This is the name of my new blog, found here: http://robertsguild.com/technology/
I opted to seperate the blogs as this blog has become more personal than work and tech related. I could barely update one, so we’ll see how maintaining two goes……
The plan is to have a regular schedule for updating the tech blog with a series of topics laid out in advance.
Course Development – Made progress -
My spell of self pity didn’t last long. I manage to crank out about 90% of my course over last week, I made my self imposed deadline. I managed to do a quick review and fixed some minor issues. There are some handouts to finish creating and some course details that need attention, but over all….. Getting there.
I started on the syllabus and coarse calendar for CIS 120. CIS 120 is going to be a challenge. I’ve taught the class before, 3 years ago when I first started at PCC. It was a Saturday morning class. This class is Tuesday and Thursday morning, I have never taught a class that takes meets two times a week.
In preparation for the fall term, I’ll have to get on campus and make sure the lab is in order. As the full time instructor I’ll take ownership of the lab and making sure the instructors that teach in the lab have what they need.
My CIS-240M also needs to be updated with the latest dates and such for the fall term as well. And on top of all that……… I still have to start writing the other course for winter term. That’s CIS-289M.
My part-time job is now my full-time job. I plan to take full advantage of the opportunity to improve the quality of work.
Voice recognition – I decided to try voice recognition, Windows Vista comes with it. Works very well with Word, but takes some getting use to. We’ll see how much practical use I get out of it.
Yo Joe! & District 9 - As many of you know, I’m a serious G.I. Joe fan. When I heard about the movie I figured – IT WOULD SUCK!
But I saw it anyway. With suck low expectations, there was a good possibility it wouldn’t be that bad. It wasn’t. I actually enjoyed it. It was a standard summer action flick. They didn’t managed to destroy my childhood with a hammer.
District 9 was a good movie. I didn’t know what to expect going. It was entertaining and action packed.
On the hobby front - I’m still painting, making pretty good progress on my mass of figs. I wouldn’t say I’m any closer to winning any competitions, but hey. Practice helps.
I managed to get out and play a few games of WarMachine. Doesn’t happen all that often.
I realized as I was preparing for the fall term I was going to need to store an additional 20 – 30 GB on my laptop……
That realization was followed by the realization of “That isn’t mathematically possible!”
Hummm……. a laptop harddrive upgrade. If I was going to do it, it needed to happen before the term starts the sooner the better. I started looking for compatible drives for my laptop. Tracked down a model and was surprised to find out, Acer laptops use standard SATA harddrives! Happy dance!
Got the new drive installed, first I installed the Vista ultimate and attempted a restore, but to perform a full restore you have to boot from the CD and perform a full system restore. Booted from the CD, it located my full backup on a USB drive and went to town. But I noticed in the messages, it would make the partitions the same size as the ones from the back up D’oh! That’s not very helpful.
However, Vista has native drive resizing. So I made a new large partition out of the 300+GB on the new drive, copied data from the smaller D partition to the new larger partition. Then I deleted the smaller D partition and expanded C into that space. So Now I’ve got plenty of space!
Yeah to a smooth IT operation, as simple as I expected it to be.
My co-worked passed this list on to me today. He is a big run line person. He knows plenty of these commands but this is a massive list. Run line people are a mix between GUI (myself) and command prompt people:
Active Directory Management admgmt.msc
ADSI Edit adsiedit.msc
Application Server appsrv.msc
Authorization Manager azman.msc
Certificates certmgr.msc
Certificate Authority certsrv.msc
Certificate Templates certtmpl.msc
Indexing Service ciadv.msc
Component Services comexp.msc
Computer Management compmgmt.msc
Default Domain Controller Security Settings dcpol.msc
Device Manager devmgmt.msc
Disk defragmenter dfrg.msc
Distributed File System dfsgui.msc
DHCP dhcpmgmt.msc
Disk Management diskmgmt.msc
DNS dnsmgmt.msc
Active Directory Domains and Trusts domain.msc
Default Domain Security Settings dompol.msc
Active Directory Users and Computers dsa.msc
Active Directory Sites and Services dssite.msc
Event Viewer eventvwr.msc
Exchange System Manager Exchange System Manager.msc
File Server Management filesvr.msc
Shared Folders fsmgmt.msc
Microsoft Fax Service Manager fxsadmin.msc
Group Policy gpedit.msc
Group Policy Management gpmc.msc
Internet Authentication Service ias.msc
Internet Information Services iis.msc
IP Address Management ipaddrmgmt.msc
Local Users and Groups lusrmgr.msc
.NET Configuration 1.1 mscorcfg.msc
Removable Storage ntmsmgr.msc
Removable Storage Operator Requests ntmsoprq.msc
Performance perfmon.msc
Enterprise PKI pkiview.msc
Public Key Management pkmgmt.msc
Routing and Remote Access rrasmgmt.msc
Remote Storage rsadmin.msc
Resultant Set of Policy rsop.msc
Active Directory Schema schmmgmt.msc
Local Security Settings secpol.msc
Services services.msc
Sidwalk sidwalk.msc
Telephony tapimgmt.msc
Terminal Services Configuration/Connections tscc.msc
Remote Desktops tsmmc.msc
UDDI Services Console uddi.msc
Active Directory Users and Computers (Exchange version) users and computers.msc
WINS winsmgmt.msc
Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI) wmimgmt.msc
Yeah, been a bit busy. I was actually typing something else about how busy I’ve been and realized I haven’t blogged. I’ll get an update soon…..
But I am alive.
I installed WSUS 2.0 in my virtual Environment and realized I’d have to use a physical network connection. Well then I realized the DHCP server was handing out IP addressed on both network cards – NO! that’s not good. So I had to hit the books (Google really) and I can came across this:
Troubleshooting DHCP: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/6350df25-a5d9-46e4-82c7-85d9141aa24f1033.mspx?mfr=true
And from there I ended up here:
I knew I had to tell DHCP not to hand out IP addresses on the external network card.
So my Virtual environment looks like this:
One Active Directory Domain
- Two 2003 Servers
- One Windows XP Client
- One 2003 Server and the XP client have one network card set to local only.
- The second 2003 Server is setup with two network cards. One is local and the other is set too the external physical network card in the laptop. This server is acting as the router for the environment. DNS has been configured to forward DNS requests too the outside DNS Server. DHCP is also running on the virtual environment.
When I’m done, All the clients will be updated using WSUS. The entire virtual world will have access too the Internet.
So I got WSUS installed and 700+ updates for XP and 2003 downloaded. The Group Policy for the Server 2003 and XP client appears to work on the server but not the client. I might be missing something on XP system.
Wow talk about geek speak!
I decided I wanted to freshen up on my WSUS skills. So I went to Microsoft’s site to download it. Is anything ever easy in the tech world? Of course not…..
First things first, getting my Virtual Server on the Internet. I discovered that wireless cards, in most cases are not available as a networking option to a virtual machine. So I had to use my standard network card. That meant I had to run a network cable from my room too the FiOS modem. Nothing like running cable through the house to get everyone’s attention. I had to assign static IP info too the network card and make some DNS changes. The virtual server is also the server I use for my teaching. But it worked…..
I downloaded WSUS and went to install it, nope. I had to download three other components before I could install WSUS. One of those installs, Service pack 2! So that took a while. In the end, I got the server setup to run WSUS. I configured SUS to pull down English updates only for Server 2003 & Windows XP. Tonight I’ll hook up the laptop directly too the FiOS router again and kick off a synchronization.
The next step will be to create a Group Policy object for my 2003 Server and my XP Client to receive updates from the main server. Might even configure the other 2003 to synchronize with the primary server. Guess it depends on how I feel.
I came across Microsoft OneNote and it’s a pretty slick product. Has a lot of the features of a typical word processor but really helps to keep things organized, in the form of notebooks and pages.
- Spell check is there
- Things are automatically saved, so no more closing the document and accidentally forgetting to save.
I’m using it at home and at the office. I generate emails and forum posts on a blank page and then copy/paste. Works rather well. The only drawback, this is only available with Office 2007 Ultimate @ $500.00. That’s just crazy talk. So its not something I’d go out and buy on my own – for sure!
I’m sure there are plenty of other features I’m missing but I’m keeping it simple.
Technology:
So I took a day off, a day to recharge the batteries and get back on track with a few aspects of my life.
And who wants to waste a day off, so I’m up early. I can’t remember the last time I slept in…….
Blog entry is first on my list. It was a good weekend. Re arranged things. Found various things to lend my attention too.
The weather is changing, which is a good thing, at least for yesterday and today, sunny and warm. It’ll be back to rain later on in the week.
So Aspects of my life:
Work (day job)
Work (Teaching)
Hobbies
Home life