Cloud Zoo Onsite

Does anyone know if the cloud zoo can be run onsite. The Education Department have banned 3rd parties from having student’s personal details on their servers. It looks like Autodesk will be blocked from being used in schools so I though it may be possible for the schools to run the licensing service. Note, this is for online learning so a LAN setup would not work.

It can work if the students can VPN into the school server.

Thanks for the input but the government does not allow vpn’s into the server.

Is it possible on the existing Cloud zoo to not provide identifiable user details, ie student2@xxx.yyy.edu.au,student1@xxx.edu.au

As far as I know none of that info is public. The student just needs a Rhino Account. That account needs an e-mail address - doesn’t need to be the student’s educational address, could be a gmail or other.

The personal info in the Rhino account is very minimal - name, country, preferred language

The administrator of the team has all the e-mail addresses of the Rhino accounts invited.

Thanks again Helvetosaur, but the child protect laws introduced would not allow any directly identifiable information stored by a 3rd party of a student, nor any ability to contact them directly, so the email and phone is out. It will be a bloodbath at the start of next year as ~ 90% of software used is now ineligible to be accessed unless the company has applied to be accredited. This has caught many schools out. Due to Fusion being free, most schools use it, but it looks like they will be black listed. I thought this might be a chance for me to get the students using something more relevant ie Rhino.

Cheers

Well, under those restrictive conditions, I guess you could end up buying a large quantity of individual licenses (schoolkit) and distributing them directly to students for working at home. Not the cheapest solution certainly, but one that complies with the ‘rules’.

Cheers yet again Helvetosaur for a bit more insight.
I’m hoping there is a sales person in Aus that we can run through the licensing issues. Hopefully we all can have a big win.

Just as a side note, the only option on the table at present is FreeCad (FFS)

Maybe @aj1 or @brian can also chime in here, and perhaps @bobmcneel might be interested in learning about the restrictions happening in your region…

Hi @des, no, Cloud Zoo cannot be run on-site, but our Zoo server software which has been around for a long time can be run on-site and does not store personal information as far as I’m concerned. It is a free download and requires a Windows PC to act as a server.

@aj1 - I think the students need to access the licenses from home, and are not allowed to VPN into the school network, so I guess that doesn’t work with the LAN Zoo.

So if they are not allowed to access the school’s network, I don’t see how running the Cloud Zoo on-site would work either. The only solution is to buy a license key for every student, but then they’d still need to give us an email address.

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Which country does this apply to. I’m curious!

I think he mentioned Australia…

Yes Australia, Certain services are available externally to the students, ie Moodle, Medial so if it is a matter of opening up the firewall on certain ports, that is not a problem.

Hi @des,

I agree with @aj1 - your best option here is to set up networking infrastructure to support the Zoo. Details about the Zoo are at https://www.rhino3d.com/zoo

Your students will need VPN access to the Zoo server (the Zoo presents its service on HTTP port 80 and has no authentication - so you definitely do not want it live on the Internet).

Your students will have Rhino installed locally, and will be configured to access your Zoo server on your local network.

When you configure the Zoo, it will be registered and activated to an email address for the school, but we will not ever see any of their information.

Please let us know if you have questions as you get this set up.

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You might also explore something like Amazon AppStream - you run the software on those desktops, and the user logs in using their web browser for online learning. But again, there’s a service in the middle that probably knows who your students are.

Thanks for the input Brian but the government does allow VPN’s into their network.

I’m afraid we don’t have a solution, sorry.