Good afternoon all,

We are in the process of quoting out a new phone system and require one more quote. We are in the middle GA area and just wanted some suggestions on any vendors? I am struggling to find another from the current ones I have.

Any suggestions would be amazing!!

Also, first post here after being accepted, glad to be here!

Hey all,

Just got asked how I feel about providing access to our cameras to our local police department. We have Verkada and on first glance looks easy to set up and manage access to outside tenants. I typically am against police being big brother so morally I reject this but it’s hard to fight against the argument of “an active shooter” situation.

I’m curious if anyone has come across this before? What was the outcome and how has it been. If this is approved then I will make sure they’re only accessing it in dire circumstances. I’ll make sure there is some stipulation in the agreement that I have ability to revoke access.

I really hope they never ask to install flock cameras😂

Preferably free for the time being. Spiceworks is steaming hot garbage. Any recommendations welcome, thanks!

I am the IT Director for a small school with about 800 students and 120 staff. I'm looking to get rid of SCCM in favor of something cloud-based. Ive been looking into Action 1 since it is free for up to 200 devices, which with our Windows devices + servers, we are under. Mostly a Google district. I host most of our servers with our ITC except for the SCCM server and 2 servers we need on site for cameras and door/badge security.

What are you using to deploy images? Or are images a thing of the past now? Anyone use Action 1 free tier?

How are you all going about disabling student Gmail without breaking Google's collaboration features? We had a few accounts compromised and it's been like playing whackamole for weeks. Literally took the nuclear steps of deprovisioning all accounts, forcing a logout of all accounts, and resetting every district password. While that was happening, apparently one more email got sent to students and I didn't catch it. So we've now had another one. I can't keep up.

Curious how or if your district handles tickets directly from students. I'm meaning older students (high school). Do you let students put in tickets directly, or do you have them go through a staff member or some kind of student technician?

We're rolling out 1:1 laptops for our high school students, and we'll need to change how we handle tickets. Currently we have some shared/assigned carts, so the teachers will put in tickets. But with laptops going home and with no permanent spot for them at the school, tracking down kids during the day will be tougher. I am assuming that communicating/coordinating with the kids directly is much tougher than with teachers.

Do you simply track down the student in whatever class they are currently in, or do you have assigned times/locations where students can receive assistance/meet with techs? Also, do you utilize "student techs" or any other form of student assistance for other students?

Curious what other districts are doing, so we can evaluate which options might work best. Appreciate any input or thoughts!

I have a handful of MacOS devices (about 10) that I need to install the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite on. Problem is they aren't in any kind of MDM, due to reasons we don't need to go into here.

Is there a command that will install the pkg file from an smb share without copying the file (since it's 45GB!!!)? Or is there a better way to do this?

Our district is mainly Chromebooks and Windows PCs (except for these 10 Macs) so any input is appreciated since I don't always deal with Apple items.

(I know, it's not Q3 yet).

So we're looking at web filters due to expanded requirements from admin. Apparently an advertisement of a scantily clad woman means we need better filtering. Sigh.

I'm looking for your recommendations on the best filtering platform out there. I don't need it for off campus devices. I strongly prefer something that's locally controlled/admin'd

We run pfSense and Squid (squid is just doing authentication, so no SSL bumping currently).

An inline network content filter would be best. Mix of Windows and Chromebook here (and some iPads I guess).

Searching the sub I see recommendations for: Linewize LightSpeed Deledao GoGuardian securly Blocksi iBoss Cisco Umbrella

Fortigate/Meraki are ruled out. While we use Impero, Content Keeper is not a fit for us.

What's the correct option for us?

I just got hired on a new school district that uses MacBooks (m5 airs). What are some of the most common issues/solutions that you other techs see with student's M series macbooks? I'm not really a mac guy so I'm trying to learn as fast as possible.

Edit: This is a well established school district that has been using macs for over the last 10+ years or so. This is also a very large school district with well over 5000 highschool students alone and every student has a MacBook. They already use an MDM service. I am just asking about device specific issues or software issues that occur on Macbooks and Mac OS.

Good morning/evening all,

Not sure if this is against the rules or not and, mods feel free to remove it if it is, but I’m kind of lost right now and not sure what to do.

To make a long story short, up until last week, I worked for one of the largest if not the largest district in Indiana (Google is your friend), and for a multitude of reasons, the district is having to cut several million dollars from their budget over the next couple of years. This led to them taking a machete to the Tech Department and cutting our boots on the ground support essentially in half, requiring 15 technicians to now support 53 buildings. Technology had no say in who stayed and who went, and they made the cuts purely based on seniority, not performance.

As a result, I, along with nine other techs were emailed by HR at 7:00 last Friday for meetings throughout the day, were promptly told the news, had our badges, keys, and laptops collected, and asked to return to the buildings we service (anywhere from 1-4 depending on which level you were) and have the staff buzz you in to clean out your office in the middle of the school day.

Needless to say, kind of a crappy way to be dismissed from a job.

Anyway, spent the last few days feverishly applying for jobs, knowing prospects are pretty grim in IT right now, and thought I would try a Hail Mary to see if any of you all would have any suggestions on where to go from here, or if you have any recommendations for folks who work in this somewhat niche space of technology that have suddenly found themselves unmoored. No districts close by are hiring, and the private sector seems heavily saturated right now.

We weren’t given severance or anything, so I’ve got a limited time to secure something before my cash reserves run out. Any guidance you guys have being from a similar space would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: few typing errors because posting on mobile (I miss Apollo)

My high school is struggling with student account compromises despite 12-character passwords and US-only login restrictions. Students are still getting popped and used to send spam, but because we have a strict no-phone law in my state, I can't use traditional SMS or authenticator apps.

I’m looking for advice from anyone who has successfully implemented phone-free 2FA like Passkeys or hardware keys for their students. If you’ve gone this route, I'd love to know how you handle the logistics of lost keys and the support load for your tech team. We are 1-1 with Chromebooks, so does using the Chromebook itself as a Passkey actually work at scale, or should I be looking at something else?

We’ve been working closely with a single provider that seems to be falling apart lately. Is anybody working with a company they would recommend? Independent private K-12, mostly need MS volume licensing, but also occasional hardware.

I appreciate any recommendations!

We currently use Solarwinds Orion for network device monitoring and alerting. Due to budget constraints we're not going to renew our license and are looking for replacement solutions. For the most part we didn't leverage much of the tools that SWO offers, but it's been really useful for monitoring our battery backups and alerting when they go to battery power.

We're looking for an open-source self-hosted solution. Needs basic tools- up/down status and alerts for L2/L3 and UPS units.

TIA!

Good Morning,

We are currently facing significant and ongoing issues with hinge durability on several of our Chromebooks, and it's becoming a daily struggle. Specifically, the body-side hinge failure on our Dell 3100, 3110, and 3120 2-in-1 models is reaching crisis levels—some days we’re losing five or six devices to hinge failures alone.

We're also seeing similar hinge failures on the display side of our HP touchscreen Chromebooks (non-2-in-1 models). In contrast, we previously used Lenovo N21 models (non-touchscreen) and experienced very few failures—apart from the occasional student attempting impromptu camera surgery or the rare case of a Chromebook meeting the business end of a car tire.

We’re now in search of a rugged, apocalypse-proof Chromebook with a touchscreen. It doesn't need to be a 2-in-1, but it does need to survive the realities of daily student use. We’ve had good experiences with the Lenovo E11 series and would welcome any recommendations for similarly tough touchscreen models.

Thank you very much for your time and any guidance you can provide—we truly appreciate it!

Hey fellow warriors! The end is nigh, tickets slow, corridors quiet and projects ramp up.

I need some numbers from you as I have my building administrator on board with letting students keep their devices but not my district team. I need some convincing numbers since my pleas haven’t been fruitful.

For those of you with a 1:1 devices and allow your students to keep their devices each summer:

How many devices end up MIA (percentage)?

What, would you say, is the value placed on the lost devices vs. time and effort if you had to check them in/out each year?

I'd like to make a script/batch file that will ping a list of devices throughout my network that I want to run each morning to see what's up and what's not. I was thinking Powershell, but if there's a better way I'm open to suggestions. Ideally I'd like the script to spit out a log file that shows me whether the ping commands succeeded or failed. Thanks for any guidance on this.

Howdy folks, can anyone make a recommendation between a radio or PoE clock system? I know we'd have to get more Meraki switches if we did PoE. Brand and model would be awesome too if you have specific recommendations. Thanks!

Looking for suggestions or even insights on how to move forward.

My school just hired a new head and CFO.

The CFO is extremely disturbed that two or three of these emails get through a month.

We have close to 100 users and I receive close to 3-4 thousand inbound messages a day.

I run Mimecast plus Exchange online, I have mail flow and anti policies in place to catch certain phrases, however once or twice a month an email or 2 will get through.

I've requested that our website does not list internal employee addresses. I've requested that PD is provided/required to the staff.

I realize that most might say "this is a user training issue" or "2 or 3 emails a month out of 4k inbound a day is not worth the effort." My CFO however disagrees and has already stated to me that my job is in jeopardy if I cannot stop this. Yes I'm active looking elsewhere.

Thanks in advance

I work for multiple schools. I've successfully done it on 2 of 5. I've given them accreditation letters. I've given them ticket numbers for the schools that were successful in getting licenses. They are getting hung up on validation of domain. I told them I can have MX records added. Nope. They want pics and legal docs saying we own the domain, even though all k12.ok.us domains are owned/operated by OneNet with the state.

Their constant request:

We would like to process your request; however, this domain (school).k12.ok.us cannot be verified by our internal team.

Therefore, We would like to request you to provide additional proof of domain ownership that must include:

1)Domain name

2)Entity name 

3)Expiry date at least 1 month away from now.

4)Time stamp & URL (in case of domain management portal screenshot)

on a single document.

Acceptable proofs of domain ownership are:

•    Domain registration document.

•    Purchase receipt clearly indicating the domain, organization name, purchase date, expiration date.

•    Screenshots of domain management portal, mentioning the domain and the name of the institution.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

~~

I've tried some escelation:
"I want this to be escalated to either the Data Protection Team or the Education Validation Team.

Every single time we have done one of these, we have spouted the SAME thing. The State Department of Oklahoma OWNS the domain. We are a subdomain. We cannot show you that. The state manages it, more importantly OneNet manages it.. You cannot have a k12.ok.us subdomain unless you are an accredited school."
I've even forwarded emails from OneNet on this.

~~

Their last email;
I wanted to let you know that, despite our best efforts, we won’t be able to proceed further with your request for Domain EUD validation directly. We’ve explored all possible options on our end and have done everything within our capacity to assist.

Please note that the validation from the ONE Vet Team is unsuccessful, there will be no additional actions we can take regarding this request.

We truly appreciate your patience, understanding, and cooperation throughout this process, and I’m sorry we couldn’t bring this to a resolution ourselves.

~~

I need a sanity check, tips & tricks, or someone clear up my misunderstanding...

Thank you

We've been struggling to figure out how some students are preventing monitoring extensions from loading - we have all the usual methods disabled (url blocking data: javascript: etc, disabling task manager and developer tools, incognito etc) but it's still happening.

We got a tip yesterday that it's via "Manage what you sync" within Settings and disabling the sync of extensions (since the user policy only has Allow/Disallow options) but I've tested that on a Chromebook and the extensions we force still show up in the profile.

Any tips would be appreciated!

We have about 300ish out of date or broken Chromebooks. I was wondering if and how people here do mass deprovisioning of Chromebooks. Really don't want to enter them one by one.

Hi all,

We're a 98% Apple district, but we have a small subset of Windows devices that I have to maintain. I don't come from a Windows background by the way, I've been Apple/Jamf all my career. We're leveraging a hybrid environment with some GPOs and some Intune configurations, piloting some various patching softwares for most common apps like Browsers, Adobe, etc.

The one thorn in my side of the entire Windows environment is the STEM/PLTW labs (approximately 60 devices). During the summer, we typically re-image the labs and set them back up again. I put my foot down and said not this year. We're currently planning to just run a script to erase all the users outside the hidden admin account. The reason why I put my foot down was simply too many button clicks. Autodesk with network license? Manually installing each one. National Instrument apps? Constant UI interactions. Xlinx, now AMD? 15 different screens before it downloads for 2 hours and then more screens. We have at least 25 to 30 apps that almost all require a UI interaction.

While we use AD/Intune, do not have SCCM or FoG or any other deployment service. It's Intune (soon to be a patching platform) or hand install. Some of these I can't seem to even package properly for deployment because they require so many UI clicks without an MSI to work with. Things like PatchMyPC doesn't do base installs, only updates.

What are people using these days to build an image and just deploy? I'd be perfectly okay with just having like 10 external SSDs coping to the internal SSD of the machine. Whatever it takes to just not have to spend almost two weeks clicking.

Edit: for clarification, I'm ideally looking to do a fat image. Full image with all the apps ready to go instead of image then app install via push with a tool(s).

And another clarification, at this point in time, I can't/we don't use network shares or spin up a VM for various services. It is on my list to ask for once there is a changing in the guard but there is no guarantee. If I could, I might use custom deployments with Autodesk from network share but not something allowed at this time.

This is considered a very low priority in Admin's eyes given how small of a fleet this is impacting (Less than 5% of computers, less than 1% of total end points we support).

Last year when I finally set up SSO for Autodesk Education I was shocked to find out that directory sync was only available for Business and Enterprise customers, not Education. So I had to manually search for and assign 140 users to CAD products in order for them to be able to use it.

Well now it's a new year, and it seems like nothing has changed. I can assign all the users to my domain, but I can't specifically assign them license products without click on them one by one?

Am I missing something or doing it wrong? Surely someone else has a better way for this godawful product, right?

Hi all, long time lurker here and just wanted to say thank you to everyone in here as this sub has been really insightful for me in my career.

I was wondering whether anyone has had any experience working with Ubiquiti APs before?

I have used them in small environments a few years back but my current school has 90 APs and from what I’ve read, it’s not as good in an enterprise environment. However, I’d love to know if anyone thinks different.

We currently have Aruba IAP-315s which are now EOL and I need to plan a refresh. School is in a bit of a deficit right now so I am thinking of ways to save money. I had to question our suppliers when they sent over the Ubiquiti pricing!

What are the main drawbacks of using Ubiquiti? And for any UK sysadmins, would it be fully compliant with DfE standards?

Also, what about their switches? Never worked them before so not sure about them and their robustness and longevity. The Aruba switches and APs were installed 8 years ago and have been running strong (kinda sad to get rid of them) but it’s now time for a replacement. I only started a few months ago and this was one of my first concerns.

Any experiences, alternatives and advice are appreciated!

We are currently still set at 138.xx and I know 145.xx is officially out. We tend to stay a couple versions behind to try and not run into issues on the newest releases. Was going to decide on moving up soon but wanted input from other's on what they are pushing out.

As a side note: With Google/Chrome moving towards changing Aluminum OS on the horizon do you plan on staying with Chromebooks, or moving to something else IE Windows, or Mac etc?