Network Drops, Databases, Snowstorms, OHMY!
This has been a very busy week for me. I spent the weekend in Onion Lake visiting with my brother since it was his birthday on Friday.
Well, it’s busy in general, but that’s life these days.
This week though … IT SNOWED. Crazy lots! The weather sites say it snowed about 15-20cm (3-4″ for those of you south of the border). And it’s still snowing. It will probably snow a bit more throughout the day, with it tapering off a bit by tonight. Oi.
But before the snow, I got to do a network drop on Monday which was awesome. I haven’t the opportunity to do that in a long time. We ran cable from the server cabinet to the room, installed a wall jack, punched down the line, and made cable ends. Pretty sweet. I even got to use the power drill for a bit. The worst part, though, was running the cable through the ceiling. Those tiles drop all sorts of crap on your face and hair. Ugh. We have safety goggles, but still. Ew.
And then the storm hit, so we have been office bound since then. I have gotten a lot of paper work done since then. I am in the middle of training people on inputting DRA data and attendance on Open Office, using SMART Notebook for the SMART Board, and using the new email system. Then on top of all that, there’s the regular hardware repair and software maintenance I do.
I love my job. :D
Which I should probably get back to. Haha I mostly just wanted to share the fun snow times. (Already, I’m certain we’ve had more snow in the past 2 days than we did all of last winter! Not even an exaggeration which I am prone to do.)
ETA: I just spent my morning and part of the afternoon climbing around IN the ceiling running cable for our new enterprise level access point! Aside from the insane amount of dust, it was aaaaaaaawesome. I even got to use the headlamp and walkie talkie. lol Best week EVER! XD
IT Summit 12
I had a lot of fun at this year’s IT Summit put up by Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation. I’m told most years the summit can be geared more toward the educational resource side of things, but this year, I got lucky and they decided to make it all about IT. It was all about incorporating IT into classrooms (and keeping it out when appropriate lol), supporting school networks, network security in an educational institution, and planned expansion and upgrades to the Saskatchewan school networks, both mainstream and non (the non being the Christian school system and on-reserve school system).
I got to hang with other techs who support schools, see some great presentations, pick up some sweet swag, and I came to a very important conclusion about my own personal career goals.
Failure is not fatal …
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
I’ve had to remind myself of this fact a lot this week: that failure is not fatal, that it is the courage to continue that counts. You see, on Monday the server at work suffered a catastrophic failure. While my boss, the systems administrator, was on vacation in Cuba. And was completely cut off from office communications.
I’m told I did the right thing, I handled it well, but even upon his return and that we ended up losing everything on the server (thank goodness for daily backups!), I still feel like I came up short somehow.
We are still in the process of rebuilding the Active Directory, adding everyone back to the domain, recovering local data lost in the conversions, etc. I had one employee break down in tears that she may have lost everything personal on her work laptop. *headdesk* I also had, on average, one person ask me if I could have them back up by noon every ten minutes or so, every single morning since it went down on Monday.
Even with my boss putting in nightly overtime, my going in one night to help him, we’re not quite done yet.
On top of all of this madness, I still had to go out to one of the schools and do an Open Admin in-service and install Deep Freeze on their lab computers. Which I screwed up by giving my intern incorrect instructions. Since I was splitting my time between the lab and the in-service (I was instructing), I didn’t catch on right away and he managed to get through ten computers before I caught on. Oi. We spent the rest of the day fixing the mistake instead of moving forward on the remaining eight computers in the lab.
Perhaps splitting my time between the two projects was a bad idea. :P And perhaps my mind just isn’t altogether … here this week. *sigh*
To say I’ve had a stressful week is putting it lightly.
My house is beginning to show this stress. It is scary at the moment. Today I’ve begun the cleaning process. Dishes are getting done, the laundry pile is slightly smaller, the living room is toy and litter free … oh and speaking of litter, that will get done today, I swear! And if I can get my boy out of his room after throwing a mini-fit, the recycling may get done as well!
If we get enough done before it gets too dark, I may take pictures today to refresh my creative side, or just take the kids sliding since we’ve had a crazy amount of snow this week. :)
Busy as that proverbial beaver …
Man, it has been crazy busy lately. The biggest project on my plate at the moment is the Saskatchewan 2012 First Nation Winter Games. Battlefords Agency Tribal Chiefs (my employers) are hosting the games this year in Saskatoon. Normally, IT wouldn’t be a big part of a sports … thing. But BATC is doing a lot of innovative stuff this time around that involves our little geeksquad.
For example, we’re planning on live streaming a few of the games. We’re also doing online registration of the athletes. So … as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s taking up a lot of our time. Not to mention we still have to do all our regular jobs like making sure the school servers are up, the school computers work, the chiefs’ computers and laptops work, the office computers are running well, etc.
PLUS … our latest project is Deep Freeze on the school computers. Let me tell you guys, DF, in its latest incarnation, is a thing of beauty. I mean, really. Especially if you use the Enterprise version, which is what we have. I looove it like there’s no tomorrow.
Add the LogMeIn software to that, and Sharon is a happy geek. :D
And with that, I’ve noticed how late it’s getting and I really need to get up early tomorrow. It’s actually Reading Week. My kids have the week off so I’ve offered their fathers visiting time with them. I’m not happy with it, because I miss my kids, but I suppose kids should bond with their other parents. And perhaps my boy will see his other mom when he’s there on the rez too. Get the whole family experience.
In any case, it’s a lot of driving for me and driving makes me tired. :P So with that, I bid thee adieu.
Ubuntu
I finally got sick of my laptop taking 8-10 minutes to start up, and then taking another 5 minutes to start any program, and THEN crashing. Too many programs installed, the operating system was too old, and just had too much stuff.
So, rather than attempting to uninstall tons of crap (which I doubt I could manage, since it took so long to even boot), or re-install XP I decided to upgrade my operating system (OS) to something new. Unfortunately, I am broke and could not afford Windows 7, not to mention I doubt this old beast of a laptop had the hardware that could run it anymore. I mean, originally it could, but I don’t know anymore. lol The kids have taken it to hell and back.
Since Windows was out of the question, and obviously an Apple OS wasn’t an option (hahahaha), I decided to check out some Linux distributions. After doing a wee bit of research (not a lot mind you), I decided to go with Ubuntu. Mostly because it’s fairly well known as an OS that’s easiest to use for non-programming users, or users who aren’t really tech-savvy. And while my kids are pretty well-versed in computers, they’re still kids. Same goes for my sister. She’s becoming more comfortable with computers, but to be honest, she’s still not the most able of users. :) At least she’s using the Playbook we got for Christmas. Haha
Anyhoot. So I installed Ubuntu. I used a USB stick to boot from and Pendrivelinux to create the bootable USB. Once the bootable USB was created and the Ubuntu ISO was loaded on, I stuck it in a USB port and booted up my laptop. The great thing about this was that I got to try out Ubuntu before installing it.
That’s right, I was able to run the entire OS from the USB stick without changing a single thing on my actual harddrive or affecting my current OS, which at the time was XP.
Which was cool, but as it turns out, unnecessary since I fell in love. lol I ended up installing Ubuntu for realzies!
And yes, I am typing this blog post from my laptop that actually works now, and it takes less than 30 seconds to boot now. Whee! Loves it! There a few glitches here and there, but nothing compared to the horror that this laptop was before. So … no real complaints.
I’d still rather have Win 7, but I’m cheap, and in the end, I’m still happy. :D
CREEHAWK 