Geeking At School

Printers are by far my kryptonite. The huge variety of printers and inconsistency, even within brands, is very difficult to get a good idea of what's going on. At any rate, one of the biggest problems we've had so far is documents that get 'stuck in the spooler'. As a more technical explanation, whatever document that a user is trying to print (generally a PDF) has somehow been corrupted or wasn't created properly, which causes the print spooler to crash. This has a detrimental effect on practically every program that uses a printer, causing people to think a virus has attacked their computer, and others, who are not as familiar with the issue, to spend hours trying to take care of a problem that is relatively easy to workaround. This problem has generally effected the HP LaserJet 1018, HP LaserJet 1020, and HP LaserJet 1022n. Unfortunately, those models are everywhere, almost at every school site. The secret? Several steps: Stop the print spooler service. Either ...

This is a little off-topic from what I've been posting the past couple of weeks, but I think that it's so vital to our jobs as technicians that it deserves more attention. Change, and the graceful management of change by both individuals and management itself, has always been harped on by those who are "progressive" or whatever you may want to call them. Much as I don't like associating myself with "progressives", I can't say I'm much different. Of all the things in life, change is by far the most consistent. Perhaps that's a dumb statement because it's so obvious (and cliché), but it's true. You can tell a lot about someone's character and life by how they handle change--whether they do so with thought and optimism, or blindness and negativity. Without trying to bring in a lot of personal experiences into this, I'd like to make a few statements: I'm 21-year-old male and almost done with college. Perhaps that's a discl...

Just got the green light to implement an OSX server (Xserve running 10.5 Leopard) as a gateway at one of our school sites to replace one of our ancient Novell servers that was choking down our bandwidth (the replacement of the server confirmed that). I have only good things to say about OSX server software--incredibly easy to setup. For those of you who have not setup an OSX server as a gateway, here's some tips that I got from Apple's documentation: The NAT service needs to be on (obviously) but in our environment, it was important that we choose the option to forward all IP addresses so that we could see traffic from individual computers, since all sites are on different subnets, but connect back to our office (through Charter provided connection) for internet, filtering, etc. In order for NAT to work properly, the firewall has to be on for the "packet divert rule" to be enabled, which is vital to NAT's functioning. This was my first mistake before reading A...

Meant to post this last Monday but life got real busy real quick. So...got a response from the person I emailed earlier about archiving Google Apps for Education email using Lightspeed's TTC server. The verdict? He was able to implement it...but it took quite a bit of doing. I'll update this later when I can make a little more sense of what he said. It was a tad confusing and involved, but was doable, which is pretty much awesome. The basic setup involves redirecting Google Apps MX records to your TTC server, which then forwards the mail to a computer on your network (he suggested hmail) and then point that back out to Google to handle the email. But this way, it gets the mail in your network where it can be archived. More on that later when I have some time to look into it more.