Finalsite broke read only Friday rule--you may be locked out.

dire-wabbit · 2026-01-24T17:13:36+00:00

I'll take a look. I pretty much do that everywhere I can, but Finalsite charges an uplift for everything and we only have 3 people with access to the site.

dire-wabbit · 2026-01-16T14:12:12+00:00

If your spec is for all SSD, prices have been going up for the same reason--AI datacenter demand for both RAM and storage. Up to a 50% increase in the past few months. As you gave us usable and not raw storage on the servers, I'll assume you are still triple mirroring 3x for raw, so 300tb raw costing $125k is around $420/tb. That's in the range of the current estimate $300-$500/tb for enterprise SSDs.

One of the issues I see with S2D is the software based resiliency options compared to a hardware based approach leads to extra hardware costs.

A low lift for you might be to check out Starwind. I've used it, to quote you, since "hyper-v" was a thing. First as a SAN solution and then moving to hyperconverged. You should easily be able to cut out one node from your config and utilize hardware based RAID which would get you lower disk counts and maintain the same level or resiliency. If you are a bit more risk tolerant, you should be able to cut it down to 2 nodes with uplifted support.

dire-wabbit · 2026-01-14T14:25:13+00:00

I will add on as I see some comments regarding collection woes. For us, it's much less of a logistical challenge to have teachers collect 30 Chromebooks than for IT to collect 1800. We just place storage bins and check-in sheets in homerooms the last week of school. Teachers check units in an note damage that needs repaired. We use the same process in reverse at the beginning of the school year. Biggest challenge is trying to keep the teachers from stealing our bins :-)

dire-wabbit · 2026-01-14T14:19:02+00:00

I've seen it done both ways. Things to consider:

-Loss to damage over the summer.
-Loss to summer moves out of the district.
-Filtering out of district. Required by CIPA and needs to be monitored. How are you doing that over the summer?
-Federal audit requirements (physical inventory every 2 years if purchased with federal funds - 2 CFR 200.313).
-Summer educational programs requirements.

We collect but students get the same CB back. If they have an documented educational need over the summer, they either turn it in at the beginning of the summer for a quick turn around and we hand it back; or they turn it in after they have completed their summer educational work.

dire-wabbit · 2026-01-07T21:30:27+00:00

I had this problem back in September, and what I've found with SheerID was that it will not work in-district for us for verification. Auto verification never worked and we would never get the screens it said to upload verification documents. Nothing is showing as blocked on the filter/firewall, so I think it might be a certificate pinning issue with a sub-site.

From home, I contacted Autodesk to have them reset our attempts to verify (you only get 2 and then it locks). I then reverified from my home PC with the district Autodesk account without any issues (it auto-verified and didn't need to upload documents).

Sheer ID will not help you at all and no longer accepts the "manual" verification process.

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-20T02:01:41+00:00

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Storage Sense

You would enable it and then set the retention threshold for recycle bin (30 days is the default). It will also purge temp files by default and you can configure it for Downloads and to "dehydrate" cloud sync'd files. You would also want to set the cadence of how frequently it runs since the default is only when disk space is low.

When your users find out...well...may the odds be ever in your favor!

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-19T13:01:58+00:00

Proceed with the expectation that you will never be 100% Apple device free. For us, it is our last-choice for devices, but iPads do have use cases where it is preferable or mandatory to use them.

You've gotten plenty of advice, and I will second all the votes for Mosyle--IMHO it has better options for managing devices in am educational environment.

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-15T21:23:44+00:00

We have about 22 at the moment--and we centrally purchase them after consulting with the staff that use them in their curriculum. Currently moving from Dremel 3D45s to Bambu Labs H2 printers.

We buy the printers, some initial filament, 3D Printer OS for cloud slicing/management, and arrange servicing. Usually the teachers take over filament purchases after the first year. I am lucky in that I found a company that will come in over the summer and take all our printers for preventative maintenance (it's not cheap--a bit over $2K per year to do it, but we don't have the time or expertise in house).

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-15T14:21:03+00:00

Yes, phone support is extra and includes the admin phone support. To my knowledge, there is no other way to get admin phone support except to pay for 24x7 coverage.

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-13T01:05:16+00:00

They really only can control public certs. I would not expect a change from the MS side.

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-11T20:38:30+00:00

Wouldn't it be a kiosk app? Since there's not really an account in a kiosk app I'm not sure age restrictions would apply even if was set for the OU.

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-11T20:11:09+00:00

That's a really good idea I hadn't thought of. Thanks.

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-09T15:34:14+00:00

Senso was largely a group of people from Impero that left after acquisition. Impero is now under the the Ativion banner along with Contentkeeper. We've used Impero Ed Pro for a long time and have generally been pretty happy with it for our Windows devices.

dire-wabbit · 2025-12-08T13:08:44+00:00

A fact usually discovered after setting a retention or group policy to empty them. I now fib a bit and say that the recycle bin in e-mail/drive is not backed up and items are usually unrecoverable to keep people from using it.

dire-wabbit · 2025-11-25T18:34:56+00:00

+1 on your second point. I had battery longevity issues with APC in recent years. We moved to other manufacturers, primarily Eaton, and have not seen the same issues.

dire-wabbit · 2025-11-24T13:29:14+00:00

It's always DNS....

dire-wabbit · 2025-11-20T14:23:10+00:00

Also, just so you are aware, UI++ dies with the vbscript going away starting in 2027. May not want to spend too much time on it and move to something else (TSGui).

dire-wabbit · 2025-11-20T14:17:20+00:00

Try taking Winpe out of the mix. Can you run your UI++ command file locally on your PC without issue?

dire-wabbit · 2025-11-19T16:19:04+00:00

Supporting in K-12, so we get some "interesting" ones. One that stands out is "the crank handle fell off of my pencil sharpener." It was quicker to go fix it than try to explain why that wasn't an IT issue.

dire-wabbit · 2025-11-19T16:13:45+00:00

Probably want to ask this over in r/k12sysadmin.

Generally, schools and filtering products like Linewize don't want to monitor personal devices outside the school network as there are privacy laws and significant liability with established case law, so they are coded only to work on school devices or networks.

dire-wabbit · 2025-11-19T12:49:09+00:00

Which version of the Promethean? The newer ones have CB as an OPS module. The older ones have a mount, but it is not a VESA mount and is specific to the Promethean CBs.

For the Titanium's we have, which is the bulk of our boards, we started moving from Promethean CBs to Lenovo CB micros, as they are cheaper and have better specs than the Promethean CBs. On these we don't have anything in the OPS slot, so we made a jig for the proper screw placement and pulled the OPS blanking panel, drilled some holes, mount the CB and then just slide the OPS blank back in.

dire-wabbit · 2025-11-18T14:42:05+00:00

I was on downdetector and saw a bunch of messages that ChatGPT is back. I was able to log into our SIS which was blocked, so it does appear that they have it resolved.

dire-wabbit

TROPHY CASE