A peaceful Sunday...

Yesterday my family and I went to my father-in-law's house to hang out and ride horses/4-wheelers. Now you have to bear in mind what this entails ... Getting everyone ready. Hooking up the horse trailer. Loading the 4-wheeler and (The freshly groomed) horse into the trailer, loading our "house horses" (4 year old rotties) in to the back of the truck; THEN wrangling the goat (Who thinks the horse is mamma!) back in to the pasture while loading all the tack. But I digress...

We made it safe, happy and ready to ride. It was nice to see my father-in-law!

The UK and Microsoft

It looks like the UK education agency has an issue with Microsoft...
According to this page at least.

Thanks for the heads up Phil!

The Meeting is Set!

I am still working out the finner technical details, but the date and place of our meeting has been set. I hope to have about 20 people show up, but we shall see. Patrick tells me he is excited about this because it is a new take on an old process. It seems that he is liking the idea about avoiding the purchase of MS CALs by using an X-server to authenticate against. More details soon!

Planning

I had a call today from Patrick, he wants to push back the meeting till the first of the month. It seems if we can accommodate this he can get a SE to come to the meeting that may be able to go into more detail about the server and setup in a bi-computer environment... We shall see.

Can't Please Everyone

I don't think that I have mentioned this before, but I work at a small school district in Central Texas. What this means is I am continually baffled by the goings on of the typical student mind. It is amazing to watch the thought process and see where those thoughts take them. For instance, I was working on a student computer station the other day when I came across the search history of the browser. It seems that there is a student here very upset with me because after trying to get to several blocked sites, and proxies this student decided to search for "gay fat computer teacher that blocks web sites." I can only assume this student meant me as I am a rather joyfully rotund individual and I do block websites, however, I am NOT a teacher. My wife and I got a good laugh out of it because it lets me know that my new web filter is working... apparently pretty well. Just remember if someone is mad at you at work, it may be because you are doing a good job!

Just a note before bed time

Here is a very informative article from the folks over at lifehacker's Geek To Live that deals with PC - Mac Compatibility.Check it out, you may learn something... I did

Thanks Life Hacker!

Phase One Almost There...

Ok, so when last we left I was rambling on about hoping to get Macs with good Vistas or at least a lot of eXPerience. Well I have been talking to Patrick at the Apple National Education Center and have been assured that there are ways to accomplish the primary goal! In fact there seems to be at least two ways to do this:

One is the use of of the third-party software, Parallels, to start a virtual Windows session to run your Windows applications. On the plus side if you have a problem with the windows portion you could just push a new Windows image file out to the computer.

The second is to use what the Mac people call BootCamp which is already apart of the Mac OS. This solution will require that the user restart the computer in question and choose which OS to use. As a foot note, David, an inside Systems Engineer at Apple, told me that there is even a FREE boot manager that could be loaded so that the computer will boot into a GUI and present the user with a Choice via two buttons on the desktop! While this seems the easy road he did caution me to consider the roll-out process. It seems that to get an image of this computer I will need to use third-party software (Casper... I think) because of the NTFS partition. This has all the hallmarks of a good decision and I will probably follow this path.

Next in line is the server options... Again Patrick and David were there to answer my initial questions. First and foremost is the burning Question about whether or not we can control/manage windows computers from the Xserve. The answer is a resounding yes. Through the use of OpenDirectory and other OpenSource software it is possible to talk to Active Directory.

My plan is ambitious, but I hope to be able to pull it off... I want to completely remove AD from my network and use the Mac servers to authenticate against for all computers and have the windows servers regulated to very specific job rolls in the hope of eliminating the need for CALs.

Next step.. "The Meeting" with the Mac people. I hope to have more information on this tale in 2 weeks or so. Until then, I will more than likely have something else to say about something.

A peaceful co-existence

When you think of Computer Labs what comes to mind? Row upon row of new Dells, or shiney new HPs, or are you adventurous and dream of a room full of Macs? Here I will try to chronicle the evolution of the birth of one computer lab as it forms into a homogeneous collection of Mac computers with a clear Vista or at least a lot of eXPerience. It may be a fruitless journey, but it will be interesting!
More to come...