We had gone completely off-topic about Die Another Day, if your post refers to me

Yeah I know but what do you mean? Nuked the fridge???

Oh, sorry, it's that ridiculous bit in Indiana Jones 4:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuking_the_fridge#History

There's a movie website called that IIRC...

Ah, I see!

I haven't seen that film so it went straight over my head.

Re: The job

I did a full day yesterday, although I wasn't very hands on. They had a guy in from Du Pre who is setting up five servers. He got two done yesterday, and although I didn't get to do anything hands-on I did learn quite a bit just from chatting to him through-out the day. I hope I wasn't annoying him!

At the end of the day when I was leaving the school's network manager asked me if the day was useful and I said it was useful but I'd be keen to get a bit more hands-on at some stage. He said that I should read up on WDS and learn as much as I can about it, because he's going to get me to use it to roll out an image to about 200 PCs. So that sounds good.

I didn't go in today, but I'm going back in tomorrow when the manager is going to show me around the current systems and explain what does what and how (it's RM stuff so apparently it's a bit different to the vanilla network that is going in). The guy is really good - he said I should think of some questions to ask him, and seems genuinely keen to help me get something out of it which is nice.

So far so good, basically.

Glad you're enjoying it Nick.
RM networks are horrible to use so glad a proper one is going in.

You've only got a few years of box humping & idiot who need handholding before they let you loose on the fun stuff.

Yeah, he was telling me about a few of the troubles he has had with it. I knew the machines were really locked down hard as a user, but didn't realise just how tight things were as an admin too.

I had a day of fun and games with WDS today.

Got it working across two servers. One as WDS and PXE, the other as DHCP. After spending a while binding the WDS/PXE to DHCP (turns out they prefer to be on the same server for some reason ) we had a power cut! The current system is still in use, so we weren't using the UPS and it put a spanner in the works. After bringing the servers back up, WDS wouldn't start and the two servers wouldn't play nice so had to revert to putting DHCP on the same server.

Then it turns out that the default boot .wim doesn't have the right driver for the NIC in the PCs so had to download the WAIK and inject the driver. That took three people a good couple of hours to find a solution to.

All in all a very frustrating day. Today was the last day of the setup, and at first I was a bit annoyed because everything else in the project (ie everything everyone else ha done) went absolutely fine. But today we had a whole host of problems, with the single thing I was told to do.

There was a glimmer of pride at the end of the day though. In the last hour and a half or so we managed to get our image onto about thirty machines, so that was nice.

Still a bit pissed off that it didn't go smoothly though.

Man, that's a model of smooth running in comparison to my first week on my placement.

Have been trying to do a survey of a building for the positioning of access points and so far the AirMagnet Wireless card (all £3k's worth) has been ruddy useless. We've done half a floor in three days.

Easy solution

1) Place AP's in rough position.
2) Walk round with pda checking for drops
3) Test from pub

Sadly, someone has decided that there needs to be specific throughput and SNRs throughout the building, so it's supposed to be more precise than that.

Updates please are we winning.

I'm not really. We still don't have a link between the two sites, which is making things hard.

Add to that a few different problems, mostly with power (we had another power cut which the servers didn't enjoy much), and things have been quite frustrating.

I've got a day off today, but I'm not sure what is going to be happening tomorrow. The plan says that we should start working on setting up the DC at the second site to get the two sites working nicely, but that can't happen because we don't have a link.

We've also just found out that instead of the current network being used only until the start of august, it now turns out that it is going to be used through to mid-august, which doesn't leave a lot of time to get everything changed over to the new system before the staff come back and start training on the new systems (got some fancy whiteboards etc going in).

At this stage I think it will either run over, or they'll have to get some more people in.

AS an ancient old fogey who remebers the "sixties" when employers were queueing up to PAY people to work, your story typifies the malaise of our poor old world.
Of course I'm pleased for you that this might be a useful entre for you.
"Back in the day" (i.e. the 90's even ) the job you're lined up for would pay up to £400 per day in the City. I wouldn't expect you to get that in Pompey, and certainly not these days, but frankly the "do it for free and get a reference" line is pure exploitation. These charmless people will be charging parents a small fortune to look after their kids, so I rather expect they can pay the going rate for staff...

Back in my day you had to pay to go to work, none of this "free with a reference" malarky.

*Hobbles off grumbling

This does rather sound like planning "on the hoof", never a good sign for an IT project!
Compare and contrast with some epic hump 'n dumps I did in those "bad old days" when we had to migrate hundreds of users over a weekend: new PC's, new servers, new desktop images etc etc. Oh how we laughed (not). It worked because:
a) It had to work
b) It was rigourously planned by people who knew what they were doing (that ruled ME out!)
c) It was copiously staffed
d) The plan was built around lots of contingency time, like when we discovered that NT4 DHCP would only do 254 address and MS flew in a "Gold" rescue disk and brainbox to fix it!


Still having slagged-off the project it is obviously providing you with some good learning opportunities, so at a selfish level, its good.