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!