The Screaming Viking

It’s year end for the school, and with that comes the onslaught of ordering.  I like this time of year because I get a chance to play with a few new things.  It also gives me the opportunity to set things up the way I’d like them setup.  Like I’ve said before, there is nothing wrong with the way the previous guy configured things…I just have a different idea of how I want it to work.  I want to move towards a more “enterprisy” environment.  I want to be able to manage all the machines from one central point, and I want to do it as cheaply as possible.

So far we have received approval to build out 2 business computer labs.  I’m going to use iMacs for these labs running both lion and win7.  They are going to be setup to dual boot.  I think this gives us maximum flexibility.  For one of these labs they are looking at teaching multimedia applications and some web design.  We’re looking at dual monitor setups and all that.  I think it will be pretty decent by the time we are done.  The only real concern I have is getting enough data pipe to these machines.  I don’t think the network drops in that room was ever really designed to push as much traffic as these machines will potentially push/pull.  What I’m going to do is build out the room the way I want, then I’ll look at going back and attacking the networking situation later.  The way the building is segmented there is no real main switch closet.  There are a couple of locations that have auxiliary switches.  In the next few years I would like to run fiber…but I’m not sure how much that is going to cost.

Something else I want to do is replace all the ancient macs we have here.  There are 90 or more emacs, which at this point are long past their usefulness.  I wonder how much we’d save on power alone if these were replaced…  My thoughts are instead of replacing X amount each year, we finance it…replace them all at once and pay it off over a few years.  This is going to be quite a bit of work for me, but I think this would jump start us on to a regular replacement schedule.  Also, in five years maybe we would be looking at some kind of 1 to 1 initiative where we can downsize the desktop machines.  Right now I don’t know how that would work…but we’ll see.

If all this replacement action gets approved, it will keep me fairly busy over the summer.  Physically setting them up and moving things around will take a little bit of time, but the big time sink will be putting images on the machines.  With deep freeze it has to copy the size of the frozen disk with each image…that’s what takes all the time.

We’re also ordering a few iPads.  Not a whole bunch, I will probably have around 20 to mess with and get ready for the school year.  The management of the ipads is something that is a bit tricky.  I’ve decided to quite expecting that people won’t use them for personal stuff.  As long as they are ready for school and they have them for that…I don’t care what they are used for.

Gonna be a busy summer.

Printers are the bane of my existence.  When I started off here, everyone was printing directly to the printers via bonjour…I think I’ve chronicled here before about the problems that caused.  I’ve resolved that issue by setting up  a print server and routing users through that.  A centralized print server is a path I’d have gone down sooner or later even if things worked decently the way they were setup…the problems I was seeing accelerated that process.  I had one printer that would randomly drop off the network.  I wasn’t able to ping it until it was manually restarted.  For this machine it wasn’t as simple as pulling out a modular print server.  The NIC was built into a larger logic board.  The vendor came up and replaced that.  It was work I could have done, but the replacement piece was actually here quicker with him driving it up.  Also, those printers are on a program where we pay per print…so they handle all the parts and labor.

After those issues were resolved, I had two printers that would jam constantly.  I was pretty sure one was because of the feed rollers for tray 2…but the other one I was not sure about at all.  I emailed the xerox guys in minot about each of them.  He was able to overnight the feed rollers.  For the other he advised me to clean things up but it was probably the fuser that was causing the jam.

The new rollers came when they were suppose to, they installed very easily and things seem to be rolling correctly again.  The secretary printed out some information page on the other one and it showed jams constantly at the fuser.  I replaced that and things seem to be working there as well…  Now I’ve got a color balance issue with one of the printers, and I’ve got no idea where to even start with that.  I went through their color caliburation setup…and that didn’t bring things even close to where they are suppose to be.  I’ll think of something I’m sure.

Having to order every part I need for these things is certainly a draw back of living in this part of the world.  The guy did not have the parts on hand in minot either, so anyplace short of GF, Bismarck or Fargo and I’d have to order things just the same.  I wouldn’t even bet on Bismarck having these parts in stock.  I could keep one of each on hand for each model of printer…but then if one dies and I toss it I’ve wasted money.  The best thing to do, I think, is to consolidate down to one model printer for everyone.  That’s going to take a few years but I should be able to do that….or get it down to a couple models at least.

We did get a new copy machine in that I hooked up to the network, that was a far more expensive machine as far as hardware cost was concerned, but our price per page is significantly cheaper than the rest.  I’ve strongly encouraged all users to print to that machine when possible.  It’s also handy when they would print something and make copies.

I need to start changing the culture of the school…which is going to be quite hard.  I need to help people understand that not everything needs to be printed.  Things can be kept on their laptops…in their email…etc.  Maybe students can hand some assignments in electronically.  That is the way of the future…but it’s going to take some time to get there.  I don’t think the obstacle right now is technology…it’s changing the mentality of the instructors.  We’ll see how it goes, I’ve got 25 years to work on it.

Had a fairly productive week.  I was able to figure out how to get a 10.5 server act as a system update server for 10.6, 10.5 and 10.4.  It didn’t take a whole lot of tinkering…but there were a couple of random comments on the web that said it “couldn’t be done”.  I’m not really sure why people would think that…it was fairly simple once someone explained how.  I don’t know enough about the inner workings of a mac to have figured it out on my own…but after reading a walkthrough it took around 30 min to set it up.  Most of that time was spent waiting on the web server to restart…man that thing is slow.  I took a look at the server’s specs and it runs dual 2.3 ppc procs, but it’s only got 2gig of RAM.  Depending on how much I ask of this little sucker it could end up fairly over taxed.

I setup the service yesterday and let it run for a bit to pull down all the updates…so far for the 3 major versions of the os it’s weighed in at 27gig.  That’s a bit, but when you think about how many applications are included in apple’s patching process that’s not too bad.  Once the SUS is setup you have a couple of options to switch the machines over to using it.  The first…and one I really like is changing your internal DNS so the update urls resolve to your server.  The second option is to manually force the update address into each machine.  It’s a one time push, so it’s not something I’d have to change over and over again.  I dig on the first option because of the instructor laptops.  They will be taking them back and forth so I would like to not end up in a situation where they can only update on the school network.  Outside of those machines, it’s not much of a problem to change the update address on the desktops.  I bang out a unix command and send it to each machine via ARD.  So far I’ve only set this up on a couple of machines.  I did the high school lab all on 10.6, then a single machine each of 10.5 and 10.4 to verify functionality.

I saw a web site that was pimping some open source software that would allow you to build a SUS on non mac hardware/software.  While I am intrigued by this idea, I don’t think it’s something I would go with.  I like the idea of saving money, but I don’t want to end up in a situation where apple changes something and this software is unable to work for a little while.  I’ve looked at the prices for a mac mini and they are around 600 with Lion, but 1k with Lion server….but that’s a lot more machine than I need.  If I go with a 579 model, then pay the 50 for lion server….  On one hand it would be nice…but it’s quite a bit of money just for an update server.  I might think about trying to ebay a mini…we’ll see.  The updates are not all the critical, so they could easily be stored on an external usb or firewire drive.  Some stuff to think about anyway, and it’s not going to be a problem for quite a while yet.

I figured out how to push the printer update to all users from ARD.  It took a little digging around, but I found a nice little command line string to pull it off.  So far it’s worked well.  I’m hoping this ends the printer issues we’ve been seeing…I’m real tired of running around and hitting the power button.

I found out that deep freeze is really handy for testing changes.  I could monkey with the update server settings on a desktop and not have to worry about screwing anything up permanently.  So far I’ve only had one staff member not happy with the change.  For this person it’s a matter of getting use to not having control over the machines like they used to.  It’s not going to be possible for me to effectively maintain these boxes if students are accessing the machine with admin privileges…etc…  I think it will work out fine in the end…it’s just a matter of getting a handle on it all.

I also found out that when I setup parental controls on the student machines that Mac OS decided to be helpful and set the web parental controls for me.  I didn’t notice this until some students were not able to go to websites they should be able to.  I haven’t been able to find something I can run from command line to adjust this setting, so it’s a lot of touchy feely on each machine.  It’s not a huge deal…just not idea.

The week started off rough…I was getting hammered on with several problems.  After I got a handle on stuff and started knocking them down things have lightened up quite a bit at the end of the week.  Finishing up the printer configuration is going to eliminate quite a few “service” calls I’m guessing.

Just some stuff I’m looking at doing for the school when I get time:

Radius server

LDAP server

System update Server

New File share/storage server with some redundancy.

I might look at using the existing good Mac server for the first 2, pick up a mac mini for the SUS and then build a linux box out of commodity parts for the storage box.  Right now the student storage is on an external firewire drive, instructor storage is on internal RAID disk.  Not a huge deal, but I’d like some redundancy just because.