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.

7th week of ITS internship 3/15/2010

Today started out as fairly busy, but slowed down once we had everything done that we could. The Dell machine we have been working on for a couple of weeks was almost done, he just needed to find the graphics driver for the card we installed. The card had no markings on it, and it took quite a bit of investigative work to find the driver for it. However once we found it, we had no problems with it from there on out and unless they plan on doing any more work to it, I believe it is done and ready to be given back to the customer. We also had to finish up some work on a laptop that we've been working on, it just needed a virus scan done and it was ready to be shipped out. The last machine we and to work on we ran into some trouble with. I guess some people before copied over the files from it to an external hard drive, however when we got there, we could not find the power cord for the external hard drive, so we could not copy anything back. That is all we were able to accomplish.

6th week of ITS internship 3/01/2010

Today was another busy day in ITS. We had 3 different computers we were working on. One was a laptop that needed Sophos antivirus installed on it and run. It was running extremely slow and wasn't even done when I left, but it hadn't found any at that point. The time was also wrong on it, we corrected it, but it was wrong again when I left; I wonder if the battery on the motherboard that helps it keep time has gone bad. The 2nd computer was the computer that we have been working on for a few weeks, By now it was ready to have Sophos installed and ran; it found a few problems and was correcting them when I left; hopefully we are just about done with that computer. The last was also the one with the most problems, Windows couldn't boot because it was missing a few files, so we had to copy over the files onto another hard drive and reinstall Windows, unfortunately we couldn't copy over some of the files because it had some viruses on it, so we ran Sophos on it and hopefully got rid of all of them. It was still copying over the files when I left. It didn't seem like I got much done today because I spent most of my time wating for those programs to run, but I guess that's something that you have to get use to when working in IT, because you can't continue until those programs get done running.

5th week of ITS internship 2/22/2010

Today was a busy day in the ITS department. We mainly worked on our Clonezilla project. We got our client PCs today, and our server. We spent most of the time setting them up and getting all the parts we needed to get all of them to work. The main problem was finding a DVI to VGA cord for one of the machines. We also labeled all of the to make sure someone wouldn't take them. Mike set us up with a cubicle so we would have a little space. After we finished that, Mike had us look at the machine we fixed a couple of weeks ago with the bad memory. It was having trouble getting the Active X directory. However we ran out of time to really dive into it and find what the problem was.

4th Week of ITS intership 2/15/2010

Today the campus was shut down due to snow; however I used the time to try and learn more about Clonezilla and are operating system we decided to put it on, Ubuntu.

3rd week of ITS internship 2/8/2010

Today we were installing Windows 7 on the computer we have for our projects that work. This took a fair amount of time, but when we were done we turned our attention to a School of Business computer that was brought in. It would not boot Windows; so Mike let us use this tool called Ultimate Boot CD I believe, and we used it to look for problems. Most of the tests it ran, like the hard drive or CPU test, it passed; however it kept hanging up on the Ram test, so we decided to pull one of the memory sticks, and sure enough the first one we pulled, it was able to boot Windows. We tried many different arrangements of the two memory sticks and slots they were in, but the first one we pulled never worked. We also noticed that the screen had a nice yellow tent to it, so we pulled the graphics card and just used the integrated graphics and sure enough the yellow tent was gone. We were able to get it to the password screen, which was much farther than we were able to begin with, but we were unable to test it any farther because we didn't have the password. It also didn't have a SATA cable to begin with so we had to use one we found.

2nd week of ITS internship 2/1/2010

Today we pulled all the known bad parts out of the computers and made a log of all the parts that were either missing or were bad. If we had them, we went ahead and wrote down the serial numbers of the parts. We did this because Tangent, the company that supplies the computers, will replace the bad parts free of charge, but if they are missing, the school will have to buy the new parts off of them. We sat the bad parts on top of the computer they came from so everybody could easily see where they went. I found it interesting that all of the drives that we had that were bad were the infamous Hitachi Deskstar. The Deskstar line, or Deathstar as was commonly called, was actually bought from IBM; however before Hitachi bought the lineup, it was considered one of the worst hard drive lineups of all time, this Wikipedia article, Deskstar failures, goes into more details about all the problems IBM and Hitachi had over them. Hitachi was supposed to have started making better drives, but it appears they were still having problems, at least when the hard drives we have were made. We also spent some time trying to reinstall windows to see if it was a bad install or a hard drive causing problems on one machine, after some time where the installer seemed frozen and would boot anymore, we decided to pull a known good hard drive from a machine and sure enough it worked fine.

1st week of ITS internship 1/25/2010

Today was the first day of my ITS internship, our goal for today was to make sure all the machines that we are using for the Windows 7 trial had all the parts they needed and would at least boot. Most worked fine, a few were missing hard drives and power supplies, however the last one we tested ended up being the most troublesome, it would start, then after 2-3 seconds it would restart. After making sure everything that needed to be plugged in was, we came to the conclusion that it must be a faulty power supply, hopefully its that and not something worse like a bad CPU or motherboard. During the last 20 minutes, we tried to get the ghost server running again. They have a USB DVD burner plugged into it, however since it sets far away from the actual computer itself, they have it plugged in via USB to Ethernet. We tried unplugging that to see if it was the problem, and it did attempt to boot Windows, however it wouldn't and we ran out of time to try anything else.