Last week of ITS internship 4/12/2010

Today we continued working on our project, getting ready to give the presentation

10th week of ITS internship 4/5/2010

Today we really didn't do much, so I tried different settings with FOG. I think I know quite a lot about it now

Get Windows Server 2008 R2 for free

Even though MSDNAA still does have Windows Server 2008 R2 yet, that doesn't mean you still can't get it for free. Microsoft's DreamSpark website does have it. The DreamSpark website is a lot like MSDNAA, in that you have to be a student, but you also have to have a .edu email address, however it doesn't have everything like Windows 7. But it does have Windows Server R2; all you have to do is sign in with a hotmail account, pick your university from a list, SIUE is on there, and type in your name and .edu email address. Wait 5 minutes or so for the activation email and your good to go.

FreeBSD

I've been working with FreeBSD in Virtual Box recently. It is a direct decedent of UNIX. Whereas Linux is more of a UNIX clone. Its been kind of a tough project because it doesn't install a desktop of its own; however several Linux desktops, like KDE and Gnome have been ported to make using it easier. I encourage anyone who likes using Linux to check it out.

9th week of ITS internship 3/29/2010

Day was we monumental turning point with our project. We were finally able to get our FOG (free open-source ghost) server working. Of course we would have never gotten there without Darren's help on Thursday, and I was able to to get it to work on Friday. But I really didn't try imaging any machine. We got that done today, and we were able to use Sysprep with our XP image. I really like the FOG interface, and it only takes about 4-5 minutes to deploy an image with it. We haven't tried multicasting with it yet, but I don't foresee any problems with it Mike didn't have anything else for us to do so we spent most of our time working with it.

Clonezilla Woes

I thought now would be a good time to chronicle some of our problems with Clonezilla. First off it kinda hurt us that not all of us and any experience with Linux. I myself have some knowledge with Linux, I've used it a little, but I didn't have enough experience with it to set down and do the coding in the terminal necessary. One of the requirements to run Clonezilla is that the computer your installing it on must have two NICs in it. This presented a problem because we couldn't figure out how to configure Linux to accept two NICs; but after a few days of fiddling with it, and countless Google searches, we finally got it figured out. Then came actually installing Clonezilla; we had to read up on how to install it, thankfully there were many guides to help with this. Unfortunately none of the guides were exactly the same, and none of them had the same setup has we had; they all recommended setting up static IPs for all the computers including the clients, that just wasn't an option for the campus. So we had to disable quite a few settings in the install. Once we actually got it installed, we were presented with a text-based interface; while much better than a command line interface, this presented problems because there were no options to change anything once you went through the setup steps. We also had ther problems but decided to try FOG (free open-source ghost) to see if it was any easier. We also learned that it has a bad habit of messing up the MBR.

8th week of ITS internship 3/22/2010

Today we reinstalled Windows on a client's computer; a virus had rendered it useless. So we reinstalled it and downloaded all the drivers for it, and started downloading the updates from Microsoft for it. That took most of the time, so while that was working we worked on our project a little bit. That was the only thing Mike had for us that day.