It is February 23 today. This has always been a difficult time of year for me. Why? Because of the weather. It isn’t really winter any more – in fact it was 34 degrees today. It also isn’t quite spring either. It was grey, foggy, wet, muddy, dirty, and dreary all day long. It makes it hard to be excited about anything. I can’t wait for the warmth of the spring sun on my face and the enjoyment of walking my dogs through the streets of Loretto without worrying about slipping on ice.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like to give my users choices when it comes to web browsers. All of our computers at HHS have both Internet Explorer and Netscape/Mozilla installed on them.

When we switched our Windows based machines to Windows XP, I noticed something I hadn’t expected for my installations of Netscape/Mozilla: the browser preferences were not global. Each user had their own set of custom preferences — things like proxy server settings, registration, wallet, etc. In some cases, like the proxy settings, I wanted the settings to be the same for every user. After a bit of digging, I found my answer.

Netscape/Mozilla include a set of preferences files that the user preferences are based off of. The most important file is called all.js. It is a text file located in the the Netscape/Mozilla folder. It’s exact location will vary slightly depending on whether you are in Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX. If you open this file with a text editor, you can edit it and change the default behavior for all users for certain parameters.

In my case, we are mostly still using Netscape 7.1. I edited the all.js file so that it forced the proxy server settings for all users and also so it never asked them to register with the Netscape.com site. Very useful.

–Pete

It has already been a crazy week for me at work. Both days this week have seen me heading home at 5:30 instead of 4:00, like I’m supposed to. The reason is the long discussions I’ve ended up having with Media and Technology staff about the future.

The school district is in the midst of budget cutting (again!) and that is driving everyone crazy. If the cuts go on as they are currently planning, it is definitely going to impact how I do my job and to some extent what my job is. Some of the proposed cuts impact staffing for audio/visual support, Technology Education, and of course our Tech Levy money. I’ll be curious to see how it all pans out, but it isn’t too encouraging at the moment.

The frustrating thing about it is that we’re in this position because the money the state and federal governments provide for school districts don’t keep up with inflation. With costs going up 3 to 4 percent every year and the state only giving us 1 to 2 percent increases, the net result is a budget cut. Meanwhile, the politicians are all patting themselves on the back saying, “Gee — we saved education. We gave them more money!!” What they aren’t saying is that even with their new money, we still have to cut. Very frustrating. Oh well. That’s puplic education in the new millenium.

–Pete

Most schools use DHCP servers to assign IP addresses. Most schools also need to have a static address assigned to one or two computers. The most convenient way to do this is creating a “reservation” in the DHCP server for the machine that needs a static address. The reservation means that whenever a certain computer asks for an IP address, the DHCP server will always give it the same address. Very useful. Very convenient.

Strangely, when I started looking at Mac OS X Server (both Panther and Jaguar), there didn’t seem to be a way to set up DHCP reservations for machines. I read and re-read all of the documentation, searched on Google, and came up with nothing. I finally decided that DHCP reservations just were not possible with Mac OS X Server.

Yesterday, I re-read the documentation again and found my answer. Reservations ARE possible. The key, it appears, is the NetInfo Manager. The documentation for DHCP talked about the UNIX daemon that Apple uses to provide the service. The daemon is called bootpd and the manual suggested opening the terminal and reading the man page on bootpd. The man page was rich with information, and it gave good instructions on how to set up reservations. For detailed instructions, take a look at that man page!!

I took some time yesterday and tested the functionality of reservations, and they do work as advertised. I’m still not thrilled with how reservations work though. It is not the most convenient way to do it, but at least it is there!

–Pete

One of the hardest things about documenting your tech support work is figuring out an easy way to do it. In my years here in Hopkins, I’ve documented things in a number of different ways using a bunch of different software packages. Until this school year, I never really found a solution that seemed to do all I wanted it to do.

This year, we set up an issue tracking software package called Request Tracker. Request Tracker consists of an SQL database that is accessed via a web interface, via email, or some combination of the two. It is open source, free software and so far, it seems to be the perfect choice for tracking tech support requests.

Request Tracker is run on a server and currently it will run on most flavors of Unix and Linux. Although it doesn’t specifical say, I would be willing to bet it would also run on Mac OS X, since that is just a variety of Unix. For those of you just starting out with it, it will run on a wide variety of software. When we first started using it, it was running on an old Pentium II 266mhz desktop we had sitting around. We’ve liked it so much that we recently purchased a rack mounted server to run it on. The new server has shortened the wait time when you search for records and will really pay of later as the database grows.

Here is how it works:

A user who is having difficulty with something would send an email to a “special” email address explaining what the problem is. Request Tracker receives the email and generates a numbered “ticket”. The ticket number is used to track this request until it is resolved. As part of generating the ticket, Request Tracker automatically generates a reply email message to the user explaining that their request has been received and what their ticket number is. It also explains how they should correspond in the future about that particular request.

When a tech works on this request, they enter in comments, or send additional email through the web interface of Request Tracker or via email through their favorite email client. Every comment they make or email they send about this ticket becomes part of the ticket’s history.

Why is this helpful? First, the email that your users send you is automatically documented. It becomes part of a searchable database that you can refer to time and time again from any web-enabled computer. Second, your users are doing half the work of documenting for you by sending in their questions and problems.

If you haven’t seen something like Request Tracker, check it out!

As a new tech support person, one the difficult things for me to learn was what to document. If you document everything, you’ll quickly get buried in the process. You’ll spend your day documenting instead of fixing things. If you document too little, you won’t be able to look up the resolution to a problem you solved six months ago so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel again.

Here is my suggestion:

Think about the question you are being asked or the problem you are solving. If you can solve the problem in a minute or less, it is probably unneccessary to document it. For example, if a user stops me in the hall and says, “How do you make text bold in Microsoft Word?” I would simply tell the user how to do it and then forget about. I wouldn’t run right back to my desk and document that I had been asked that question.

If the problem takes between 1 minute and 10 minutes to solve, it might be worth documenting it. It will depend on the problem, the user, and the solution. I hate to be this vague, but it is simply a judgement call.

If it takes you more than 10 minutes to solve it, you should definitely document it. You’ll want a record of it so if you have to do it again, you’ll remember what you did and so when someone asks you why it is taking so long to finish another task you needed to do, you can say, “Here! I was working on this!”

In my next post, I’ll tell you what we use to do our documentation.

–Pete

At work we’re building an 18 million dollar addition on our school building. The addition includes a new kitchen, new cafeteria, new front entrance, new 900 seat theater, new scenery shop, new makeup rooms, and a bunch of other stuff. It is actually really exciting for me because I was on the team that helped design this new addition.

Today I had the pleasure of walking through the construction project to see the progress. Steve, the site manager for the project walked me through to show me how things are going. First of all, let me say that Steve is a really cool guy and has done an amazing job of keeping things rolling. Up until I’ve been involved in this project, I had absolutely no idea just how complicated a project of this magnitude would be. Steve has done a great job of coordinating all of the various contractors to keep things moving.

The new addition is scheduled to be open next fall, and they have come a long way, but have a long way to go yet. All of the exterior walls are up and they are currently heating the new addition. What I thought was interesting, and particularly clever, is the way they decided to heat the new structure during construction. Rather than do the simple thing which was to rent big natural gas heaters, Steve realized that if he moved up the plumbing schedule, he could get all of the steam pipes in place before it got very cold. The steam pipes are hooked to the existing boiler system in the building and the boilers are running anyway. So, instead of renting natural gas heaters and paying a huge gas bill, he rented steam coil heaters and used the steam that our boilers were producing anyway. Good plan, huh?

Anyway, the project is progressing nicely and it is fun to see it take shape. There is enough done now that it is easy to visualize how it is all going to look when it is done. When it is done, it will be really nice.

–Pete

Today I woke up to a major Winter Storm. What they originally predicted was a couple of inches of snow. What it turned into is a double-headed winter storm. The first half last all day today. The second half will hit around 2AM tomorrow and last through the day tomorrow. When all is said and done, it is going to be around 9 to 12 inches of snow. I don’t mind really. I like winter storms. I find them fun. I find them somewhat romantic. I mean, what could be more romantic that snuggling by the fire with a snoring Labrador at your feet, while watching a sappy movie….all the while a winter storm rages outside. Doesn’t that sound good?

How is this to top it off? A ride in antique horse drawn sleigh through the fresh, powdery snow, with the sound of jingle bells filling the air? I actually got a chance to do that today for the first time. A friend of mine has an authentic, antique sleigh. It only seats two, so it wasn’t terribly romantic since my friend is a guy! It was fun though. We took his sleigh through the woods in the fresh snow. It was really quite an experience.

After that, I had the pleasure of driving three hours on slippery, snow and ice covered freeways because I’m an idiot. I got a snow blower three years ago. Anyone who owns a snow blower knows about shear pins/bolts. These are “break-away” bolts or pins that break if the auger on the snow blower grabs something that it can’t chop up, like a rock. The idea is that when the pin breaks, the auger stops turning so it doesn’t damage the motor or auger on the snow blower. You’re always supposed to keep a few extra shear pins around so if you break one they are quick and easy to replace.

I’ve known since I got the snow blower that I needed to have extra shear pins around. In fact, my snow blower even has a compartment that says “Extra Shear Pins” on it. Do you think I had any extra shear pins in there? Of course not! Do you think I needed one today? Of course. When I started blowing snow tonight, I kept thinking, “Man! This thing is really having trouble with this snow.” Usually it throws it without any problem. After ten minutes of struggling with it, it dawned on me to check the shear pins. Of course. I had a broken one. The reason the snow blower was having difficulty is because only half of the auger was turning!

So I shut it down and started my drive to Sears to buy a shear pin. Wouldn’t you know it, the first Sears store I went to didn’t have any. I had to drive for another 40 minutes to another store to get what I needed. On the way back, I counted 9 cars in the ditch. It was very slippery. At least I finally got what I needed.

Enjoy the snow!

–Pete

I’ve been having a problem at work with the server that out Library’s catalog system is run on. Like all System Administrators, I like to have this server backed up on a regular basis — nightly if possible. We usually use a program called Backup Exec by Veritas to do this sort of thing and they have a client for Mac OS X Jaguar, which is the operating system this server runs on.

Backup Exec is an extremely powerful backup software package, but it is also extremely frustrating. A couple of weeks ago, the backups of this server began failing. I have no idea why they began failing and honestly have not had the time to figure whether the problem is the server or the client. I ended up doing what all Sys Admins have done: I starting copying the data to another server that the backups were working on. The problem is that I was doing this by hand and that is a real drag to do.

Today I had a breakthrough. First, let me say that I’m no computer programmer. Oh sure, I took a year’s worth of computer programming in college (Pascal and LISP), but that certainly doesn’t make me a programmer. What I did today was write an AppleScript. If you aren’t familiar with it, AppleScript is a scripting language that is built into the Macintosh OS and can be used to do all kinds of amazing things. I’ve always known that AppleScript was there, but up until today I’ve never utilized it.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon reading about how AppleScript works and examing a whole bunch of scripts that others had written. I took the information I learned and combined and tweaked about four scripts to accomplish my task. The task was for the Library catalog server to log in to our staff file server, empty the contents of the directory that I had specified to hold the copies of the catalog server’s database, copy a new set from the catalog server to the file server and then log out. Just before I went home, I got it to work. Yahoo!

The next step is to set up Cron to run that script once a day. I suspose I should also put some error handling in it. I would also like it to somehow notify that it successfully completed the job. Hmmm…. I guess I have some more work to do on it. I still feel pretty good abou it though.

–Pete

I just noticed that for some reason an entry I wrote last night didn’t post. Like an idiot, I don’t have another copy of it either. Oh well. I guess I’ll have to re-write it later. It was about an awesome piece of software called IPCop. Check it out and I’ll write more about it later.

It is brutally cold outside right now. I mean it. The outside air temperature is -16 F and the windchill is a numbing -34 F. This is the coldest it has been in the Twin Cities area in a really long time. They said on the news tonight that we were lucky. In parts of Canada, the air temperature (without windchill) reached -60 F. That’s crazy!

At times like this, I really wish I lived in California or Florida or something. At least the summers in Minnesota are awesome.

–Pete

Have you ever had one of those days where you feel like you’ve been working your butt off all day, but when you get to the end of the day, you didn’t get anything done that you wanted to get done?

Today was one of those days for me. For some reason it was phone call after phone call today. I had planned to spend all day building a new software image for a lab computer. Instead, I ended up spending about five minutes on it. The bad part is, that I had promised it would be done today. Oh well…..

-Pete

Tonight I watched the movie Groundhog’s Day again. I absolutely love that movie. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It stars Bill Murray, one of the world’s great comedic actors.

The gist of the story is that Bill Murray’s character is stuck re-living the same day over and over again. Every morning when he wakes up, it is February 2. It doesn’t matter what he did the day before. He could even kill himself and when he wakes up, it is February 2nd again.

Eventually, he realizes that he could use the never-ending day to learn new things. He learns how to play piano, make ice carvings with a chainsaw, make snow sculptures, and a bunch of other stuff. Think about what life would be like if that were to really happen to you. What would you do?

-Pete

For the small number of you that actually read my blog, you probably noticed that it was down for more than a month. The reasons for it being down are complicated, but needless to say, I have restarted it now.

You’ll also notice that I now have a photo section powered by Gallery. Check it out.

–Pete

I was working on a project for my personal website and I ran across a fabulous piece of open source software for creating a photo album on the web. The software is called Gallery.

As their website says:

“Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website! ”

It is very easy, very professional looking, and very powerful. If you are looking for a quick, easy way to add a photo gallery to you website, this is the answer.

–Pete

One thing I learned when I started this job is just how cool manageable printers could be. Here at HHS we try to buy only network manageable printers. The majority of the printers here at HP LaserJet printers. If you haven’t looked at HP printers with JetDirect network cards in them, take a look. They are awesome!!

Here are some of the things I like about them:

*They have a built in web server so they can be managed via a web interface. Just type the IP address of the printer into your web browser and start managing!
*They have a built in Telnet interface, so they can be managed via a command line.
*They can integrate into HP’s free Web JetAdmin management application. Web JetAdmin is for managing large numbers of printers all through your web browser.
*They can “speak” in just about any protocol and language you can think of including PCL, PostScript, AppleTalk, IPX/SPX, mDNS, SMB, TCP/IP, LPR, RAW, etc. Amazing!

Because these printers have all this great stuff built into them, I can set them up to do things like:

*Email me (or others) when they are low on toner, have a paper jam, etc.
*Upgrade the firmware of sixty printers from my desk
*Remotely run the control panel on the printer to clear errors

Having printers this manageable makes my job a lot easier, especially when you consider that there are 67 printers in this building!

Pete

Over the last two years, we’ve had a number of Palms trickling into our environment. These, of course, have their own challenges as far as tech support is concerned.

One of the more frustrating issues I’ve had to resolve with Palms is problems with Hotsyncing. On both Macs and Windows based machines I’ve run into problems where one day the Hotsyncing is working fine, and the next day, the Palm and the computer can’t communicate with each other.

After much puzzling, I’ve discovered that the culprit is often corrupt NVRAM on the computer that is messing up the computer’s USB ports. To reset it, do the following:

Mac: Restart the Mac and zap the PRAM. To do that, hold down the apple-option-p-r keys during the startup sequence.

Windows: Resetting the NVRAM is going to vary by manufacturer. All I can tell you for sure is that on a Dell OptiPlex GX260, you enter the BIOS by holding down F2 at startup. When you are in the BIOS editing screen, you turn on the scroll lock, num lock, and caps lock. Once all three are on, you hold down the alt key and press E and that will clear the NVRAM. Check the documentation of your machine to figure our how to do it on the specific machine you have.

Happy Hotsyncing!

We are in the process of switching to OS X in our district for all of our Mac users. Currently, we have a number of OS X machines in our student computer labs. They are set up to automatically log in to a local user account on startup. The user account is a restricted account, but even with a restricted account, the user can change a few things, like the magnification and size of the dock. While this may not seem like a big deal, it is potentially annoying to the next user.

To protect the dock, you can simply lock the plist file that the dock settings are stored in. If you do that, any changes that are made to the dock are erased the next time the computer is restarted or the next time the user is logged out and then logged in again.

The plist file for the dock is located in the preferences folder in the library folder for the user. The name of the file is com.apple.dock.plist. Locate the file, do a get info on the file and check the “Locked” box.

Now that we have your clients time syncing, it is time to start thinking about running your own time server. If you have more than 20 or 30 clients trying to sync their clocks to an NTP server outside of your network, do yourself a favor and set up a time server of your own. It’s easy! It’s cheap! Here’s how to do it:
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Now that I’ve convinced you that syncing your clocks is a good idea, you are probably wondering how to accomplish it. There are actually several ways to accomplish it depending on what kind of clients and servers you have on your network.
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