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.

At the school the desktops in the labs are not too bad, but one of the big things that is holding the school back from embracing some of the neat technology coming down the pipe is our lack of an enterprise class wireless solution.  When I came into this job they had ordered laptops to be given out to all the teachers.  This is a good idea, but the next logical step is obviously a wireless infrastructure to make these devices truly mobile.

I priced out various wireless options, received some feedback from my peers and decided I would recommend Rukus wireless.  This has been deployed to various schools in the area and so far the people have been satisfied with it.  I compared their price to cisco gear and it was a bit cheaper…that coupled with the feedback I’d received from other people that have used Rukus heavily influenced my decision.  There is a reseller in the area that came to the school and conducted some tests for me to decide where to place the access points for the most comprehensive coverage.  They worked up a quote for me that was pretty on par with what another school had advised me their cost was.  I presented this information to my boss along with my “pitch” for why we should get this stuff.   Read the rest of this entry »

So far I have been amazed by a couple of aspects of the mac machines…one is pleasant the other is surprising and a little concerning.

First and foremost I have been shocked by the stability of this platform.  Mac equipment has always been a bit spendy compared to IBM counterparts and my experience was always that they are unstable and just all around not worth the money.  I knew things had changed with OS X, but really, how much could it have changed?  I’ve been knocked over really.  It’s like Linux for a desktop that just works.  They are incredibly stable, if an app locks…force kill it and try to fire it up again…etc.  If something doesn’t work you have the unix command line to fix things and work out permissions and so forth.  I’m really digging on it.

The second thing that has surprised me is how easy it is to “recover a password” on these boxes.  Most any machine is susceptible to booting to alternate media, that’s to be expected but if you look online for how to recover a password it takes you about 2 min to find out how to force the machine to go through the setup process again.  This will allow you to setup another account with admin access…it takes about 5min.  Also, you can boot to single user and reset the root password.  It’s pretty simple and has helped me out on several occasions.

I’m not going to go all governmental level of paranoia over this situation…I think 99.9% of the kids that mess with the machines won’t know how to do this, won’t know how to look up how to do it, or just don’t care.  But I do think there is that .1% that knows how, and will want to mess with things a bit just to do it.  When I worked at sykes there was one dude that was in high school and was pretty damn sharp with machines.  He was rockin’ out Linux at a time when I could hardly pronounce it.  He “hacked” in to the school’s linux system(s) a couple of times, just because he could do it.  While I’m not going to try to tighten things down to the level that would keep a highly motivated attacker out, with the ease of installing an OS on a thumb drive and single user mode being so open, a few steps to heighten the security of these machines is not unwarranted.

These few problems can be solved by using a firmware password on each machine.  This will block certain key command for starting in this alternate modes or starting to an alternate disk.  The only person this step should affect would be me when I’m performing diagnostic actions on these machines, but with the software package I’m looking at (deep freeze) hopefully any of those actions will be significantly reduced.

It’s probably because I came from a company that was so edgy about “security” that my mind naturally veers off in that direction.  While I don’t want to go to the extreme that we had to there…some steps are necessary to keep users from getting in to things that will cause me more headache.

In case you and the roommate are having problems figuring out what an “equitable” share of rent should be…I give you the Rent Calculator!

Would have been nice to have this when I was living with 3 other guys…rent might have worked out a little differently.