Managing Google Classroom with GAM and Powershell

Part of my job requires me to actively manage our instance of Google Classroom - the adding/removal of teachers, students, changing of class owners are just a couple of the every day tasks that are required. Unfortunately, Google Classroom doesn't have an included management interface for doing this - but there is a great command line utility called "GAM" which I use to accomplish these tasks.

I looked at a few different management utilities to do this - and essentially left GAM until last as I was really after a reliable (and free) utility that had a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of command line, but unfortunately at the time I was looking there was nothing that met these requirements (and worked) for me.

GAM can be downloaded from here - they have an excellent Wiki section with detailed instructions on how to get GAM setup and running within your environment.

In subsequent blog posts I'll be covering some of the scripts/commands that I use to manage and bring some control over Google Classroom such as identifying active classes, exporting them to CSV, archiving (disabling) old classes that are no longer required, synchronising members (teachers and students) and managing/maintaining the owners of Classrooms.

I'll be executing GAM commands from within powershell to do this.

What tool do you use for managing Google Classroom? Do you wish Google would create some kind of web/graphical user interface to do this?

uTorrent - A newer version of uTorrent is already running

I've experienced this problem a few times with uTorrent - when attempting to open the application, or opening a new torrent file, the following error message is displayed;



"A newer version of uTorrent is already running. Please shut down uTorrent and try again"

After shutting down uTorrent and opening it again, the same message is displayed.

The Fix:
The issue appears to be related to uTorrent getting confused about which version it has installed, and wants to run.

Make sure uTorrent has been closed (you may need to kill the task from Task Manager)

Go to the uTorrent installation directory (usually %appdata%\uTorrent or C:\users\%username%\appdata\roaming\uTorrent) and delete the Updates folder (and everything within it). If you get an error advising the files are locked/cannot be opened, you will either need to kill the stuck uTorrent process from Task Manager, or simply restart your computer.

Try starting uTorrent again after removing the Updates folder - it should now open correctly

Mozilla Firefox - The Proxy Server is Refusing Connections

Over the past few days I have encountered a number of users reporting issues with Firefox displaying the below error page:

The proxy server is refusing connections. Firefox is configured to use a proxy server that is refusing connections.

As at the time of this blog entry being written, the issue appears to be specifically related to version 18.0 of Mozilla Firefox. By installing a previous version of Mozilla Firefox (17.0.1), we were able to resolve the problem. Version 17.0.1 can be downloaded from here (Windows version)

In the specific environment that I discovered the issue, the proxy server involved was a Client Side Proxy (CSP) Squid server. The error page above was displayed intermittently on random pages/sites, most of which were using https.

Note: If you install a previous version of Mozilla Firefox, be sure to go into the Options and disable automatic updates for Firefox, otherwise it will simply update itself to 18.0 again automatically.