Updates on school network

I went into the school today to work on a couple of outstanding issues.

Primarily my visit was to retire the old Linux pc that was acting as the local proxy server and DHCP server. Over the last year, this had become increasingly unreliable and a couple of weeks ago it wasn’t giving out IP addresses, which was a bit of an issue. The DHCP pool was activated on the Windows server and the second network card was plugged into the broadband connection. In common with the county configuration, a static route to the county servers was created and no gateway settings are made. This ensures that all Internet access from the school computers can only be via the county filtered proxy service. The computer suite and all classroom computers have been configured to use the new proxy server. While visiting the classrooms to make the proxy settings, I took an inventory of the computer equipment in each classroom. This will allow a replacement schedule to be drawn up.

One of the computers in the suite had been showing an unmountable volume error on boot. This was resolved by running chkdsk /r from the recovery console.

In addition to this, the classroom computers running Windows 98, were configured to log onto the domain. This gave them access to the shared class data area and shortcuts to the appropriate year groups were added to each class computer. I had to use TweakUI to configure the autologon, as just setting the registry keys didn’t work.

I managed to install the Espresso software on most of the classroom computers. Most needed Internet Explorer 6, so this took a while to download first. Two of the computers will not run Espresso; when you launch it, it crashes Internet Explorer, so that needs looking into. One of these computers had a lot of MALware that I removed using Adaware, but I’m still not convinced its clean.

There’s still work to be done, but after seven hours it was time to call it a day.

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