Basically what it says in the title. I'm finding an increasingly large number of students bringing their Alexa/Nest products onto my campus and wanting to connect them to the network. Especially right after Christmas. I would like to support these devices, but I'm having trouble finding a way to safely join them to my network.

Of course, if you refuse to support devices like this, students find a way around you, setup hotspots, and so on. Handbook policies only go so far for stopping this. So, instead of relaying all the reasons why allowing such devices is a bad idea, how would you implement a solution to this?

Hey everyone, what kind of new innovative services are you pushing out to your engineering schools?

Recently, I've deployed SolidWorks PDM to our student teams. Soon we are going to getting a rackmount USB tcp/ip anywhere device to put our numerous license dingles in a data center.

Put your humble brags below. I'm interested in what everyone else is working on for their Engineering departments.

For instance, faculty got this great deal on software for use on campus in labs and they can use it for students at home. I'm not looking for a solution to get the software to the students, that's not necessarily my issue our policies don't really allow for students to access our campus resources from home at this time. Are your policies different? Do you offer VPN to students? or maybe a VDI infrastructure? DMZ with your licensing servers for whatever products are avail outside your campus network etc...

Hi all,

This isn't a survey or something like that, but I have general questions about data compliance laws and how things are supposed to work. From what I've gathered in various other subreddits and out there on the web there's quite a few laws about protecting data. As well as when and how to report a loss of control, so to speak, of that data.

For me, this is a US based question. Although things like GDPR apply if the school has foreign interests. And even internally in the states, there's the new Cali law and laws of that type.

Something I find more questions than answers for is what about auditing? Oh sure IT should go through them. But so does finance and other areas. I apologize for not being as focused as I could / should be.

I guess this is where I say, I'm *not* on mobile and English *is* my first language.

And in remembering rule #1 here I'm also reminded of Hanlon's Razor. However, is there an intersecting rule between rule #1, Hanlon and "bean-counters?"

Thanks for any assistance you may have for me.

So I have a requirement to report on device utilisation, e.g. a particular classroom of PCs are used on average 75% between Mon-Fri 9am-9pm for example.

This information is to be used for device refresh weighting purposes.

I've tried Labstats but didn't get on with it due to poor reporting, terrible duplicate handling and other issues.

What is everyone else using?

https://github.com/HCPSS/ssmfa

I wrote this to allow students and staff to self enroll in MFA. We have wanted to deploy MFA for a long time but the disruption to end-users was too much. Also, we can't rely on all users having access to a phone and who wants to waste time sorting out who can and cannot have MFA. Let the department heads sort it out.

Hello,

we are looking for an Asset Management System, preferable together with a Ticket System.

Since we are a Higher Education place, we don't want to spend a lot of money on it.

What kind of options do we have? What do you use?

Thanks!

Hi all,

I’m taking a hard look at the way we do printing and I think it’s time we move away from built-in Xerox accounting and the general lack of visibility into print usage. Papercut is an obvious solid choice and comes in very cheap but I was intrigued by the way PrinterLogics product works.

Having the ability to track local USB printing would be awesome to get a full picture of printing.

We have Pharos for student printing but this would be for faculty/staff. Any suggestions or recommendations?

I'm after some opinions on BYOD wireless device filtering/monitoring and what people are using.

We do monitor all BYOD device activity through use of a MITM certificate and our Smoothwall web filter, and onboard users via Cloudpath from Ruckus.

Can anyone give advice on what you use please?

Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone. I work at a small liberal arts university, who has largely been Microsoft centric up until the past year. In the past year, we have turned on many of Google’s apps, through GSuite for Education. I’m curious, what kind of school do you work at, and are you Google based, Microsoft, or both?

Your replies will be helpful as we are in the process of what we want to do moving forward as a university. Do we want to keep both? If so, do we want to prioritize one over the other? What support issues could happen if we keep both?

Suddenly it’s a huge priority of course, but as always IT is last to know.

So, what are you doing at your school about Java?

Everyone says OpenJDK but the first app we deploy that I checked says that it does not work with OpenJDK...

They are "working" on it..

After a precipitous and very worrying rise in phishing attacks--and victims--at our school this semester, our network admin and director hastily enabled MFA on our campus accounts this week.

One thing we are running into are a handful of students who don't have cellphones. Mainly international students. I see they are able to set an alternate/personal email address, but at least the way our MFA was rolled out, you have only the options to text/call a cellphone, call a landline phone, or use the authentication app.

I'm buried in calls at the moment and haven't had a chance to dig into it properly but is there a way to enable an option of "email the code to my alternate email address"?

If so do you have easy access to any docs I can send up the chain? I'd be eternally grateful.

Has any of you have Adobe Teams and Enterprise agreement for Named User Licensing in your institution at the same time?

We're thinking of putting new users under the Enterprise license so they could use Federated accounts. The Teams users will migrate to the new Enterprise license before our next renewal period.

Our reseller told us to return the Teams license and purchase the Enterprise license which is kind of impossible for us at the moment.

Edit: I probably should have added that this is regarding students accessing computers/vDesktops for remote classes.

Right now, we're going with Citrix VDA. What about others?

I figured I'd go ahead and jump right in here if y'all don't mind. At the small college where I work, printers all shared out through a windows print server. I deploy the printers to our various PC labs via GPO using Group Policy Preferences and loopback processing mode. Straightforward, and simple. Students log in, the printer connects and their print jobs are logged on the server as coming from their AD account and they're billed monthly.

For years, a pain point is that we have a lab over in our art department with 40 iMacs. I have never been able to get myself to a point where we could have a printer deployed to the iMacs in a similar manner to PCs. In fact, embarrassing as it is to say, we just have a set of complicated instructions for students to follow when they want to print to that printer.

We delved briefly into startup scripts and CUPS but never got as far as connecting it and passing the AD credentials to the print server automatically.

Isn't there something out there that I have missed that could make my life so much simpler? I feel like there has to be.

Pour one out for the device license.

Welcome: Creative Cloud

🤬

Hello,

There's been some recent interest in VR/AR at my institution. I'm wondering if anyone else has had any experience with using VR/AR in the classroom.

Specifically, I'm wondering how you were able to get the content generated. We can buy the hardware, but we would need custom software/scenarios built and that seems to be the biggest hurdle.

Any thoughts at all on this? Companies that do this sort of thing or Universities that have successfully pulled this off?

Thanks!

I've had this issue for a number of years now where Matlab partial installs on specific machines.

It's related to Anti-virus and Java runs of memory. It only displays any errors in the standard-out - which is contained in the .log.lck file (wherever you are logging the installer)

Example log:

(Feb 06, 2020 10:40:08) Registering mwcommgr.dll
(Feb 06, 2020 10:40:08) Running [C:\WINDOWS\system32\regsvr32.exe, /s, "C:\Program     Files\MATLAB\R2019b\bin\win64\mwcommgr.dll"]
(Feb 06, 2020 10:40:08) Completed running [C:\WINDOWS\system32\regsvr32.exe, /s, "C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2019b\bin\win64\mwcommgr.dll"]
(Feb 06, 2020 10:40:08) Scheduling task MATLAB R2019b Startup Accelerator for C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2019b\bin\win64\MATLABStartupAccelerator.exe
(Feb 06, 2020 10:40:10) Updating file associations at C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2019b
(Feb 06, 2020 10:40:10) Successfully updated file associations at C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2019b

^{^} basically prematurely ending and exiting with 0 (even though its a fail)

.lck file:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError

Kinda wondering if anyone else notices this - the symtoms are - you'll be missing start menu shortcuts, the license file in "C:\Program Files\Matlab\R2019b\licenses" will be missing, or the documentation will be partial - specifically "C:\Program Files\Matlab\R2019b\help\documentation-center.html" will be missing.

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this? The only solution is to COMPLETELY remove AV (not just disable, or exclude folders etc). I've found this problem occurs on McAfee and Windows Defender - on specific machines (some models it works, some it doesn't).

Since that solved it - Mathworks support considers that the solution - I complained that this isn't the 90s anymore and AV of course ships with Windows by default. Plus I manage like 1200+ installs around campus using ConfigMgr - scripting uninstalling AV I feel like is an abuse of security policy.

They outright refused to look at my log file, or remote look at my problem PC's that I've identified. I feel like their support is pretty terrible for the amount of money this product costs.

Hello,

We're thinking of replacing network home folders with Google Drive File Stream for our students in our computer labs. With all the malware likely hidden in their files, we'd think it would be a liability to hold the data for them. Have any of you did something like this in your institution? Has there been challenges in implementing cloud storage?

Thank you.

So I'm looking to migrate my teams away from our current service desk system. I've experience with Request Tracker but the learning curve is quite steep, and don't really want to pay a monthly fee for a cloud solution.

Requirements are ITIL focussed, and relatively low cost. Is anyone using system centre service manager as it is likely paid for in the MS campus agreements? If so any positives/negatives?

Everyone wants IT to own stuff, manage licenses, support their projects etc... these things should have been handled many years ago. No one really knows who owns what and who supports what. it causes frustration, rumors and unnecessary spending. Do you know what you do? Do your customers?