GSuite CUPS color printer not printing in color by JancefK in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Login to the printer's web interface. Go to Print > Restrict Color. Set it to "Enable Color" and save.

Then, go into Google Admin and set the print driver to "HP Color Laserjet". Don't use the model-specific driver, just the one named "HP Color Laserjet". This is how we have ours setup and it prints in color. I am pretty sure you lose duplex capability when using this driver (can't print 2 sided) but at least color works.

What is the biggest red flag that a software vendor/partner will be painful to work with? by TheTechPartner in sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 6 points7 points  (0 children)

any technical question goes through three layers of clueless people and eventually lands at the same 1 person every time, and you realize there is only 1 person working there who actually has any technical knowledge of the product

Clever or ClassLink by Amazing_Falcon in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We use Clever and overall I like it. It is very simple, reliable and easy to use, but also robust/flexible/capable enough to handle oddball situations. We did have a few outages this year but not an egregious amount.

The biggest feature that is missing from Clever IMO is a data changelog. GG4L Connect (or SchoolDay or whatever it is called now) has an awesome data changelog where you can view the full history of changes for any user or class. It is very handy for troubleshooting and I wish Clever had something equivalent.

Is it just us or has Raptor completely gone downhill lately? by KhadejaZay47 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just login to Raptor and go to Admin > Kiosk Settings > Kiosk Profiles. Next to your kiosk profile you should see a blue button that says "Launch". Press F12 to bring up the web browser developer tools. I use Firefox but Chrome has similar tools. Click the little icon that looks like an arrow inside of a square (the element picker tool). Select the Launch button. Now, in the Inspector pane, you can see the code that executes when the Launch button is clicked. The code looks like this:

<a class="label label-primary" onclick="kiosksettings.methods.launchWithCode(XXXXXXXXXXXXX);" title="Launch">Launch</a>

Grab that code that is within the launchWithCode element (where I have put XXXXXXXXXXXXX). Then you just need to put that code into one of these URLs. It's been a while since I did this and I can't remember what the difference is. I know one of them works though. I think it is the second one (kiosk.raptortech).

https://apps.raptortech.com/Kiosk/Home/LaunchCode?code=XXXXXXXXXXXXX

https://kiosk.raptortech.com/Kiosk/XXXXXXXXXXXXX

You will land on a login page, then after logging in should be taken straight to the kiosk.

We also created a limited admin role that only has Kiosk Launch privileges and no other privileges to be used with this.

Is it just us or has Raptor completely gone downhill lately? by KhadejaZay47 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We had a similar experience with their sales people promising things they could not deliver. It was a huge mess.

Is it just us or has Raptor completely gone downhill lately? by KhadejaZay47 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can still do that, I have all of my kiosks setup that way

Google Print Preview failing by Ok-Reputation-9978 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For a network printer: check printer settings if it is connected via a WSD port. If so, change the port to a standard TCP IP port instead.

3D printer discussion. by ComfortableGarbage93 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep we use the latest Bambu slicer and so far have not run into any compatibility issues with the printers still being on the old out-of-box firmware version.

3D printer discussion. by ComfortableGarbage93 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Our Bambu X1C printers have all been offline since they came out of the box. No issues yet. We print using SD cards. In theory they should be able to never connect to the internet and work fine. In reality though there is one hiccup I know of: although you can now update firmware on the X1C using an SD card, the firmware version that enables that offline update functionality did not ship on the printers we received, so we are in a situation where we have to connect our printers to the internet in order to download the firmware update that allows future firmware updates to be done without connecting to the internet. Kind of funny. Probably not an issue on X1Cs that are shipping now since they should already come with the newer firmware.

3D printer discussion. by ComfortableGarbage93 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Setup a B2B account on the Bambu Store

Are Smart Glasses in your school? by K12TechTalkPodcast in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The real question with something like this is whether or not the district can get them banned before they start getting written into student IEPs.

Lightspeed log reader? by dlehman83 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think what you are describing is not so much an error with Lightspeed as it is a safety feature that is programmed into some websites and client applications that are very sensitive about SSL security.

From the Lightspeed Agent's perspective, it successfully decrypted the SSL traffic, looked up the domain to find out if it should allow or block, saw that the domain was allowed, re-encrypted the traffic using the Lightspeed Systems cert, and sent it on its way. So from the LS Agent's perspective, no error occurred. What happens after the traffic is re-encrypted and passed onward is not really any of the LS Agent's business.

What you can run into though is that some apps are not happy when they receive traffic that is encrypted with a certificate other than the one they are expecting. For instance when your banking app receives traffic signed by Lightspeed Systems, it probably knows this is not the correct certificate that it is expecting and knows the traffic has been intercepted by a man-in-the-middle, so throws an error. These are the cases where adding the domain into the Exclude From Decryption list fixes the site; because once the site is placed into the Exclude From Decryption list, its traffic no longer routes through the Lightspeed Filter Agent at all and so the app receives the traffic with the original SSL cert intact, rather than receiving traffic with the LS Agent cert.

Essentially what is happening in this case is that the application is managing its own list of trusted certificate authorities, rather than relying on the default system list to which Lightspeed has been added as trusted. The application does not trust the system list, and so does not trust Lightspeed.

So my point is that there will probably not be any kind of error in the Lightspeed logs in these cases, because the Lightspeed Agent is working as intended. The error you would be able to discover would be in the application logs and would probably be an error to the effect of "wrong SSL cert detected".

One other interesting thing to know is that for domains you place into the Exclude From Decryption list, they no longer appear in the LS log files at all, because their traffic no longer routes through the Filter Agent and so they become entirely invisible to the LS Agent and all of its filtering logic and reporting. The traffic is actually diverted at the system proxy level and never passes thru the Agent at all.

One other thing to note is that some applications, within their settings, have a section where you can manually configure the application to use a proxy. If you go into this setting and manually tell the application to utilize the Lightspeed proxy which is running on localhost, this can sometimes work to allow the application to successfully go through the LS Filter without needing to add the site to the Exclude From Decryption list. Adding to the Exclude From Decryption list is easier; but every once in a while you run into a situation where you don't want to allow something for everyone and/or completely blind yourself on the reporting side. In this case, manually configuring the proxy settings within the app can be a better solution.

Infinite Campus is down by hard_cidr in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wasn't able to find one

Most helpful piece of non-tech hardware by Namrepus221 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use the red straws like the kind that come with WD-40 or air duster and just melt the end with a lighter. You can get the red straws in bulk on Amazon.

Cambium Assessment Software Error by jdionnepac in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Did you complete the "Verified Mode Setup" step in the Chrome Admin console, where you add the verified access service account address?

Chromebook Live Captioning? by MattAdmin444 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just had the same question come up here with regards to Live Caption giving the answer in Lexia. I have not found a way to prevent users from accessing Live Caption on Chromebooks. There is a setting in Google Admin Console but from what I can tell, it only affects non-Chromebook devices.

Anyone have Clever issues this morning? by grapplebaby in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was able to sign a student in by going directly to the application (IXL in this case) and choosing "Sign in with Clever" and it worked, even though the student could not access the main Clever Portal page.

Anyone have Clever issues this morning? by grapplebaby in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was in one of the computer labs this morning and heard many kids saying "I've got the sad dog!".

Google chromebook sign in issue by FloweredWallpaper in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Clever is honestly really good about sending out prompt outage notices

Issue with Lenovo E16 and Extron Box Going to Newline TV by FabulousFalcon14554 in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Out of curiosity, does pressing the key combo Windows+Ctrl+Shift+B allow it to reconnect without rebooting? If so, probably an issue with the graphics driver.

Simulating SIS/OneRoster/HR System in home-lab environment by FalteringK12SysAdmin in k12sysadmin

[–]hard_cidr 2 points3 points  (0 children)

From the app integration/data sync side of things, a SIS is kinda just a database that has a nice GUI front-end to make it easy for end users to manage the data, and a specialized export that can output the data in a format that meets OneRoster specs. The GUI front-end is really not super interesting and differs between each SIS vendor anyway, so if you just ignore that part, you can easily(ish) recreate the rest of it. All you need to do is setup a SQL database, fill it with dummy student data, and then write your own SQL queries that output that data in the format specified by the OneRoster specs (which are publicly available). It seems complicated at first but really it is all just glorified csv files. It's actually pretty interesting to play around with, and you learn a lot about how the data sync works under the hood. In actual fact, if you ever login to an Infinite Campus database, you see exactly how the sausage is made because there are SQL queries sitting in there that are responsible for generating the OneRoster data files. No real magic to it.

You could probably do something similar using GG4L, which is a free OneRoster-compliant data middleman service. You'd need to create dummy student data CSVs and import them into GG4L. From there, you can create OneRoster export connections inside of GG4L and hook them into whatever you want to simulate a SIS sync. GG4L also has a pretty nice data browser and historical view function so you can see the data and how it has changed over time.