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.