mattmole.co.uk

It’s been a while

2020-05-24T00:00:00+01:00

An Apology

It’s been a little while, and for that, I can only apologise.

For all of February I have no excuse, apart from the usual nonsense of “I was too busy”.

However, March, April and May has been spent largely working flat out on supporting and improving remote learning for all of the students at the Academy Trust that I work for.

We’ve prepared devices to go out to students, created google classrooms, both manually and with data from the school MIS systems, supported the staff, students and parents, created remote learning resources and many other things!

Working from home has been surprisingly OK. I’ve got my laptop and my two extra monitors and I’ve been able to work away upstairs and help with the kids when I can.

Hopefully posts will return more regularly!

Installing VMWare tools on VMWare Virtual Machines using MDT

2020-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

I trust this post is a little less dry than the last one!

MDT testing using VMs

Testing MDT task sequences is so much easier using VMs than physical machines. The main issue I found was that without VMWare tools installed, the mouse usage with the VM is incredibly jerky.

While it is easy to install the VMWare tools manually, carrying out this task as part of the task sequence would be great!

Step 1 - Create a group

Firstly I created a group, which contains an application installation step and a computer reboot step.

Step 2 - Set a query for the task sequence group

The first thing I tried was to use a WMI query, using the query below. This didn’t work as expected and everytime the task sequence failed with errors relating to an incorrect WQL query

While checking out the logs I noticed that there are a couple of task sequence variables that can be used.

IsVM is binary and shows True or False
VMPlatform shows VMWare in my case and a list can be found here

Once I discovered these variables, I created a set of conditions where all criteria had to be matched. See screenshot below

Step 3 - Create an application with the correct flags

The final step was to create an application pointing to the VMWare Tools installation files and then to link this within the application installation step

When running the task sequence once more, VMWare tools were installed on the VM at the relevant point in the task sequence.

I hope this is useful! If I have time I will look to add steps into the task sequence that would install drivers for other VM platforms, such as virtualbox.

Streaming, recording and creating remote training sessions

2020-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Please note, this post is rather text heavy. Hopefully following ones will have some images to make things as clear as possible

The MAT that I work for offer out a large number of training courses. It is sometimes necessary to record these sessions where staff cannot attend or for QA purposes. Also, as the distance attendees travel increases, there are occasions where remote attendance would be useful.

Setting the scene

Our training room consists of three large screens at the front of the room, a comfort monitor for the presenter and the usual tables and seating for the delegates.

We use a presenter PC for the presenter to be able to show their resources. I did not want the presenter to have to think about the recording / streaming software.

The second PC is used for recording / streaming.

The screens in the room are set up as follows. The comfort monitor is able to show either the presenter PC or the recording PC (more on this later). The centre screen at the front of the room is setup to show either the presenter resources or the recording PC (more on this later). The other two screens at the front of the room are setup to show presenter resources.

The software and kit

A presenter PC - I chose a refurbished HP800 Desktop with 4th gen Intel i7, 16GB RAM and a 240GB SSD
A recording PC - I chose a refurbished HP800 Desktop with 4th gen Intel i7, 16GB RAM and a 240GB SSD. For this machine I opted for an NVidia 1050Ti graphics card as well
A boundary mic - Tascam TM-90
Digital mixing desk - I chose a Behringer XR18 digital mixing desk
The streaming software called OBS
The software which can convert video / PC display output and transmit over the network, NDI Tools
Plugins for OBS to interface with NDI, the Behringer mixing desk ASIO and a virtual webcam plugin
Logitech C930 webcams

Tying it all together

OBS running on the recording PC captures the following sources:

The display of the presenter PC using NDI
The two C930 webcams, connected to the recording PC via USB
The output of the Behringer XR18 digital mixing desk using the ASIO plugin.

We use a layout where the presenter (and audience if required) webcam is shown in the top left corner and then in a larger section in the bottom right we display the screen of the presenter PC.

With the setup as above, it is possible to stream sessions to a youtube channel or record the local harddrive on the PC or a NAS drive, perhaps.

By using the virtual webcam plugin, it is possible to output the video from OBS to video conferencing solution such as zoom, google hangouts meet or skype.

To be able to send audio across the video conference, then either the Behringer USB sound device could be selected in the conference settings.

A more flexible solution, allows any audio sources added to OBS to be sent across the conference. To accomplish this I use a second sound device on the PC, with the line out connected to the line in. I then use the advanced audio channels to output the required sources to this extra sound device. The loopback then provides an input device, which can be used.

Even better if…

If I was to carry out this project again I would pick a slightly different webcam. I think that the Logitech C920 has a better lens for the purpose of capturing the video of the presenter. The C930 has a wider angle than the C920.

Should there be any issues capturing audio, the webcam mics could be used as backup audio. This can be enabled in OBS by using the advanced audio recording and selecting a codec which allows multiple tracks. These tracks can be selected in the advanced audio options.

Issues worked out during the process / since completing the setup

Reverberation - originally I used NDI to capture the audio from the recording PC. This caused issues with the boundary mic in the room also picking up the same audio. I looked at trying to use a side-chain effect to cut the boundary mic when the recording PC was playing, but decided against as sometimes people speak over backing audio. The simplest option was to stop capturing the audio from NDI and rely solely on the boundary mic.
Another consideration I made for the cameras were unifi security cameras. I decided against these in the end due to the slight delay in getting the feed into OBS. This would then have caused issues with syncing the audio.

Welcome welcome one and all

2020-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Welcome

As the title says, welcome all! Many times now I’ve created a new website and said “this will be regularly updated.” Well, let’s see how I get on this time.

My aim is to blog about things I find interesting and that I hope will be help other people too.

Areas of interest include:

Home Automation
EdTech
GSuite and how it can be used in an education environment. In this, I will focus mainly on the administration side of things as this is what I have most experience with
Linux and Windows server maintenance