Wednesday - Traveled to Bradley to help troubleshoot several issues and run a cable in one of their labs. We had to install DyKnow monitoring software, which turned out to be much more involved than we had anticipated. In fact, we ended up removing the installation at least once (I think maybe twice) before we got it right. Let me just say that I miss the days when thousand-dollar software came with a PRINTED manual. We had to locate and replace a wire that was causing a video issue in the distance learning lab. We also looked at several other technical issues as well.
Thursday - I drove to Fouke to help troubleshoot network issues. The tech and I looked at their backup configuration and made sure that it was backing up everything it was supposed to be. We went through the Middle School trying to find a possible network loopback, but did not find one. There is something going on, and I let the tech know that the co-op would be getting an Etherscope soon and that I would bring it to troubleshoot as soon as it arrived. in the meantime, I offered suggestions for manually hunting down the problem. The "old school" method is to unplug cables one at a time until things settle down. If EVERYTHING is unplugged before the network settles, then plug things back in one at a time and monitor the situation. It is long, tedious work with a lot of network connections to go through.
They have Xirrus wireless and one array keeps rebooting itself, but does not log the boot loop in its diagnostics. I can only assume that the system is rebooting before the diags can be recorded.
The tech asked me to research the following: 1) Cloud-based backup for Netware, 2) Multi-sheet document scanner for record keeping, 3) Info regarding migration from Groupwise to Google Apps for Education. I will have those to them next week.
Friday - Went to Blevins to help troubleshoot network issues and other problems. They had a lightning strike take out one of their T1s. The telco replaced the line, but the internet connection was no where near up to speed (running about 26k/sec). We had DIS on the line and Warren helped us narrow down a couple issues. One issue surfaced in the form of the video LAN and the Data LAN being on the same physical network. After a LOT of sneakernet, we found the problem (a wire plugged into the wrong place) and fixed that. As for internet connectivity, it turns out the line was not provisioned correctly on the telco end. Aonce both of those were resolved, the district was running at near 3-meg capacity.
Additionally, I had a list of things the techs wanted me to look over, so I did. A MacBook had a CD stuck in the drive and it would not eject. The system was "hosed" and would not boot beyond the spinning grey circle. Holding the EJECT button whole booting did not work. Holding COMMAND-OPTION-F-O never put me in Firmware Mode, so that was no good. I finally took a stiff piece of cardboard and stuck it in the drive. When the system tried to boot, the CD was held in place by the cardboard. The system tried to read the disc 3-4 times. After that, the CD eventually ejected from the system.
I helped set the password expiration period to 90 days (it had been set to 42 days).
I helped set up two printers as DHCP reservations.
I showed the tech how to DENY requests for IP addresses in the DHCP server module. I love that feature of Server 2008 R2! Wahoo! They had a LOT of iPhone, iPod, Android, etc users snagging up IP addresses.
We worked on a couple other issues, then I headed to the office.
At the office, I worked on updating the Operations Guide for the Conference Room - added a cheat sheet for multiple screen scenarios. I posted the 2012-2013 DL Calendar to the ARDL portal, answered phone calls, emails, voicemails, etc.
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