Chromixium - a possible way of reprovisioning old hardware.

I've been playing around with Chromixium over the past few days. This is Ubuntu 14.04 modded to look and feel a lot like ChromeOS. It is possible to install actual ChromeOS on your own hardware - but its a tricky business and I've had limited success. Chromixium, being built on Ubuntu has excellent hardware support right out of the box and is relatively easy to install - taking only 10 minutes or so to be up and running. It might be an effective way of reprovisioning some old laptops...

While it looks a lot like ChromeOS - its still Ubuntu at its core. So some of the advantages of ChromeOS are not there - but on the other hand you can install local linux apps. You can easily install it as a virtual machine using VirtualBox or create a live USB boot stick if you want to give it a whirl. Brief look at it below:

And just for fun, I've booted a 9 year old Windows laptop with the USB live stick. Works really well and runs fast.

Just a shame about the battery life....

One update - if you install Chrome and set it as the default browser, then Chrome Apps such as Screencastify them work. See guide here.

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Delete a specific email using GAM

If a user send an inappropriate email to a loads of people or get stung by some sort of email exploit you can quickly delete the email from all of the recipients using a GAM command. Step 1 - get the email header Go into Google Vault and search for the offending user or someone known to have got the message. Click show details and grab the email ID. This will be a long string of characters followed by @mail.gmail.com Step 2 - find out who has the email Go into Google Vault and find the original message sent by the offending user. Look at the details to see who got it. Copy the list and dump it into a spreadsheet. Clean up to just a list of emails with a column header 'mail'. Save as a csv file. Step 3 - delete messages with GAM Put your CSV file in your GAM folder - this e.g. assumes its called mail.csv Run: gam csv mail.csv gam user ~mail delete messages query rfc822msgid: MESSAGEIDHERE doit The alternative nuke option is: gam all users delete messages query rf...

Adding subdomains to G Suite

This is how I add subdomains (so basically new schools) to out G suite setup. I've got these steps documented on a scruffy set of notes that I've now got in Keep - so time to document them - for myself as much as anyone else! Steps in order (roughly) Add the new domain Verify the new domain Add MX records to hosting Add SPF record for Google to hosting Turn on email authentication Add DMARC record to hosting Setup custom Directory and restrict students OU to this. Create an admin quarantine for the domain. Configure SPAM setting for the domain. Turn on and off services as appropriate. Map a blank Google Site to the naked domain - if required. Setup some basic groups - allstaff, allusers (for directory) and students with appropriate permissions. Deploy custom wallpapers. So the steps in a bit of detail: Add the new domain & Verify ownership Click on Domains in the admin console: Add/remove domains followed by "add a domain" At this...

My favorite GAM commands - well a few of them at least!

Where would be without GAM? Paying for expensive syncing tools or doing tedious manual tasks in the admin console. GAM can automate most things you might want to do in G Suite. So these are a few of my favourite commands - one I use either as part of a batch file - or just standalone. There are loads more - but these are ones that are used daily. Classroom Create a spreadsheet of all your domains classes - gam print courses todrive Create a spreadsheet of a teacher's classes: gam print courses teacher fred@mydomain.com todrive Bulk create classes: gam csv classes.csv gam create course alias ~alias name ~alias section ~subject teacher ~teacher status ACTIVE where classes.csv is a list of classes you want to make. Add teachers: gam csv teachers.csv gam course ~alias add teacher ~teacher Add students: gam csv students.csv gam course ~alias add teacher ~student Sync Students (in this example to a group - but could be an ou/csv file) gam csv grou...

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