Maintenance

Helped Stew and Greg with an emergency install and configuration of the Dialang application on all the lab machines, for Marie-Josee Hamel's session tomorrow

My station was getting more and more flaky and sluggish, so I uninstalled some old stuff and did a defrag. It took a while, during which I cleaned up my desk area, a gruesome task that should be done more often.

The roles of Squash and Crossroads-B have changed. They are no longer running the Crossroads daemons for the labs, and the access permissions on a per-directory basis are not as robust as we'd like. The current OS (Server 2000) does not provide a granular enough method of restricting access to test materials, which means that we need to set permissions on test directories manually each time (and then turn them off later).

By installing Windows 2003 Server we can set up a permissions cascade that allows direct access to a specific file, but does not allow read access to any of the parent directorie(s). This should mean that we can set read perms on test directories for instructors only. They can then find the test file and send it, and the students can receive it, but not browse for it. The only wrinkle in this cunning plan is that we'll need a complete list of NetLinkIDs for all instructors. There may be a solution in LDAP, however. If I can set permission on test dirs based on the user's role, which is had by querying UVic's LDAP DB.

So the task is:
Rebuild Crossroads-B with Windows 2003 Server.
Rename it.
Put in a second drive for data.
RoboCopy all the teachingmaterials from Squash to the data drive.
Write a script to mirror the squash\teachingmaterials directory regularly.
Make it a file server.
Enter it in to the domain.
Put it in the server room, add it to the IP database, and give it a static IP.
Test accessibility via Sanako apps in Labs.
Research/Install/Configure LDAP connection to accommodate cunning plan above.
Test cunning plan.

This problem is not new.
Context:
* I run the ghost console against the labs from within a virtual machine running Windows XP.
* VMWare's vmnet NICs (virtual devices) are bound to one physical NIC.
* The host OS (Linux) is configured so that both gigabit NICs are using the research network.
* Ghost server needs a static IP and access to a variety of ports.

The problem:
When configured as above the ghost console does not seem to send any packets. I currently have a request in for NETS to look in to this. However, when I swap all ports and settings to run on the 100baseT network (on both host and guest OSes) everything works perfectly.

Why this is a problem:
Having two different physical networks on a single machine requires having two default gateways set. I believe this is called dual homing, and it just doesn't seem to work. If I define two default gateways, the whole host machine runs on one network - invariably, the slow one.

FacMan has delivered the cart all modded up for our videoconferencing pleasure. I've mounted all the devices, plugged them in and done some very basic testing. I'll need to run a proper video conference to be certain, but so far so good.

There is still a bit of work to be done: FacMan wants to put something to tighten up the strapping on the codec.

1. $ svn checkout http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/linux-uvc/
2. $ cd linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
3. $ make
4. $ sudo make install