Day One Hundred 'n' Thirty Seven

Minutes after I'd finished the mammoth task of tracing the network last week, and decommissioning surplus network switches, the LEA turned up to install 2 brand new gigabit switches in to the music block extension. That's 72 ports in a block that only has 6 computers. These were removed Monday morning and added to the stock pile which now totals 15x 24 port switches, most with some form of gigabit connectivity.

Got a quote in to upgrade out Citrix servers to the latest XenApp software, 2 new servers, bit of RAM, MS Office and MS Server 2003. The cost for this is £41k. Yes. £41,000. That will sure make next year's budgeting VERY interesting.

Nothing interesting happened so far this week. It's been very mundane (helpdesk, laptop fixing, video on demand authoring, unpacking laptops) :(

Day One Hundred 'n' Thirty Five

Today I concluded my mission to disconnect all network points from the network if the are not used. This means we've reclaimed 10x 24 port network switches, 4 or 5x desktop mini switches, and binned about 5 older rack mount switches. We've now got 4 crates of cat 5 cable in stock. In most of the cabinets I've been to, I've put in red cabling to indicated ports which link to other switches, and marked where they go. I've also logged every single cat5 point in every room as we don't have a list or map of where our points actually are. Can't believe it took a week to sort out, nor how many of our resources were being wasted in terms of "unused" kit, noise and heat. I'm very pleased to announce that we no longer have any 10baseT hubs on our network, hurrah (there were only 2 left anyway...).

The Other Tech got our antivirus updating properly on our Macs, which is good.

How VERY exciting it all is.

Day One Hundred 'n' Thirty One

Today, I did some work on next year's budget. Money is going to be tighter than last year! I then worked on one of the network racks in the technology department - there are many more ports patched than have computers on the other end. To make the network more secure (and prevent anyone making a loop), I've disconnected any ports that aren't being used. Lots of the ports had also been patched with 2m or longer cables, meaning the cabinet was a mess of tangled cables. I stripped it all out and rewired it with short patch leads....this meant I could put the doors back on AND close them. I managed to pull 3x 24 port switches out of the cabinet!

In the adjacent IT room, there are many ports on the wall which are marked as damaged. I've been round and tested them. Many work fine, and the others just needed re-terminating with a new face plate. This means we can get rid of the crappy desktop switches that add another hop on to the network (this is a good thing).

Finally pulled out the 10base2 cabling in this room, with the user ports being blanked off.

Day One Hundred 'n' Twenty Nine

It's slowly starting to come together now.....very slowly. Had the first of our wireless quotations in this week, and another company visited to work out how much it will cost to replace our Citrix Metaframe Farm with XenApp. A man from the Local Authority came in to see if we can change our core switch configuration from a ring in to a star, and we can, apart from a part of the other site - which is being bulldozed within 2 years anyway. He also mentioned that other placed where they've had a new switch and topology have noticed good speed improvements.

Other bits and pieces of hardware have been arriving such as battery kits for old UPSes, new gigabit switches, and XServe RAID parts which we'll fit at some point. Finished making a new antivirus server, it works, too. Updating for Macs over http isn't working yet, but Windows side is.

The Other Tech has also fixed folder re-direction on Windows. Windows is rubbish.

Day One Hundred 'n' Twenty Six

Christmas continues. We've ordered a refurbished laser printer (fun) to help our art department. They currently print drafts of Photoshop work to a LaserJet 1320 printer, which takes an age to output pages due to the size of the document. The new printer is going to be pimped with 400MB RAM, vs 16MB, along with a much faster processor.

I sent of a batch of emails for an information access request. Those things take too long to organise.

Our old Intranet server has been retired by default as our anti-virus server packed up last week, so it's taken over that role. I need to get the AV software installed and updating the school as we're going without updates during the transition to the new server.

We received a new laptop to do network monitoring. However the monitor software is now end of life, so the company won't reset our serial key for the new machine. We've moved to a free alternative. Seems nice but is SLOW over VNC.

Upgraded one computer room to run at 1Gb, network wise. All clients connect in to the network at a gig. Hurrah.

Have a company coming in a couple of days to discuss and spec a big Citrix upgrade for our place. Finally.

Day One Hundred 'n' Twenty Three

Christmas has come - the goodies purchased with end of year money are coming in thick and fast. So far on the list we have:

• XServe RAID cache battery modules
• A 7th 750GB XServe RAID drive
• 20x 512MB SODIMMS for laptops
• A network management card for a UPS
• A laptop
• 4x 120GB laptop hard drives

The laptop is a new network monitoring station to replace a 7 year old Dell laptop that crawls. However, after filling out my Windows XP user information, it restarted to a "disk read error", so it's killed itself. It also blue screens when loading off a generic XP install disk. What a load of rubbish.

Cache batteries are so we don't loose a a potential 1GB of staff data if the UPS it's connected to cocks up (why weren't these purchased when the unit was new?!)

Tomorrow, ahead of schedule by about 2 weeks, we'll take delivery of 30 new MacBooks. I have no idea where we're going to store these at all. They will probably come when I'm in 1 of 2 meetings I have tomorrow - one about a core network upgrade to 1Gb switches, one about a wireless install.