The saga of the network upgrade

OK – a brief synopsis of the original plan…
The network I manage in a school was still running NT4 on the servers and 9x on the desktops with the wonderful software that is RM Connect locking it down to prevent the little darlings running amok. With MS support for NT being officially dead 8 months ago and the hardware getting no younger an upgrade was called for. In order to do this in a cost effective and easily manageable fashion I opted for the wonders of Citrix – which those that know me will know I love.

The Summer break began and the upgrade commenced…
I’d already placed the order for the new servers, etc. and they had arrived. I bought 10 Sun Fire v20z Opteron-based servers with 4GB RAM in the 6 Citrix servers. There’s also an EMC SAN and Tanberg LTO2 autoloader. My intention was to convert all the curriculum machines so that they would run as Citrix clients – the client OS would be XP where the licenses were available and a special Linux distro called Thinstation where the boxes only had 98 on them. I proceeded to set up the first new DC and the new mail server.

I got some instructions off msexchange.org which led me through the process of moving all the mailboxes from the old Exchange server to the new one. I then set up the new DC and began setting up some of the other servers and services. At this point Chris arrived for a week to give me a hand – he really didn’t know what he’d let himself in for! We tried to remove the old mail server (also a DC) but things stopped working. Exchange fell over, RIS stopped working, DNS went mental… God only knows what had happened.

After several days we decided that it was royally screwed so I decided to give up on retrieving the mail (incidentally, a previous network manager - probably the one who set the mail server and AD up - hadn't been backing mail up correctly!) and we re-created AD and started again. This left us about 4 days behind schedule and has had a knock on effect ever since. I have nearly finished configuring the clients now though :)

Talking about clients... one room contained 30 RM desktops of one particular model not found elsewhere in the school. These are nothing fancy - Intel mainboards with Celeron processors - but they refuse to boot via Etherboot when it is installed to the hard disk. Why the hell this is I don't know.

What's left to do?
I've configured Citrix on 3 out 6 of the servers with the fourth one only needing its baseline updates and Presentation Server installing. The Citrix farm, however, has only 2 applications installed at the moment - Office 2003 and Studio MX 2004. This leaves what seems like billions of apps still to install and configure - thank God for the easy application deployment in Citrix! :)

However, I also have a handful of colour printers to get Jetdirect boxes for and configure plus I need to complete the client configuration and tidy up the user configs. It all then has to be documented too!

Adding insult to injury
I found out today that my new server room is definately not going to be ready in time! I will be finding out tomorrow what I will have to do with all my servers since they currently occupy half a classroom - I know where I'd like to put them... bloody contractors! I'm also not sure where I'm going to put my 7' rack and 2 pallets-worth of UPS until the server room is ready.

Oh well... no point stressing out. Time to go and play pool!

Will update soon. :)