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...

I got my hands on one of the new HP 11 G5 Chromebooks today and have spent a little time with it. The model I get had the following basic spec: Processor: Intel N3060 RAM: 4Gb Screen: 11" IPS 1366x768 touchscreen Ports: 2 USB, 1 HDMI, power, headphone and micro SD (as opposed to the usual SD found on most Chromebooks) Few Pictures (first one sitting next to a 4Gb R11) A brief video comparison to the R11 4Gb The inclusion of the N3060 processor gives it the edge in terms of performance over the R11 and it's thinner than most Chromebooks. However, for touch to be really useful, I think you need the flip functionality which I believe is coming in a variant of the G5.  I could see this being a solid staff or 1:1 device.

I've spent a few days trying out various apps on the Acer R11 (you can also do this on the Pixel 2015 and the Asus Flip). While it's a bit buggy at the moment, it does show great promise and most apps work without issue. Those that don't work are generally games. My favorite apps from a productivity point of view are: GMail - very fluid Google Drive - faster than web version Google Docs/Sheets/Slide - all work well Microsoft RDP - works well WiFi Analyser Google Keep - great for written notes INKredible - for making and organising written notes Spotify YouTube Google Photos iPlayer BBC News Netflix IP Tools iPlayer Radio Play Newsstand - can fail to load sometimes BBC Weather Snapseed Skype & Hangouts JuiceSSH Spiceworks All of the above work largely without issue. Once you get into games - some are OK, some just crash on loading e.g. Angry Birds, QuizUP etc Video demo of some of the apps I've tried and use: I'm sure stability wil...

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 ...