A new school year is upon us

Tomorrow is Monday, 1st February 2010. This date signals the return to work of all our teaching staff, and the realisation that our few weeks of peace and quiet are well and truly over!

Quite a bit has happened since my last post...here is a quick run-down:

We finalised the 2010 budget and spent lots of money! For our money we got:

* 80 staff laptops
* 162 new student laptops
* 3 new Xserves
* 1 new Windows Server (Library)
* RAM upgrades for 170-odd computers
* 6 new laser printers
* New software site licences (Mac OS X 10.6, FileMaker Pro, iLife and Adobe Creative Suite 4)
* A new wireless network

...and the associated bits n' pieces to make it all work. We didn't end up purchasing a 4th year of warranty for our computers...it was waaaaay too expensive. Instead, we've "retired" some desktops to use as spares, and purchased additional laptops to give us enough spares for the student fleet.

Our migration to Google apps has stalled...due to difficulties in synchronising our Open Directory (LDAP) with Google accounts. It's simply not worth it if we have to maintain 2 different sets of usernames and passwords. However, we have done some tinkering with our email server in an effort to make it more stable...fingers crossed.

We have managed to set up a QuickTime streaming server in conjunction with the 3 PVRs we purchased at the end of 2009. We will probably allow some staff to access this service (so we can test thoroughly) before unleashing it upon the masses.

During the last week or so, a network engineer from HP has been with us setting up our new wireless networks. We have upgraded to HP ProCurve's MSM422 access points, and 765zl controllers (which plug into our core switches). We have currently set up 61 new access points, and for the most part, our coverage looks pretty good. Since the vast majority of our client machines have 802.11n capable wireless cards, we have concentrated on the "n" deployment throughout the College, with a "g" network offering thin coverage for non-"n" clients.

There will be some tweaking to be done, with some access points to move, a couple to add, and we are waiting on some antennae which will improve our outdoor coverage. Once this is all done, we will get our resellers in to do a "post-implementation survey" to verify the network coverage.

Just before Shane (our HP engineer) arrived, I managed to bring down about half the network. I was "simply" configuring some new edge switches in the network, when I gave one of them an MST (Multi-Instance Spanning Tree) priority of "0", not "10" - 1 character can make a whole load of difference!

Nett result of this action was that the new edge switch saw itself as root of our MST implementation, rather than our core switch. Traffic was being sent to the wrong switch (and then dropped, because the switch didn't know what to do with it). Fortunately, with Shane's help, I managed to find / fix the problem.

After a bit of effort, it seems that I have had a win with the Principal's calendar. Until recently, we have been using Meeting Maker for his appointments. Problems began to arise when the Principal bought a new phone (an iMate Jazz) a couple of years ago. It simply wouldn't sync to a Mac, and it was clear that a better solution was needed.

About 12 months ago, I flagged the possibility of using iCal and synching to an iPhone. The Principal was happy for me to test this. We installed some workarounds so that Meeting Maker could sync to iCal, and then to his iPhone. This worked OK, but obviously not an ideal solution (I didn't want the Principal's PA to have to re-enter all appointments for the year...minimizing downtime was crucial!)

This issue came to a head during these holidays...the Principal was getting an upgraded laptop, and Meeting Maker will not run on the new machine. Being the end of the year means that it is the perfect time to make these major changes. So, last week I upgraded the (previously) Meeting Maker server to Mac OS X 10.6 server. After a couple of calls to Apple in Austin TX, I was finally able to configure iCal service, and publish some iCal calendars to the server. I also successfully tested delegation - which means I can control who can see (and modify) my online calendars. Last, but not least, was to deploy a new SOE on the Principal's PA's laptop, so she has the newest version of iCal. Tomorrow will be the day that this all works, or all falls in a heap (I'm confident that it'll be the first option!)

Of course, we still have quite a bit to do before students arrive back at the end of this week. First of these is to arrange the upgrade of our Learning Management System (Studywiz) server. We're going for a multi-server deployment to cope with increasing numbers of connections. We're also hoping to have the system automatically interrogate our student records database for all staff, student and subject changes. This should make administration much easier.

We also need to create accounts for new students. Hopefully (fingers crossed) this will just be a matter of importing a specially-prepared spreadsheet. Creating the accounts is the easy part...getting tutors to hand the password slips to students is the difficult bit!

While I'm setting up new accounts, I also need to roll over the users on our online Mathematics program (Mathletics). Again, a specially formatted spreadsheet should do the trick!

There are still some computers waiting for new homes:

* Several staff laptops (about 30-40)
* Library circulation desk PCs
* Laser printers

...this is before we get any support calls from staff. Looks like another busy week for the IT Department!