It seems that some of the older HP printers do not like to work well with Mac OX 10.5.  Often when users print large color documents to the LaserJet 4600 or a LaserJet 4200 the printer malfunctions and reports a service error message.  Unfortunately the only way to fix the service error is to restart the machine.  It seems like this issue is probably a software driver issue but since I am already using the newest drivers available I have turned to maxing out the memory in each machine.  I am also using the latest JetDirect and device firmware so adding memory is about the only option left.

Looking through a box of old ram and doing a little trial and error I eventually found enough working RAM to max the 4600 out at 224 megs.  Although this has not stopped all the service errors it has reduced the frequency of this problem substantially.

At the High School we have one lab of PC’s that run Vista.  After updating the default profile to include some new printers and drivers I was made aware that most users where being logged in with a Temp profile which is deleted on logout.  It turns out that if you delete the users from the c:\USERS directory in Vista, registry entries still exist for all of the unique logins for that machine.  If a user returns to this machine Vista will get confused as there is not a directory on the hard drive for this user but instead there exists a user entry in the registry refering to one.  This problem does not seem to affect administrator accounts or accounts that are part of the local admin’s group.

The easiest fix I could find is to login to each machine as Admin,  then delete the Profile list registry entries which are located at Local Machine | Software | Microsoft | Windows NT | Current | ProfileList

Here I just deleted all of the entries except for the top three which refer to the system accounts. This problem only seems to appear on Vista based machines,  deleting Users profiles on XP does not seem to cause this glitch.

Recently I replaced two failed harddrives, one in a EMac the other in a Imac.  I was suprised by the difference in time and difficulty between the two models from apple. The first drive I replaced was in an older G4 800 Mhz EMac,  this machine had a failed 40 gig maxtor drive.   Looking around my office I found a good IDE 250 gig drive and decided to replace the drive with this one.

Removing the casing off of the EMac is easy enough although the machine is heavy so it can be kind of ackward pulling the plastic shell away from the compter.

Now comes the interesting part,  it quickly becomes apparent that the Apple engineers were not considering hard drive replacment to be a routine maintenance or a quick job.  After placing the machine on its front and still no visible sign of the Harddrive anywhere it became apparent that you have to remove close to 20 screws, in a variety of lengths and sizes to access the part.

Notice that the Hard Drive is not visible anywhere on the machine, instead it is buried on the back side.  To access the Hard Drive it necessary to remove the system fan, move the heat sink, remove all screws holding the logic board in place, and then pull out a metal casing with the Hard Drive inside.

With the system fan removed you can now see where the hard drive is located, if you look behind the heatsink you will see a rectangular metal box that houses the hard drive.  Unfortunately to remove this housing you must detach all surrounding screws and move the logic board out of the way.

With the logic board loose and the hard drive housing pulled out you have just enough slack to pull out the molex power connector to the Hard Drive.

After putting the machine back together the entire process is 30-45 minutes (not including the re-imaging process which is another hour).   With over 100 of these machines in the school district it is still feasible to replace the Hard Drives but it is probably a job best left done during the summer hours.

The Newer IMac G5 on the other hand is engineered to make replacing the hard drive a breeze.  Simply loosen three screws on the bottom and pull the casing off the machine.

The hard drive is immediately accessible being held down by a total of five screws.  The only tricky part is that these srews are not phillips but are instead start shaped.  Using a small allen wrench set I was able to remove the screws and replace the drive.  Total time 5-10 minutes.  As I continue to work on lots of different apple models I find it interesting how they seem to go back and forth in terms of design for system maintenance and repair.  For example the ibook G4 takes 45-1 hour to replace the harddrive where as the newer MacBook takes only around 5-10 minutes.

Recently I have been investigating setting up a more advanced Wordpress Installation that will allow all High School Students access to their own individual blogs.  The open source Wordpress has a package called Wordpress MU (Multi-User) which when setup could enable all students to setup their own blog easily.

Harvard Law School is running Wordpress MU and gives away free webspace / blogs to all.   Take a look at how they have this setup http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ .

Here is a screen shot of the website,  notice that students can simply sign up and Wordpress MU will auto setup the rest.

I would like to clone this basic idea and create a webpage here at gcsdblog.org and give it a url entitled students.  The setup would then add the students last name and graduation year to the new URL, such as John Smith 2012 would be set to http://gcsdblogs.org/students/2012/smith.

I think it would be interesting to allow students to create and manage their own blogs which could then become kind of their own personal portfolio of student work / accomplishments.

In an attempt to increase traffic to the main district website I have configured a variety of free tools to monitor, track, organize, and hopefully increase the website’s availability through search engines.  To begin with I have installed the google analytic’s java script code on each of the main index pages (kudos to Scott Kuffel who originally mentioned this idea as it turns out to be a wonderful tool).

After placing the code near the end of each page before the </body>, google analytics began gathering lots of useful information.

You can see from this basic chart that the site already averages close to 1500 hits a day.  This number is considerably higher than I would first have imagined.   Looking through more of the data it becomes apparent that about 60% of the traffic comes from the district’s LAN  and surprisingly 40% or close to 600 hits a day come from outside sources.

In a week’s time you can see that 45% of the hits came from machine running Windows,  this is interesting since Geneseo’s School District is over 95% Mac.  Again this illustrates that close to 40% of the traffic is coming from outside networks.

Using another set of free Google webtools https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ I was easily able to gather more interesting info on web traffic.

Looking through the data you can see that although the site gets a lot of hits the site is really not very accessible via search engines.  Google ranks the page pretty low.

According to google’s webmaster tools it appears that only searches the have the word Genseo or Geneseo High school seem to turn up any results in google.

In an attempt to increase the page rank in google I have added new meta data on the main index.php page and have uploaded a sitemap.xml file.

Using simple Meta tags for description and for keywords I added phrases like Great Quad Cities Schools, Great Illinois Schools, etc.  In addition to the meta tags I created an sitemap.xml file and uploaded it to google.   I created the sitemap.xml file using another free tool although this time I used a utility that is not connected with Google.  I have uploaded a sitemap in the past and noticed that this really helped to increase Google’s search engine’s ability to find the website and overall increase page rank.  Hopefully in about 3 weeks these changes will be picked up by Google and the District’s website will be visited from more outsiders.

On friday I installed a HP MSA20 Raid device,  this rack mountable system has 12 SATA drive bays and is connected via a 320 SCSI cable.  Installed in the system are six 250 gig SATA III drives that when combined in a RAID 5 config provide 1.25 TB of storage.  The added storage space will be utilizied for some backup purposes on the server level, and also for staff members to backup important documents and files.   All future windows based accounts will also utilize this drive for a network home folder.

The installation of the device was pretty straigtforward except for connecting it to a SCSI port.  Since the Raid Device has little to no controller built into it, it requires a corresponding special HP RAID scsi PCI-X card in order for it to function.  I found such a card online for about $120.00.

The Card is rather large and barely fits into a poweredge 2500 Server.

With the Card installed and the Raid device powered on, configuring the RAID is done during the Boot process on the server.

Sometime after upgrading our web server to Leopard a strange problem surfaced in which emails sent via PHP on the server were not being sent.  This issue was perplexing since the problem would appear almost at random with most of the emails being sent but about 3 out of 10 failing to be delivered.  Since sending PHP mail via our district website is the main contact point between parents and staff, a 30 percent loss of emails is unacceptable.

Looking through the server’s mail log \var\logs\mail.log, I discovered that the mail server attempts to send emails via our mail server and also our podcasting server.

In the log you can see that whenever a message fails to be sent via PHP (postfix)  it is trying to use the podcasting server rather than the mail server.

My quick solution to this problem has been to simply allow a relay between the Web Server and the Podcasting server so that whenever a php mail message is sent/relayed via the Mail server or Podcasting server it is still delivered.

In this screen shot you can see that the messages are successfully sent with the relay opened on the Podcasting server.

Although this solution works well,  I must admit that I am perplexed as to how and why Leopard server would auto sense another Mail server on the local network and attempt to use it randomly.

Today I spend sometime updating our local server which records all the security camera data for the school district.  This system utilizes a SQL database to stores footage from all cameras.  The software portion of this system is called Rapid Eye Multi-Media View and is created by Honeywell.  Previously we have been running two versions of the software version 5 and version 6, both worked but the picture quality and performance seemed limited.  A quick look at Honeywell’s website showed that a free upgrade to version 8 was available, and this version appears to correct both performance and picture quality.

The upgrade to version 8 was pretty straightforward with the only possibly tricky spot having to upgrade the older version 6 database to the new version.

With the new version 8 combined with a Terminal Server running the software, the software is available to be installed on multiple machines providing every administrator with access.  Microsoft’s new RDC version 2 for Mac works well and is free so running this program from a Mac is also straightforward and easy.

Screenshot running RDC client from a Mac to a terminal server utilizing Rapid-Eye version 8.

At the start of this school year a few teachers quickly ran into a problem with slow computers at the labs.  Looking at logs on the XServes which manage the AFP based home directories for the students I found that we were crossing a threshhold of over 240 simulteneously logged in students.

Over the summer I upgraded all of the xserves to Leopard and upgraded the LDAP directory to 10.5 based (LDAP 3).  With the newer Leopard based server OS I have switched all accounts at the High School from standard AFP network accounts to Mobility based accounts.  The difference is that the mobility account syncs your home folder at every login and logout but does not maintain a network connection while the student is logged in.  Since the schools have different bell schedules by switching to mobility accounts the network congestion has been drastically reduced and the district can now easily handle more than 240 students logged in at the sametime.

With more users utilizing ichat, uploading data to their staff website, leaving skyward logged in for most of the day, etc, it is good to reduce network traffic whenever possible.

The only problems with Mobility I have run across are longer login times and problems with NFS.  Anyone attempting to setup mobility accounts should only use AFP shared home directories, since NFS based shares will have trouble syncing.  This is unfortunate as NFS seems to be a little more stable than AFP with Leopard.

Last night I upgraded the Library Catalog/Database system from 8.0 to version 8.5.   Upgrade process went smoothy and the sql database was upgraded with no apparent errors.  This server and software have so far proven to be quite stable and relatively friendly with handling large data imports.

I have also configured a Batch process to backup the Library database on every third night.  This backup has worked but it appears there is no working restore feature built into the system.  It turns out that Destiny really requires a third party sql backup agent to work properly (told by the tech people at Destiny).

Connecting Destiny to Skyward has shown to be successful but is a little less user friendly than one would imagine.  The data can be exported out of Skyward in a custom report but unfortunately must undergo a series of transformations before the Destiny Patron Import Utility can accept it.  This involves downloading into a Tab Ascii file,  converting to a CSV file while preserving leading zeroes,  loading Import configuration templates,  coverting to XML using the Patrion Utility and then importing into Destiny.  This process takes about 20 minutes and works well but is a far stretch from an automated import function.