A Duck for Good: Mass Chromebook Enrollment

[Ataphes]

Good afternoon, gents

So before I go into it I'll start off by saying thank you to those involved in the creation of this magical device, I'm pretty sure it's going to save me from adding more holes to my Carpal Tunnel punch card. To the point though, I work in public education and we recently we ordered 5,000 Samsung Chromebook devices. If anyone knows anything about the enrollment process on these devices it is an absolute nightmare. A lot of typing and manual input which is prone to human error. I'm mostly opening this topic so it will hopefully get crawled by a search engine for the other poor sods having to deal with a massive Chromebook enrollment.

The question I'm posing to the community here (since I already bought the device and I'm frothing at the mouth waiting for my UPS tracking to update) is has anyone else here had any success using these devices with Chrome OS? I'm going to test later today to see if it will accept USB keyboard input from the enrollment screen. I'm pretty sure it does since this guy: http://haytech.blogspot.com/2014/05/automating-chromebook-enrollment-with.html does it with a teensy but I'm wondering if anyone has found any specific hangups with ChromeOS and this device.

I'm in the process of writing a script for the enrollment process pre-emptively and I'll share it once I have it together for anyone else dealing with the Google Apps enrollment process and is in dire need of some sort of automation for it.

But yeah, basic gist of the thread, lets talk about putting this Duck to work for good, and what other difficult automation tasks you've used it for. Sorry for being all over the place with this thread. Just need to get everything out in the open so :words words words:

[Ataphes]

Just for definitive confirmation, ChromeOS recognizes an external keyboard in around a seconds time. The issue I'm coming up against at the moment is that for the WiFi selection prompt, the network I'm trying to connect to sometimes gets forced down the list by a blank "Searching for Networks" context option. I'm going to look into seeing if I can get the device to manually join the wireless network by name and go from there. If only I had a bunch of USB ethernet adapters, life would be so much easier.

Back to the point. Completed script coming soon! If others show interest I'll keep up with my updates. I'd really like to have more people find and use this device for this express reason because honestly it takes Chromebooks from being completely impractical in large numbers to EZPZ in no time flat.

[Oli]

I'd be more tempted to use an Arduino based emulated keyboard device for this kind of thing (teensy, leonardo,...). That way you have i/o pins so you can make a more robust enrollment program by adding buttons/leds/etc.

For example:

1) Wait for drivers.

2) Run first part of enrolment process then pause.

3) User manually chooses network and then clicks button on arduino.

4) Run second part of enrolment process.

I suppose you could do this with a ducky by doing the first part of the enrollment on a batch of machines and then changing the payload.

[dankgus]

Has anybody made any progress with enrolling Chromebooks using the Rubber Ducky? We are trying to accomplish this today but we are getting hung up on the 3 key combination "CTRL ALT e"

Any suggestions?

While we have tried several combos, we have so far been unsuccessful.

CTRL ALT e

CTRL-ALT-e

CONTROL-ALT-e

CTRL-ALT e

These are some of the unsuccessful combos we have tried. If I plug in a standard off the shelf US keyboard, the CTRL-ALT-e combo works manually.

ANY TIPS APPRECIATED!

THANKS!

--Dan

[Ataphes]

I'm at home right now but I'll post the script I used tomorrow if I get a chance. I'm surprised anyone actually wanted to know!

PS the deployment went swimmingly. It's still tedious but it's markedly less tedious than typing everything. The worst part becomes the unboxing and reboxing.

But yeah, I'll get it up here tomorrow and comment it out if I have the chance.

[dankgus]

THANKS!

I would love to see what you are doing.

We ended up solving the mystery 3 key combo with the following:

CTRL-ALT e

Which, by the way, we were SURE we had already tried! It could have just been human error, I'm just happy it is working now.

After watching a chromebook enroll itself, with the generous delays in place, it is clear that it may not actually be faster to enroll using this procedure. However, it is certainly less intense than running around a room full of chromebooks and furiously typing.

THANKS!

--Dan

[drclean]

Id love to see the script if you could post it ?!?