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.