Nothing Technical

The only downside to summer planning is all that happens is meetings. And once those are done, you have to schedule more meetings. Nature of the beast. The kids are going. The teachers are going. The buildings are about to empty. Facilities, Construction, Training, Summer School, Technology all want a chance at the empty buildings to do tasks, whether it be painting, waxing, moving AC units, continuing ed credits, credit recovery, and whatever we are supposed to do (phones, wireless, ipads, nooks, etc). Time to get on the same page to start. We all know best laid plans, etc, but at least if you start on the same page you can adjust. Here's hoping we get to the same page. Thats why the lack of technical fun recently. And I'm tired of getting errors with ipads trying to register as a device with NDES/SCEP. grrr. Need those 4-6 hours uninterrupted to turn up the debugging to really see what the errors are.

Coordination

Woo! Summer is almost here! Welcome to the beginning of an organized train wreck called summer project time. Well, not quite a train wreck, but does it ever feel like it. Trying to cram all work that was put off during the year cause it was too intrusive, too expensive, too time intensive into 8-10 weeks. I think we need a bigger shoe horn sometimes. Here are the few items we are trying to coordinate.

1. Construction at 6 sites
2. Summer School
3. Summer Cleaning/Waxing Schedule
4. Summer painting schedules
5. Technology projects
6. Start of new school year stuff
7. Vacations
8. Politics 

Ok. It is only 7 items. Each has anywhere between 2-20 sub-items beneath it. For example, who cares about summer cleaning, right? Well, everyone in the district does. The floors gotta -shine- the first day those kids come back. First impressions matter. And a shine with my big ol' hoof print in it isn't going to win me any points. So we have to schedule around that process which takes about 5 days per school with 4 schools going at a time. 

I'll even break out item 5, cause, well, that's what I do for a living.

• 5a -- deploy new phones to 40 sites!
• Pick up old phones
• What do we with the wall where the old phone was mounted? Yikes!
• deploy new phones
• verify extensions
• verify e911
• configure a fax solution now that we are all IP
• 5b -- deploy 1000 access points to 40 sites!
• Verify student, staff, and guest ssid's work right
• install about 100 switches to light up said APs
• 5c -- implement new email policy
• 5d -- deploy out 300 ipads
• 5e -- deploy out 300 nooks
• 5f -- deploy out 1200 new workstations/laptops
• 5g -- Upgrade internet pipe to larger size
• 5h -- implement new content filter

I'm sure if i polled my group, they'd add 2 or 3 more each. 

Anyhow that's what we do during the summer. Working with the other departments is fun. Teamwork matters. 

Microsoft CA's & DNS entries

Important lesson on implementing Microsoft CA and autoenroll. Make sure your primary dns suffix and such is set to your CA's domain. We had broken out our workstations to be register in their campus locations for dns such as workstationa.mydomain.org. Yeah, not so good when you setup auto enroll on your CA. After following guides from http://www.kurtdillard.com/StudyGuides/70-640/6.html and http://security-24-7.com/windows-2008-r2-certification-authority-installation-guide/, I got a sub CA with hidden root running. Lesson learned for future designs of networks. Always, Always, Always buy enterprise server licenses for your CA. Anyhow the registration entries errors on both the CA and client would give a DNS entry not found error (sorry, not rdp'd into pull the exact language). We've since modified our GPO to have the primary dns suffix be only mydomain.org. auto-enroll is working great now.

Next up is how to get an iPad with a workstation cert. following a few of the guides. will let you know.

Intermittent

Wanted to say these are the worst problems to troubleshoot. Especially when they are happening to your own equipment. AIGH! Probably should reboot the workstation and not blame the network. always always step one (after whining and bitching). reboot.

Writing Tech Cabling Needs for Architects and Installers

When building or updating a new school, it can appear to be a daunting task to write out a data cable plan design especially for infrastructure to give to the architect. However, one of my professors a long time ago told me something very important. Make it into smaller problems. 

Our process starts thinking what type of rooms are in a school? Classrooms, Offices, Libraries, Science Labs, Computer labs, Cafeterias, Gyms, Hallways, and maybe a few others. 

Lets break one of those down. Whats in a classroom? A teachers computer station, a projector of some sort, maybe a few student stations, and perhaps kids with student devices (ipads, nooks, kindles, etc). What connectivity is needed at a teacher computer station? A data drop, a phone drop (likely a data), an interface to the projector, power outlet, and maybe something else? So that makes 2 data drops, an AV plug, and power for a teacher computer location. Maybe we want to define the AV plug a bit more. Most projectors have 2 SVGAs, HDMI, mini audio, and svideo, RCA crap. Well, we get lots of tech support calls on svideo and RCA so we don't install them. No reason to create a headache in the future for both groups. If you give people a spot to plug in a cable, they will. simple but important lesson. The cables will need to be run to the projector so that fact will need to be notated (btw, there are some cool solution that will fit in a 3/4" to 1" conduit for this). 

Now onto the projector. Lets call this the ceiling since more things will be up here. You have the projector which will need power and the matching AV from the teacher location. If there are lots of wireless devices, maybe a network drop. Most rooms have speakers too. some are getting cameras. We do all these over IP in our house. lets count. 1 data for the projector for management, 1 for wireless, 1 for speaker, and for camera/future. 4 data in the ceiling plus an AV box and don't forget power for the porjector. Using a custom ceiling tile here works well. Other things the designers will want to know is the throw of the projector so learn to dig up cut-sheets. 

Next student drops. Data and power, just how many. We do 2 or 4 depending on the age. we are dropping to two since all devices now are wireless. no reason to put data on the wall not to be used.

It looks like we've just defined a classroom? A teacher station location, an AV/ceiling location, and student data locations. Other notes to add for the designers, projectors do not like hot air. do not place a vent in front of the projector. It works great...until the first cold day. You'll find you can reuse a lot of your definitions as you go. Our spec to hand to architects and designers is about 8-10 pages.We add stuff for IDFs, MDFs, etc. We even cover service loops, support structure and other items. It ends up taking about 1-2 days to write it out with another to clean it up.

And thanks again to my professor who taught me solve a bunch of small problems.

All in a day

i like days like today. mostly. except for the crazy stuff. i think they are called people. And not my own. i like my people's version of crazy. Anyhow...todays quick recap

the vmware, S.I.S. issue.

followed by the veeam issue since it still running after 8 hrs and had a snapshot. not good. tried to cancel the job. stuck. rebooted the server. cleared the job. cleared the snapshot. notified friday will be a full backup with new start point do to the disk size increases etc. 

construction site visit. Fun!

fiber locate for an orchard at a school. yeah, really. find outside plant fiber pathway to make sure the orchard would not be on top of it. Good news it wasn't.

Figure out what our KACE box is crashing every day at 2AM. found somethings. have a case open KACE case. pizza pizza. anyhow, more to come. Our ftp backup was running at 2am. Maybe conflicting with the zipping of the databases? Backed our ftp backup to 4am. Straws, grasping, i know.

and i hate PKI & certificates. Actually, i hate trying to -fix- PKI and certificates. Going behind 3 years of issues isn't fun. Trying to document and track something that wasn't done by you or your team is a chore. Especially when its not your specialty. But the intertubes being great and all, have wonderful articles on how to implement MS certificates. The lesson learned was, buy MS server enterprise (or better) for PKI in an MS environment. They almost shouldn't put it in standard since it has limited functionality. If you are going to do anything cert based and have ms, don't use standard. 

And board meeting...

Vmware and unable to expand a disk

I have this rule about losing a technical person. in about a month, some service that person knew the most about will have an issue. And like clockwork, it happens. So, our student info system decided to grow to its full capacity on the disk and max out the vmware disk. No problem, expand the lun, scan for changes, have vmware expand its disk. ah, not so much. vmware could see the change in size, but couldn't expand. after spending time on the phone with support, going directly into the vmware host, not the management piece, we could expand the disk in vmware. then we were able to go into windows etc and do that virtual host piece. Lesson learned and notated.