We have a fairly large number of laptops in our school districts. Because laptops are so portable, we’ve had our fair share of them stolen over the years. There are a number of products that can be purchased and installed on the laptop that make it easier to recover them if they get stolen. One that comes to mind is a piece of software called MacPhoneHome. While I’ve looked at these two products and believe they are quite good, they aren’t cheap when you look at rolling it out to hundreds of laptops.

Tonight I’ve been researching ways to accomplish something similar using the tools that are built right in to Mac OS X. I’ve found a couple of interesting leads and plan to explore this further in the coming days. Mac OS X Hints has a particular interesting set of hints in this post. Once I’ve tested a few of these ideas, I’ll be sure and post again with more information.

–Pete

As a tech support person, I regularly get forwarded emails from people that question whether or not the forwarded email is “real”. It might contain info about a virus or something as strange as the safety of freezing water in plastic water bottles.

One of the resources I point my users to is this really useful website: www.snopes.com. Snopes.com has information about many of the most popular urban legends and myths and provides good information for users who are looking for the truth about these things. If you haven’t already, check it out!

–Pete

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope your day is filled with family, good food, and a good nap. At church last night, our pastor challenged us to all go home and write out a list of things we were thankful for. Here is a partial list, in no particular order:

I’m thankful for a wife that loves me, loves my dogs, and puts up with my idiosyncrasies. We met seven years ago and I loved her from the moment I met her. My happiest days have been with her as part of my life. She thinks my fascination with computers is weird, but nobody’s perfect, right? 😉

I’m thankful for parents who have always cared about me and kept my best interests in their hearts. We haven’t always agreed on things, but no matter what, I know they are looking out for me and love me.

I’m thankful for wonderful siblings. I have a close relationship with my brothers and sister and can count on them when I need them…..for anything.

I’m thankful for a great group of dogs that live in my house. Coming home to an excited pack of happy Labradors is always a joy. They are ALWAYS happy to see me. Sharing a bed with a couple of warm, snuggly, and snoring Labradors is also a joy to me, except when they won’t get off of my pillow!

I’m thankful for a great job and great coworkers. Both jobs I’ve had in the last six years have been jobs where I’ve heard, “Thank you for doing what you do.” on an almost daily basis. I’ve worked in jobs where that wasn’t true and it definitely makes it easy to get up and go to work when you know you are appreciated. It also makes it easy to go to work when you have coworkers that look out for you and run in to help at the drop of a hat. That’s the kind of people I work for and work with.

I’m thankful for the amazing opportunities God has given me. I’ve had the chance to march in a drum and bugle corps, go to college, learn how to fly an airplane, learn to train dogs, teach science to kids, go skydiving, learn how to make pottery on a pottery wheel, ride in some historic airplanes, take memorable trips, and so much more. I’ve been so blessed to have all of these opportunities.

I’m thankful for the wonderful friends I’ve had over the years. There have been so many and they have all enriched my life in so many different ways. They have been there to share the good times with me, help me through the bad times, and share their lives with me.

–Pete

As I was looking at my blog I realized that I haven’t mentioned anywhere that I have a new job in the Hopkins School District. My new title is Technology Services Manager. My responsibilities include being a Level 3 tech support person for all of the building tech support staff across the district. In addition I am the primary System Administrator for many of our district’s servers, which are a combination of Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Mac OS X servers.

I started this work in August and so far the work has been extremely interesting, as several of my blog entries have detailed.

I also wanted to note that my colleague Tim Wilson, the Hopkins School District 270 Tech Integration Specialist, has moved his blog, The Savvy Technologist, to a new server. The URL is now http://www.technosavvy.org.

–Pete

Being a school district, we don’t always have the latest and greatest technology as compared to an enterprise environment. When I first started with the district our server room was a small room the size of a large closet. It had no four post racks, water sprinklers for fire suppression, and a window air conditioner to keep it cool. It was not exactly an ideal location for mission critical servers to be housed, but it was all we had, so we made due with it.

Two years ago we finally had the opportunity to create a room a bit better suited for housing servers. The new room has a gas fire suppression system, six four post racks that are bolted to the floor, a separate heating and air conditioning system, and a large UPS system for providing backup power. The server room has worked well for us, but it hasn’t been without its teething problems. Friday was one of the problems.

At this time of the year in Minneapolis, the high temperature is usually quite cool — in the 40s and 50s. Consequently, the air conditioning system in our server room is not usually running. We’ve usually switched to heat or at the very least, piping in outside air. Our air handling system is handled by a computer and so we don’t usually have to think about. This past Friday was a fluke. The high was 75 degrees in Minneapolis. As a result, the air handling system should have turned on the air conditioning system. Unfortunately, because of a mechanical problem, that didn’t happen. It didn’t take long for the temperature to begin to soar in that room. Unfortunatley for us, we didn’t realize it for quite a while because of a critical mistake we made in the new server room. The mistake: we don’t have a device monitoring the temperature in that room. The result, of course, was that we were not notified that there was a problem until the servers themselves began to notify us that they were getting hot. Not an ideal situation!

Because the situation got very hot very quickly, we ended up shutting down the majority of our servers to prevent them from producing additional heat and to prevent them from overheating. Fortunately, this happened late on Friday afternoon, so it wasn’t a big deal to shut them down — we were lucky! The air conditioning was fixed on late Friday evening and everything is back up and running now.

What did we learn? We need to have something monitoring the temperature of that room so we can be notified if there is a problem way before the servers themselves start reporting a problem. I’ll be ordering something to do this job sometime tomorrow. It seems like such a simple thing to have that. I’m surprised that none of us thought of this sooner!

–Pete

UPDATE 11-13-04: Our new temperature/humidity sensors arrived this week. I’ll be installing them as soon as I get the chance.

Happy Halloween everyone! Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. This year, for the first time in years, I carved some pumpkins. I had forgotten how much fun it is. Trick or treat!

–Pete

I learned a hard lesson this past week about using the command cp in Mac OS X. You’ll want to know this too!

I needed to temporarily move a large directory from one drive to another on a Mac OS X server. The directory contained several subdirectories that had different permissions, so trying to do this copy from the Finder was going to be a pain. The solution was simple — do it from the command line. I quickly launched the terminal application and did the following command:

Server: sudo cp -r /Volumes/Drive1/BigFolder /Volumes/Drive2/

The copy complete several minutes later and on quick inspection, the permissions were intact. Everything looked good — until about an hour later. I got a call from the Tech Support Specialist from one of our buildings. One of the subdirectories in the directory I had copied contained installers for software for Mac OS 9 machines. None of the installers even launched correctly. Puzzled, I connected to the server to see for myself. He was right. They didn’t work. Strangely, all of the installers for Mac OS X software and Windows software worked perfectly.

After puzzling over this for a few minutes, I suddenly realized what the problem was. The resource forks of the files were gone. In the Macintosh operating systems, files have two forks — a data fork and a resource fork. In Mac OS 9, the resource fork is crucial information. It contains information about what kind of file it is, whether or not it executable, etc. Without that, the operating system doesn’t know what to do with it.

After doing a little research, I validated my theory. The cp command, being a UNIX command, doesn’t understand resource forks, so it simply strips them off when it copies files.

There was no way to fix my blunder, but there was a way to keep it from happening again in the future. The answer is the Mac OS X specific command named ditto. Ditto, if used with the -rsrcFork flag will preserve the resource fork of the file it is copying. I guess I’ll be using ditto from now on.

–Pete

Like I did earlier this summer, I will be doing a presentation titled “Issue Tracking and Forums: Open Source Tools For Technical Support” at the TIES Technology Leadership Camp being held this week. The description is “See demonstrations of two free, open source tools that make technical support easier: Request Tracker, a web- and e-mail-based issue tracking tool for logging, assigning, prioritizing and resolving tech support requests, and phpBB, “bulletin board” forum software that gives technical support staff a virtual place to discuss common support issues.”

The issue tracking software we use is called RT: Request Tracker by Best Practical, LLC. Point your browser to http://www.bestpractical.com

The on-line forum software we use is called phpBB. Point your browser to http://www.phpbb.com

Here are some excerpts from my presentation:
Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently setting up some training for the techs in my district, and I had a chance to curl up with an excellent book. The book is Mac OS X Unleashed (Second Edition). This book contains gives a great overview of Mac OS X and gives a terrific overview of the BSD Unix that Mac OS X is built on. I’ve only got the Second Edition, which is specific to Jaguar, but I imagine the Third Edition is great too.

Today was a fun and relaxing day. I slept in, and then after a leisurely breakfast we took the boats out for a ride. Both boats belong to my parents. One is a traditional runabout type boat and the other is a personal watercraft. I really enjoy driving both of them, but this morning I started out with the personal watercraft. My niece rode with me and we blasted around the lake on that thing. I have to admit, I take great delight and pushing the limits of that machine. It is very maneuverable and I love doing tight turns and sideways skids. Thankfully, my niece likes that too. Later in the afternoon, we tried going boating again but after getting out into the lake we got caught in a rainstorm. That sucked some of the fun out of the event.

I don’t know what it is about boats and water for me. I love being out in the water. I have since I was a little kid. I have very fond memories of hanging out with my friends as a teenager while bobbing around in a lake.

–Pete

This has been a summer of short vacations for me. My folks rented a cabin at a nice little resort called Beacon Shores, which is situated on the shore of Whitefish Lake in Cross Lake, MN. The cabin is small and a bit rustic, but comfortable. I drove up this evening with my 12 year old niece. I hadn’t seen her for a while and we had a nice conversation on the way up. She is a very nice kid. Now it is off to bed. Tomorrow we’ll be playing with the boats and relaxing in the sunshine. I sure hope the weather is nice. It has been extraordinarily cool this week.

–Pete

It is freakishly cold today. I think the high was around 58 degrees….in August!! It is supposed to be 82 degrees. It feels more like October than August.

Thanks

The last two weeks I’ve been attending two classes that are put on by Apple through their training department. They are Mac OS X Helpdesk Essentials and Mac OS X Server Essentials. Although I have a great deal of experience in both environments, I’ve still found these classes to be useful and I’ve be shown a few “gems” in both of those classes. If you have the means, I highly recommend taking both classes if you are working with Mac OS X in your environment. Point your browser to http://train.apple.com.

–Pete

If you ever want to really scare your wireless (WiFi) users, download a Macintosh software package called EtherPeg. EtherPeg will let you put your WiFi card into “promiscuous” mode and it will quietly listen to all of the unencrypted wireless traffic and then display any JPEG or GIF files that it intercepts. This is a fascinating program and a good shocker to show users how insecure unencrypted wireless networks are. It doesn’t display anything that is done over encrypted WiFi or through encrypted browser connections.

I’m not sure if there is a Windows equivalent of this, but I would imagine there is.

–Pete

OK. I think I’ve officially achieved “redneck” status. I attended my first tractor pull last night. As part of the city of Hutchinson’s summer festival, they had two evenings of the tractor pull event. These were officially sanctioned NTPA events too. The scary part is, I actually enjoyed it. If you’ve never experienced a tractor pull, I recommend giving it a try. Oh wait. One thing though. Bring your earplugs. It is very LOUD!!

The other kind of cool thing was that the stands we were sitting in faced the Hutchinson airport. What you may not know is that Hutch is the hotspot for skydiving here in the Twin Cities area and the home to Skydive Hutch. While the tractor pull was going on, we watched three groups of people load into the jump planes and then a few minutes later we watched all of those people parachute gracefully back down next to the building at the airport. Very cool. This is something I’d love to try some time.

On Thursday and Friday of this past week, I took a much needed mini-vacation up to my home-away-from-home – the North Shore of Lake Superior. Normally, I would take trips like this with my wife, but for this trip, she was unable to get out of work commitments, so I decided to go alone. Although the trip would have been more fun with her there, I still managed to have a good time.

I took the opportunity to visit a couple of old friends from my college days at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and visit some of my favorite local sites. I’ll write more about those in another entry. I also decided to camp instead of stay at a hotel. Camping by myself was a new experience, and I had a good time. I ended up at the

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I almost bought the farm last week. Here’s what happened:

I was mowing the lawn with my new riding lawnmower. Our backyard is a steep hill with a pond at the bottom of it. I was at the top of the hill, just starting down, when the drive belt on the mower gave way. Without the drive belt, the transmission was just disconnected from the wheels, which were now freewheeling. The end result is that I started rapidly accelerating down the hill. I hit the breaks, but I was moving too fast for it to do much good. Fortunately, I kept my wits about me and managed to make a hard right turn, ending up in the neighbor’s yard. I was happy I didn’t end up in the pond, but now I had a heavy lawn mower without a broken drive belt at the bottom of a steep hill. Fun!

I’ve been intrigued this week by the flight of SpaceShipOne, the privately funded sub-orbital spacecraft built by Scaled Composites. This week, it became the first non-government sponsored aircraft to reach an altitude of 100km which is widely accepted to be the start of “space”.

I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned it in this blog, but I am a licensed private pilot. The sad part is that I haven’t flown as PIC (pilot in command) in over 5 years. Shortly after getting my license I got married, bought a house, and a new car. All of the cash that I was using to go flying disappeared into those new things. I don’t regret that happening — I love my wife and love my house. I do have to admit I do miss the flying once and a while.

It is an amazing feeling to be flying an airplane. I’ll never forgot the day I solo flew an airplane for the first time. As the airplane was lifting off the runway, I remember a big grin spreading across my face and thinking, “Oh my God! I’m flying this thing all by myself!”. A few seconds later I remember thinking, “Oh my God! I’m flying this thing all by myself!” The second time there was no grin though. I’m sure it was more of a frantic, panicked look. Despite that, the flight was a huge success, with three take-offs and three landings. It was an incredible sense of accomplishment to earn those pilot’s wings. I can only imagine what it must feel like for SpaceShipOne’s pilot to earn his Astronaut Wings.

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation yesterday at the TIES Leadership Camp. I had a lot of fun presenting!

I promised in my last post that I would give some more details out of the presentation. Here they are:

Issue Tracking:

Why did Hopkins choose Request Tracker?
1. It will run on almost anything.
• RT runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP also.
• It can be accessed via any web browser from any platform or via email.
2. It is database flexible.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports.
• RT can be used with MySQL or PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL Server
3. Support is widely available.
• Commercial, paid support is available for ongoing support needs as well as installation and development of new features.
• Active mailing lists are available for users to post questions and get answers from other RT users.
4. The price is right!
• If you donít wish to have any paid commercial support, the cost of the software is free!
• It will run on relatively inexpensive hardware.

Forums:

Why did Hopkins choose phpBB?
1. It will run on almost anything!
   • Runs on any major operating system that can run web serving software and PHP. This includes Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X
   • Requires a database server running MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, or Microsoft Access
2. The price is right!
• phpBB is licensed under the GPL and is free to download and use.
• It will run on very inexpensive hardware.
3. It is easy to administer
• Designed to be administered from the web.
• Even complex tasks such as setting up users can be done with very little interaction from the adminstrator.
• Users can reset their own passwords.

I’ll speak more to why we are using issue tracking software and forums in my next post.