Day One Hundred 'n' Eighteen

Newbie is temporarily unavailable at work due to one thing and another. This is RUBBISH as we're very busy. He's going to temporarily be replaced with the IT Assistant (who is getting no admin access unless his life depends on it).

Citrix people coming in Monday. Wireless people coming in Tuesday.

30 MacBooks ordered and ready to clutter up the office.

Day One Hunderd 'n' Sixteen

Today, I traced the networking which feeds the servers / Internet connection so that I could mark it all up, making it easier to fault find when there is a problem. Doing this, I found a problem. Our student file server was set up with an ethernet bond ages ago, to give 2Gbps. This would be fine, except The Last Guy plugged the other end of the bond in to ports that weren't bonded! I've sorted it out now, so network throughput should double, in theory. This may speed up the slow Network Home performance.

I also made some changes to the RAID unit which houses the kid's work. This has two 2Gbps fibre links in to the server - forced at 2Gbps rather than auto negotiating. I've also told it the RAID unit is connected to a server, rather than letting it work that out. This should improve things too.

I've ALSO turned on the drives' cache feature....to increase performance some more.

In other news, I added 6x750GB drives to this RAID. It has taken control of all of them and tells me they are in use, even though I haven't even formatted them yet. This is rubbish.

Beating a couple of companies down on a quote for 30 MacBooks. Nearly ready to purchase with the cheapest price being £535 ish per unit. Bargain.

Busy busy busy.

Day 114.5

So today I had to go to work to get all the systems back up and running after some builders put power off to the whole site this morning. As I like to do when people aren't using the systems, I had a tidy and sort out of cables and networking......

• Our main domain controller was plugged in to a KVM switch but the keyboard and mouse didn't work (as the last Net Mgr told me). It turns out if you plug them in the right ports, they do work. So that's fixed.
  
• Had a look at one of our 3com switches and looked up the manual. Turns out its 100mb uplink, then 10mb per port. Macs don't like 10mb ethernet as it's ancient! I've replaced this with an Intel 460T switch - another old and previously managed switch, but it should temporarily work.
• Another switch holding up the network was a cheapo 16 port desktop switch. I replaced this with a spare Intel 510T switch. However, this has 3 port lights stuck on....so I'm guessing it's knackered. I'm going to buy 2 or 3 new switches next week so any forthcoming reliability problems go away before they start.
• Our old internal web server was removed from our server rack and put to one side - ready to plug in if need be, but more ready to be retired
• MCX settings stopped working randomly. In the time it took me to panic, check the logs, research the issue, and panic again, it started working. I also did a 10.5.6 update on this server. Seems to be working now.
• Replaced a HUGE UPS with a smaller one to power our core switches so the servers can do network shutdowns when the power goes off. Pulled out a load of power cables that didn't go anywhere, marked up the ones we do use.
• Checked our public server was happy after I pulled out a SAS drive from it. It was.

My coffee is a bit strong. Needs more milk.

Unfortunately, Remote Access seems to be down for web services AGAIN, but apart from that it's all fine.

Day One Hundred 'n' Thirteen

The meltdown has been stopped.

34 machines have been returned to a local home set-up under Mac OS 10.4. I have also prevented the computers from being overly keen and indexing any home folders by nuking Spotlight so that it doesn't even load. This leaves the other 35 new machines running network home folders, and that's fine. I also tried putting a 10.4 image on a 10.5 only-booting iMac. It works, except it doesn't have the right sound drivers, so it won't do sound. Bum.

Anyway, this slow down wasn't down to the server as the network throughput was minimal (did you know that when netbooting a Mac the server will pump out 110MB, not bits, actual BYTES per second over a gigabit connection), RAM was fine, processors were fine. SSHing in to the client, that was fine too. I'm thinking it might be something to do with out network set-up. As a result, I've ordered 2 books on networking to try and learn something!

The Web Tech made Moodle backup to a NAS box. This is the only good thing about Moodle - the fact it backs up.

It's that time of year where we need to spend our remaining budgets. I compared my version of the accounts to The Big Bosses version. He's spent £6,000 of my cash somewhere, so now I only have £15,000 left to play with, £2k of which has gone on some XServe RAID drive modules which are turning in to rocking horse poo to find. After doing some sums and re-jigging our drives we will have 9500GB of storage for staff and students. They don't produce even half that yet, but it's futureproofing. Eventually we will need to up backup space but I don't anticipate that for well over a year.

It's also been decided that we're going to buy 2 laptop trolley things each with 15 MacBooks on on a shoestring budget - 30 laptops and 2 trolleys for £12,000? It's going to be tight if not impossible. I have a consultant working on his most competitive quote for this.....

....which leads me on to my next project of finally implementing some sort of decent wireless networking. I have a guy sending me info on a patented super duper way of doing it, which is installed in a nearby school, so I might go and visit them one day to see how they are getting on. This will cost a fair whack of money - at least £8,000 to get started and around £25,000 to cover the whoooole school.

That's about it for now. Until I start re-doing the Media Studies edit machines to make them actually useable!

Day One Hundred 'n' Ten

Oh Cock.

I experienced the melt down of the IT system courtesy of Microsoft Office on Friday. Machines with network home folders take an age to launch it with most machines hanging on 'configuring Excel'. The other 100 machines with local home folders die when you try and browse files on the server when you do File--> Open. The server wasn't overloaded CPU wise, and network throughput was around 15MB per second, which isn't that high considering its 2x 1Gb ethernet.

Anyway, today, I set the kiddy file server up with 6GB RAM instead of 2GB. Set it to tame it's logs, allegedly disabled creation of .DS_Store files on clients and server shares, and completely disabled Spotlight (which is an arse but we'll get to that shortly). Things didn't improve noticeably. I did spot some kids trying to do iMovie over the network, so I rang up their teacher and moaned that they can't do this.

Next thing I looked in to was the fact a corrupt Microsoft User Data folder in a user's home space could cause issues with Office 2004. So, I made a script to find and delete this folder. HOWEVER, it didn't work. It found them, just didn't delete them. So I had to search manually....except searching ie, Spotlight, was full-on disabled. So I had to delete them manually. Some kids had links to /tmp for this folder, some had complete folders, and some had folders that were incomplete. They've all gone now, so we shall see how this affects things tomorrow.

The Other Tech finished off a new version of 10.4 for Intel Macs with local homes set up on it, so we can install that on half of the offending Macs as soon as we can, theoretically.

Also updated our XServe RAID's firmware so it can see drives over 500GB. I'd love to crank the storage up on this. We have about 180GB free for half the kids, and 140GB for the other half. I'm worried that we'll run low at a time that isn't convenient....such as just before the exams. It'd be nice to make a couple of volumes with some 1TB drives at some point.

Also, I'm due to get started on an extra curricular project soon for year 8. Did it last year and it was good fun!

Day One Hundred 'n' Five

The new guy has not resigned yet. This breaks with tradition. He also said today that he looks forward to coming to work. How marvelous.

MS Office seemed to break on Friday when I was off. The Other Tech thinks he's fixed it with a .plist. We've tested it out today simulating loads of people logging on, but the real test will come when a class arrives (when it is all likely to cock up).

Backed up a teacher's work on to an external hard drive. It broke. She lost some videos. She will not be happy and will probably gallop off in a mood. Crap

I have to design and make a religious calendar for our digital signage and website. There are SO many religious events its silly! I've also found out I have to improve kiddy communication, with some staff or something. I'm off now!

Day One Hundred 'n' One

New guy started yesterday. Due to a power cut and general confusion, the system was "down" as everyone calls it for most of the morning. So, showing him round was a bit pressured! The Fat Man came to recycle our old computers, so we have marginally more storage space now.

The new software image roll-out seems to work well. No staff or students have called IT support with any major problems so far. There are still a few quirks to sort out like some machines missing printers, and one or two machines not having a serial code for random bits of software, but on the whole it's fine.

Quite a few staff dislike the new Moodle skin the web guy has put on. It does look better but I think many staff just oppose change. A lot have complained that it doesn't have a link to Google on it...even though they have a google search box in their browser (!)

Anyway, new guy seems alright. The learning curve is going to be steep but as much as I can talk at him he won't learn unless he does stuff. He hasn't resigned yet, which is a good sign.

Rang an IT company today to get them to visit me to discuss our major server upgrade in the summer. They will meet me in 10 days so I can explain what I want doing.

After talking to The Big Boss about my job, it seems that no one thinks I'm rubbish at my job. Reading between the lines, he doesn't know what's going on, so I have to keep him updated with what I'm doing so he can relay how good his department is to the Head.

Day Ninety Nine

We've netbooted the entire world.

Ok, not quite, but there are only a handful of machines left to do! This includes a few iMac G4 machines which do not boot from the network without dying. They share the same GeForce 2MX video chipsets as the G4 towers which would not boot either. I aim to get the new IT technician to install these via CD when he joins us next week. Everything seems to work properly, connect to home folders, authenticate against Active Directory and get managed preferences. Good times.

The digital signage systems have also been reinstalled. I have the school logos running on them with transitions to help stop burn in. I wish someone would give us some content for the damn screens!

Ran out of time to get any Video on Demand up. I'm going to try and do a load on Monday in between going to a 2 hour training talk on fire safety, and, training the new IT technician.

Still need to find out who thinks I'm rubbish at my job...