What are /r/k12sysadmin's favorite Products & Services?

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https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-print/

Not sure about your network setup but this is probably your best solution. There is a way to deploy certain printers to certain users too.

Papercut makes a thing called Mobility Print which is free (even if you don’t use Papercut). It does exactly what you want.

There’s a bit of setup, depending on network complexity, but basically: you throw their server on your network, connect to the printers and an auth provider, and have the users go to the link it generates on their devices to get AirPrint sorted. Then they can just use the Print button anywhere in iOS, and they can print (authenticated and everything). If you’re feeling clever you can just deploy the settings using your MDM so you don’t even have to train the users at all.

Docs: https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/mobility-print/

You could use something like this Android App to view the signal strength coming from each AP (listed by MAC address). You can play hotter/colder with a specific MAC address and the Signal meter (change the scan interval in settings to the shortest interval).

We have teachers on 10.11 lol. They can't even give it for a day. Now that DST Root Certificate expired, they won't be able to browse some web pages. They are about to cry.

Papercut has a free utility called Mobility Print. We're using it for all of our machines in the district (Chrome and Windows), and it's been great!

https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-print/

https://www.amazon.ca/Kingston-Digital-120GB-SA400S37-120G/dp/B01N6JQS8C/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=kingston+ssd+120&qid=1622834733&sr=8-1

Kingston's even at Retail are cheap. Bulk 100+ orders drives it further down from suppliers

Barcode Scanner is still free and works great for QR codes. It's based on the open source zxing.

With the demise of flash, I'd be surprised if the client browsers will allow them to run.

There is a project to preserve flash function though.

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Currently the project is a web game archive, but it appears you could side load some content as well.

It is an archival project so there will be some NSFW content accessable at first, configuration and testing recommended

The project does include the needed files to work as a CMS via apache2

If you are an account admin, you can log into the dashboard and it will give you metrics of the meeting and will show you reasons why a user disconnected from a past meeting. Clicking on a particular client will show you bitrate, jitter, packetloss, cpu usage, etc.

https://zoom.us/account/metrics/pastmeetings

I use Freshdesk’s free Sprout plan. It’s hosted by them, has enough customization and features for my current needs and they offer paid tiers if my needs change in the future. I had to contact support once (15 minute outage) and they took care of me without issue - even though I am on the free plan. I can’t recommend Freshdesk enough.

https://freshdesk.com/pricing

I think numbers always speak volumes. Number of devices put in the hands of students. Number of times [software/system] has been used. Number of times your team provided support to keep students learning. Dollars used to help kids learn, famiies connect, etc.

Video is a great medium. Infographics are great too. If you don't have a free Pro/Educator account to Canva.com it's easy to get and supports print, social media, video (new!), and much more.

Tell your department's story. I don't think this is wasted effort. K12 IT departments have been hugely pivotal in the successes that have come from one of the most trying periods in education history. Take some credit! Celebrate your people. Pull back the curtains!

Culture eats everything else for lunch and I think this kind of thing can help.

I had been looking at https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/ and https://fxhome.com/express as possible replacements but I will add Shortcut to my list as well now. Other that knowing they have free copies I haven't done much research into them.

Just to be clear, these apps are going away from anything that's not a Chromebook.

Remote Desktop is now in beta:

https://remotedesktop.google.com/

Wonder if there'll be one for Chromebook recovery. I don't use the recovery USBs much, just reimage from the recovery screen. But suppose it wouldn't be too hard to pull a Chromebook when I need to make one.

https://meet.google.com/tools/quality/admin

you see the performance of the machines on here in your meets. That will help see how wide spread your issue is. We are seeing 85-90% CPU loads on our Acer amd machines.

I feel your pain. The rostering for all our online tools and testing rosters pretty much defaulted to me as part of the "user account creation process". In the process, however, our IT team often ends up also doing a lot of Registrar work because we're the ones that get the notification when sync errors occur, and so we're the ones that end up cleaning up the bad data in the SIS in order to allow the syncs to complete correctly.

Over the years I've gotten quite savvy with Google Sheets as a result of creating the intricate web of sheets that we use to sync everything up. Our SIS recently added some more integrations with some of the tools we use, but I found that my Sheets did a better job of generating the roster sync files than the output we got from the SIS integration.

Some tools that I've added over the years to help with the process:

• Sheetgo - to automate and schedule the process of importing and exporting CSV files from Google Sheets
• Microsoft Flow - to automate transfer of files via SFTP into Google Drive, though this year I've shifted to using...
• RClone- to copy and move files from Google Drive to the various SFTP accounts used by the various online sites for injesting our rosters. I created batch files to run the command line instructions, then created scheduled tasks to run those batch files on a regular basis.

In my experience it is about Future proofing and latency, yes 10Gbps to 35 AP's for 500 students seems nuts, but the latency is what makes the network perform.

Additionally, POE++ and the new draft for 100Watt required Cat6a, or Cat6 with AWG of 22 or larger.

Now, make sure that everything is terminated Cat6a, I had the contractor install Cat6 for a building but used Cat5e terminations, now they are almost done reterminating the entire job.

Also, there are companies selling Cat6a thin patch cords, they work fine in the server room, but they are horrible for POE+. *facepalm

Example from Amazon

I use this:

https://www.amazon.com/Fluke-Networks-MS2-100-MicroScanner2-Troubleshoots/dp/B000QJ3G42/ref=asc_df_B000QJ3G42/?

Fluke has some other tools that can tell you almost exactly where the breaks are in the cable and can verify/certify cables but those are much more expensive.

Apparently you are me. I ordered about 160 of these. Fulfilled thru Amazon. Check them out. About $70 each and folds to the size of a paperback.

https://www.amazon.com/OKIOCAM-Documents-Recording-Time-Lapse-Definition/dp/B0827LLG8P

Get something that had better zero day coverage and is a complete endpoint protection solution, that way your don't have to supplement. We use bitdefender. https://www.av-comparatives.org/tests/summary-report-2018/#award-winners

We have students usually provide their own except for testing or labs. Had a bad time at the middle school when kids convinced each other that if you cut the cable, they magically became wireless.

Always buy extra. Believe we have been using these SmithOutlet 100 Pack Low Cost Classroom/Library Headphones https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MSYP86Z/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_FCRMPBF4FRY2CRM4Q698

You have to enable it for that to work.

Heres the settings page for it for Gmail, has specific instructions for Outlook.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/fwdandpop

Not sure why you would though, the gmail version is significantly better than outlook. I was so relieved when our district dropped Outlook, way less people asking how to do simple stuff.

Well if they were actually reconnecting wouldn't the log have " <Student Name> got disconnected from the meeting. Reason: Network connection error"

Also in the zoom admin panel you can goto the meeting click on the students name and check if they were sending / receiving video / audio packets

zoom.us/account/metrics/livemeetings

But I don't THINK there is an even recorded in the logs for name change.

Not really...previously you could use SSL decryption and block the login pages. However, some update that Zoom rolled out essentially broke it when using SSL decryption. At that point we had to turn off the SSl decryption for Zoom.us, otherwise the students couldn't get to their meetings/classes. I think the best option for now is to only allow it during school hours and block it completely after hours.

My usual checklist, as it's usually not the hardware at fault in my experience.

Have you replicated their concerns on that hardware?

Checked for any common extensions that could be causing the issue? Does the issue occur with no extensions installed?

What does the Meet Quality Tool say about their performance? CPU bound? Network bound?

Is the chromeOS version out of date? Sometimes new chromebooks ship with old OS versions and fail to update.

That's not even to mention Scratch, which is chock-full of (albeit terrible) games and music, while still being vital to the curriculum of many STEM or PLTW classes.

From my perspective as a student, it seems that the filtering solutions in place at my district (GoGuardian on Chromebooks and a Fortigate for the entire network) do a better job at blocking educational content (such as Thingiverse or The British Library) than inappropriate content and games.

Truthfully, I have easier access to those pointless **.io games than the poems assigned for my English class.

I've been working on this exact same thing and have also landed on using GAMADV-XTD3 but have only been in some preliminary testing since I do not want to delete everyone's users!

I've always been annoyed that Google Admin does not provide any access to end-users contact list to remove contacts. Since the API exists, it doesn't seem like it should be too hard for Google to implement in their admin UI! Maybe we need to launch a feature request.

Another use case is that if the whole school gets a phishing email impersonating another staff member and folks engage, that address sticks in their contacts.google.com which increases the chances they will accidently send emails to that address in the future! So part of mitigating a phishing attack needs to include using GAMADV-XTD3 to purge the known address from all contacts!

Agreed with @BattleRabbit here.

Also, the setting to have people added to "other contacts" can be modified in Gmail settings - but it's per user and can't be set by admin globally.

I tend to just send people to

https://contacts.google.com/

And let them know they can delete anyone they want there in "Contacts" or "Other Contacts" - the only downside would be losing the auto-fill for that person (and contact info, obviously).

I'd prefer to disable the auto-adding if it were up to me, but I don't know that it's possible.

We've battled the same thing - old account, duplicates, etc.

The whole "contacts" feature/service truly looks like it hasn't been improved/revisited for a decade..

No idea about when its coming back but thank you for the link-- this looks like a nice resume add.

I'd recommend you try out visualping-- they'll email you if the page changes.

We're starting to roll out GLPI. It depends really on the staff, resources, etc. If you use a mainstream product like GLPI or osTicket, you'll be fine, as they are tested pretty thoroughly. Just use something like GIT or docker to manage versions. This will make it easy to roll back updates. Keep your DB backed up as well. You do all the basics you should be doing and there really won't be issues.

We don't, but if you want to try a free one to test out we use Freshdesk which has been running great. I think the free version allows you to have 3 agents, but you could use that to setup, say, Administrator and 2 Students, and go from there. You could also setup a quick Spiceworks session or OSTicket, all free.

If you open up a terminal on macOS or Linux, you can call curl then pass it a web address as an argument. In this case it returns a dataset with some info on that IP address:

$ curl ipinfo.io/97.88.58.98 { "ip": "97.88.58.98", "hostname": "97-88-58-98.dhcp.roch.mn.charter.com", "city": "Waite Park", "region": "Minnesota", "country": "US", "loc": "45.5572,-94.2242", "org": "AS20115 Charter Communications", "postal": "56387", "timezone": "America/Chicago", "readme": "https://ipinfo.io/missingauth" }

Oof, you've your work cut out for you. You're a teacher I'm guessing? The good news is it seems like you're pretty much starting blank slate, that makes things somewhat easier.

Get PDQ Deploy and Inventory, it will make your life a lot easier for maintaining software packages.

If you want to go the in-house OS deployment route, check out FOG Project.

Add all workstations/laptops/users to the domain. This can be automated.

15 hours a week is not enough, unless they're happy with broken stuff for days/weeks on end. You'll need some help. Hop on the k12sysadmins slack and we can probably swing some advice as you need it.

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-supporting-android-apps

From there, it's listing the C100 as stable for the store.

Thanks for your input on this. I'm working with some vendors now to pull up our best options. Much appreciated for bringing me back to reality.

+1 for Nircmd. For example, I have a GPO for my MAP testing accounts set with a logon bat script to run the following:

robocopy "\Network Share with read access for map account\NirCMD" "C:/temp/" nircmd.exe

cd C:/Temp

nircmd.exe mutesysvolume 0

nircmd.exe setsysvolume 48000

Looking at it again.. looks like I was too lazy to avoid the UNC path errors with command prompt, so I copy the exe locally first, but you could probably just run from the share. First call unmutes. Second call is the volume level; '65535' would be max volume, 48000 is what we use during testing. No experience with TestNav.

Nircmd

Try https://www.photopea.com. For my needs at work, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to Photoshop. My most used keyboard shortcuts are there and the GUI is heavily influenced by Photoshop. It supports PSD and most other common file types.

In my work flow, only layer transform is slightly different with a check box on the toolbar instead of the traditional Photoshop keyboard shortcut or menu item. Since it’s a web app, the file > save triggers a download. I can easily get past that for the access and ease that it provides.

Your public IP that is sending email was probably blacklisted, the mxtoolbox.com site is good one to monitor your domain on. You will also want to confirm that the reverse DNS for your mail server is set properly with the ISP as that can cause deliverability issues with email. You will also want to confirm the SPF record for your email domain includes the public IP address of your mailserver.

An example is v=spf:ip4xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -all

If you made changes to your SPF make sure you set the TTL low and wait for those changes to propagate across the internet.

There are a couple things you can do to limit CRD, though not completely.

First, you can try blocking remotedesktop.google.com/access while whitelisting remotedesktop.google.com/support. This will allow for remote support sessions (with a live person on both ends) while preventing remote connections to an unmanned computer.

This user policy can be configured per OU. Yes, students can still initiate remote connections to each other's devices, but I don't see that causing much trouble. The main thing for us is preventing students from remotely connecting to unmanaged computers at home.

The other thing you can try is in the Admin console under User & Browser Settings, look for the "Remote access clients" setting. Entering your school domain here will limit these remote access support sessions to only accounts from that particular domain (you can add multiple domains, one per line). This works well for us because we have a separate domain name for staff vs students, so I put our staff domain here, which allows me and the other IT team to remotely support students, but it prevents them from opening remote support sessions with each other.

Fresh Service (https://freshservice.com). It's made by the same guys that made fresh Desk, but offers a lot more and their EDU pricing is great.

We're on Web Help Desk and I miss using Fresh Desk/Fresh Service

If you're not a certified teacher, are you allowed to be with the kid unsupervised? Some states get real finicky about that sort of thing. Just protect yourself is all.

As to the topic at hand, Valve offers Steam for education, which gives you Portal and Portal 2 for free, along with a lot of prebuilt lesson plans tied to common core that might help. Khan Academy might also be a good resource, as well as Dream Spark (if you have an Open Value license with Microsoft). I know the kid has an IEP, but exposure to a broad spectrum like that may reveal an area with which he does well. As to coding, there's also Scratch, which is web based.

They also released Mobility Print as a free, standalone product.

We have PaperCut MF and the upfront costs were around $3K for licensing, setup, training and key fob readers for our 2 copiers, but our yearly support & maintenance is under $400.

A few vendors I've talked with have used https://calendly.com/. It seems to work well for setting up follow up calls. It gives the person requesting a meeting a webpage with the times the calendly user is available. You pick a time and it's added to their Outlook/Google/O365. And no private calendar details are shared with the public facing website.

Anyway, I've only used it from the requester side, but it might be able to pull off what you're looking for. And they've got a free tier you could play with.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071LQSXGD/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glc_fabc_5T7FN5TM78WA9GKG0AJV this replaced canned air for us years ago so much more power too. Probably have saved thousands on canned air at this point.

I’ve gone through two of these in one school year repairing Chromebooks in a small district. Not very robust. OK for smaller less frequent repairs. Got this Dewalt gyroscopic and although it’s much more bulky, it’s faster, stronger and you can set the torque.

https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DCF680N2-Gyroscopic-Screwdriver-Battery/dp/B00DL7QDS2

Yes, you can use a POE wifi extender for runs under 100 meters, and you can use a booster for longer runs.

Amazon.com: PoE Cat6 Extender Gigabit Ethernet Waterproof Outdoor PoE Extender, Single Port Signal Extender Compatible 802.3af/at: Electronics

I used one of these for running a wifi AP 125 meters from my switch.

I haven't tested this yet, but I would guess that a parent who is saying the battery is drained while plugged into power is not using the adapter that came with the iPad.

Suggest setting the screen brightness to the lowest practical setting (it took months for my daughter to realize that the brightness didn't need to be at 100% all of the time and she would get way more "game time" —this was a personal iPad, not a school iPad—between charges if she lowered the brightness).

We gave each classroom teacher two extra chargers for students that needed to top off.
Similar options would be something like a charging stand, or multiple-port charger for classrooms.

Obviously you have to preach to students that they need to come to school with the iPad fully charged, that's just classroom management stuff.

For mandated state testing, we always have extra iPads ready to go for these types of "issues".

We have not needed to deploy charging stations, and I think we would push back on the classroom management angle before we went that route.

Grades K through 2 are not taken home, so those classrooms have charging carts.

We use cheapo Moread Hdmi to vga adapters from Amazon. They are like $8 and work really well. You can get multi-packs too.

What is the VGA/DVI needed for? I've tested a few USB-C models and seen some differing behavior between Chrome devices and the same unit so my advice would be to pickup a few different sub-$100 models off Amazon and test them with the exact Chrome device staff will use. In terms of personal recommendations, this CableMatters works great on all devices I've tried. I used it until I got a Lenovo monitor that had the dock built in (maybe something else you should consider also):

https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Multiport-Adapter-Ethernet/dp/B01M0K0DL2/ref=psdc_3015395011_t1_B01C316EIK

If you have G Suite, you can use Hangouts Chat. It's the G Suite version of Hangouts for consumers (consumer Hangouts is going away soon). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.dynamite

Could this maybe have something to do with students installing a VPN such as Betternet to bypass a web filter? I do not work with Casper, but I know our MDM didn't like it very much when we blocked Snapchat from the network and all the students installed a vpn to get around that.

I've used ImgBurn and CDBurnerXP in the past and both are pretty good. I think CDBurnerXP is slightly more intuitive, but both are fine.

Just a tip: when I'm looking for some kind of quality freeware for common tasks I'll swing by ninite.com to see what programs they support. I figure any of those must be pretty widely used and trustworthy, and haven't been proven wrong yet.

You may want to check out this thread, where it talks about needing to wipe them or have never logged into them....and the problems everyone has had with getting it to work.

http://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/08/get-rid-of-uac-prompts-with-microsofts-application-compatibility-toolkit/

This is what I have used. Once I do the above, then I use Sysinternals Procmon while using the app and I look for access denied errors which usually can be easily fixed.

I've set up Voidtools' Everything for users with lots of local files. It works exceptionally fast, and you can create regex filters to trim out temporary and system files from the results.

Even with the online feature turned off, the built-in search sometimes persistently wouldn't find basic results such as cmd or the Settings app, which is just silly.

I work for a school of about the same size. I use two Linux machines running separate instances of Pi-hole, with the Unified hosts + fakenews + gambling + porn + social hosts blocklists. Just set up the machines, set static IPs on them, configure your gateway/dhcp server/domain controller to distribute the two machines' IPs as primary and secondary DNS and bam, network wide blocking. If your school requires any custom DNS, you can add them in pi-hole (or as dnsmasq configs, as pi-hole uses dnsmasq as its back-end). Pi-hole is free and open source.

Krunker.io is so much better than that Egg game some of these kids are on. To answer your question though, I don't filter it. That's kind of a non-answer and the ramifications of not filtering it result in a change in culture ultimately, but I feel it the only way to keep me sane, and that's more important to me then being the internet police.

This article: http://dnsredirector.com/faq/163.asp ...explains it better than I could, including links at the bottom to the Google documentation.

...also includes links to a list of all Google country code domains and how to do it.

Better documentation here I think: http://dnsredirector.com/faq/163.asp (including links to the Google Help articles)

Also, block "explicit.bing.net" (or by creating a dummy DNS zone so it resolves to 0.0.0.0)

Still don't see why anyone would want to search with yahoo - all you're guaranteed to get is more spyware/malware - we block yahoo entirely.

> * Windows 10

Kind of a given, get Pro minimum.

> * i7+

Overkill for the majority of applications. Go i5.

> * At least 16gbs of ram

You can get by with 8, 16 is better.

> * SSD

Yes. Easily has more impact on speed than more RAM.

What you didn't touch on is WiFi. Get something with 802.11AC minimum, 802.11AX preferably. Intel if you can. This way you're somewhat futureproof and Intel plays nicest with the majority of WiFi deployments out there.

I like to give out laptops with full size keyboards, not everyone uses the numpad, but those who do will be very happy. This instantly reduces the amount of models you can pick from. Also, get a screen resolution of 1920x1080 minimum. The 1366x768 a lot of them still come with is atrocious and a lot of external equipment doesn't like it.

Pick a business line like Dell Latitude, HP Pro/EliteBook, Lenovo Thinkpad T/X Series. You can get better warranties, get access to business support channels and there's driver packs available.

> I would love the laptop to have an easy way to replace the hard drives so I can keep master clones of machines and replace when I need to.

What? No offense, but cloning and swapping harddrives is needless busywork that can easily be automated. You shouldn't have to touch laptop internals ever. unless it's break/fix. Read up on MDT or FOG for a deployment solution.

I'm a high school student (senior) who got to work with the tech department as an intern over the summer. When we refreshed our PLTW labs, we set up one machine with all of the software needed (Chrome, the Autodesk suite, Office, RobotC, etc). We used FOG to create an image of that configured machine and, over the network, pushed that image to all of the new machines. However, we still have to manually tag, label, rename, and add each machine to the domain. The machines that we bought from HP came pre-installed with Windows, but we imaged them with Windows 10 Education.

Googled it for ya

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&amp;view-type=content-only

But its a big no for everything, except for private personal use.

I agree with Logvin.

try doing "nslookup" on your machine while in-network. See if that shows the same info as https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3awww.eftps.gov&amp;run=toolpage

I get the same ipv4 address and I am able to access the website.

From an old comment of mine:

"Need any help? Let me know! We are actually revamping our install right now, so a lot of the setup and config is fresh in my mind!

Here is our setup: https://imgur.com/a/uS3UUhC This is Zabbix collecting data and Grafana for the data visualization.

I think I redacted all the identifiable info. As you can see, we have a lot of copiers down for floor waxing over the Summer."

Here is a link to the Grafana plugin: https://grafana.com/plugins/alexanderzobnin-zabbix-app

If you need help, let me know! I love this stuff. We have since gone overboard with metrics. We track all of our data center equipment, our vmware infrastructure, our helpdesk ticket counts, we have a few camera feeds that we monitor, we even put environmentals for all of our closets as well. We only show one board to the public (the one linked). The rest are all internal, and play on large TV's in our area as a slideshow.

Zabbix works well. I have many devices being monitored only by ping. It has a basic green/red dashboard to quickly spot problems. For basic ping tests it's pretty easy. It can get a little overwhelming though if you want very specific fine-tuned monitoring, but it's free and it's been pretty solid for me.

https://www.zabbix.com/

/r/zabbix

Thanks for the tip about blocking https://remotedesktop.google.com/access, that seems to work great for preventing remote access to unmanaged computers.

As for the domain restriction, I found that setting under the Chrome User settings. The setting is called Remote access clients

Before setting my school domain in that setting, I tested doing a chromebook remote support session from my personal Gmail account, and it worked. After I set my domain in that setting, I tried connecting from my personal gmail account again and it failed. It works when connecting from a domain account.

This won't stop students from doing remote support sessions with each other, but I'm not too concerned about that at this point, time will tell if I get complaints.

That's exactly my problem. It's priority #1 when I'm slammed, and then it's just mildly annoying throughout the year so I forget about it.

I'm almost positive I saw a pre-packaged solution out there but it was far too expensive. I know it should be easy enough to implement so I was just curious if anyone had done it. If you give it a go please follow up.

Edit: http://ltb-project.org/wiki/documentation/self-service-password I wonder if something like that would work.

We were going to as well until seeing this: https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/business-windows-client/windows-10/

Sophos (SESC) and Microsoft (SCEP) are the bottom two for performance by a large margin. :(

Adopted Bitdefender this year, been happy with it (Anything is better than Symantec I suppose though) - although deployment is a little rough if an AV is already installed.

Not education, but as an NFP we were <$2000AU for 100 seats.

No Macs in my environment, but they do offer Mac and Linux install kits.

edit: ESET was my first preference, but pricing for the cloud model was nowhere near as generous as the on-prem licencing.

Decent wrapup here too: https://www.av-comparatives.org/tests/enhanced-real-world-test-2019-enterprise/

Smoothwall and Lightspeed will allow this, as long as you can set proxy or install software. OpenDNS can do filtering if you can set DNS. I have no idea if they are CIPA compliant though.

The new Chromebooks that came out with the AMD A4 processors seem to be unable to handle meet as a whole. You can check https://meet.google.com/tools/quality/admin to see what percentages people are hanging out and identify specific users/devices that may be having issues.

Hope this helps.

No. Calendar event hangouts are different. They do not appear to expire (maybe after event is deleted?). I haven't had an opportunity to really test that.

As for Classroom, is basically uses the same concept as the nickname. The major difference is the link that it creates for students. The URL is https://meet.google.com/lookup/RANDOM. It functions the same as the nickname URL (g.co/meet/NICKNAME).

The files are on file servers? If so you will need to use a tooll such as Sharepoint migration tool or mover.io to move all their files over to onedrive. Then you just map them the same as they are now. Each machine Onedrive runs on will get a new %onedrive% variable you can use

I believe that I saw here recently the suggestion to use rclone. I can't find the original post right now, but here is a link to the config for rclone and drive. Going to play around with this myself later this afternoon.

https://rclone.org/drive/

Very interested to hear, since we're, for the most part, an open shop. (OTRS for ticketing is quite tolerable, and we're using Zabbix for monitoring.) Been looking at elk - https://www.elastic.co/elk-stack - for a fall test, but I'm open to hearing especially from those of you monitoring Win boxes.

My previous job was part of the Lenovo Self Maintainer program and I loved it. All parts were shipped next day so the downtime was minimal.

You must be A+ certified and take their training and pass tests to become certified to repair Lenovo devices.

When I started my career in the education sector I looked into becoming a self-maintainer but the admins felt that it wasn't the best move at this time due to initial costs. Here is the information Lenovo sent me when I reached out to them.

Old school hangouts becomes available via https://hangouts.google.com and in Gmail (if you have that enabled for students). I found this out yesterday.

In user settings, though, adding the URL above to the blacklist solved that problem real quick.

To be completely honest I've given up on ever trying to get Office 365 SMTP relay working correctly, especially on copiers. SMTP2GO is a great solution for this - very easy to get up and working quickly, and you don't have to do silly things like putting your public IP in your SPF record. Free plan is 1000 emails per month, which might cover you if you're a private school. Otherwise it's only $10/mo for 10,000 emails.

Get yourself a PDF printer like CUTE PDF. That should allow you to try and print, and each slide should end up as a page. Never tried it w/power point, but I don't see why it wouldn't work... CutePDF Writer

Might I suggest giving PaperCut Mobility Print a try? It is free, super easy to setup, and the Chrome deployment "process" just involves pushing an extension to the Chromebooks. There is BYOD discovery support via DNS as well.

If you decide to try it and run into any trouble, just let me know - recently finished a deployment of Mobility Print to replace Cloud Print.

Disclosure: vendor speaking

Check out Yodeck. It is free for a single screen and works on the Raspberry Pi, so you can easily check it out. For managing more than 1 screen, it's $76.70/year/screen for non-profits. You can have as many users as you need and combine content from different users.

Snipe-it for inventory. Spiceworks for tickets. Spiceworks can be setup so that users can direct their emails to one address and it automatically creates tickets from those.

We use RT with mostly email submissions, though some people use the web portal. It's free, self-hosted and pretty straightforward to customize if you know your way around Perl and CSS. We hooked it into our inventory system and can assign assets to tickets for easier tracking of recurring issues.

The primary difference between the Waffle and the Dashboard link is that the Dashboard adds a section called "Approved Apps" which shows all the Google Marketplace add-ons and such that we allow all users to install as desired. The "Your Apps" section at the top seems to match what's in the Waffle.

Thanks for the link, but it's a separate issue. The App Launcher shows the specific Chrome Web Apps that the user has installed, and is distinct from the Waffle. The primary issue for getting the waffle URL is that students use it to get to the SSO page for some of our online curriculum stuff (eg. Savvas and McGraw Hill content). But until we figure out what that waffle URL is, we'll just direct students to the workspace.google.com/dashboard link instead which will get them to the same place.

No problem. This might be a setting and not exactly a new service, so I may have provided information not exactly related to the issue at hand. Either way I'm glad it was helpful nonetheless. Since March (COVID), Google has pushing new stuff more than ever. I signed up to get email alerts so I can be in the "know". I think I signed up from this page: https://workspace.google.com/whatsnew/product-updates/

We have the Google Dashboard set as the home page for all students. This page allows students to access almost all of our web-based curriculum programs using Google SSO.

https://workspace.google.com/dashboard

On the top of that page, there is an option on the top right to add an admin message. This would then display that message on all of the Chromebooks on that particular page. We've never actually done it, but it's there.

I don't know of a way to send a message that overrides the user's screen, so they'd have to be on that page to see it.

Not to pass the buck or anything but don't you have a building and grounds department? This should fall squarely into their lap. They probably already handle the leases on the equipment. Like one of the people replied you probably should look at fleet management system or something basic like:

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https://www.amazon.com/LandAirSea-Waterproof-Magnetic-Personal-Location/dp/B06XVZ6Y4T/ref=asc\_df\_B06XVZ6Y4T?tag=bingshoppinga-20&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=80539281984679&amp;hvnetw=o&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvbmt=be&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvlocint=&amp;hvloc...

This tool is definitely more on the expensive side but it has helped me more times than I can count. The amount of time saved pays itself. It’s a LinkSprinter. You attach this bad boy to any ethernet run, it’ll tell you where it’s located by switch and port, give you the IP of the switch, how long it is, how much power it draws.

NetAlly LSPRNTR-300 LinkSprinter 300 Network Tester with WiFi and Distance to Cable Fault Indication https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UD6G2OY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_1SGDE4K7PW4DZE3X1CS2

Here is your ghetto hot-fix if they are delayed (15 or 25 foot)- https://www.amazon.com/Amamax%C2%AE-Extra-Power-Warranty-Listed/dp/B00K7COZRA

Then get a big box of magnetic hooks to suspend them from the metal of a drop ceiling. https://www.amazon.com/Magnetic-Strong-Neodymium-Kitchen-Workplace/dp/B077PZLX6M

I don't actually endorse either of those products since I've never used them- just an idea.

The vertical cable management that other people posted is probably too small for your setup- they are only 2"x2" or so. This one is more expensive, but not insane. It has more space and the covers can snap to the left side, right side, or both so it covers up all the clutter that is routed through it. It would require you to move the power strip for the bottom half management.

If you can't move your patch panels or switches to put in shorter cables, it is a good middle ground. You might have to get one for the left side and one for the right side to handle the bulk. Whether you get this one, another one, or whatever you should definitely get double sided velcro- it is the best.

https://www.amazon.com/Panduit-WMPV45E-Vertical-Cable-Management/dp/B0076B03KS

As stupid as it may sound, if they are USB-C based charging. Flip the connector over and plug it back in. I have one of these Satechi usb-c charging display for this sole purpose.

Plug it in and wait for the device to display volts & amps. If it is stuck at USB 5v, it won't turn the device on and do a trickle charge. If it doesn't bump to 15v in a short time (30s), I'll unplug the power cable and flip it over. 99% of the time it'll boot right up. All in all the process takes less than 2min.

And our Dell 3100's are so bad about it, I've instructed the student body to literally try flipping the cable if your device doesn't turn on. If it still doesn't turn on, bring it to IT and we can resolve the issue in less than 3mins (including quick diag and reseating the battery cable)

I’ve gone through two of these in one school year repairing Chromebooks in a small district. Not very robust. OK for smaller less frequent repairs. Got this Dewalt gyroscopic and although it’s much more bulky, it’s faster, stronger and you can set the torque.

https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DCF680N2-Gyroscopic-Screwdriver-Battery/dp/B00DL7QDS2

https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Wireless-Display-Adapter-P3Q-00001/dp/B01AZC3J3M

Then using The Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter App I update the firmware and add a School Logo for the Background as well as change the name to something meaningful like Teacher Name.

It depends on which NVR/DVR you buy. Mine is 32 channel, but you can get 4, 16, 32, and 64 commonly. This company also has a 256 channel beast, but you would need a bunch of PoE switches or plug in powered cameras.

Sure! This is what we have. We also have some of the 4-in-1 models. I haven't seen any difference in the two re: smartboard issues.

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Upgraded-Delivery-Pixelbook-A83460A2/dp/B07ZVKTP53/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&amp;keywords=anker+usb-c+hub&amp;qid=1620748175&amp;sr=8-5

The Amazon Basics one works OK. It will stick out a little bit and I've people bumping into them and snapping the plug off. There's alo no retention screws for the VGA cable so it may fall out.

Usually Monoprice is king for these sort of things, but HDMI to VGA they simply don't offer.

guitar picks are awesome!

https://www.amazon.com/Donner-Celluloid-Guitar-Medium-Gauges/dp/B0187288ME/ref=sr_1_4_sspa?dchild=1&amp;keywords=guitar+picks&amp;qid=1605229217&amp;sr=8-4-spons&amp;psc=1&amp;spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUEzSzBGTldWN0E1T0pRJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwOTA4NDcxMThEU0VITU9CVTRSWCZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwMjY0MTgzMTlFOFIxMEgzR1AyRiZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2F0ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU=...

If you go with RFID, make sure the tags you use don't work with NFC because then kids can easily clone the tags with a app like this one and have friends sign in for them.

https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Charging-Colorful-Wireless-Energy-saving/dp/B078Q5CP1Z Only thing that I have found that fits that description

Before covid hit, we were testing some wireless USB lavalier mics for other situations. I think we settled on THIS one but we stopped testing and playing with them since covid started. We ran into some EMI issues with Bluethooth when on devices other than phones or tablets so that's why we went with USB.

No idea if it will work on a Chromebook but it works on a Windows machine with no additional drivers, so maybe it's possible. For your situation, it may be smart to get a 1080p or 4k webcam for the Chromebook too. You may get audio sorted out but if you plan to use a Chromebook webcam, students won't be able to see the teacher. A lot of good webcams will also have Good mics so a good webcam may be all you need as well.

We buy them on Amazon and replace the screens. Takes ten minutes with no difference between original and replacement part.

See this link, comparable to what we would order in district: https://www.amazon.com/AUO-IBM-Lenovo-Chromebook-Screen-30PIN/dp/B06XKPDTM7/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=lenovo+n23+lcd&amp;qid=1578962763&amp;sr=8-3

Like others, I've used these: https://www.amazon.com/BlueRigger-Female-Active-Extension-Repeater/dp/B005LJKEXS/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1535800693&amp;sr=1-4&amp;keywords=usb+extension+cable+25+ft

For both smarboards and printers. Been a few years, no issues that I can think of. Powered usb is probably overkill for my purposes.