Grumbledook Blogs

On Wednesday, the England vs. Slovenia World Cup match brought many a broadband connection across the UK to its knees as iPlayer, the BBC’s streaming video service, hit a peak of 800,000 concurrent streams (mostly skiving gits who should have been working).

Even before the match, IT professionals in schools were marginally backing a meltdown in a poll on EduGeek, realising that demand coupled with shared local authority bandwidth would likely scupper chances of getting a decent stream in schools. That prediction was largely borne out on the day, though experiences varied, with some schools getting a decent feed, while others got only a few minutes into the game before it stuttered to a halt.

We had no problems watching the game at all; we had more than 25 computers across the school watching a high-quality feed, despite having nothing more than an ADSL connection for the entire site.

How?

I cheated.

I realised the night before the match that I already had everything I needed to serve up a live site-wide feed without using an Internet streaming service at all. Instead, I used a TV tuner to stream the DVB-T Freeview feed straight off the air and onto our network. Here’s how you could do the same.

Why?

As I’ve already explained, this means you aren’t relying on an Internet streaming service with questionable reliability when faced with high demand. You are relying on having decent Freeview reception, but that doesn’t tend to vary much unless there’s a thunderstorm. (FYI, it’s probably best not to do this during a thunderstorm). You also won’t saturate your Internet connection bandwidth with multiple streams, meaning those people on site actually doing their job will not be impeded.

Another key advantage is that the standard Freeview feed is a superior quality picture compared with most online feeds, meaning your viewing experience should be better.

Lastly, doing this is very cool, and will definitely get you laid. Definitely. Even during a thunderstorm.

You will need

Your brain. I know this may be something of a liability, but you are going to need to pay attention. This guide is detailed and may seem complicated, but once you understand how it all works the actual process is not that hard.

A working DVB-T tuner device on a computer. There are a lot of these on the market, with PCI, PCI-E, and USB versions available. Which sort you use is pretty much irrelevant so long as it works. I’ve had a lot of success with the Hauppage WinTV Nova-T USB Stick. Whatever you use, make sure you can receive a TV stream using the manufacturer’s software before you proceed, or you could face a very frustrating time with the rest of this guide.

A working network that the computer is connected to. Again, I’m not helping you with this bit, and I’m only covering IPv4 networking. By the way, it will help if your network switches support IGMP multicast filtering, and have this feature turned on. More on this later.

VLC Media Player. This free software is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I used Windows but the procedure should work equally well on other platforms since VLC is almost identical on each. I used VLC 1.1.0, the latest version available at the time.

Details of your local Freeview transmitter frequencies. You may be able to get these directly from your existing software, but if not, first find out which transmitter is nearest you. That site will also tell you the frequencies, but it rounds them up to the nearest 0.1MHz, and VLC prefers the more precise kHz values. You should be able to find those sources online; I used an online database on the Medion support forums.

You’ll notice that only a few frequencies are listed, despite there being many more channels than this. This is because Freeview bundles channels together using multiplexing into a single stream on one frequency. For example, most of the BBC channels are on a single frequency. The site where you checked which transmitter is nearest you should also show which channels are bundled together, and therefore which frequency you’ll want. Getting individual channels out of that frequency is taken care of by the receiving software, as you’ll see later.

A TV licence. You may not like or agree with it, but in the UK, your premises must have a TV licence if any channel from Freeview is to be displayed. Most schools probably have this already. Anyone else in the UK needs to be aware that you are a thieving git if you are watching live TV without a licence (this applies to using iPlayer too). Breaking the law is bad, mkay?

What to do

1. Open VLC, go to the Media menu, and click Streaming.

2. Click on the Capture Device tab. Change the Capture mode to DVB DirectShow, change the Device Selection to DVB-T (and pick the correct device if you have more than one tuner), then enter the required frequency into the Transponder/multiplex frequency box (using the information you looked up earlier). Depending on your device, you may or may not need to change the Bandwidth setting. If it doesn’t work on Undefined, change it to 8Mhz.

Once that’s all entered, click on Stream.

3. Click Next on the Source section; you’ve set all this up on the previous screen.

4. In the New destination box, pick RTP / MPEG Transport Stream, and click the add button.

We’re using RTP/TS because it support multicast/broadcast, which will mean the bandwidth consumed by the device streaming the connection is the same regardless of how many clients watch the stream. As I said earlier, I had 25 machines receiving the stream, and the bandwidth usage on the broadcast machine never went above 5Mbps.

5. In the Address box, you need to enter a multicast or broadcast address to stream the video to.

• If your network switches support multicast, pick a multicast address. There’s a long and detailed document from the IANA about picking one, but unless you are already using multicast on your network then you really just need to pick something in the 239.255.000.000-239.255.255.255 range, which is identified by the IANA as the Site-Local Scope. Anything in this range should work. I used 239.255.1.1 as shown below.
• If your network doesn’t support multicast, or you don’t want to use it for whatever reason, then enter the broadcast address for your local subnet.

The advantage of using multicast instead of broadcast is that when using broadcast, every device on the network will have the stream broadcast to it and use up some bandwidth, while with multicast, only those devices listening for the stream will consume bandwidth.

Make sure that the Activate Transcoding box is NOT ticked. Unless you are really screwed for bandwidth, you don’t need to do any transcoding since the video stream is already compressed when it comes over the air, and transcoding introduces an extra layer of complexity that you just don’t need. I found the bitrate was between 3-5Mbps without transcoding; low enough for even a 10Mbps connection to cope with, and a walk in the park for a 100Mbps client.

Leave the port at 5004 unless you have a good reason to change it, then click Next once you’re done here.

6. Configure any advanced options. I didn’t touch any of this stuff, but knock yourself out if you know what you’re doing. Don’t tinker unless you know, or you’ll probably break something and coming crying to me like a baby. I will be… unsympathetic.

(I did experiment with SAP announcements, but it seemed a little buggy, so I didn’t use it.)

Click Stream once you’re done.

VLC should now be streaming away merrily. You won’t see or hear anything, because all you’re doing is streaming to the network, not playing the file locally.

7. Change the channel. Remember how Freeview has multiple channels on one frequency? Well, when VLC started streaming, it just picked whichever channel it felt like on the frequency you entered in step 2. To change the channel, go to the Playback menu, click Programme, and select the channel you want.

If the channel you want isn’t there, you either need to try a different frequency, or you can’t pick up that channel in your area.

8. Configure your damn firewall already. If you’re using a client-side firewall such as the one built in to Windows, you need to open up some incoming ports on every client you want to receive the stream. If you left the port setting alone like I told you in step 5, you need to open up UDP ports 5004 and 5005.

You shouldn’t need to change anything on the firewall to broadcast the stream, only to receive it. The exception is if you are using one of those stupid firewalls like the one in Symantec Internet Security that blocks any traffic by default, instead of just incoming connections.

9. Now open a second copy of VLC. You can do this on the same machine (open the firewall!), or skip straight to trying another machine on the network if you’re feeling cocky. Go to the Media menu, and this time pick Open Network Stream.

10. Enter rtp://@ followed by the streaming address you entered at step 5, e.g. rtp://@239.255.1.1

Now click Play.

Congratulations, genius

You’ve streamed Freeview to your network using VLC! The screenshot above shows the stream I broadcast alongside the web interface for one of my switches, with the graph showing multicast working successfully: only the clients actually listening for the stream are consuming bandwidth.

Or not?

Maybe you didn’t get it working, because you’re an idiot. That’s not really something I can help you with. This process worked for me, and it should work for you if you follow it properly. Unfortunately, this guide represents pretty much all I currently know about streaming with VLC, so you may want to consult your favourite search engine if replicating these steps doesn’t work.

Some tips

Here’s a couple of tips to make things easier for you and your users:

• If you are able to, create a new A record on your local DNS server so you don’t have to remember the address you entered in step 5. You can use this when you set up the streaming in step 5, when you connect in step 10, and in the shortcut described below.
• To make things easier on your users, make a shortcut for them that automatically starts the stream in fullscreen. An example of the command line you might use is "%ProgramFiles%VideoLANVLC Media Playervlc.exe" -vvv rtp://@239.255.1.1 --fullscreen
• Turn on deinterlacing in VLC. This will improve your picture significantly whenever there is fast-moving action showing. Go to the Tools menu, click Preferences, then click the Video button on the left and play with the settings highlighted below. The selected options are the ones that worked best for me.

Useful? Useless? Feedback on this guide in the comments, you idiots.

Somewhere in the deepest, darkest, regions of a DHL warehouse, is package #77 of 118 from my annual Dell workstation shipment. The others were delivered yesterday, but #77 has eluded both the driver and his compatriots at the depot.

I’d be more annoyed, but the driver did help us move the remaining 117 to their secret storage area, somewhere in the grounds of the school. There were stairs involved. It was painful towards the end. I had to go home and shower afterwards.

The willingness of the DHL driver to endure a grotesque amount of suffering is a stark contrast to Dell’s normal courier, Walsh Western, who are normally about as much help as Clippy the talking paperclip. They once failed to deliver our order because they claimed they couldn’t get under the low bridge. That’s all very well, but there are three other roads into town that don’t have a low bridge. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to the untrained donkey driving the truck to try another route. They are also quite happy to deliver equipment heavy enough to kill a man on a truck without a tail-lift, and were genuinely surprised one year when they arrived unannounced at 6am and found no-one ready to meet them.

As you can understand, one delayed package is a frankly a welcome relief in comparison.

Federico forwarded me this email today, a mailshot from the makers of my previous school’s defunct language lab, which was a pile of junk even when it wasn’t in its near-constant state of dysfunction.

There’s so much wrong with this email, I almost don’t know where to begin. Almost.

…

COMIC SANS??

It’s certainly not something I’ll be doing with my own phone any time soon, but these makeshift projector stands at a recent social were certainly… innovative.

Sadly, the projector was almost completely dead, putting out only a fraction of its normal brightness…

…you could say it was… on its last legs.

There are times when you just come across blog posts that you wish you had written or that you want to get to a wider audience.

After a brief chat with one blogger I have come to admire he has agreed to allow me to syndicate his blog on mine.

Using the auto-blog plugin for wordpress has made this pretty simple too, so I get to geek a bit at the same time.

So … With no further ado … Ladies and gentlethings of the interweb I present you with The Angry Technician.

In a recent article by Miles Berry, over on Merlin John’s site Agent4Change, Miles raises a number of really good points about saving money in this year of austerity … but there are a few points that still get me about Open Source and an almost blind faith that it can solve nearly all our problems (actually … it can solve a significant amount and Miles is realistic enough to point out limitations, possible other costs, etc but that is another post for another time).

My issue is with point 5 of the article which I have copied below

5. Take control of your Internet connection. Compare the cost of your LA/RBC provided service and that of commercial providers, and check you really do need any additional benefits that you may be paying for. How often do you need access to the NEN? This seems to be what’s hinted at in the DfE’s description of the second Harnessing Technology grant cut, as giving schools time to plan to “reconfigure their broadband”. I think it interesting that hardly any independent schools opt in to RBC services. Use Squid as a proxyserver to speed up multiple access to the same pages. Explore some of the filtering options for Squid, such as the kind-of-open-source DansGuardian, which is based on Squid. Think carefully about your filtering policy, bearing in mind that children have a right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.”

Yes … the recent cuts are an attack on things like RBCs and the capital investment that goes into these projects and how they are now into the ‘revenue’ phase (your running costs should always be cheaper that the capital projects which will include the setup costs and running costs during that project period), but have you noticed how there is no noted revenue grant (either a new one or increase in others)? Strange that … Anyway, back to Miles’ point.

I’ll let RBCs talk about the other services they provide such as DNS, website hosting, email filtering and email hosting, video conferencing, firewalls and security … they already have a lot of collateral on that and they will have their own job cut out to get people to realise the the things which are taken for granted.

Instead I will focus on why I have a lot of respect for those schools who run their own filters, have their own firewalls and spend considerable time and effort on doing things as efficiently as possible. And I will also mention those that try and miss to hit the objectives (often through no fault of their own).

Dansguardian is a fantastic piece of software from a bloke called Dan. It is the open source end of an even better solution from a company called Smoothwall. It works on the basis of filtering on phrases, regular expressions in URLs, it can whitelist and is pretty configurable. It is compatible with squidGuard blacklists … and this is where my problem starts. Filter lists generated by the community come from *all* of the community … and what your needs are, they are likely to differ to others. Whilst the lists are really good for protection against porn (amazing how eager people are to search for porn … and then block it of course!) they can be lacking in other areas such as hate speak, weapons, drugs, violence, crime, malicious scripts … and then you get things randomly (apparently) blacklisted because someone doesn’t like it. Those of use who have run their own mail servers know what a pain it can be have to deal with RBL lists where your mail server is regarded as a spam machine … even though it isn’t and it is because someone has made a complaint! The same applies here … you run the risk of sites you know and love suddenly becoming blocked … on a regular basis. You get what you pay for when it comes to filtering lists … and that is why there are commercial add-ons to ISA and why DansGuardian is not as effective as Smoothwall’s Network Guardian / Schools Guardian.

Many schools who make use of DansGuardian are fine with this and have staff who can manage it and can whitelist the required sites … and this is my next sticking point. If you get a lot of problems with sites then the de facto method of dealing with it is to lock down and release it slowly. This means blocking everything and whitelisting sites. Yes … a step back for some schools to consider whitelisting resources instead of managing them effectively.

Now this is also an issue I have with people running Microsoft ISA in schools … who rely on a few key phrases and hope it works. They might turn off as many categories from the RBC filters as they can and say they are dealing with it all in house. The thing I would then ask is what are the criteria do they have for adding sites to a whitelist or blacklist? Who verifies that the changes to the phrases which are filtered are correct? I’ve already posted about how it is not the technology but the people and how it is managed. If the schools are going to move to something that definitely requires more management then they had better make sure they know what they are getting into.

And then we get to who will manage it … is it an admin task which teachers will not do? Is it something for pastoral staff to update? Is it soley done by tech support? You do have tech support available every day don’t you? The interface for Dansguardian is not exactly user friendly IMHO … I’ve seen worse (don’t get me started on vle editing interfaces!) and when it comes to reports you are talking about really knowing what you are doing … because make no mistake, out of the box systems take time and considerable effort to get right and be suitable to get infomration when you want it.

I can hear the Ubuntu hordes massing at my door telling me it is easy … yes, if you have picked up the skills and I won’t even start on the fun you can get into trying to compile things in *nix (and yes … for some of us it is fun, but not for everyone). I am not saying that ISA (or other products) are any better for this … a school I know recently had performance problems with their internet connection after moving to use an ISA box in-house … and it was also using a filter in front of that … so all web traffic went through the filter and then to the ISA … which had the default maximum of 600 connections per minute set. Yes, that means that only 10 connections a second from a computer could be made to the internet … all because of default settings being missed.

Open Source Software may be free … as in no licence costs and open to be developed by yourself and others … but the other costs of management, hardware, training and risk play a large part here. Out of the schools I have worked with who are not on RBC connections most use commercial products to protect themselves and the choice not to be with the RBC is mainly political, not cost. They also accept that they have to deliver *all* their own services including email, email filtering, etc … and this also involves spending significant money on a decent firewall to protect their network … and this is before we get into the fact that a ‘cheap’ commercial connection might not get you the quality of connection you get from an RBC. Very important if you live outside of a large urban area.

So yes, consider that you can make use of Open Source Software to supplement what you are doing on your connection … I love the textual filtering on some filtering products to allow you to score and filter keywords … but accept that this is small scale tweaking to target a particular issue (like the growth of new slang for insults) and the integration ISA has into the Active Directory making it more flexible when restricting a particular group of users … but also consider the time and effort to do all of this, the other things you will use … and no matter how much someone tells you OSS is free, there will be some costs.

And whilst we are talking about sharing and communities … I’ll hold my hands up to when I was a vocal person working in a school arguing that the idea of smoothing costs for RBC connections across schools was unfair to us as an individual school. Now that I am at an LA I can honestly see how selfish that was. Surely if we are a community and trying to share and look after one another then it is unfair to pull out of a scheme designed to give equity of access and not penalise the rural schools? I know people will say that the answer should be solved by the market, but since the Govt thinks we don’t need to invest anymore in the infrastructure then they must also accept that some areas are more costly that others for connections. Are we not just supporting the break up of this (NEN) community? Oh … it is because schools should have control and not LAs? Ah … that is a different discussion to have then and not about saving money, but power, control and politics.

Ladies and Gents, the cynic has left the building.

I’ve already posted about why I like Sharepoint so much and it was quite interesting to spend Friday in Warwick with Mike Herrity and co presenting about Sharepoint in Education.

Mike’s blog goes into full details about who presented and what on, but here is my presentation as I looked more towards sharepoint 2010 as a business tool.

Why on earth would you take a business point of view for something that should be about education? Have a watch of my presentation below and I hope it explains my thinking a bit more.

I hope to spend more time on this in the coming months … to cover areas such as using Sharepoint for managing department or SLT meetings, tracking of performance management … there are lots of things to cover in fact.

If you have any clear examples of sharepoint as a management tool feel free to drop a note on here too.

A short post today, partly in preparation for a longer review of the courses from the FITS Foundation, but mainly in response to Ray Fleming’s latest blog post.

One of the areas we covered on the FITS : Advanced course (also known as the FITS : Manager course) was about financial management … but, as with all of the areas covered, it was not dealt in isolation. For all of us on the course it was a good chance to look at all financial aspects which impact on IT / ICT in schools.

I’m not surprised that Ray has pointed out that 33% of headteachers could not state what percentage of their budget was spent on ICT … but I think that is more a reflection on the honesty of those headteachers and the complexity of what we are talking about.

Let us look at what we could include in this budget.

• Desktops
• Laptops
• Servers
• Peripherals (printers, cameras, scanners, etc)
• Audio – Visual equipment (projectors, IWBs, speakers, DVD players, etc)
• Consumables (toners, backup tapes, mice, etc)
• Educational software
• Contracted support
• Network Infrastructure

And then you get into some things that people might not have initially included in this pot.

• Broadband connection
• Broadband / LA services (email, web filtering, etc)
• Management Information Systems
• Staffing
• Reprographics (and perhaps the paper in the printers)
• Telephony
• CCTV

… and they might not have included things that individual departments buy from their own pot.

And what about the energy consumption … surely that should be included in the pot too.

So … I am actually surprised that it was only 33% who said they didn’t know, as I didn’t think the Becta survey quite drilled down as far as some of the above, but I will be suggesting to my local schools if they can use the above as the basis of their planning. It should help with those looking at virtualisation as an option which might help to reduce the energy consumption as well as helping to establish long term, sustainable plans for funding IT, or at least being able to manage the impact of some investment in refreshing equipment is put off for the next year or so.

As most people will have seen Becta will be cut as a cost saving measure by the Conservative – Lib Dem coalition government. There is no published timescale on this but a number of people have said they have been told it is by November 2010 (myself included).

As with many others who have experienced working with Becta over the years I would like to thank the various staff there and others who have worked closely with them (and yes … that even means consultants). I have had the pleasure of having input from Becta in 5 roles. The first was way back with I was an IT Technician (in a pretty forward thinking school) and I was able to attend various events include expert workshops and the Annual Research Conference. It shaped my view of technology as a tools for education, and with things like FITS for me to be an enabler. Next I experienced then as a middle leader … a network manager. They allowed me to talk on a level playing field with teachers and other Heads of Departments. As a Senior Leader their work helped give direction for my school, especially around the Self-review Framework and as an LA worker the advice, guidance and clarity means I can cascade this down to schools and support schools moving forward with using technology.

The fifth one? Why, it was their support (and patience) with EduGeek. The first EduGeek Conference in Corby had Becta staff coming along for the keynote and happy to take an ear-bashing from a bunch of techies … EduGeek members and mods (I don’t think we even consider calling ourselves admins, never mind staff!) had the chance to air their views about the IT Infrastructure documentation … I was invited to give input into the advice and guidance to schools on Data Protection.

So … yes, I have a healthy respect for what they have done over the years and I am really thankful for it.

Do I think some things could have worked out better? Of course I do … some of the targets they were given were political.

But where do we go from here?

It will take some time for all the projects to run their course, for legal and contractual requirements to be sorted out and for elements of work they do to be taken on by others. People should not make the mistake that just because the organisation is gone the work will finish. Until Becta, DforE and others sort this out we are all down to speculation.

However, there are some things we do know and can do. If nothing else, make yourself familiar with the Becta site and materials. Even if you have thought “They don’t have anything to offer me,” still go and have a look. Dig into the research section to see some of the background work done over the years, because just as the Laptops for Teachers and IWB projects were large funded projects they came from small beginnings.

Have a look at the different schools and teachers who have won awards from Becta. See if you can track them down today. Are they still in successful schools? Are they now senior leaders? Do they work for LAs? Consultants? See if you can speak to other schools they have worked with? Can you find some good practice you can use.

Look at how they examined emerging technologies. What criteria did they use for seeing whether there would be benefits to learning and/or teaching? Look at how they took on some of the procurement frameworks. See how they worked out how to challenge companies to get the best deals they could, even if it meant doing a bit of a deal with the devil at times.

Look at the technical documentation. Examine how it has changed over the years … try to spot where it is going to change again. Look at the work, both historical and fresh, on open standards. Will this have an impact on what you choose to use in the future?

Why all this effort though?

Simple … you don’t know what bit of this work you may have to do yourself, or find someone else who is already doing it with whom you can work with. Some part may be taken on by other groups … some might get dropped and schools / LAs / Companies have to do it themselves … but start preparing now for what your requirements for the future are and learn how to plan.

If you are a school which doesn’t engage with stuff then this will mean nothing to you … you will still plan poorly, have a panic every few years because you have a sudden bill for hardware, and you will see computers as something to keep kids quiet with.

If you are a very proactive teacher / school / LA then you will be happy because you can gloat about being able to do it all yourself anyway and will be able to tell everyone how wonderful you are … but please start talking to others about how that can be effectively shared without costing the earth.

If you are the other group … those who happily work away, waiting for the early adopters to do their bit and learn from the experience of others, who know that in the mountain of priorities which is education you sometimes have to put things to one side and pick up a bit later or you have to get the advice and info from others … well, now is the time to start developing those networks of support and advice. Stuff that could have been cascaded down via the LA might not be there because some of that stuff will have come from Becta …

As you form those links then let me know … I will be doing the same and happy to share mine with you. I’ll also happily share any news about what I find out about the future of what is happening with technology in education … and I hope you will do the same for me and others.