IT Ideas

We have some old Apples (2008/9 models) that have become troublesome to manage and were only ever being used as web browsers. So to rejuvenate them and make them into productive systems, we decided to give Cloudready  from Neverware as go. This is essential a build of ChromeOS that you can install on a wide range of hardware and for a $15 licence fee you can enroll and manage as any other ChromeOS device. Installation is simple. Just follow the guide to make a bootable USB stick. Pop into your Apple, turn it on and boot to USB and it takes care of the rest. After installation, make sure you remove the stick before booting into ChromeOS for the first time. Video of one of our devices:

Webfiltering is one of those necessary evils and has plagued me in one way other another since I started to do anything with school IT management. On one hand people expect free and easy access to the internet and on the other we are expected to be able to report on every action of every user on the network on any type of device. This blog post is not about the wrongs and rights of webfiltering, more a technical perspective on the Securly product and some of the features and deployment pitfalls. We have just moved to using Securly. Previously we were using OpenDNS Umbrella and GoGuardian Admin on ChromeOS devices. We moved due to this combination not providing the level of reporting that is required as of September 2016 (in the UK) and the combined cost of these two produces being considerably higher than Securly. Deployment Onsite its much the same as OpenDNS. We point our Gateways DNS to Securly's DNS servers rather than OpenDNS. This obviously takes a few seconds to do...