Day Ninety Six

The netbooting is ON! We've done over 150 machines so far with the only problems being:

-Quicksilver and MDD G4 towers Kernel Panic when booting from the NetInstall set. I have a hunch this is to do with video drivers as it mentions things about graphics IO kext's.

-The 10.4 Intel image will not boot on GMA graphics machines. We have at least a room of these, so they've had to be upgraded to 10.5 until we can fix the problems with these GMA iMacs.

Tomorrow, we should have nearly 200 machines done and dusted.

Moodle is looking good, and a few other web services have been migrated to this server too. 

A big pile of CRTs were moved out of a music room ready for collection on Monday by the recyclers.

Plasma screen controllers have been wiped and updated with a slim install of Mac OS 10.4 and iLife '08. 2 more to reinstall. Also added audio to one of the screens for an incredible mindblowing multimedia show. Amazing.

Emailed The Big Boss' boss today to sort out plans for our summer upgrade. As expected he has told me to go ahead with it, and that the school IT group does not need to discuss how many users the new system should support. Me - 1, Big Boss - 0.

Day Ninety One

Moodle on Windows is off. It turns out there is a lack of authentication going on, so the web tech has advised we stick with Ubuntu (although I should really write down how to change the auth incase it needs re-binding to our AD server in the summer....). Anyway, he's already tarted it up nicely.

Video on Demand has been moved off the Moodle server on to another server that has 900GB free! Should keep up with demand for some time! Just have to re-author the links on the pages to point to the new video store.

The new music block has been data wired and goes back to the old cabinet, which has been replaced. I've patched in their old machines and left any unused ports disconnected. At some point soon, I expect the installers will put in a patch panel to terminate the new data runs.

Reorganised our stocks of spares in the office. It's now organised, instead of in a big pile. This is good.

Worked with The Other Tech on netinstalling eMacs today. If you up the number of NFS daemon threads it will let you boot more machines at once. We've left 30 going (server is dishing out 24MB per sec, apparently) instead of 8. If this is reliable, tomorrow we're going to try booting 60 odd machines at once, and hope it installs them with Mac OS over Xmas. Worst case scenario is that it fails, leaving all of them unbootable....oops.

Chucked out some redundant hardware today - should be collected at the start of the new year, but we don't have a central location to store it all in, which is a problem.

Oh, and Safari on the latest 10.5 image, which was tried and tested to be working fine, now dies once it's been deployed. I'm sure this happens just to spite us. Anyway, in the room with these offending machines, the printers have been relocated and cabled up.

Oh, and one of our NAS boxes, which had the plug pulled on it rather than being shut down gracefully, is wrecked and will not load it's OS from ROM. It's now just an expensive paperweight.

Day Ninety

Today, the big staff shared space nearly ran out of space. So I put a new SAS drive in and moved everyone's stuff on to it. Took around 90 mins. Also moved the FileMaker databases over and sorted out the FileMaker Service to point to the new location.

Started work on the new Moodle set-up with the ex-tech. It's a PAIN. Moodle is on a server with expensive SAS drives which are only 146GB, and we have 1 spare. So if we make a new infinitely better Moodle without breaking the old one, we only have a single drive to put it on (ie, no RAID). If we want a 300GB drive for future-profing, they are £400 each. The old Moodle is set up in Linux in geek mode and its hard to copy the stuff off to a backup location as it refuses to copy properly. GRR!

We've decided to set up a temp new Moodle on an old Xeon server which has 500GB of SATA RAID. However this was slow when it was last tested out, so if we can't tune the PHP and Apache services, then its going to be crap. The current Moodle server has a fat processor and 4GB RAM, so it's ideal apart from its expensive and relatively small drives, and the fact we don't have enough spare SAS drives to set up a working config with the fail-safe of going back to the old ones!

Acquired some new furniture today to organise the office a bit better.

The new ICT suite is getting blasted with a shiny new 10.5.6 image, so that should be amazing next term.

Day Eighty Five

Today we had a second candidate in for the generic IT Tech position. He didn't seem as keen as the original candidate was about learning more in the post. He also said he "had varying degrees of success" when working on computers in his spare time which didn't sound too good when you're meant to sell yourself at a job interview. Myself and The Other Tech decided to go for the original candidate as he had more informal experience of IT (neither candidate had much), and seemed keener to learn more on the job. The Big Boss seemed to have reservations about this decision - particularly that he would not be reliable as he had to catch the bus to work. I pointed out that The New Guy manages to do this each day. He then went on to say that his employment history was short. I said that this could be down to temping on many fixed term contracts rather than not being able to settle at a job. As the guy was keen and interested I put that possibility aside and went out on a limb to offer him a chance. The next thing he said was that he'd received an email from the agency saying that today's candidate was better, except it didn't say that as you had to read between the lines. I asked for a copy of the message to take in to consideration while mulling over both CVs, but I was never sent it. After lunch, he reluctantly agreed to contact the original candidate to offer the post.

Later that day he caught me on my own and wanted to make certain that we were sure we wanted the original candidate. He said he still had reservations, but didn't know what they were. So I said "you don't like the first candidate, but you can't say why?". In my mind you can't dismiss someone because someone else has a mystery reason they can't put their finger on against employing them. He then started saying, again, how "reading between the lines" the agency we use were "steering" us towards today's candidate. I went through the pros and cons again, then another member of staff came in so The Big Boss left. Seeing as I'd met both candidates and been with them for around an hour each I was very confused how The Big Boss had a different impression of the first candidate from the agency, so, I rang the agency to seek clarification. The agency said that both candidates were suitable, and that the original one was more forthcoming, today's one was more shy to start off with etc.

The Big Boss returned saying he'd received a strange email from the agency stating that they were not promoting one candidate over the other and apologised if it came across that way. I came clean that I had contacted them to see what this "reading between the lines" business was about. The Big Boss did not like this and said that "if you do that your fingers will get bitten off". Finally, after reading a 3rd CV which we dismissed, The Big Boss said that I must not contact the agency and that "I will make life difficult" if I do. He made out that doing such a think means I may not trust him, but I insisted that I only called them to seek clarification as I had not had any of the apprehensions he had, and that he would not explain what the "reading between the lines" comments meant.

Oh well. I bet after all this the guy will have found another job! If not, I think he's due to start Weds / Thursday this week on a 4 week trial.

If someone has a reason not to give someone a shot, then you SAY, not say "I have a reason but I don't know what it is". Ok, if I'm wrong, and this guy is terrible, then you learn by your mistakes. After all, this is my first appointment decision. The guy could be great! We shall see. Secondly, I don't appreciate being told that my fingers will be bitten off, or that I will make life difficult, as these could be construed as bullying. Especially when said without eye contact (he was reading the CV we'd dismissed) in a very bassy tone, when standing up as I was sitting down.

Oh, and Terastation boxes don't support serving files over HTTP. Lacie boxes don't support serving unauthenticated over HTTP......so I think we're looking at a random server machine with big disks and Apache installed. 

Day Seventy Five

I knew I'd find this hard to keep up! A lot has happened since the last blog. Here are the highlights:

1) Had a meeting with contractors, project manager and people from the LEA about the new building. One phase of it is due to be handed over in 8 weeks - with the networking going in within 3 weeks, however it turns out some of it is not up to LEA spec

2) Took LEA people on a tour of the older site to look at where they need to adjust the networking to facilitate the new build

3) Found out that our core switches are going to be upgraded from 7 year old Cisco units to HP PoE gigabit switches. I have to arrange a period of downtime for this upgrade, taking the entire network down. They plan to move us from a ring network to a star at the same point.

4) Had 3 people apply for the ICT Technician job. I was asked by The Big Boss when I could interview the first guy, until I pointed out that he had no IT qualifications, and no mention of even playing computer games in his interest section (duh). The second can only do 3 days a week, but I've met him and he seems a good candidate. The final one lacks academic qualifications, but has the 'hobbies' experience. I'm down to interview them this week, which I will wing as no one has told me how to interview anyone!! I asked for some advice but The Big Boss just said he'd take over - not going to help me learn, so I said I'd do it alone.

5) Started building new Mac install images - 10.4.11 and 10.5.5 on PPC and Intel. Also changing our Applications structure and LocalHomes scripts to make the machines easier to use

6) Spoke to a Mac consultant about the problems in the new IT suite - turns out 10.5.4 had a bug in it's Active Directory stuff, which is why the machines loose their bindings sporadically when in use. This should be solved with my new image.

7) Replaced all the staff room PCs with 2.6GHz Pentium 4s instead of 1.7s

8) Caught up with the backlog of Video on Demand authoring, although I'm still looking for a new server to host the files. If I get Flash Streaming working, we'll use that, if not I'm tempted to put them on a Buffalo TerraStation Pro (2TB storage) and have them served as progressive download.

Need to get on top of software licensing again. An audit is due.