I spotted this on the walk back from Povpool. Remind me what you use to play bowls. :D
Monday, August 29, 2005
A sensible set of signs...
I spotted this on the walk back from Povpool. Remind me what you use to play bowls. :D
The Bank Holiday Weekend
In order to take advantage of the bank holiday weekend, Caroline came 'round last night. We had a fun-filled evening watching some more episodes of Most Haunted - a genius show, with Derek Accura cracking us up more and more with every word he uttered!
Anyway, one of the places that the Most Haunted team visited was Blackpool Pleasure beach - the Ghost Train to be exact. Caroline had the great idea that we should go to the Pleasure Beach today and for some bizzarre reason I agreed - the Pleasure Beach is somewhere I would never normally go!
Anyway, we had quite a fun day with a ride on the tram down to the Pleasure Beach and not reasonable lunch in Yates' - I have a pie-type thing and Caroline had pasta. We paid an extortionate amount of money at the Pleasure Beach and went on several rides including the Big One (which wasn't all that it was cracked up to be IMHO), the Grand National (that thing is unsafe) and another roller coaster which didn't even have safety bars (a good job that we were wedged into the tiny carriages cos that thing was insane!).
Incidentally, we didn't see the ghost of 'Cloggy' which Derek was rabbiting on about, or any other ghosts for that matter!
As can be seen, I managed to get Caroline lovely and wet ;)
Saturday, August 27, 2005
The Wonderful World of Driving
I took my car for its MOT today - £40 well spent!
Due to the LPG-ness of the car there is no emissions test so the test was done in double quick time. We then had to wait half an hour before the stupid computer system would accept the results from the test. I mean... the mechanic had enough time to make a phone call, have brew and perform half of the MOT checks on another car (including the emissions test).
Anyway all was well cos the car passed with flying colours - just need to spend £100-odd on tax plus get the cam-belt changed and a service done.
As if all this wawsn't bad enough, i received my new license today. The stupid medical boffins at the DVLA have now decided that a 3-year license wasn't short enough. Despite the fact that I haven't had any epilepsy-related problems for over 7-years, I now have to have a review of my license after a year!
Due to the LPG-ness of the car there is no emissions test so the test was done in double quick time. We then had to wait half an hour before the stupid computer system would accept the results from the test. I mean... the mechanic had enough time to make a phone call, have brew and perform half of the MOT checks on another car (including the emissions test).
Anyway all was well cos the car passed with flying colours - just need to spend £100-odd on tax plus get the cam-belt changed and a service done.
As if all this wawsn't bad enough, i received my new license today. The stupid medical boffins at the DVLA have now decided that a 3-year license wasn't short enough. Despite the fact that I haven't had any epilepsy-related problems for over 7-years, I now have to have a review of my license after a year!
Friday, August 26, 2005
Looks like NASA control!
This is my desk at work with the fancy twin 17" Neovo flat panels. I thought I�d post a pic to show how cool it looks before I cover it in trash (the classroom next door currently contains all the trash!).
Now I just need to work on the computer - an Athlon XP 2400 with 700-odd meg of RAM and a 32MB graphics card is just a bit lame.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
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. :)
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. :)
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
My new blog...
Well... Kath finally persuaded me to have a blog so here it is on Blogger (the home of the Blog). I will add some more later when I've finished tweaking the settings.
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