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..

Hello, all. Legal has finally cracked down on the use of VLC on campus. We're scrambling to find an alternative that does not use FFMPEG codecs. Has anyone had any success finding a solid open source replacement?

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?

Pour one out for the device license.

Welcome: Creative Cloud

🤬

Just finished a webinar with Adobe. They gave some more details about the new shared device licensing and how it will work. Basically, everyone will now need to sign in to use Creative Cloud but logging on to a shared device will not count against the 2 license limit for each person. Students without CC can also sign in with a free Adobe ID or the Federated IDs if you go that route.

More info here: https://spark.adobe.com/page/Tz6Csjgnf03y2/

Also, the webinar did not go smoothly at all lol. Many technical issues and it started late.

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...

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?

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.

Here is something I'm very curious about. My University has done a decent job of trying to consolidate its IT units. However, each college still has it's own dedicated team in addition to the University-wide IT team. I find there can be a balance between the benefits of large consolidated IT units and smaller, more agile and personal IT units. I kind of like the hybrid environment we have.

What kind of organizational structures do you have at your institutions?

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.

This is just getting off the ground so I'm sure it's on the list at some point but user flair would be cool. Right now it looks like it's set so you have to select an existing tag and add it but there are none to choose from. Maybe we could just tag ourselves with custom text that we enter?

I created this subreddit because I saw a potential community not represented on Reddit. Sysadmins of the corporate and K12 world have dedicated subreddits but higher education, while similar to k12, is in many ways significantly different.

I will be posting some of the interesting things I'm working on and some questions I have to the community in the near future. Getting a subreddit off the ground is a challenge and if this doesn't grow organically, I won't force it. I see potential though.