Monday and Tuesday

Monday, I spent the morning teaching Principals and Instructional Facilitators how to use their new 4th Gen iPod Touches.  They all had or created accounts and downloaded a couple free apps.  We also played with the cameras, then they were turned over to the other presenters for Classroom Walk Through training (Teachscape).

The rest of Monday was spent catching up on things left since I had taken off the entire previous week.

---

Tuesday, I worked at Bradley schools.  We had several things to take care of.

First, here is a repost of an article I wrote for TechBlog:

Inadvertent Email Rules

Came across a user that was receiving intermittent emails.  Some messages would come through and others would be directed to her "Junk Mail" folder.

 

The first place I looked (In Exchange) was under "Junk Mail Settings" and I looked through her Blocked Senders list.  The only one out of the ordinary was her own email address.  I removed that from the blocked list.

 

The next place I looked was her rules.  She had several set up to direct certain messages to junk, and for the most part, these were correct.  However, there was one rule that said "Any mail sent only to me, move to the Junk Mail folder."  There was the culprit (or one, anyway).  That rule essenatially said that if anyone sent a message to her and ONLY her, it was to be tossed aside.  Since many of the messages had been sent to multiple people, she would receive those.  Direct, one-to-one communications, however, did not make it to her inbox.

 

I deleted the errant rule.  I scrolled through the other rules, and found one more that might have been causing trouble, though the exact nature escapes me now.

 

When a user says that legitimate email is going to SPAM, JUNK, DELETED ITEMS, that is a good sign that the use has a rule being enforced that he/she did not actually want happening.  A little sluething, though, and hopefully you will uncover the bullying rule (and then delete that rule!).

 

---

After that, the Superintendent asked me to provide testing for their Continuity of Operations Plan.  As it turns out, the tech and I had done an 'inadvertent' test last May, in which we realized the backup we were doing was corrupt.  We had a failing test, monitored the situation and adjusted.

So, today, I ran a "loss of data" test, and the backup data was restored perfectly! Excellent!

---

Next on the list, I ran the Data Doctor on the locally installed Accelerated Reader program in order to prep the data for the move to the cloud.  The district is moving their AR to the online version.  One less thing to manage and worry about.  We hit a couple snags, but eventually zipped up the data and uploaded it to their site.  Now, we just wait for the good word.

---

While uploading the data, the tech and I took some RAM over to the business lab in order to install it in a couple of computers that gone awry.

---

The last item on the agenda was to download and install Vexira antivirus.  They have a very cool central management system and once we figured out what we needed to do in order to get things rolling, it was actually FUN to watch the software getting pushed out to the workstations on the network.

Thanksgiving Break

No recent posts, as I have been off for Thanksgiving break.  Monday brings CWT training.  Most of the folks in our area doing classroom walk throughs are using Teachscape's CWT software.  This will be the first training in which we are training on the iPod/iPhone version of the software.  Each participant receives an iPod touch at a discounted rate (it's more of a cost-sharing situation, really - we pay part and they pay the rest).

I'll post after it's over to let everyone know how it went.

Friday

Started the day by going to Prescott to swap out the ECH computer there.  I tried simply moving the hard drive from the dead computer to another one, but got the BSOD. Yay me.  Set up the new (temporary) computer - installed printer, Vineland II, etc.

Got to the office around 1030a.  Went to Teacher Center to work on several issues.  The first one was related to Publisher 2007 and copy/paste.  For whatever reason, the clipbook service had been disabled, so I opened the Services.msc and enabled Network DDE and Network DDE DSDM which allowed me to enable Clipbook.  Once Clipbook was started, I modified the "Log On" tab to include "Allow service to interact with desktop."  I then restarted the Clipbook service, closed Publisher then relaunched it.  At that point, I could copy/paste from the clipboard to the Publisher document.

I also worked on a video camera, which turned out to have the settings such that it was looking for an external memory card (the unit has 16GB built-in).  Once I found my way through the menus, I set it to use internal memory and the camera then allowed for 4+ hours of HQ recording. Awesome!

I spent part of Friday working on email notifications for the camera system (security).  That was, er, fun.  After much poking around in the DVR software, our Exchange set-up and in ISA (firewall), I finally got it going...and going, and going and going.  There is no way that I have figured out yet to set a time limit on the emails.  Thus, as long as the cameras are set to record, email goes out everytime something moves on any of the cameras.  My mailbox is going to fill up quick during regular working hours!  But, the advantage is that I will get noticed if people (or anything) is moving around inside the building AFTER hours.  After the Thanksgiving break, I'll work on scheduling... maybe.

Thursday

Busy day so far today. It is roughly 10:00 am, and I've had two conference calls and a CIV test. I met with the Early Childhood Coordinator regarding the installation of cameras and Skype for her teachers. The plan is to use Skype for parent meetings in order to avoid the driving from our main office to the school sites when face-to-face is not necessarily imperative. It looks VERY promising! I also made the appropriate modifications to the bosses' bookcases in order to hook up their LCD TVs. Once the TVs were hooked up, I fielded a call from Blevins regarding a non-deleting icon. That was an interesting adventure.

Evidently, the user dragged a message from Groupwise onto the desktop, thinking it wuold save a copy of the message. Instead, it created a .GWI file that would do nothing. When the user tried to delete it, it wuld not delete and instead get caught in an infinite "deleting" loop.

After a bit of research, and trial and error, I came across a post about a program I had forgotten about: Unlocker. Unlocker is a great tool that will show you what process(es) are holding the selected file(s) and then give you options to rename, remove, etc. You can find it here: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/

Once Unlocker was installed, we selected "Delete" from the drop-down and then played it safe with the least intrusive option (I cannot recall the exact wording). Ultimately, though, they got the same inifinte loop until they clicked the "Kill Process" button. As soon as they did, the icon disappeared and the process stopped! Excellent!

I had used unlocker before, though I cannot remember what the circumstance was. Now, I've used it twice with great success!

Let's see what the rest of the day holds.

Talked with the local cable company regarding pricing and installation. They will send a letter of proposal and we can decide from there whether or not we want the service.

I am also looking into using a dish-based service.

Received a call from Prescott's early childhood program - her main computer died. It seems all of these out-of-warranty Dells that the ECH programs have are dying lately. Not good! I'll be heading there Friday to swap out computers.

Fielded calls from Blevins regarding USB issues on several computers and regarding sites blocked by the state content filtering system.

Took care of general office duties as usual.

Near the end of the day, I decided to try and set up the security camera system for email notifications (that is, notify me when an 'event' happens).  Still working on that one.

Tuesday

Stopped in Prescott first thing to drop off a DVD of the tech plan training we had on Friday.  The tech had not made it to the office yet, so I dropped in to one of the DL labs since she was having trouble switching to her document camera.

Her system has been acting up, so I wired a bypass from the document camera to the codec (bypassing the touch panel module since it is out).  I then showed the facilitator how to use the remote to switch between the various input devices (main camera, doc cam, etc).

After that, I visited with the tech for a bit.  We talked about a whole range of topics (filters, wireless, web servers, etc).  Before I left, we worked on his DNS server, Firewall and Sharepoint server to route traffic from their old web address to their new web server.  We had previously set up a redirect page, but now we moved to actual IP resolution.  The next step was to have him call DIS and make the change in the state DNS server(s).

---

Once I arrived at the office, I had several meetings planned out.  First was one with DataCove for email archiving.  After that, I met with IK Electric regarding phone systems, network security, and data aggregation/firewalling/content filtering.

Near the end of the day, Harry Dickens happened by so I visited with him at length about iPads, apps, and trainings that he had done recently at several of our area schools.

Monday

Spent much of the time doing general daily office stuff (troubleshooting, cleaning spam filter, email, phone calls, etc).  I took several calls from a couple of techs working on their technology disaster recovery plans and continuity of operations plans. 

Last Week

Monday (11/8) - general office work, as usual, so far as I can remember.

Tuesday (11/9) - 1/2 day at Blevins School District, worked on fiber connections.  Had to hunt down a few lines to figure out how the connection for the new admin building met up with the current demarc location. 

1/2 Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (11/9,10,11) - I was out sick.

Friday (11/12) - Back in office for a morning training on new tech plan development (CIV from ADE).  That was followed by a local area tech meeting.  The afternoon was spent cleaning/organizing the technology closet.

Time Flies!

Whew! Keeping up with this everyday is harder than I imagined!  But, I will try to rebuild some of what has taken place outside of regular daily duties (ex: fixing computers, printers, etc).

During the past week, in addition to regular daily activites, I have done the following:

Installed camera control cable in conference room to rear camera.

Spent Tuesday still fighting internet connectivity issues.  With the help of DIS, we narrowed it down to a local issue (not sure what just yet) and on Tuesday, we jumped from 500k usage to 2.86Mb usage almost exactly at 8:45am.  Turns out, that is almost exactly when we turned all the Macs on in the computer lab.  At lunch, I disabled updates on both the Mac OS and in the Windows running on Parallels on the Macs.  Not sure what difference that has made yet.  Today (Friday), our connectivity seems to be stable between 2-3 Mb, even with a video conference going on.  That is good.  Now, I will fire up all the Macs next Tuesday and see what happens, since the problem is mainly on Tuesdays.

Wednesday, I worked at Blevins schools troubleshooting several issues - one of which was another scenario where someone had plugged a loose end into the same switch it had come out of.  Since this unit was up on a shelf, it would take a deliberate effort to pull that off.  We're starting to suspect a mystery plugger-inner! ;-)  Steve and I also walked through a few fiber runs and a new cat-5 run to be done, trying to determine where the wires went, where they originated, and how to patch things together for the relocation of the administration offices.  So far, we have at least two runs that don't seem to line up.  In my experience, this usually means there is an inbetween stop that we have not yet discovered.

Thursday - Met with other state techs in Conway at Video-Relaity for a demonstration of the SAFARI Montage program/appliance.  We also met with Beck Rains and Debbie Coffman.  The notes from that meeting (if I can remember) will be posted once they are officially adopted/approved.

Friday - ran fiber between floors for data, hoping to resolve connectivity issues.  That will be a metter of time before I know for sure.  Worked with Phoebe and Lindy on the outside light issue for our new building (the timer is, well, wonky).  We also discussed the alarm system and I used the surveillance camera software to review a situation from earlier.

I am hoping to run the wiring for computer/dl labs today (Friday)  and beef up security even more.  Frankly, I'm liking the security we have in place.  Very nice!