The main thing I want to be able to do is lock down the settings. I don’t want anyone to even be able to get in to them. These are school issued ipads so there is no reason to change the wifi network…why would they go outside the school? (yeah, yeah…I know they will but I don’t have to be happy about it). Another challenge is buying applications. They need to be purchased in such a manor that the school owns them. Apple has a program that you are suppose to be able to use for this. It is really cumbersome and a little difficult to explain. Essentially, my app store account would be the “program manager”. From there I can put money into accounts that are available for “program facilitators”. These folks actually buy the apps. They then get a redemption code or link to download the app. The main problem I have is that these codes are not linked to the program facilitators account. Soooo, someone could buy an app on the school’s dime and download it to their own itunes account. This isn’t a good solution, obviously because the school would no longer own the app. This is going to mean that I will have to be extremely hands on when it comes to installing these apps…something I was hoping to avoid. Through this program there is also volume discounts. You get them for 1/2 price when you buy 20…so if you are buying 10 or more it makes sense to buy 20.

The business manager also finally talked me into getting an ipad for the tech coordinator. What tipped the scales for me was seeing the blue tooth keyboard folio she had for hers. In my mind that made the ipad infinitely more useful. With this keyboard, I’ve been trying to use the ipad for what I used a laptop for. The main issue I’m having is printing. There are some other issues, where the ipad just won’t cut it, downloading files, editing pictures…etc….but for day to day stuff it’s pretty handy. There are a couple of apps I could download to print…but that highlights another problem.

I’ve bought a couple of apps from the app store, and one of the big downsides to buying an app is that you can’t really try many of them out to see if they fit for what you need. At 99 cents I don’t much care, even at a couple of bucks it’s no biggie…but one app in particular I bought for 15 bucks. It’s a remote desktop app…and it doesn’t seem to work. That sucks. There are a couple other apps I’ve bought that are kind of cool…an ssh client, a different remote desktop app, a social networking app…etc. It would be nice if they came with a 2hr trial period or something. A buddy said the android market gives you 15min to try out an app…that doesn’t seem like quite enough to me.

We also let people know over the holiday that the wife is pregnant. It’s due July 4th, Sara’s birthday. I’m hoping it doesn’t come out on that day…it would be nice for everyone to have their own “day”. If it was on my birthday I wouldn’t care, but sara’s birthday coupled with the various celebrations on the 4th…a couple days either side would be preferable I’d think. tbh, we’ll take whatever works out best with no complications. This is kind of bitter sweet for me. It would have been nice for the old man to live long enough to see the baby…but life just doesn’t’ work out that way sometimes.

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The kid and I rode up there on 4-wheelers this summer.  We stopped in and it wasn’t too bad…clearly some animals had been in there but overall not too bad.  We went up there today to clean things out…the child walks in…and there is silence.  I went around back to turn on the propane tank for the lights…I asked her how bad it was and all I heard was “love you daddy”.  I knew it wouldn’t be good.  I walked into the building and it was a crazy mess.  We’d left a couple of pillows in there and they were tore completely apart with stuffing all over the place.  The steel cabinet was tipped over, the other one was opened.  It wasn’t good, but over all it was just a mess to throw in the garbage and sweep up.  There was no food that needed to be cleaned up…then I started looking around….

There were piles of crap everywhere… literally crap, fecal matter… excrement…whatever you want to call it, it was crap.  Some of the piles looked animal sized, other’s looked more people sized…my lord.  I started looking at stuff, some were clearly from animals with the seeds and all that in it…at least one other pile didn’t look like it had any seeds.  Now to be clear, I didn’t get face to face and dig around there….I was looking from about 2 yards away.  The kid and I started looking around…trying to figure out a game plan.  It had to be a ‘coon that was in this place.  Not that it matters really at this point, it needs to be cleaned up.  We’re talking and moving things around…suddenly I tell sam to “stop moving” and back up slowly.  Behind one of the cabinets I saw a bit of fur that was unmistakably ’coon in nature.  We needed to determine if this sucker was alive or dead…well it quickly assisted us with that determination by moving slightly.  Damn, now I had to figure out how to get this thing out of here.  Now what?

The first thing that crossed my mind was rabies…for whatever reason when I see ‘coons and skunks I think rabies and get ta hell away from them.  I’m sure this was driven into my head when I was a kid…and I’m not sure how grounded in fact this is.  I think I read somewhere that bats are the most prevalent carriers of rabies…but I don’t mind watching them flying around.  In fact I like to see them around…help keep the bugs under control.  Being the turtle mountain hillbilly I am..naturally I did -not- have a gun in the truck.  Later when relaying this story to my ma she asked me “how the hell do you not have a gun in the truck?”  It’s pretty simple actually…it’s hard to say what vehicle I will be taking to work (at the school) on any given day…so I don’t keep guns and ammo (or booze) in any of them.  I could just drive one every day…but the other one needs to be run sometimes as well.  So, what the kid and I did was prop the door open and headed back to the house for a couple guns (4 mile run).  As I was driving away I realized I had turned on the heat in the cabin (propane) so why would he leave?

As we come back it turns out he had moved…he turned just enough to be looking me right in the eyes across the room as I walked in the door.  Anyone who has seen ‘coons at night in the headlights know how brightly those eyes reflect…it’s kind eerie actually.  When I was looking at him (or her) it was hidden behind the door of the steel cabinet a little bit, so with the .45 pistol it would have been a really awkward shot…so I elected to use the .22 rifle…I also didn’t want to use the .45 since it was going to be a shot inside the building.  I told the kid to get outside…I stood up a bit and shot.  Suddenly all hell broke loose, that thing started flopping and going crazy.  I hustled out the door and cocked the .45 for when he worked his way outside.  The noise coming from inside the building was crazy.  I told people it sounded like a Sumo wrestler trying on tights in a china shop…crazy amount of noise.

Finally things settled down and the noise stopped.  I came around the corner and the little sucker had worked his way out from behind the cabinet to under one of the bunks and died.  I told the kid to come in and we again started forming a game plan to clean things up.  We started moving things around a bit.  On the way home to get the guns the kid had asked about why it would come in the building…etc.  Normal kid questions.  I told her it could have had little ones in there so they might be hiding in there somewhere too.  I told her they would be about 1/2 the size of that thing or about the size of our 1 year old cats.  At the time I didn’t know it was an adult, so this was all speculation.  After we saw it was full grown she started asking about little ones and so forth.  I told her to look around a bit but don’t reach under anything…etc.  She stops suddenly “there is one!”  Right behind the same cabinet the “mama” was behind we could see what looked like a small tail.  I tried to look behind there but it was too close to the wall to be able to see anything.  I told the kid to go outside, I had to move the cabinet and I wasn’t sure what it would do.

I moved the cabinet and tried to look back there…sure enough one of the little suckers was staring me right in the face.  It looked like only one so I should be alright.  Again, since it was inside I was going to use the .22.  I got the gun back there…wedged myself in a spot where I could shoot and gave him a round.  It popped him in the head and he starts going ape chips.  I got up off the floor…again all I could think of was “rabies”.  And this sucker…just as big if not bigger than the first one…comes -walking- around the corner.  Not running, not staggering…-walking- around the corner after taking a round to the head.  It walked outside and I could see it leaving a blood trail.  The kid tells me “it’s under the blue chair!”.  (we have a blue chair outside of the shack…it’s an old bus seat that they got decades ago for nothing).  I come outside, the child is sitting on top of my truck.  Not in the box…she is sitting on top of the cab of the truck….  I get her down in to the box, toss her the .22 and pull out the .45.  I don’t see him under the chair…but there under the shack between the chair and the galvanized garbage can he’s staring at me.  I gave him a round with the .45 this time…whablammo!  He staggers a bit…flops under the shack…and nothing.  I assume he’s dead but I’m not going under there to verify.

At this point the child and I need to “clear” the shack to make sure there are no more animals in there.  Here comes the child in with the .22, “I’ll cover you!”…uh…no dear.  I don’t want you with a gun getting excited.  She uses a shovel to lift up the foot rest on the chair, I get ready to give ‘em hell…nothing.  We looked behind everything else…nothing.  Only 2…two!  of the little suckers in there.

I’m not sure how much they weighed, but I do know about how big these things are normally.  I believe these both to be 2+ years old and around 20lbs.  They were -big-.  The kid threw the one out of the shack and said it was pretty heavy.  We ended up throwing out a lot of stuff because it had ‘coon crap on it…maybe we could have washed it but I wouldn’t have been able to get over seeing it covered with crap.

We got things cleaned up pretty good…but it’s going to take some work to make this place a bit more animal proof.  I need to put some time into sealing up the cracks and so forth.  I don’t want to pour much money into this place…but a little bit of elbow grease would fix things up pretty good.

Almost ready for another season!

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One of the opportunities for me in moving up here is a little bit of consulting type work for some of the small businesses in the area.  Yesterday I had my first “interview” with a small business.  When I say small I am referring to the number of employees they have…I do not know what volume of business they do.  It’s possible they are bursting at the seams with clients, which is great for them and me.  I worked at a company a few years ago that was struggling (workforce) and it wasn’t a good feeling.  I also don’t think interview is the right word.  It’s more of a meeting where they can decide if my service is right for them and I can also see if their environment is going to be right for my services.  We discussed their needs/wants, I compared that to my work experience and abilities and it looks like a pretty good fit.  I left the meeting feeling pretty good that we would come to an agreement and this morning I received an email that confirmed that sentiment.  To finalize the deal we’ll need to work out the numbers and work through some transition time.  I’m not going to be posting the company name and/or what they do.  I don’t think it’s good practice to be talking about various companies on a blog site and certainly not without their permission.

One of the initial challenges is going to be learning their environment quickly and efficiently.  What they have right now works for the most part, so we don’t want to make major changes.  At the same time though, much like with the school, there are probably going to be some areas that are going to require some major overhauls to bring them up to best practices, or at the very least up to a point where they are working efficiently.  That is not to say that my predecessor(s) in this new spot or with the school didn’t have things working well…it’s just a matter of “style” I guess (for lack of a better word).  It’s been my experience that every tech monkey has their own way of doing things and no one seems to every completely agree.  I have no doubt that if I were to suddenly not be employed by the school anymore, the guy that came in would be lost on how I’ve got things setup.

Another challenge I find myself faced with even before it’s set in stone is “how much is my time worth”?  I don’t want to undervalue myself, but I don’t want to be cost prohibitive either.  I was thinking a smallish retainer type fee per month that comes with a certain amount of time or service, then an hourly or “service call” type charge for time over that.  The impression I got from the meeting was that they would rather have a service contract type of arrangement.  For the most part that doesn’t bother me, but it does add a little challenge in deciding what my service is going to be worth.  Going in to this, I can see myself being very busy for the first 6 months or so maybe then pretty low key after that.  I think once I get things setup the way I envision them, there won’t be much for problems outside of routine maintenance.  So, if I’m really busy I might be the guy losing out…but if I’m not doing much they end up losing out.  I need to find the point where these “overages” and “underages” (is that even a word?) balance out.  It’s also going to be important to take the area into consideration.  Services in general are a little cheaper around here than they would be in a bigger area so that comes in to play.

I am confident that I can bring their infrastructure up to a level with which they are quite satisfied.  After that point, when it remains that way for a couple of months…I might look at expanding to another small business if possible.  Over the summer I could handle a couple very easily…but I don’t want to get so many that when school and coaching starts up again I’m so busy there is no time for anything.  I think once I get this place up and running well if I bring on one more of about the same size that would be just about right.  I’m expecting to be able to do most things remotely, and if I have a couple of different businesses I’d be able to do both at the same time.

One advantage I might have over a lot of people in this area is a familiarity with open source alternatives.  There are a few guys around here that work on machines and it seems like all of them have been schooled in the arts of MS.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but a smaller business might appreciate being able to use a “free” os over paying licensing fees.  If they are just looking for a file server…why go with windows?  If they need a firewall there isn’t really a reason to buy an expensive appliance.  Smoothwall can be setup on pretty inexpensive hardware.  I don’t think that most people would be interested in moving to an open version of office as opposed to MS…and I wouldn’t push them in that direction.  But there are a few areas they can save a few bucks with open source alternatives.  If I save a company a few thousand on a buildout, I’ve at least paid for myself.

When I came up here I took a pretty big pay cut.  I was able to justify this to myself by thinking I wouldn’t have a house payment at least for a few years (oh how wonderfully that’s worked out /eye roll).  I enjoy coaching, but it can’t be denied that it does add a little to my yearly salary.  By picking up this one business I’d be pretty close to what I was making in Fargo, if I’m able to pick up another similar business I would be a little better off financially…and much better off mentally (just by living up here again I’m sleeping so much better).  On the surface it might look like I’m doing “more” work, but those late night/early morning, weekend….anygoddamntime calls from Noridian really wore thin.  I would almost expect that if a guy went through all the hours I’m spending working I am coming out with a few more…but not near as much as it might seem.

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The wireless is working out well.  I’m using a certificate based authentication mechanism that, so far, is pretty smooth.  The only real issue I’ve run in to is if the time on the client is off by too much.  I’ve seen this on two machines.  I expect they ran out of juice and didn’t charge them for a day or so?  Dunno.

Apple’s remote desktop solution isn’t horrible…but it’s not fantastic either.  It has a feature where I can lock the screen.  This allows me to work behind a curtain of sorts…you can’t see what I’m doing on the screen, but the display comes to my remote connection.  The main issue with this is when I put up the lock everything becomes really sluggish.  I’ve tested this on a couple of new mac’s on a solid wired network and for whatever reason it get extremely sluggish.  It may also lock up one of the machines so I need to restart.  On an old machine…forget it.  I don’t care if students see what I’m doing, but the lock screen would be handy if I was working on a machine in a public area…users could see it’s locked and go work on a different box.  Otherwise it is workable.  One of the big things I need to get use to is how to send unix commands to a list of machines.  Sometimes I can do it as admin…other times I need to be root.  Then it’s a matter of figuring out what commands in the terminal correspond to commands in the gui…etc.  It’ll take a bit of work, but in the end it should allow me to do some basic functions in bulk.

Deep freeze has been working out pretty well so far.  I haven’t heard any complaints anyway.  I haven’t been called to a machine for a student caused problem yet either.  We had a teacher meeting at the beginning of the year.  I spoke to them for about 30 min, and in that time I reiterated over and over again that if there is a problem with any machine, reboot it…then call me if the problem persists.  This will take some time as well to get use to.

Printers are the bane of my existence so far.  There was a problem with them towards the end of last year.  If you restarted the printer it would work fine for around 20min…but after that it would seem to drop off the network.  No machines could print to them anymore.  I would be able to bring up the printer’s webpage and reboot it remotely…then it would work fine again for around 20min.  I figured it had to be some sleep or power save settings…monkeyed with all that…no dice.  To be honest, I’m really not sure what the underlying cause of the problem is even yet.  What I decided to do was setup a print server on one of the mac server boxes.  It took a little bit to figure out how to configure the print server, then make the client machines send to a specified queue.  For a mac system, this wasn’t all that intuitive.  It took a couple hours of playing around, but I got the high school printers working via the server.  I deployed this change to a test group and so far it’s working.  If it goes through the end of the week I’ll setup all the printers in the main building with a queue on the server and configure things that way.  I’m not really sure what it wasn’t setup like this to begin with.  I suppose with the smaller user base it’s not entirely necessary…but it seemed to resolve a nagging problem real quick.

I have another printer that this won’t work with…clearly there is something wrong with the device.  It’s got to be something with the internal print server or a problem with the machine itself.  This is one of the boxes that is on a “pay per page” program with a vendor.  I emailed them to see what service options I have on this thing…so we’ll see how that goes.  At some point I’m going to have to have a meeting with the instructors and we’ll need to evaluate if things really need to be printed this much or if we can look at some sort of electronic solution.  There is still going to be a ridiculous amount of paper and toner used for the foreseeable future…but it would be nice if we could cut that down.

I also setup a ticketing system for problems!  The main reason for this is I was getting lots of people stop me in the halls and ask for all sorts of stuff, or I might be shooting the breeze with someone and they mention something in the conversation…by the time I’d get back to my office or have time to work on things I would forget some stuff.  This was also a complain that the users had with the previous guys.  Everyone would expect you to remember their specific issue…which for one person isn’t bad but stack up 10 people who’d stop you in the hall…and suddenly you have just too much to remember.  People have been using it quite a bit, so now it’s a matter of training them to put helpful information in the descriptions.  TBH, it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me that they put detailed information in the descriptions…I just need a list of things to do.  I tried email last year and it didn’t work out well, message would jumble together and it got to be difficult to track where I was with each issue.  The system I setup allows the users to go to a webpage and enter a ticket or they can send an email to an address.  The system checks the inbox every 5min and enters the information into a ticket.  I get email notifications when there are new tickets….so it’s easy for me to filter those to a specific folder.  So far the system has worked pretty well and users are getting more and more in to it.  It was a free open source php/mysql system I setup…pretty easy and light.

There is quite a bit of work around here for one guy, but after things settle down it will be fine.  I need to get the printers hammered out…then most of my nagging problems will go away.  After that it’s the daily desktop support type stuff.  Ideally I’d like to be slightly less busy than I am now…but a little more busy than “surf the net all day”.  I’m never going to be able to get rid of the desktop and user training issues, but the printer issues and network problems I can resolve.

There’s a lot of work here for one guy…but after things are setup the way I want them I think the overall amount of

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Deploying these machines involves more than just plopping then on their desks and being done with it.  I use mac’s migration assistant to move their info and applications, docs…etc over.  After that I install mac’s remote desktop software (ard), give the machine a name, configure the wireless…done.  At the same time I’m doing this, I’m configuring the other machines with unique names, setting up my admin user and installing ard…it gets to be a little involved.

I’ve talked about the ruckus cert issue before, but in brief…the certs come down with out a password, mac os doesn’t like this.  I download the cert, run some openssl magic on it, then install it and manually setup the connection.  The mac side works great, the ruckus side is suppose to be running a script that configures all this.  With the cert broke the script didn’t work.

To setup all the users in the system I manually entered them.  It wasn’t so bad and let me generate random passes for everyone.  There seems to be a problem with doing that though.  I would use the same password probably 3 times then get a new one…not a big deal really, but for some reason the zone director didn’t generate a cert for some of these duplicates.  I would have to delete the user, use a unique pass, then the cert came fine.  It seems wierd it wasn’t for everyone, but everyone it was for used a duplicate password (not the same one).  I can’t think of any other similarities.

The zone director is not designed for this many users.  In my tests (open a bunch of wireless clients and tell them to patch at the same time…traffic is traffic) things went well.  I will be looking at radius and ldap options.  I’d like all users logging in to the network as themselves and have their everything be right infront of them.  Maybe I can work on that while classes are in session.

While it is tedious work, the process is going faster than I expected.  I am anxious for my user base to return so I can see how things hold up.  I think using ard along with deep freeze will help my work load a bit.  There are some pains with deep freeze though..minor changes take longer.  I hope the end result is worth the hassle.

This busy summer should be about the most busy i’ll be at the school for several summers.  The work I’m doing now should carry over fairly easily and not have to be repeated…hopefully.

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My initial plan was to image all the mobile lab machines, then the high school lab, high school library, middle school lab…so on and so forth.  The high school lab went just like I expected…I used 2 external usb drives and was able to image a machine an hour (so 2 drives = 2 machines an hour).  It took all this time because of the size of the thawed partition I built.  Not a huge deal, 25 machines were done fairly quickly.  I assumed the same process would be used for the hs library and the middle school lab.  Boy was I wrong…

The eMac’s in the library are running Mac OS 10.4.11, the boxes in the HS lab are running 10.6.8.  I has hoped I would be able to push 10.6.8 to the lib machines (yes, I was going to license everything…take it easy.  I needed to see if it would work before I bought licenses).  I tried to boot to the 10.6 disk…no dice.  Looked it up online…nope, with 10.6 they discontinued PPC support.  Intel hardware only.  Not a huge deal, but it would have been handy to have everything use the same OS.  At this point I figured I’d boot to the newest OS I had that would run on PPC hardware…10.5.  Nope, that disk just said “not for use with this mac”.  Ta hell does that mean?  Tried 10.4…same.  WTF?  Apparently the 10.4 disks I had are for G5′s and I’m trying to load them on G4′s.  Yes, I know they are old machines….I’ll be looking for update money in this budget cycle.  I’d like to get everything updated to Intel hardware.

I looked and looked…but I was not able to locate a disk that would boot an O/S for these boxes.  There has to be one there somewhere…but I couldn’t find it.  Everything either wouldn’t boot “kernel panic” or did boot and told me it was for a G5.  Now maybe I could have bounced around to different machines and found on that was a G5 or didn’t kernel panic…but I didn’t feel like screwing with that.  What I decided to do was pick a machine…clean it up, update it…set it up like I wanted and use that as my base image.  It’s not quite as good as a clean install…but it’s not too bad.

With these machines I setup only a 10gig thawed partition.  They are lower powered machines and are only used for word processing and so forth.  The library machines and laptops will be used for some projects like movies and audio files so they could use a touch more space.  Now that I had the eMac setup…how can I get an image?  I can’t boot to my external drives because they are running 10.6…I can’t get 10.4 to load on them..ta hell am I going to do?  What I ended up doing was booting the machine I’d built into target disk mode.  I connected a firewire cable from that box to the one next to it and used mac’s disk utility to create an image.  How do I get that image to the other machines?  Target disk mode again and push the image to the boxes.  I used 2 laptops this time to push images.  It worked very well.  I imaged each machine in 40-45min.  It’s not much less than the lab machines, but given the difference in speed of the hardware it’s acceptable.  Besides, it’s not like there is a damn thing I can do about it.  After each machine is imaged, given the age of the machines I have slightly less to configure.  I still need to change the host name and set a firmware password.  There is no blue tooth, time machine or wireless to monkey with, so it went just a touch quicker per machine…but it’s not like it mattered really.  The few seconds I saved are largely irrelevant.  There is some more configuration I need to do with the two machines that are used for the card catalogues, but for that I’ll need to wait for staff to come back from break.  I’ll need to discuss with them how exactly those machines work.  I’m sure the previous guy set things up the way that made sense to him, I just have different ideas on how to do things for those boxes.

After I finished up the HS Lib, I moved on to the middle school lab.  Using the laptops worked so well with the lib machines I decided to use that method for the ms lab.  I built one on the image I used for the HS lab, then added the single application that was different.  I saved that image and started to push it to each box…where I ran in to what was looking like  a -huge- problem.

As I’m pushing these images I saw the ETA listed at 3hrs.  This was significantly longer than the others…but the time usually bounces around pretty good at the beginning…I waited a bit, nope that 3hrs looked to be pretty accurate.  About 30min in I decided to use an external USB drive…to save me a day or so the way it looked.  I hooked that one up, pushed…blammo done in the expected 50ish min.  Ta hell?  Tried it again…same.  I’ve got 2 different laptops pushing to 2 different boxes…both telling me 3hrs.  Sure enough, at the end of 3hrs they finished.  The laptops were using firewire and the external drive was using USB…firewire is suppose to be faster.  I’m a bit stumped.  Honestly I didn’t really ever figure out why pushing from the laptops like that took so long.  Then I had a thought…

I’m not really sure what the basis of this idea was…but it sounded worth trying.  Instead of booting the desktop into target disk mode, I booted the laptop into target disk mode, then used the alternate boot disk option on the desktop to boot it from the laptops HD.  While it was running off the laptop HD, I was able to image the internal disk on the desktop.  Suddenly I’m back down to my 50min time.  I have no idea why this worked differently…but I do know for the rest of the day it worked successfully on all the machines with that 50min time.

This target disk mode would not be so useful in a home environment with a couple macs.  Even if all your friends used macs you might get a couple uses out of this option…but in an environment with 100′s of mac’s it has proven quite useful.  The more I use these things the more impressed I get with them.  I still think they are a bit expensive for a home user, but they are saving me quite a bit of time and headache in the school environment.

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I had looked around a little bit trying to find one of those AWD vehicles.  I pointed out quite a few to the wife that I thought would work well…for one reason or another she didn’t like any of them.  It became clear that I was going to need to let her find one on her own.  It did get a little frustrating trying to find something for her…but once I let her handle it and told myself that she’ll either find something she likes or deal with the impala…it’s her problem, I was much more content with the process.  I did put a couple requirements on her, I wanted one where the interior space compared to the impala and the milage needed to be mid 20′s.  In the end, I did end up giving up some on the interior space…there was no way we were going to find an AWD she liked that had the same space as the impala with the milage we wanted.

The wife did some looking online and picked a few to go test drive.  As she was talking to the salesman he asked her if her husband was going to need to drive the vehicle and give the O.K.  Naturally she said I wouldn’t need to.  Both the salesman and his manager were quite surprised by this.  That seems pretty strange to me, I’m not sure why I would need to look at the vehicle she is going to buy.  The input I gave her was what kind of price range we were looking at, the term of the loan and what I expected to get for the impala.  As far as -what- she actually got…I honestly couldn’t care less.  My win is her getting something she likes and isn’t bitching about.  She’s the one that has to drive it.  Beyond that, when I got buy something for myself…I’m not all that interested in her being satisfied with it.  I give her the same respect I expect.  Besides, if she can’t handle picking out her own vehicle…we’ve got bigger problems.

She didn’t find anything she was particularly interested in during this first go ’round.  This is another reason I didn’t want to be involved in the test runs.  When I bought my first dakota, I looked around at a few other trucks because it was my first time.  The second one I bought, I looked online a little bit, drove to a lot in Bismarck and chose a new one instead of the new one I had been looking at.  The 3rd time I could just as well have bought the impala online.  My next vehicle was the kid’s dakota.  Barring something unforeseen happen, I don’t envision buying another pickup for myself.  I might end up with a few spendy repair bills…but I just don’t care anymore.  The shopping aspect of it is a huge turn off for me.  When we bought a house sara looked at several, I looked at the one we bought…I -hate- shopping for stuff like that.

I went down to Fargo this past weekend and was hoping we’d be able to get the car thing out of the way.  There is a far better selection in Fargo than there is up around here.  She picked out one online that she thought was a winner.  She convinced me to come look at it with her…she drove it and turns out it wasn’t such a win.  She drove another…and it was close but really under powered with only a 4 cylinder.  At this point she was getting irritated…I’m not sure why.  I wasn’t the most pleasant I’m sure…so the test driving ended.  The next day we had something to do so we planned on picking up the process on Saturday.

Saturday she picked out an escape to try out.  We had both thought they would be a bit small for our size, surprisingly we fit very well in there.  She drove it and was sold.  Let the dealing begin!  I had told her what I wanted for the impala (6500 + autostart in the new(er) car), and she was going to handle the negotiation process.  I liked this, I could sit back and play with my phone…she could mess around going back and forth.  They opened with a 5k offer for the car.  She told them what we want.  Now I’m sure she could have opened up higher and worked her way down, but both of us were not interested in going back and forth for the afternoon.  The salesman went back to his manager…whom came over himself and told us why he wasn’t going to give us that much.  This irritated me to no end.  Maybe I should have let the wife handle it completely herself…but she looked at me, this guy irked me…and I wanted to drink some beer.  I countered with, “there is one for 2500 less at the ford lot, I’ve got 3 4×4′s at the farm…so I’m not in any particular need.  If you can’t come to my number, we’ll buy the ford.  LMK!”  He makes a show of calling someone…talking loud and looking at both of us while he’s doing it, making sure we hear the intended emphasis.  He looks at me and asks “you’ll help me out a bit won’t you?”  I said, “nope”.  The wife laughs…the salesman chuckled, I’m not sure what the joke was.  He says “alright, 6200 + autostart”.  At this point, $300 isn’t worth me walking out…$500+ and we’d have left, but less than that…whatever.   There were a few minor problems with the impala, one potentially not minor and the hail damage.  If you take his 6200, add in the hail damage check I got from the ins co I’m at $500 better than kelly blue book value for good condition.  I told the wife, “whatever you think dear” and she took the deal.

It took quite a bit longer to finish up the paperwork then I would have hoped…that crap always takes too long.  The part I don’t like about the car buying process is the making the deal, -then- the loan part comes.  My agreeing on the prince is somewhat contingent on the interest rate I get on the loan.  I was figuring on a fairly high interest rate and was O.K. with my price range.  If for some reason it is significantly higher than what I expected I’m walking away from the deal.  When the finance dude came over he asked what the target payment I wanted was.  Told him I wanted 4 years.  He says, “yeah, but if it comes in at XXX..we need to know what your number is so we can adjust the term length.”  I said, um no..if it doesn’t work out how I think it should for 4 years I’m walking away from this.  I’m not interested in going 4 more months to get the payments lower.  I want them in my range for 4 years…  He seemed confused by this.  Maybe I’m not the one making sense, but to me the interest rate is a key part of the negotiation process.  I’m not so enamored with the vehicle that I’ll go longer and end up paying more just because I “like” it.  I don’t think he ever understood what I was talking about.  It turned out to be a moot point as the interest rate was less than I used to figure out my price range.  We elected to make payments bi-weekly which cuts our term from 48 months  to 44 months.

So far, the wife is happy with her car…hopefully it stays that way.

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When I made my plans for moving on from Noridian known and that I’d be working for a school, one of the other guys at the Nor hipped me to a piece of software called “Deep Freeze”.  The idea of this application is pretty cool…you set a machine up how you want it and the users can do what they want with it…but when it reboots it’s back to exactly the way you configured it.  You can set “thawed” areas that do not get reverted after the reboot.  I monkeyed with the demo a bit, talked to another buddy about it and had heard on the tech list serv that a few people are using it.  I was sold so I decided to pick up 200 licenses.  This presented a little bit of a problem.  We had a couple of other big buys that we were going to make before the end of the year and they were going to eat up the last bit of my budget, I was going to have to wait until the new fiscal year before I could buy anything else.  This wasn’t really a problem until the end of june.  I had my images pretty well built…but I wasn’t sure just how Deep Freeze was going to work with my configuration.  I ended up having to wait a couple of days before I could make the order, then a couple days after that for them to send me the licenses.  Maybe I could have installed the software as a demo, then licensed it…I didn’t look in to things that far.  I ended up using the extra day and 1/2 to setup an internal ticketing system.

I installed the software and started monkeying around.  I figured I would use it to freeze everything except for the user folder.  I created a 20 gig thaw space, moved the local user over to it and rebooted…kablooey! everything went to hell.  I’m not sure what exactly the problem was, but it appeared that however DF moved the user folder to the thawed space did not agree with the way the Mac thought things should be done.  The user was history.  I ended up having to recreate the user, redo my config, then trying DF again.  This time, I chose the option to remap some user directories to the thawed space.  Basically I wanted to thaw locations where the users might save docs, so “documents, desktop, music and movies” were left in the thaw space.  I wouldn’t have thought music and movies would be necessary, but at the end of last year a couple of the instructors had the students putting together videos, editing them, adding music..etc for some class projects.  I rebooted the machine and things seemed fine.

Having things setup the way I wanted I got to thinking about the size of the thawed space.  The machine isn’t going to chew up too much more of the frozen disk…because things will be reverted.  If the students start editing videos really heavily they are going to eat up disk space quite quickly.  Suddenly 20gig didn’t seem like all that much.  In the end I couldn’t come up with a good reason not to use a good chunk of the disk for thawed space.  It would still only encompass those locations I listed above.  DF has a function to resize the thaw space.  I rebooted thawed and chose to resize from 20 to 100gig.  This process took quite a while, but in the end it appeared to go.  I restarted the machine…blue screen with the spinning circle.  Restarted again…this time it booted to the student user but there was no “thawed” disk mounted.  The documents folder was missing…it looked like it screwed up that disk image somehow.  I rebooted to admin, looked at the DF console…it says it’s still there.  No problem…I’ll just whack the thawed space and add new stuff….

I whacked the thawed space, added a new area, then went to the user to map it to the new thawed space…nope wouldn’t let me.  It kept kicking back a “could not find source” error.  Tried to map it back to the boot disk…nope, same error.  I ended up having to whack the user at the system level, re add it and then map it back to the thawed space.  This seems like a real short coming in the software.  Upon retrospect, yes I should have realized I had a user mapped there.  I should have remapped the user back to the boot disk, whacked and re-added the thawed space, then remapped the user.  It was something I just didn’t think about at the time.  I’m not sure why the application wouldn’t have thrown a warning that I had user(s) mapped to the space.

At this point I was satisfied with the disk image I’d built for the mobile lab.  I began to image these machines.  Initially when I’d imaged the instructor machines it took around 30min using a single firewire drive.  The mobile lab machines are macbook’s, not macbook pro’s so I had to use USB to push the image.  I expected around 45min…by the time things were said and done it took between an hour 45 and two hours to push the image.  I was a bit taken aback at first and didn’t think the difference between firewire and usb could possibly account for this.  Then I remembered that 100gig of thawed space I have in there.  I expect it writes this out just like it were regular data and it takes so damn long.

At this point I’m starting to think about all the imaging I have to do.  I have around 175 machines to push images to….at 2hrs a piece it’s going to take me 88 hrs to get them all?  That really puts a crimp in my time line for getting things done before fall classes.  I had another external hd here, so I quickly made that one bootable and decided to use it for imaging as well.  I’m sure there is a better way to do this…but I didn’t have time to figure it out right then.  This was the model I was going with.  I work 10hr days so that gives me friday’s off.  I did this on Thursday, but I had reason to come in to town every day this weekend.  Each time I was in town I’d swing by the school and fire up 2 more machines (a 5min process).  If I was in town when they were done I’d kick off another set, if not I didn’t sweat it.  It worked out so I was done imaging and configuring the mobile lab mid day Monday.  I expected it to take this entire week, so I’m pretty happy with that.

After I put the image on there is some configuration that needs to be done manually.  I need to manually setup the cert that I have mentioned a few times here, and I need to set the computer name.  I’ve been setting them to some sort of identifier for what they are used for plus the asset tag (mobile-lab1-1234, hs-lab-0987).  This might seem unnecessary but there is a reason for it.  With the mobile lab I got the apple remote desktop software.  This application is actually pretty handy.  It’s more of a management console than it is windows remote desktop.  From this software I can jack in to the machines and either observe or take over control.  I can “lock” the user out of the machine while I’m working.  It puts up a black screen with a big lock on it so they don’t see what I’m doing.  I can send unix command line commands to a single or group of machine(s), copy things to the machines, talk interactively to the user on that box, spy, take screen shots, install packages, run reports such as application version/usage, get machine info…etc.  There is quite a bit that I can do with this piece of software…so far I’ve been impressed.  So if I keep the machine name on the network the same as the asset tag on the box, users can give me that 4 digit number and I can remote in to the box and fix whatever.  It will work out better for them and me.  During the NWEA testing I end up running around quite a bit…and it takes far too much time.  Also, my boss here mentioned something about people being able to see on their screen what the students are doing on each of their machines.  With this software I can set that up very easily.  The application needs to authenticate to the box and by restricting that user you restrict what the application has access to.  I have one setup for myself that has administrative rights on the box…and one setup for the instructors/staff that has view only rights…meaning they can spy but not interact with the machine or run any reports.  This app costs 80 bucks from the mac store, but I never looked in to client licenses.  The version I got with the mobile lab came with an unlimited license.  Before I got this app I’d been looking at open source alternatives…don’t need to any longer.

Once I finished working on the mobile lab I turned my attention to finishing up the config for the hardwired labs.  They would be similar to the mobile labs, but there is no wireless that needs to be setup so no cert to mess with.  As I was working my way through the setup for those machines, I happened to look at the maintenance tab in DF.  This allows you to setup a schedule where the machine can boot thawed.  That looked handy, if nothing else I could try to schedule package installs for that time using remote desktop.  Upon further inspection though I found that you can use DF to automatically install apple updates.  That looked really handy.  I tested it out a bit and found some settings that should work out well for us.  I’m going to have it update Friday in the early AM.  Mac OS has an option in the energy saver tab that allows you to schedule various things, including a power up time for the machine.  I’ve got the machines set to power up at 0100.  At 0115 they throw a warning that they are going into maintenance mode…then at 0130 they reboot and do the maintenance cycle…then reboot again.  The machines have to reboot so DF is in a “thawed” state.  During this thawed state it locks out the machine, no users can do anything.  I had my doubts about this process, but after testing it I think it works pretty well.  I’ve set the maintenance cycle to go for 3hrs…25 machines pulling down however much data could take a bit, hopefully this covers it.  If this works out well I’ll set the other hardwired labs to update at various times.  I’m going to have to work out a decent solution for updating the mobile lab(s).  Right now I’ll do it manually every couple of months.  It actually won’t be that bad…I need to set DF to a “thawed” state, then I can update them all at the same time via the remote desktop connection.

The last tweak that I had to do here was to add a firmware password to all the machines so they can’t be booted to alternate disks or booted to single user mode without a password.  When I came to the school everything was open there.  It was handy for me because I had to go to command line to fix a couple of things…but it would take a kid less than 2 min on google to figure out how to do that and screw up a few boxes.  I don’t think the students would get information that they could use to blackmail the world or something like that…I’m just interested in saving myself headache and work.

I’ve tested pushing this disk image via firewire to the lab machines and it takes under an hour.  With two drives going I should be able to knock this out in a fairly reasonable amount of time.  I’m still not going to be able to get to all the things I was hoping to this summer, but if things go smooth when the users come back, maybe I’ll have some time to do those other house keeping tasks then.

Hopefully this work over the summer will keep things running smooth.  Unfortunately I have no way to load test anything until the students come back for classes.  At that point if something goes to hell I’ll be running all over the place.  I’m hoping things work smoothly and the remote desktop will help me address problems quickly.

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I had mentioned before that this setup has a “zero-IT” option…this thing works very slick.  I had envisioned handing out the laptops to instructors during an in-service this fall and walk them through setting up their boxes.  You login to the registration screen, download an app…run it and you’re good to go.  This worked very well for the old setup I thought I was going to use…but not so well for this new config…

What happens in the 802.1x setup is it generates the certificate, the zero-IT script downloads it from the zone director, installs it on the keychain…creates the 802.1x authentication connection, adds the network…blah blah blah…good to go.  The password on the certificate file is suppose to be the same password as the user used to get in to the activate page.  The uid/passes are kept in whatever form of DB you want to use, right now I’m using the one on the zone director but in the future I’m going to setup an LDAP server.  When the script tries to put the certificate on the keychain it attempts to use the user’s password for the cert when the keychain asks for it.  From all the documentation I’ve seen this is the expected behavior.  The Mac OS barfs on this…it throws an invalid password message and “re-prompts” for the password.  This is where I ran into my roadblock.  I tried a blank password, I tried a default password, I tried the Mac’s OS admin password etc.  None of these passwords worked.  I was a bit stumped.

Coming from a Linux background and the nightmare that is the [echoey voice] KEYSTORE [/echoey voice] it seemed obvious I would need to bust out some command line goodness and figure out what this password actually is.  I’ll save you some of the pain it took me to get there…but the password is blank…nothing, nadda…zip…there is no password set.  This might work for some OS’s, but in the world of Mac’s this is a big problem.  The keystore will not add a cert with a blank password…or rather, I could not get it to.  Maybe there is some keystroke to force it to add it, but I don’t know what it is.  Any additional keystrokes obviously make this process virtually impossible for instructors to do themselves.

What I decided I needed to do at this point was to add a password to the cert, try to import it and see if the config works.  I added the password that the documentation said it should be for this user (the user’s password in the db…obviously I knew what it was for the test user), imported the cert…setup the authentication piece…blamo…worked just like it was suppose to.  The user never had to authenticate.  I also have a mobile lab, of which there will be more, which I need this type of certificate authentication to be working seamlessly.  Currently there will be a single user that signs in to the machines, and from there the students will have to use their specific credentials to log in to their network drive.

I’ve been in contact with the vendor about this issue, they have been able to reproduce it and acknowledged it is an issue and they opened up a bug report for it.  I’ve no idea when it will be resolved and in the mean time I have 85 machines I have to manually setup.  It’s not that I just have to manually set them up, I will need to work with each individual user of these laptops to have them setup properly…what a pain in the ass.  I -might- just generically setup every user’s account since it’s only the wireless and it doesn’t really affect anything….but I’d like to have each user setup like they “should” be.  Without a back end ldap server it’s kind of a moot point, but I would like the users to be able to login if this does for some reason prompt them for a uid/pass.  I’m not sure what the odds are that the user will remember that combo…but at least I can say I tried.

Next year I am hoping to have the machines setup so that each user will have their own logins.  They will use these logins to get in to all the school asset machines, this will get them into their everything and be good to go.  I am hoping to have this in place by next year.  We’ll see what I can do.

I’m sure there is more I could type…but I’m done for the night.

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One of the my initial priorities at the school was setting up an “enterprise quality” wireless solution.  The previous guy had ordered laptops for all the teachers and with the consumer class wireless they were running it was a pain to have the users even try to get a wireless connection.  Each access point (AP) would be broadcasting a different wireless network…it was a bit of a mess.  I will say though that it was cheap, quick and got the job done.  I wanted to replace this asap…ideally, I wanted the wireless installed before the user’s had laptops (which is the way it worked out due to another issue that I will go in to later).  Part of the reason for that was to head off the questions and complaints about getting a weak signal and the other part was so I didn’t have to setup the machines for the wireless that was there, then go back and touch every machine again for the new install.

I looked at a couple of different solutions, Cisco, Meraki and Ruckus.  Cisco I dismissed due to price…it figured out to about twice as much as ruckus to get the same amount of coverage.  Maybe in 10 years the extra cost of Cisco would have proven itself justified…I don’t know.  I was down to Meraki and Ruckus.  I looked at Meraki and thought their product was worth a little more investigation.  I signed up for their “free no obligation try our equipment for a couple of months and let us know” deal.  From what I gather they would set you out a couple AP’s and some controller for you to test and see how it works at your location.  At the same time I threw out some feelers on the tech email list and heard good things about Ruckus.  I contacted them for information.  I heard back from Ruckus, whom referred me to the reseller in their area…still nothing from Meraki.  The reseller from Ruckus came out and did a site survey, generated a quote…still nothing from Meraki.  About 1/2 way through the Ruckus install I heard back from Meraki…whom, even after I told them I was in the middle of installing Ruckus, still tried to sell me on their stuff.  I had to get a little rude with him to get the point across.  Support for this stuff was going to be huge for me seeing as I’m on an Island as far as peers are concerned…so I decided I wouldn’t be investing in their product.

When looking at a wireless solution one of the big things for me was going to be the single management interface.  I’m sure that’s pretty common for most of these products, but I wanted to make sure it was there.  There was also a couple of features Ruckus offered that I found quite interesting.  I can run multiple wireless networks that are managed independently through the same equipment.  I’m sure there is an upper limit, right now I’m only running two.  I have one for the staff and mobile lab and one for “guests”.  I might think about breaking out the one for the mobile lab into it’s own network…but I’m not really sure what benefit that would give me.  It’s designed to setup a “guest” network in such a way that you can segregate it from different subnets on your internal network and not allow the devices to communicate with each other across your AP’s.  I found that quite interesting.  It also supported it’s own authentication mechanism (which works out so much better than I initially expected) which meant I wouldn’t need to throw up some LDAP server at the same time.  I’m not sure if it will have problems with a sufficiently high number of users, but I’d think it can handle a 100 with little problem.  The last thing that I read about these AP’s that I found quite interesting was they were all POE.  One line and done…no electrician or running power line everywhere.  Maybe this is pretty common with AP’s now…but I thought it was cool.  Yet another feature of these AP’s is the ability to setup a “wireless mesh”.  I’m not sure exactly how it works or what the trade off is, but if you can’t run wire to an AP you can set it to mesh with another one and thus expand your network without pulling wire.  I’m sure there is quite a trade off, but I’m not sure how drastic.  I would have liked to drop an AP over at the football field but it was too far for even this mesh to reach.  After I read these things, I was sold.

The install went a little rougher than we expected.  I chalk it up to my newness to the building layout and the site surveyor’s lack of thoroughness (if that’s even a word).  One wing of the building was constructed around 1989, all nice drop ceiling and so forth…very easy to run cable.  It was a little tough to get a line into the auditorium, but we managed.  The older part of the building was a huge PITA.  We couldn’t run the lines from the central closet that we ran the other wing.  Back in the 50′s apparently they never thought you’d have to run new anything.  You would think they would have considered you might need to run a phone or power line…but no.  There was a secondary bank of switches that we had to patch in to…which meant I had to buy another POE switch.  How they got a cable to this bank of switches I’ve no idea.  From there we were able to get cable run where it needed to be.  There is also another school building that houses the K-2 students and staff.  For this building again we setup a small POE switch (8 port switch, 4 ports POE) and just setup 2 AP’s.  It’s a 2 story building but in the “single hall” style…so these will work fine.

All of these AP’s are controlled by a device called a “zone director”.  You just plug this device into the network…it sniffs out the AP’s and manages them like nothing.  There was nothing to getting the AP’s recognized, it picked them all up right away.  If I need more AP’s cable can be pulled from one of the POE switches or I can plug it into one of the network drops and power around the building…the ZD picks it up in a matter of seconds and pushes out the configuration.  This is going to be a key point as we acquire more mobile labs.  Right now I’m planning on letting the mobile lab work off the installed AP’s, but after we get 2 or maybe I’ll wait till we get 3 I am going to want to have an AP right on top of each lab.  The instructor rolls the cart into the room, plugs it into power and a network drop..done and done.  Maybe I can just add a couple of AP’s in high usage spots..we’ll see.  Another feature that sold me on this product was the “load balancing” aspect.  It apparently can adjust the load between the AP’s in range so one doesn’t get hammered.  I won’t be able to test this until school is in session, but I’m hopeful.  I wonder if this is going to be able to monitor the backside of the network as well.  If I have 25 users hitting one AP, that’s pulling across one 100mb connection (the AP to the PC can be running at 1GB but the switches are 100mb…I can expand later) is it smart enough to push them to another AP that has it’s own 100mb line?  It isn’t going to matter right now (more on that later), but I’m curious.

I spent some time configuring the security aspect of the staff’s network.  I set the encryption, locked it down by MAC (yeah, I know…but it will dissuade the ones that don’t want or know how to put in a little effort) then I setup the authentication.  Like I mentioned earlier the ZD has a built in database you can use for authentication…but, what it also has is a PSK for authenticated users.  I can set this cert to expire after as little as a day, as long as years or any place in between.  What I this does is forces the user to authenticate once, passes the cert to the machine, then the user no longer has to authenticate until that cert is expired.  IMO that is slick as hell.  It adds a bit of security to the network and minimizes the impact on the users.  I was having quite a problem setting up this certificate though.  I thought it would pass the cert as soon as the user logged in…nope.  What you need to do is go to “zd ip address/activate”.  This hits the “zero IT configuration” utility…now this is handy as hell too…once you realize how to use it.  The idea behind this utility is you connect the machine to a hardwired LAN.  You hit this site and it sets up the wireless.  I assumed this just went through some process to configure the connection…which it does, but it seems to be during this that it either installs the cert or “prepares” the machine to receive the cert.  This “activation” can be done while you are connected to the wireless, but I had a hell of a time getting things setup via the wireless.  It seemed like what you needed to do was make sure you were not authenticated on the ZD, delete whatever info it has on there about the machine being authorized or the cert being generated.  Then you had to go specifically to the activation page, download the app/script.  Run it, close the browser, reopen it, try to open a web page, authenticate…and blamo things were setup properly.  It’s a little cumbersome, but if you do this out of the gate it works much better than if you’ve pissed around and then have to come back to it.  Maybe there is some simpler way to do things that I’m missing…but this is what my trial and error figured out.

I mentioned before that I setup a guest wireless.  The point of this is to allow known users access to the Internet but keep them fire walled off of our internal network.  Right now this is setup with no encryption, but I think I’m going to setup a basic encryption on here.  Any  user that can authenticate through the ZD to get network connection can generate a guest password.  This is configurable, but that’s the way I have it setup for now.  There are quite a few options here, you can setup the password so it is effective for a given amount of time, or indefinitely.  It can be configured so multiple devices can use the same password or generate multiple passwords for multiple devices.  You can manually type in the password you want, and you can choose what date the password becomes active.  This is all configurable at the time you go to the screen to actually generate the password.  Once it generates the password it comes to a screen that shows you the pass in big ol’ letters, and it has a link you can click on that will print off step by step instructions for the guest user.  I expect I’m still going to be doing the majority of the setup for external users, but I’ve tried to give our internal users the option so they don’t have to be completely dependent on me.

I’m sure there is more about this setup that I’m missing, but those are the highlights for now.  So far I’m impressed with the ease by which I’ve been able to configure things.  There are a couple of nicety things that I wish you could do..mass import mac addresses, label the mac’s so I know what device they are for.  You can create groups of mac addresses, and clone these groups…but when it comes to restricting access to the network by MAC address you can only select one group of MAC addresses.  I wouldn’t mind being able to keep my devices more separate (staff laptops, mobile lab 1, mobile lab 2…etc), but I’m not sure what benefit that would give me.  I’d also like an easier way to manage the PSK’s.  For the mobile labs I’m going to need to authenticate, then “install” this cert on each machine…from what I can see I will need a unique uid and cert for each machine.  I would much rather have a single cert for this group of machines…but that isn’t going to work well.  It’s more touchy feely for me, but whatever.

During the setup process for this equipment I was able to get a good overview of the network gear at the school.  It hasn’t been a problem yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if fairly soon we start running into a bottle neck problem on the network.  I have quite a few network drops and there are a couple of auxiliary closets that contain the switches for these drops.  Each of these switches is tied into the “main” switch by a 100mb connection.  Given the age of these switches that was the only option available.  With more and more of the classwork being tied to the interwebs bandwidth is going to become vital.  Ideally I’d like to tie these switches together via fiber…but I’m not sure how much that is going to cost.  I expect to be able to hold this off for 5 years at least…but it will be coming.  I have to replace one switch this summer, so I’m going to pick one up with this roadmap in mind.  Maybe some other technology will come down the pipe and I won’t have to worry about this stuff.  It is also possible that I can “forget” about some of these network drops and focus on the wireless infrastructure.  Maybe this will save me a few bucks and provide me a way to solve this issue more easily.

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