(blogged and mailed)

Hi, Ian -- Thanks for your report!  

Sara and I have also run into some overlapping set of issues related to those you identify here.  I'll plan to come by the school tomorrow (Thursday), and maybe we can talk about them more directly in person and try out some ideas. (Though I don't want to derail you from the Office rollout project.)  The wireless is a continuing story, to be sure!  However, wireless may not be a topic to bug the school administration about -- I know I've done more than my share of nagging about the WAP in 217(?) -- big science room at the end of the sideways hallway -- that just seems not to be powered.

For the printers, I suspect a "too many cooks" effect.  Using the printers' DNS-Hostnames instead of numerical IP addresses might be an answer, if that's what you had in mind -- of course that still won't help if the printers are holding onto conflicting static addresses, but if the Hostname idea works out we could put the printer in question back onto dynamic IP and CPS DHCP should take care of  conflicts.  [Though I did see a printer there which was set up to keep an address statically but the address was from the dynamic range -- probably the one it got when they plugged it in! Having a printer or computer holding statically to a dynamic-range address is really asking for trouble -- the DHCP doesn't know it's doing that and has no compunctions against issuing the IP to another device.]  

Dulles may be the first one of our schools to be implementing the MS Office 2007 rollout from CPS-ITS.  I'll be interested to see which method(s) you've been using and how they compare for efficiency and ease of deployment.  And please remind me to leave a license key with you (shhhhh!) in case of issues with the "/adminfle not found" error.  

  Cheers,

   ==Mitch