A very quiet first morning for the new students, I managed to get a few laughs out of them but it was a hard audience. Getting the computers handed out worked very well, and of course our first problems emerged, the email sign-in server is hidden behind the firewall...
If it isn't one damn thing its another, it seems that we have a wide range of known issues including permissions and email.
All this is rather strange as Yoni has one of the macs (there were 118 identical macs this lunchtime) and his is behaving flawlessly, ah well you let the users loose and who knows what will happen.
I have the next talk on Monday morning I will be very busy next week.
Cloning 23 macs simultaneously with a noisy switch and incorrect network layout takes about 9 hours, still it just works and runs itself, we just swap the machines out and on it goes for 4 days.
We have now boxed them all back up and we are ready for tomorrow, the freshman will arrive for their first day of class... and pick up their unnecessarily complicated macs.
I get about 50 mins as Director of Academic Computing to tell them what we are doing and why, I'll meet them again Monday morning as Dean of Student Affairs to hear the complaints..
Taking the med school mac part 2:
I spent a good while designing a model system for the students, we had a request for note taking software and I am a big Yojimbo fan so that was included along with Parallels for the legacy PC programs. In addition my chief support person Allyson set up a fairly large BootCamp partition and used sysprep so that it would clone as new.
That all sounded great but we ran into a little snag, if we named the user "Student" for instance. all the cloned users would be student and the short username is notoriously difficult to change.
We found a solution which is fairly simple but not extremely elegant, once the user is set up on teh master machine, use a series of UNIX commands to replace the default user template with the setup users files, then remove the AppleSetupDone tag so that next time it boots it forces the new user to create and name a user, which now has identical properties to the original.
Simple, isn't it, I took a laptop and followed the instructions and it refused to start after reboot, spinning wheel for ever, another mac guy at the school, Kenny, did the same...same result. Mild Panic.
I reinstalled system 10.5 and then kept running AppleSetUpDone over aand over after every change, it always rebooted and till this day I haven't created another brick but I cant explain it.
So Tim arrives, around 9 am amd I think here we go, start cloning, make me feel better...No, Tim procedes to improve the Master mac (and he really did improve it) wih all sorts of little tweeks etc.
Then we made an image of the mac side with Bombich's software, this took considerably longer than any of us expected. Now we used a nother product to clone the PC side.
Tim set up the Xserve, which was quite complex, but he made it seem easy. Then we tried to clone one...Mac was easy, PC side dint work..more tweaks still no go.
Then Tim read the instructions, we used Bombichs software for the PC side as well. Plain sailing from then on..
Part One:
After last years problems of conflicts between Vista and the Lenovo T61 we bought for the students, I took a bold decision and went with MacBooks.
This is not a straightforward thing, we have legacy Windows teaching software and more importantly the national Board of Medical Examiners demands that if we are using Macs, they be running Windows in BootCamp.
An aside: The NBME are responsible for the three step testing needed to become a physician in the US. In order to better prepare our students we buy access to the NBME database of retired questions and prepare real tests for our students, we think that this helps them prepare for the test. The catch is it needs a special IE plugin and they wont let us run it in parrallels so this greatly complicated the planning for the laptops.
Nobody was very enthusiastic, support folks with little mac experience, thought that this had been dumped on them. They, of course, were right. None of us knew how to clone 118 macs. We were reassured a little by the appearance of Tim David, our apple technical guy who had done these roll outs before, but he could only make it in for 2 days and it made me a little jumpy to say the least.
We bought an Xserve which sat in the box for weeks until we were bold enough to unpack it.
Last thoughts on London.
Last days in London, it has turned very cold but still Gil insists on wearing a sweat shirt instead of his coat he did put his gloves on once. We had chips from my old favorite chip shop. We had a really good visit with Marcelle. We went into London to see Potted Potter in a tiny little theatre . It was remarkably good. Gil was laughing hard and there was plenty for the parents as well. All in all a very enjoyable day. It will be a messy day tomorrow with snow and rain forecast....but we are leaving very early for the airport...
