperature-threshold/#:~:text=The%20ESP32%20also%20hosts%20a,be%20programmed%20using%20Arduino%20IDE.

The clients don't need to return a mac address, it just needs to be unique. (see https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2131) Which means some clients are configured not to return mac addresses as the unique ID. Are users connecting in via a VPN? I suspect this would cause a different unique ID to be present as the VPN would just forward DHCP requests and not pass on the mac address.

All printers are HP, according to microsoft https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/05/hp_smartapp_microsoft_issue/

Really doesn't sound like it from these posts. You've got to be careful posting that you intend to 'push' for one or the other based on a recommendation, on an open public forum, especially as we know one of the suppliers is particularly litigious. The process has to be fair and open. Asking for recommendation sounds very much like you are going to skew the tender process by writing the tender in a specific way to exclude one of the competitors. I'd be inclined to delete the whole thread and ask some questions about what should go into a tender process.