It's now Sunday, so I can't remember all of what I did Friday. I spent almost the whole day at RMS triaging a record number of tickets -- mostly little things, mostly unrelated -- the usual, "I can't print", "I can't save", "wifi slow" (that one turned out to be on YWP's end.) We were all running like scalded dogs from 7:45am til 3pm. The print queues keep stopping, and I can't figure out why, but I'll bet it's related to the redirected Desktop/Documents and Lion problems we've been having all year. Also there are still people turning up with personal laptops that have not been brought to us for PaperCut prep, so as I continue to firewall printers, they discover they can't print anymore, and that's how we discover them. Duh. Wrote a snotty note to send out, but at this point I'll probably just wait for them to self-identify after they lose the ability to print. There can't be many left.
My favorite was, a cart laptop that wouldn't boot. 2009 MacBook. Tried netbooting, no dice. We had one just like it with no sound, so I grabbed its hard drive and installed it and still couldn't netboot. No firewire or thunderbolt so no way to transfer the cart image. So, took the damned drive back out and used a USB/SATA adapter to connect it directly to the DeployStudio repo server and tried Disk Utility Restore; it crashed. Tried again on the Mini (so as not to be hammering the hard drive during the school day when two hundred kids are connected) and partway through the restore, the disk self-ejected. I became convinced it was my USB adapter, so drove to the high school to get another one that I'd just used successfully the day before. Also grabbed a brand-new hard drive, just in case. So of course it turned out that I'd replaced one bad hard drive with another one that was also bad; new drive + image = all better. Only took six hours.
Spent the evening chaperoning the RMS dance. Not really. I sat in the lobby trying to turn a Dell 2110 netbook into a Chromebook. Spent most of Saturday and half of Sunday on same, but it's not going well. There's one image from January that works, but it's so old, things like offline Docs/Drive don't work. Not sure what else. I guess we could still use them in school but I worry that they'll be glitchy.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Thursday
failed to actually post on the day of.
- worked with Marty to get the Mealtime PC online and virus-protected -- this so that it can talk to the Mealtime motherbrain and sync parents' lunch account deposits daily
- found source of BOY report errors for Ray and RMS (unset FTEs for new students = incorrect attendance calculations, and garbage data in a state field gets pulled into the report too)
- placed order for free Adobe Digital Collection upgrade for RMS -- I guess we bought maintenance after all. Went ahead and asked for the physical media since it's free.
- evaluated an opensource font to help dyslexic people -- we could copy to all comps via ARD if we wanted to, and there's a Chrome extension available which I haven't tried yet.
- responded to this week's BudgetSense bug -- email settings are somehow fuxxored in Norwich, I am hopeful that their tech Sean will chime in.
- conferred with Jordan again re: new switches for HHS -- going to exchange notes on the quotes we get etc.
- swapped out a teacher MacBook at RMS due to sound issues
- repaired an HHS student's laptop and recovered homework file
- received part for MacBook screen replacement
- PO paperwork more
- evaluated two replaced hard drives to identify one that still works (turns out, they're both screwed)
- attended Minelli's QRCodes training. Turns out my method for embedding audio into a Google Site is totally broken. Dammit! No satisfactory alternate found so far that doesn't involve hacking the HTML directly.
- worked with Marty to get the Mealtime PC online and virus-protected -- this so that it can talk to the Mealtime motherbrain and sync parents' lunch account deposits daily
- found source of BOY report errors for Ray and RMS (unset FTEs for new students = incorrect attendance calculations, and garbage data in a state field gets pulled into the report too)
- placed order for free Adobe Digital Collection upgrade for RMS -- I guess we bought maintenance after all. Went ahead and asked for the physical media since it's free.
- evaluated an opensource font to help dyslexic people -- we could copy to all comps via ARD if we wanted to, and there's a Chrome extension available which I haven't tried yet.
- responded to this week's BudgetSense bug -- email settings are somehow fuxxored in Norwich, I am hopeful that their tech Sean will chime in.
- conferred with Jordan again re: new switches for HHS -- going to exchange notes on the quotes we get etc.
- swapped out a teacher MacBook at RMS due to sound issues
- repaired an HHS student's laptop and recovered homework file
- received part for MacBook screen replacement
- PO paperwork more
- evaluated two replaced hard drives to identify one that still works (turns out, they're both screwed)
- attended Minelli's QRCodes training. Turns out my method for embedding audio into a Google Site is totally broken. Dammit! No satisfactory alternate found so far that doesn't involve hacking the HTML directly.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Wednesday
- enabled "games" module in Moodle; allows teacher to, e.g., make a hangman game using words from a course glossary.
- tuned energy saver settings for RMS labs -- automatic startup at 7am and shutdown at 4pm on weekdays. Had this last year but needed to restore settings since we reimaged and reconfigured everything.
- attended K12/curriculum meeting with somewhat vague agenda. Discussed MCS tech training day on Oct 5.
- Started the ball rolling on getting the Chrome device management console enabled for our domain. This will let us see what the options would be like for managing carts etc. of ChromeBooks. Also found info about how to turn older netbooks into Chromebooks via Chromium (opensource fork of Chrome project).
- Archived PowerSchool backups. Keeping dumpfiles from 1st of every month going back to 2009 (ish) and keeping every day's dumpfile for past month. Need to make a more regular habit of this.
- Updated various Mac servers, cleared stuck print jobs.
- i4see system granted privileges for Sarah Curtis for Title IIA grants
- Made appointment for October webinar/confcall with SHI's ProCurve specialist to begin speccing out new switches for HHS.
- Helped develop a streamlined workflow for running software updates en masse via ARD
- Established that Friday's DNS weirdness fixed itself; probably related to recent widespread ISP troubles with google.com confirmed by colleague Jordan DesRoches
- Filed accounting paperwork for Aruba support agreement for 12-13
- Tried out new Kurzweil-esque Chrome add-on for text-to-speech and other learning tools in Google Apps -- forwarded to techs and sped director
- Did POs for reimbursement for various things (network port faceplates, USB extenders, USB thumbdrives)
- Made donations/payments to several software companies whose products we use heavily (DeployStudio, Apache, GAM, DiskWarrior, Carbon Copy Cloner, WinClone)
- tuned energy saver settings for RMS labs -- automatic startup at 7am and shutdown at 4pm on weekdays. Had this last year but needed to restore settings since we reimaged and reconfigured everything.
- attended K12/curriculum meeting with somewhat vague agenda. Discussed MCS tech training day on Oct 5.
- Started the ball rolling on getting the Chrome device management console enabled for our domain. This will let us see what the options would be like for managing carts etc. of ChromeBooks. Also found info about how to turn older netbooks into Chromebooks via Chromium (opensource fork of Chrome project).
- Archived PowerSchool backups. Keeping dumpfiles from 1st of every month going back to 2009 (ish) and keeping every day's dumpfile for past month. Need to make a more regular habit of this.
- Updated various Mac servers, cleared stuck print jobs.
- i4see system granted privileges for Sarah Curtis for Title IIA grants
- Made appointment for October webinar/confcall with SHI's ProCurve specialist to begin speccing out new switches for HHS.
- Helped develop a streamlined workflow for running software updates en masse via ARD
- Established that Friday's DNS weirdness fixed itself; probably related to recent widespread ISP troubles with google.com confirmed by colleague Jordan DesRoches
- Filed accounting paperwork for Aruba support agreement for 12-13
- Tried out new Kurzweil-esque Chrome add-on for text-to-speech and other learning tools in Google Apps -- forwarded to techs and sped director
- Did POs for reimbursement for various things (network port faceplates, USB extenders, USB thumbdrives)
- Made donations/payments to several software companies whose products we use heavily (DeployStudio, Apache, GAM, DiskWarrior, Carbon Copy Cloner, WinClone)
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