Recently in Work Category

I mentioned I was in a dorm at La Salle for the week, the reason for this is I am learning to teach AP Computer Science.  Yes you heard that right I am going to be molding the minds of America's youth.  Since my school was unable to hire a replacement in time for the previous computer science teacher who left I was drafted into the position.  On one hand I am the most qualified (other than my boss maybe) to teach the AP CS class due to programming experience and other experience related to computer.  On the other hand I probably have the least teaching experience (at least with children) of anyone, even first year teachers have had student teaching.

The class I am taking this week is to help prepare teachers to teach AP CS to the required AP curriculum.  It is to help introduce the methods for teaching AP CS and some other ideas for getting the material across.  The class is based on Java, which I have never programmed in.  I have had programming experience with other object oriented languages and have helped others learn them.  If nothing else I will call on Rob who has forgotten more about OO methods than I have ever learned.

Wish my students and I luck this school year.  Oh and a couple of questions I have heard that I thought I would mention since they are somewhat funny.  Are my other responsibilities at the school being reduced? Not that I know of.  Am I getting a raise?  Since the teachers probably make less than me (I honestly don't know, just anecdotal) I should really be getting a pay cut, somehow I don't think that would have been a good selling point.  The one perk I am getting is I will for the first time in my career is a really office.  Four walls, a desk, a door and no servers.

In October of 2003 we got a new Dell PowerVault 775 NAS server. This server was essentially a PowerEdge 2650 running Windows Storage Server 2003, which is a slightly tweaked version of Windows Server 2003. The server originally shipped with a pair of 18 GB drives in a mirror set for the OS and a trio of 147 GB drives in a RAID 5 for data storage. The first problem the server had was almost daily bluescreens. It was found that these were caused by the Dell OpenManage software. After we removed the software the server stabilized.

The next problem to show up shortly was a small amount of corruption on the data drive. A few files would get corrupted each week or so. I would run CHKDSK on the weekend and it would fix the corruption, usually with no data loss. The corruption was never large but it was consistent. I created many cases with Dell to attempt to resolve this problem. I tried to check consistency on RAID set, rebuilt the drive and tried many other similar fixes. Nothing worked long term however.

Eventually we added a PV220S to the PV775. When we did this we moved the data drives from the internal slots to the external enclosure. After doing this magically any data corruption on the data drive stopped. The news isn't all good however. The OS drives started having problems then. The server started having weird memory errors and would just generally stop responding.

I again called Dell to try and trouble shoot this new but related problem. The first thing they had me do was update drivers and firmware on RAID controllers and SCSI drives. After that they began taking dumps of drive issues using a modified version of CHKDSK. Eventually they determined there was a flaw in the RAID controller. Dell did not make the controller and thus were waiting on a fix from the ODM. As time dragged on they gave me other options. Most of the options involved removing or disabling the RAID controller. The problem with this solution was they I would need to rebuild the OS. Further I would no longer be able to use Storage Server since it was built assuming that RAID was there. I didn't think this was a good solution and decided to give them a bit longer to come up with a fix for hardware.

About a week ago Dell called and said they couldn't find a fix for the problem. As a result they would be swapping the hardware out. This brings up a whole new suite of problems. The main problem was that Dell no longer made an equivalent NAS server. We cannot get a new box running Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, which is what I really wanted. Instead we will be getting a PowerEdge 2850 running Windows Server 2003 R2. The base server will be considerably faster than the older server since it is three years newer. As a bonus we also get a new three year warranty for free.

It is still going to be a bit of a hassle for me since I will have to transition the data drives to new server as well as all the share definitions. Also I have to switch around some drives so I can send back the ones the server originally came with. Fun Fun. At least Dell followed through and resolved the issue.

Update: Woo-Hoo, well today was my lucky day it seems. Dell announced the PowerEdge 2950 with Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 today. This is the exact server I was hoping to get. Dell has cancelled the order for the 2850 that was previously discussed and will instead begin the order for a 2950. It isn't really out yet so we will have to wait a little while, but it will be worth it. This server has the latest dual core Xeon's and all the other newest technologies. Awesome.

Update 2: My Dell support person got me exactly what I wanted, it is an awesome server. Dell has a very happy customer now. Even if Dell did make me suffer for a while along the way, they made it right in the end.

I saw this story on Om's site. While working for Qwest backing in early 2000 the executive mentioned in this story gave myself and about 50 others a pep talk at Dave and Buster's. Somehow that is funny to me. Of course the group I worked for was closed down shortly after I left, but that is a story for another day.

I was reading this posting and also the story it references in the Boston Globe. There were similar concerns raised in the last two weeks at my school. While the reactions were quick I am glad that they weren't so over the top as the ones in the Boston Globe story. As Mr. Thompson advocates we used the occasion more as a teaching opportunity rather than a punishment. We found that in many cases the blogs were being used for nothing more than relationship building. However in some cases they had gone farther than one would like. This is where the teaching came in. Hopefully we helped instruct the students in what should and shouldn't be put online.

Even if Scoble puts his cell number on his blog, it might not be the best idea for a <18 year old girl.

Also the idea that a school can tell students what and where to post online is a little dubious. Trying to enforce such a rule is a near impossibility. There is just no way to police every possible location on the web for posting, and further the students will simply become more anonymous.

This week was the first week of school where I work. Usually the last week of August and first week of September are nuts for me. This year was different but not too much. I had hopes for this summer being easier since over 50% of our laptop/tablet fleet would be identical from a hardware/software platform. On top of that there were no major upgrades software wise. I litereally pulled down last year's image applied a year's worth of windows/office (now microsoft) updates and a few other updated software programs and I was done.

This gave me the hope that this summer I wouldn't be quite so freaked out. However I seemed to be more stressed and got less done for some reason. Part of it was outside of work, buying a new house. The other part was turnover inside of work. This summer we transitioned in a new laptop support person as well as a new technology teacher. Both have turned out better than I would have hoped, but there is still a learning curve.

I have high hopes for the year though. We don't have any major hardware issues looming. One big problem will hopefully be resolved in a month or so. The other we have a plan of action for. Both of these problems bother me usually more than others, since I take it personally when stuff doesn't work. Hard not to, it is my job afterall.

Sometime this weekend the power went out at my school. We know it was 3:05 becuase one of the clocks stopped, however it might have been 3 PM sunday or 3 am Monday. Either way as of now it is still down. Whenever it does come back up I get to go bring everything back online. Lucky me, woo hoo.

Update 9 PM : Still no power. No I get to sleep with my phones since I am effectively on call for whenever the power does come on. Yeah me.

I am continuing to Beta test a new software version at work. In testing it I must upgrade it and run some conversion processes. It is at least a two step process and maybe three or four. The problem is that part one took 22.5 hours. This is on a desktop machine running Windows 2003 Server and SQL Server 2000. This is a P4 2.4 GHz with HT, 512 MB and 40 GB ATA 5400 RPM. The process seems to definitely be memory and then disk bound. Hopefully when it is done on our production server which is a 2.4 GHz Xeon (almost identical to the P4), 1024 GB and 36 GB RAID 15000 RPM SCSI array.

The second part was a merge process of the data with another system that had already been upgraded last year. This step takes roughly 1 minute per user. Which is ok since I could run it over night. The problem here is after running for about 5 hours the system ran out of virtual memory, which was set at 2 GB. The client shell that was doing the merge was using 300 MB of RAM and 1.5 GB of Virtual Memory. I think they might have a bit of a memory leak problem.

Hopefully this gets better before I have to deploy it in production. If not it might be tough to finish it over a weekend even.

Today my school hosted another tablet training day. We had another 30 or so people there and it went quite well. Lots of information given out by our team and our teachers. Many great questions. Hopefully the people in attendance will take the info and share it with others.

Last night I did some maintenance on both our Bluecoat Web Cache and our Nokia / Checkpoint firewall. The bluecoat was a very straightforward upgrade, they have made the process almost painless other than a few minute reboot.

The Nokia / Checkpoint upgrade isn't hard, just harder relatively. Some of you may be saying I thought Nokia only makes phones, well no they make some of the best hardened firewall boxes out there. You then layer on top Checkpoint's Firewall-1 product and you are set. The main reason I bring this up is prior to the upgrade the firewall had an uptime of 337 days. Which is pretty damn amazing I must say. In these days of daily security exploits to have a box not need upgrading for a year and not have problems.

Anyway back to the upgrade. It is a couple step process. First, you must download the latest IPSO (Nokia Operating System) and the latest Checkpoint software and hotfixes. Next, it is a good idea to clean up the logs and such since if you don't you will run out of hard drive space, which I learned the hard way last time. Then, you upgrade the IPSO. At this point you have to console in usually since FW-1 doesn't start and the box is totally locked down from a network standpoint. After you gain access again you then run the checkpoint package (install), these needs to be run from a command line. Reboot the box once more and if necessary apply checkpoint hotfixes. Took maybe an hour at most. An hours downtime a year isn't bad.

Also I must thank Dan who has forgotten more about Nokia and Checkpoint than I will ever know. He gave me a couple of quick pointers. Also Nokia's tech support is great, they even support Checkpoint so one call does it all. The Nokia / Checkpoint combo isn't cheap either intially or yearly but you get what you pay for. Highly recommended.

The students left last Thursday afternoon and won't return until Tuesday the 29th. Friday we relaxed a bit. Got to watch some of the NCAA tournament on our big LCD during lunch. Hopefully next week I can fix some nagging problems that I never seem to get a chance to get to.