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.

Construction

Ok, it is always fun visiting construction sites. Watching a building go up or a renovation is impressive.We have a project right in the drywall stage, so right before cabling is installed in the walls. Our data junction boxes & conduits are set by the electrical contractor so that's not our scope. Making sure they put them in the right places and they'll work is! We've tried consultants and 3rd parties, but getting them onsite and on the contractors butt has been difficult. Even the very good installers will take short cuts, miss something and sometimes just plain screw up. One, make sure you had a good RFP. Two, catch issues early or even as they are happening, most of the installers will fix it and not gripe too much. The other reason we like doing our own rfps and cabling is cause we learn a lot from both the GC and the installers....and my thoughts trail off to another subject. we'll come back to this

KACE Devices with multiple NICS

Here is a script we use to find both NICs MAC addresses within KACE. Using the default scripts from KACE only selects on the Machine table. We used this to find our laptops & both nics. AGain, not a SQL person by any stretch. Probably could be cleaner etc.


SELECT DISTINCT NAME, BIOS_SERIAL_NUMBER, OS_NAME, CS_MODEL, CHASSIS_TYPE, MACHINE.MAC as MAC1,
  (SELECT NIC
  FROM ORG1.MACHINE_NICS
  WHERE ((ORG1.MACHINE_NICS.ID=ORG1.MACHINE.ID) AND (MAC1 = MAC)) LIMIT 1 ) as NIC1,
  (SELECT MAC
  FROM ORG1.MACHINE_NICS
  WHERE ((ORG1.MACHINE_NICS.ID=ORG1.MACHINE.ID) AND (MAC1 != MAC)) LIMIT 1 ) as MAC2,
  (SELECT NIC
  FROM ORG1.MACHINE_NICS
  WHERE ((ORG1.MACHINE_NICS.ID=ORG1.MACHINE.ID) AND (MAC1 != MAC)) LIMIT 1 ) as NIC2
FROM `ORG1`.`MACHINE`
JOIN `ORG1`.`MACHINE_NICS`
ON ORG1.MACHINE.ID=ORG1.MACHINE_NICS.ID
WHERE ORG1.MACHINE.CHASSIS_TYPE='laptop'
ORDER BY NAME, NIC1;

Weird Days

Days where 90% of the job is awesome, but the 10% does it in and tanks it are no fun. That was one of those. Just when you have a handle on what you can do and will do as a team, poof, it changes. I know it happens, but this was far beyond the ordinary. I'll do the fun parts.

Phone calls with your vendors, resellers, and others that are actually fun, useful and on target. Had a conference call with our implementor, wireless hardware provider and us. Our implementation team from our reseller stepped up and spoke up on our behalf. The hardware vendor themselves worked to help resolve our issue. Those are good calls. Even with 7 people on a con-call with no true "organizer". 5 tech people with 2 sales creatures on the same call are interesting. I genuinely like our implementation person. Smart, sharp, savvy, and in my corner. good cloning material.

Before that I found out my zoning was 23/24 correct. freaking misclicks. Easily corrected and non-production storage. Anyhow. created the servers onto the ISE so i could provision storage. Next step to do, create adequate storage and offload busier arrays onto these units. However, adding the array to our management system...whats this yellow hardware error (and my previous storage person took another job 3 weeks ago). ah, crap. support call. We've had it happen before. And my boss wondered why i built-in redundancy at every layer possible, hardware software, cabling. CCR will save the day when we have to go offline on the array with error for the rebuild. About the only issue our users will see....is none unless they happen to be do something that 1-4 minutes we failover the ccr on sunday morning.

During the lunch hour we got to play host to our eRate company. It was informational for them so one of their new people could put the terms to the physical items. either they were polite or i was informative. 90 minutes of me doing a data center tour. i'm going with the former.

Anyhow, those were the fun parts.

KACE & Skyward - Part 2

I really did more research into this project. Kinda hit a sticking point. So our Skyward system sends email to a Reforma printer spooler (by Fabsoft) that put data in certain locations ..into a pdf which is emailed. Well, crap. as stated before KACE wants emails with
@'fieldname' blah blah blah.
I can direct the email to our system based on key fields in the print stream. that's not a problem. I'm stuck on how to elegantly get the data from the print stream (or pdf) into a formatted email.
That's where i'm stuck, but it's moved down on the priority list. From my poking around in reforma and other products I can pull field locations from pdfs and put them into a flat file or similar. that file or document can then be sent as contents of an email. As I told my boss...good programmer, 2 weeks to 2 months depending on how good we want it. damn. Filed under the list of doable, but no time.

following on this. I learned whatsupgold let us format the emails however we want. Yep. it can create the work order automagically into KACE. Just have create the rules to send email to the KACE smtp listener when an event or status changes to something bad. Can even set status as open or closed, but that can be a headache. having the system open a work order and close it without human interaction shouldn't count. such as...custodial staff unplugs device from wall for vacuum. work order create! custodial plugs device back in! close work order. (I should add the assignment to me so I get the credit right? :) The hard part on this is writing the policy and rules so we get work orders for what is "real" for our environment. having 1000 switches our users can touch makes this a challenge. A layer 8-12 (your environment, politics, religion, money!) decision.