IT Ideas

Google Cast for Education was finally release today in open beta. This app allows you to turn any devices that runs Chome into a Chromecast receiver. In addition there is a layer or permissions which means you 'share' the display with other people (students) and can invite them to share their screen. Seems to work really well and is totally independant of the network - so as long as all devices can see the internet you are good to go. Did a little demo here:

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...

With the gradual move to the cloud, local servers are perhaps less needed than they were. However, there are a range of services that still need a server - gateways, firewall, domain controller, rdp servers, SIMS, print servers and so on. While I've tried to scale back on the need for these - new things that people want to run seem to keep popping up. So how do you meet the need for reasonably fast local servers on a small education budget? Well rather than going direct to retailers of the latest server kit, consider picking up a few parts secondhand and putting them together yourself. You can build a pretty respectable rig for not that much money if you know the parts to go for. So I've set out a few examples of parts I've used below to either build new servers from scratch or zoop up other ones. New build Our main staff rdp server, print server and it support helpdesk (running Spiceworks) live on this machine. Brief demo of the rdp side of things running in Chrome ...