Summer Progress: A Reflection

School starts Wednesday.

This blog post is more about self-affirmation of what went on this summer than anything else, but I think it's worth sharing. Man, the summer has gone by way too fast. Here's a list of some of the things we accomplished this summer:

  • Replaced all our Novell servers with Cisco routers at our sites, with standardized DHCP ranges etc.

  • Moved all services and file storage that were running on Novell to other servers.

  • Setup, cabled and configured two Dell Poweredge R710, two Dell Powerconnect 6224 switches and an Equallogic PS4000x SAN for virtualization. (Thankfully, Dell helped us out with that. Of course, we paid for it.)

  • Installed and configured VMware vSphere on the two host servers and SAN.

  • Setup several Windows Server 2008 VMs to act as our primary and secondary internal DNS (integrated with AD) and swapped out our old DNS servers.

  • Changed our domain name to something much easier to type, which we are still experiencing the ramifications of that today. This included the change of MX records etc. I keep telling myself DNS stuff is fun, but I know I'm lying.

  • Migrated from Groupwise to Google Apps for Education, and trained many, many users. And still training and fielding questions as they come in. Of course, I'm known as the 'Google guy'. Which is ok, I even have a Google tshirt, but it does keep me busy.

  • Email migrations anyone? Ugh.

  • Moved a site from old T1 service to 100Mbps fiber line :)

  • Moved from our antiquated hosted CMS to a new and better hosted CMS (Sharpschool) and migrated.

  • Hired on another Computer Technician bringing our number up to four (I'm SO excited to have the help).

  • Implemented a new workorder system for us technicians, so we are no longer relying on paper workorders and faxes (it's about time).

  • Setup an SMTP server so we had an internal way to mail out (which you can read about here). So simple, yet such a pain when it doesn't work correctly. Really, what can go wrong?

  • Security certificate changes with new domain!

  • New program install for our business services people to track printer usage for our main copiers at sites.

  • And that's just server stuff. Teacher moves, new teacher setups, a new laptop cart, some maintenance on servers, some maintenance that I could get to on teacher stations, one server going down, meetings about modernization projects, discussions about moving to VOIP, and on top of that workorder after workorder, of which EVERYTHING is a priority to the user.


Of course, guess who did most of that? Yep...me! Which is cool--I learned a lot, but it also brought up some problems with me putting off the more basic stuff until the last due to complete lack of time, but the problem with it was a result of other issues. But anyway. Everything seemed to work out ok. Now to tackle the start of school!

Good luck to all my fellow school district IT people...hope the beginning of school is smooth and as painless as possible. Speaking of which, here's a comic from xkcd that I printed out and tacked to my wall. It reminds me to chill out and think of what's really important in life in a weird, funny way when things start getting too crazy:

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