Your Name: Katie Schilling

Today’s Date: 2011/2/4

Day(s) worked or described: M 10-2, F 12-3

Total hours for week: 7

The School: Dumas Technology Academy

Kind of Work: Printers, Server Connection Issues, Disappearing Accounts, INsight

Main Report or Narrative:

This week got interrupted by the snow tornado (and I had to dig my bike out of 4 feet of snow on Friday...), but everything is back on track.

Monday, I worked on connecting the printer in 312 to all the computers in the lab.  I was able to get drivers from Gutenprint, but I couldn't get them to print past one page.  Also, some of the drivers won't come up as usable on some of the computers.  Printers have traditionally been my weak point, so if there is something I'm missing besides installing the correct driver, then adding the printer through the system preferences options...  I feel like there is some little thing I have to do that I'm not catching.  I'm going to start fresh with new drivers and specific instructions next week in case I'm just making a stupid mistake.

I also started using Google Safe Search on the computers and played around with INsight.  There were some issues with the students' screens staying frozen but the teacher's program saying they weren't, so I'll be working on that with the rest of my time today.

Friday, I arrived to find that two computers had the "school" account randomly deleted, but the home folder and all the settings were still there...  I was able to just "make" an account with the same name and everything works as before, but it is very troubling that the account pathway could get deleted without admin powers.  I researched some possibilities online (the Mac Forums are fantastic) and found a lot of interesting information that did not apply-- someone had to have changed the account settings.  I'm still not sure what happened, but I'm going to ask a couple techie friends and see what they know.  <strong>EDIT: </strong> It seems as though the accounts.prefpane file could have been corrupted during a hard boot.  I'm assuming that is the issue.

There was also another issue with the file writing to the server, this time with Windows machines.  The file appeared to be written, but didn't show up on another computer in the building.  I'm starting to think that the file writing on the server has errors.  However, it only seems to happen when I'm away.  Whenever I do it, it works for me.  It works slowly (not horrendously slowly), but it is still functional.  I'm going to monitor the situation and if any other issues with this arise, I'll let you all know and we can talk about the health of the server.  I'm hoping that it's just a user error and the teacher just aren't waiting for the file to finish writing, as that would make the most sense and mean the server is alright.

It's good to be out of my dorm room!