<strong>Your Name:</strong> Ben Hyman
<strong>Today’s Date</strong>: 2008/2/29
Reporting on most recent week
<strong>Day(s) worked or described</strong>: T F
<strong>Total hours for week</strong>: 5.1
<strong>The School</strong>: Canter Middle
<strong>Kind of Work</strong>: Tech General
<strong>Main Report or Narrative</strong>:
Tuesday was printer day! I set up the very large (network) Lexmark that had already been in the teacher's lounge, and added the printer to the two other computers in the lounge. Speaking of printers, Dr. Conlan told me that she's just waiting for asset tags for the newly donated printers, and then I can install them around the schools. I also fixed a problem with Ms. Washington's local printer not working; the key to those hung print jobs is to stop and start the print spooler service. Works like a charm. 

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I got an email from Russ on Wednesday asking me to look at some things, so I took care of those on Friday. Mainly he wanted me to look at the computers in room 305 and 303. He said that 305 was low on memory and producing errors; it did only have 128 MB of memory, but I saw no errors logging in as techco or to INSTR. Since we have no extra memory lying around, I consider this problem resolved by virtue of having luckily disappeared!

As I alluded to in my last report, Ms. Escalona in 303 is okay with me removing the computer from her room (thus making moot Russ' request for me to look at the computer). Is this okay with you guys? I will probably salvage the RAM and mouse and put those in another computer...meaning we'll then have 7 useless (i.e., without RAM) CPUs and 5 useless monitors. If only there were more RAM around, I could put those computers to good use!

Speaking of memory, in terms of past reports, I mentioned that I was having trouble with computers E3 - E5. E5 is now fine with local logins, but chokes (as do all the others) on INSTR logins, which I think is the more important issue. Do you have any suggestions, or should I investigate some of those drastic memory-saving techniques that I alluded to in my report two weeks ago?

I was taking a look at the Canter Compliance page (which now has far more red entries than it should), and updated one of the computers (in the in-school suspension room), via Windows Update, which had been missing several patches. It's still showing up - do these things take time to change? I'll check on Tuesday. Speaking of the in-school suspension computer, it's again dangerously low on space. I'll think of some space-saving techniques, figure out what we can do.

I also took another look at the computer in the office, which Ms. LaCour said was experiencing the same CD-ROM issues we ran into last quarter. Nothing looked amiss - I'll have to see if anything has changed on Tuesday.

My proudest moment, both on Friday and Tuesday, regarded printing. On Friday, I changed the INSTR staff logon script so that all staff would be able to see and print to the printer in the Teacher's Lounge. I don't know why I was having so much trouble, but it's working now. You need to add the printer to the Canter server, share it, and then add a line to the logon script for this to successfully work (I can share if anyone's curious). In the process I also discovered a bug that occurs whenever teachers log on to computers that have DeepFreeze installed. This bug could possibly apply to other schools as well - basically, the script that runs on logon tries to map a network drive (the staff folder on the server) to the same drive letter DeepFreeze uses for the thaw space. This is easily fixable (a one-character change in the script), but may not have been noticed before.
 
<strong>Remaining Issues</strong>
<ul>
<li>Memory :-(.</li
<li>Space on computer in room 304</li>
<li>We need one more spare mouse to fully equip all the lab computers...but they really should have enough memory to be usable before this becomes an issue.
<li>Using Canter's compliance website</li>
<li>Editing the theme for this site. <em>Mitch, I'm still not sure my permissions are set properly for this. Can you help me out?</em></li>
<li>It would be really cool to resolve those DeepFreeze issues in the lab.</li>

</ul>

<strong>Quote: "Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us."</strong>

-Ben Hyman