Day in Review -- Geek Speak

As I've mentioned, we passed a bond. Yay. Sort of. More work. More toys. Gotta take the good with the bad. And in bonds, you must get your money off the table before others spend it for you. And then say you spent it. (Like Technology repaved a parking lot with Technology Bond Funds - true story).

As part of this, to acquire said toys, we have to produce an RFP. Starting these things are a chore. Since we'll be applying for eRate, I have to hit some deadlines. First one is in september. Ouch. Time to get started - NOW. I'll do my RFP tips in another message. I'm probably not the greatest, but maybe it'll help someone get started. I got the outline for 1 done. 2 more to go.

Did a psuedo site survey for APs needed at a campus. Pro-tip, in the summer in warm states where they turn off non-essential AC, always do these morning. Early if possible.

Also sat through another KACE educational 2 hours. I wish I had the time to play with the image and application deployment portion of that toy. I got the service desk setup.

Got our Yousend-it account enabled. We have a 10M email restriction. We send stuff over 10M out on occassions. This usually happens the day of the board meeting (board agenda, slides, etc). At 4:30PM when I want to go home. 3 times in one year, means there is a solution required. Now we get to train the people likely to need the solution. Hopefully that'll fix one source of panic. (Anyone saying they'll dream up other, I know you are right...let me bask in my brilliance for a moment. Ok, its done. Carry-on.).

Day in Review -- Geek Speak

Met with fax vendor and a switch vendor! Fun! Actually, both were very personable. Good info. It has been very cool that the two vendors which have been presenting the last 2 days had female tech people (Sales Engineer). Really cool. Girls can't be great geeks. Bullsh*t. Both knew their stuff -AND- could present. We have a white board and both go, "Can I draw". AWESOME! We have a philosophy, if you can't draw it, you can't do it. Both drew out designs, how their products worked, answered questions, and were personable. As for the vendors with male SEs, they have been very good too, knew their stuff & presented well. I guess one good thing for the downturn in the economy, the people left that I have dealt with are very good.

FYI, E911 finds a lot of mis-documented switch ports. 98-99% accuracy still means a bit of work to clean up.

Day in Review -- Geek Speak

We are doing a bond project for wireless and voice upgrades. We have the strong possibility of upgrading some of our edge devices to PoE. We also will file eRate. So we have to make sure the bid is truly open, so we must include equivalents. We were meeting with the team from one of the "equivalents". It went really well. Good AM, SE and data center talks. One of the few times  the SE is brilliant, well-spoken, and straightforward. Nice to know the nuts and bolts and also get feedback that she would not recommend going a certain direction, but they do sell the items. The meeting was 3 hours...felt like 1. Good thing.

Got a request about filters from a collegue in another district. Made me start thinking if there would be a value to a web-site/database that districts that could fill out and then search. Sometimes, just knowing who uses what is good information, especially among your peers. Yeah, we can call or email each other too, but how many of us would rather do a look-up?

Items I thought to gather...The items I've seen on some of the state reports...well, aren't always useful nor important to IT support staff. Number of PCs per students...who cares in support. I know it helps the state & district for educational numbers, but for support personnel, meh. Thoughts?

• District Info
• Name
• Enrollment
• Campuses & types (HS, MS, ES, Admins)
• Support Personnel
• Campus based techs
• District based techs
• Help desk personnel
• Network admins (this may be overall broken down for some & too general for others)
• DBAs
• Route/Switch
• Firewall/security
• Programmers
• Trained monkeys
• Number & Type of PCs, Macs, laptops, & handhelds
• Desktop management software
• Number of physical servers
• Vendor
• Virtualization
• Vendor & Number of servers - real and virtual
• Storage
• Vendor
• Connectivity (iSCSI/Fibre Channel)
• Capacity
• SIS & BIS Systems
• Firewall
• Filter
• Internet
• Email
• Virus/Malware (Desktop & email & Internet)
• Traffic Shaping Product/Vendor
• Route/Switch Vendor
• Wireless Vendor & Mgmt Tools
• Connectivity
• Intra-campus connectivity & speeds (privately owned fiber, gigaman, carrier pigeon)
• Internet speeds & vendors
• Device monitoring system (Nagios, Whatsup Gold, Insight Manager, CiscoWorks, whatever)
• Inventory management (spreadsheet, part of BIS system, KACE, yeah right...?)

It could keep going, but smartboards, printers,  projectors, document cameras, & onward could be added later. I know I get tired of filling things out after a while. secondary issue would be...keeping it up to date. Moore's law changes causes all the answers to change. The goal would be to keep the information to the districts' IT staffs. Many of the people in similar roles are already too popular with resellers & vendors.

I'm sure I did something productive this afternoon, but I can't recall. Does pondering how to write-up a RFP count? More of the structure and how many RFPs to write?

Day in Review -- Geek Speak

More class. I think this class could have been decent, but it is only the 2nd week it has been out. The labs still suck, but at least 13-15 were ok. The order and organization of the class is simply terrible. Feel like whoever wrote this was a dog from Up! Squirrel! and we change directions.

On KACE help desk...trying to figure out how to auto-select the submitter's default campus (ldap department mapped to user field location in our environment) at ticket creation. Also trying to do it for 3 others fields. Missing syntax or something. I think it might be a join on submitter & user fields (MySQL back-end). But is submitter populated during creation or will it be a ticket rule later?

Anyone using Fileway's products? Any thoughts are the thing?

Day in Review -- Geek Speak

We had a vendor claiming that we were blocking their mail. Asked for the bounce message. There was none. Figure spam filter hit hard and just hung up on the connection. Do research and show no blocks. Talk to the vendor..."Oh, its working, no one has responded yet. I guess people are busy". Or my guess is users recognize spam even when an email filter doesn't say it is for them. Just a guess.

SQL class is going down the suck terrible path. Material is good. The labs blow. Either you cheat and use the scripts provided or have no chance. Then the organization is terrible. For authors and trainers, scattering shooting topics is no way to learn. BUILD on topics damn it! If you are going to jump around at least show me why and what we are gaining doing it this. Doing back-up/restore followed by security and auditing and then indexing followed by maintenance plans? huh? How about we put the pieces together? Security and auditing today? seriously, wtf?

I'm sure there was more, but what a frustrating waste of a day. Time to practice a bit.

Day in Review -- Geek Speak pt1

Training on MS SQL 2008 R2 day 2. Not a whole lot to add. Lots of material to re-read tonight. This is one of the times actually reading the material with the product running is required.

Someone blew up one of my applications. Grrrr. Upgrades can be bad. get to put the material in class to practice.

Day in Review -- Technical

In SQL 2008 R2 intro training. FYI, almost all day 1 training days just sucks regardless of class. suck suck suck. Start with a group of 15-25 geeks trying to show each other who's geek is biggest while we introduce ourself. This group wasn't bad though (or i'm getting old). Followed by the intro to the product. then lunch. Sometimes the last half of the day actually hits some material. This one did.

Our instructor appears to be good. Withholding final judgment until the week progresses. Just don't read the damn slides to me!

Day in Review -- Geek Speak

Interviews shot the day down pretty good.

Upgraded our Veeam VM backup solution to the latest version. 5.0.1 --> 5.0.2. Click run. Agree. Yes Yes yes. reboot. test. Yay! FYI, Veeam is awesome. Inexpensive and socket based pricing solution instead of per machine per special need (exchange, sql, AD).

The group as a whole made progress on e911 (oh yeah, I manage the voice systems too!), Replay backups going better (stand-alone solution), and well, crap. It was an administrative day. Not much geek on. Such is life.