Aug 13, 2009

Getting it done.

Wednesday was a very good at work. I had to run to Blevins in order to look over their layout for digital signage. In plain English, that means they have two flat screen tv's in the hiigh school, two in the elementary building and one in the main building at their Emmet campus.

The tv's in the high school and elementary building are pretty far apart, so we will use two devices that will convert the computer image to data over a network wire, then convert it back to display on the tv.

While I was there, the technology coordinator told me that his web site was down and that his email system would not allow users to view their webmail. After messing with the server for a bit, I started looking online for possible solutions. As it turns out, the solution was to create new server certificates. It mainly has to do with SSL (like when you are shopping online and you see the lock in the address bar or near the bottom of the screen). Once that was done, everything worked like a champ.

As it turned out, the Emmet campus (about 30 miles away) had the same problem. I ran over there and sure enough, the same fix cured them, too! Excellent!

Fast forward to Thursday. While in Fouke, I met with the Supt about some upcoming projects he's wanting to implement. They are about to become one of the "turn-around districts of the year" with all the advancements in technology he is hoping to put into place.

after that meeting, though, I took on the task of trying to get their Netware server to run a tape backup. They've had a lot of trouble with tape backup units in that computer. At one point, Dell had installed a newer version of the backup software than the district was licensed to use. So, after 60 days, POOF, no more backups. Dell them rolled back to the old software, but the tape drive never worked correctly again.

Today (Thursday), after a conversation with the state field tech, I realized that I might be able to find an old driver for the tape drive. It was worth a shot. And, it worked! The drive finally showed up in the software again, and we did a quick backup of one file. And, it worked! wahoo! The technology coordinator there and I whooped and hollered about it. Yes, we techies get excited about some strange things, especially from solving a problem that's been nagging for MONTHS!

Fouke also had a weird issue with certain laptops not showing their video on projectors. After some fiddling, I realized they had to set the output by using the display properties rather than the toggle switch on the laptop. Why? I have no idea. The key is that it worked and the techs know what to do in order to keep things running smoothly on that front.

Thursday evening, Shan mowed the lawn (she likes to ride the riding mower) and I grabbed the rake to clean up the shavings. Tyler followed me around and put the shavings in a rolling cart then dumped them over the fence.

Not a bad couple of days.

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