Zen Moments

January 17, 2008 at 6:35 pm (Work)

My district has owned a massive software package called ZenWorks (fondly known as Zen) for several years before I arrived there. It does all kinds of cool things like roll out group policies, provide remote control and reimage workstations. The last network admin tried to deploy it and abandoned it because of its complexity.

After discovering that the kiddies were bypassing the content filter by adding proxy settings to their browser, I knew I had to do something. I was pretty sure the desktop staff wasn’t going to make any attempt to lock down browser settings, so I knew it was time to do it from a central location. I cracked open the massive manual I bought a year ago (the size of the LA phone book) and started reading.

Upon completing the installation and getting all the snap-ins sorted out, the first thing was to get the workstations imported; you can’t do anything until they are all safely in a central location. What I did not figure out right away is the need for a DNS entry for zenwsimport ; once that was in place, the workstations started registering like mad….all 845 of them!

Policies were next, and one of my colleagues was kind enough to send his group policies file. I made a few changes to it and saved it in what I thought was the correct place on the server. With a test laptop next to me I kept applying the policies to it, but it would not take. After several hours of combing through Google, I went to use my command line to try something and it was gone. At that moment I realized that I had unwittingly applied the policy to my own computer …duh. Back to the knowledgebase to learn how to remove an unwanted policy; it ended up being as simple as creating a blank policy and re associating it, but sometimes the simple things take a while to figure out.

Rolling out the policy to select workstations for testing purposes was made more difficult by the fact that the desktop people rarely bother to rename the machines something recognizable after imaging. I had to actually go out and make a list of machines for my test group in spite of repeated attempts to get them to settle on a naming convention. The handful of test machines worked fairly well and I am almost ready for a full scale rollout of group policies.

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One rotten apple….

January 12, 2008 at 9:47 am (Rants, Work)

I work for Capital Region BOCES as a Network Administrator and it’s a pretty good gig. Four days per week (the BOCES maximum….yes, it’s weird) I am stationed at a progressive Suburban Council school in upstate New York. They have a sizable technology budget, an administration who realizes that technology can actually work for them, and a parent population who believes that SAT preparation begins at birth. On the fifth day I am a shared resource which means I can get sent just about anywhere. My managers typically respect the fact that I administer one of the largest and most complex districts in the area, so my fifth day is usually spent at the office catching up on the minutiae of the district…paperwork, research and documentation.

You can imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when my manager told me I would be doing a long term assignment at my old district, Watervliet City. Apparently the guy who replaced me (who makes a lot more money than I do) has done such a poor job of things that the district is in a technological crisis, and they asked that he be removed never to return again. Great.

I could not believe the mess I was greeted with when I arrived there. Backups had not been successfully run in months, there were stacks of trouble tickets, and the office was such a mess that I had to fill two trashcans of crap before I could find a place to set my laptop. The staff and faculty were desperate for tech help, and I felt like I had been dumped into a tank of piranhas. One teacher got down on his knees and begged me to come back; I was flattered but thought, “when hell freezes over”.

It made me sad to see what had happened to the nice little network I left behind two years ago, but it was sadder to think about the damage that has been done to the reputation of BOCES. The technicians who are placed in districts are ambassadors for the organization and blissfully free from a lot of home office micromanagement; the expectation is that they will work independently to address the technology needs of the district they serve. Hopefully this “rotten apple” experience will not change all that.

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