Maintenance

Dan came in with 4 files on a USB stick that were needed by an instructor for a final exam in just over an hour in Lab C.

In similar situations previously, I recall going to Squash in the server room and copying the files into the appropriate folder in the teachingmaterials tree. I went in to the server room, logged in as admin on Squash, put the usb stick in the usb port on the back of the computer and the OS did not find the device. I burned the files to a CD on my Mac, took the CD to Squash, but could not get the door on the optical drive to open (tried the button on the drive and selecting the optical drive icon in windows and choosing eject disc). We've got to make it possible for an admin to sit in front of squash and copy files from a removable media to the hard drive.

Then I went to the teacher station in Lab C and logged in as UVIC/sarneil. I put the files on the desktop of that machine and tried to share them out from there, but that failed.
I used the network connections shortcut on the desktop of the teacher station to find Squash/teachingmaterials and uploaded the files to the appropriate directory on Squash. I then used Sanako to send them out to a couple of stations, everything seemed fine. I left Dan confirming everything was working.

[At this point the dean's office phoned to say they had forgotten the new password they'd created for their departmental account, so I spent half an hour dealing with that.]

When I returned the instructor, Judy and Eoin were in lab C and when they tried to send the same files out to the students in Sanako (using File button with copy and launch), they would successfully get to only two or three student machines, the rest got error "-2 permission denied" errors. We tried a couple of times and each time only a couple of computers got the file, but not always the same couple of computers.

Eoin moved the class to Lab B and everything worked just fine. I don't know who he logged on as on the teacher station.

Meanwhile, in Lab C, I could see that Dan must have logged me off and anita had logged in. I restarted the computer, logged in again as sarneil and everything worked fine. I then logged off sarneil, logged in as lang02 and tried the same File send, and got access denied errors in the open file dialog box. I was thinking there might be some issue with just logging off versus restarting the computer between users on the teacher station. However, this morning I came in, logged in as sarneil tried the send and got the -2 errors.

The permissions on the files on the server look reasonable to me, though I don't know how to get Windows to tell me who owns the files. I could also see a list of users on Squash which included a bunch of instructors and UVIC/sarneil and the instructor's account but not UVIC/lang02, so that might explain the problems with the lang02 account, but not with the instructor's.

I am not sure whether the problems stem from the way we uploaded the files to the server, or whether that's completely irrelevant. There don't seem to be problems with any of the other files on the server.

Martin, Stewart and I discussed some of the technical requirements for the new space:
Good/easy audio video projection needs to accommodate end users such that DVDs, audio CDs and personal laptops need to "just work".

To address these req's we talked about
1) a simple 4 channel stereo mixer (passive) that would allow 4 channels of audio simultaneously - no active switching. While this would mean that users might have a mish-mash of sound at first, adjusting it would *only* require turning up/down volume knobs/sliders. This should be a fairly intuitive concept. The unit we found was a Rolls MX41b, approx. $50 online.

2) An extension of this would be the use of self-powered speakers, bypassing the need for expensive (and hot) power amp hardware. Something like Yorkville's NX88s would be suitable. Powered monitors would provide the option to add something more (such as a subwoofer) if required, and also provide the option to plug in external equipment such as a recording device, through their passthrough sockets.

3) Overhead projector capable of at least 3 different inputs (DVI/HDMI, VGA and component/S-Video). This would allow for a teacher station to be plugged in at all times (to DVI), a DVD/CD player plugged in at all times, and a third connection (VGA?) connected to a port embedded in the wall for plugging in a personal machine (the fourth audio plug in the passive mixer would be connected to an auxiliary plug in the desk for "drop-in" audio connections). The projector would be switchable via remote control - no video box needs to be used. I believe that all of the incoming digital projectors being placed in classrooms in the Clearihue building will meet this requirement.

4) Physical layout of the room - Stewart did a number of possible layouts up in a graphics editor - was discussed, with the general concensus being that a U-shaped amphitheatre-like setup would work best, given the physical constraints of the space (assuming that we are taking over both of the rooms). No point in doing ASCII art or trying to describe it - look at Stews drawing - except to say that we identified a few "must haves" for the space.
a) Short line of sight between teacher and student. This effectively means a wide room as opposed to a long one, with the teacher placed against the long wall.
b) Three rows of workstations with the middle row able to accommodate reversing of the workspace - convenient for computer-based exams like TOEFL that require a measure of secrecy. As long as the furniture is chosen carefully this would be easy to do.
c) Projector screen shall be beside the whiteboard so both can be viewed simultaneously.
d) Breakout space requirement means we'll need a few tables that will accommodate up to 20 people.

Took delivery of 4 old CALL machines to add in to the labs.
Started a new build on one of them using my shiny new SP3 install disk.
Did some big updates to existing build and pulled it for rollout next week.

Follow-up: The next stage in the process was to place the updated ghost image on the new machines. I figured that I'd boot in to BartPE and pull the file from the USB drive; Bart refused to talk to the USB drive at all.

I also tried to install a clean copy of SP3 (my slipstreamed build) but it coughed up a hairball (BSOD) because of an error like this.

I eventually burned the ghost image to a DVD, booted BartPE and used the external DVD drive to read the ghost image.

UPDATE: all systems functional

Changing the default view for the Duo player can be done with a registry entry.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sanako\Lab\Lab300\Duo\Synchronization]
"Font name"="DejaVu Sans"
"Font size"=dword:0000000a
"Font bold"=dword:00000000
"Font italic"=dword:00000000
"Font charset"=dword:00000000
"AACC Answer Time"=dword:00000003
"Show Subtitles"=dword:00000001
"Hide Video CloseButton"=dword:00000000
"Show Graph"=dword:00000000
"Separation Marks"=",.;:"

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

The important bit is the bit that says:
"Show Graph"=dword:00000000
It can be changed to graph view by setting the value to 00000001

Per Eoin's request I'll send this reg entry out to the labs to make them use standard view.

Cleaned up most of my bench.
Casper seems to be dying again. BSOD nearly every time I boot it up. Reconsidering Casper-as-VM.
Choices:
Virtualize it and run Casper from it's own external drive.
Rebuild it with another motherboard/machine.

In the .htaccess:

 SetEnv UVPHP_VERSION 5


 In the PHP.ini if you have a custom one:

 Set the include path:
 /usr/local/php5/lib/php


Just the .htaccess if you do not have a custom php.ini file. 

Got a Vista image finished. It's 4.7GB compared to 1.7GB for XP. To be fair I haven't done any where near the optimization on Vista that I have on XP. Still, whoa!

Vista seems happy to take a logoff script like this: shutdown /r/ t 0 meaning that I won't need psshutdown if we go Vista.

What I will eventually need is a script that will collect the hostname and the primary dns suffix of the machine (which will hopefully be something I can set to be a combination of static DHCP and fixed hostname tied to a MAC address). I can harvest these two items by running these commands:
ipconfig /all|find "Name"
and
ipconfig /all|find "Dns"
Unsophisticated, to be sure, but I might be able to combine that with a script I got from the CALL to have the Windows side automatically add itself to the domain when it boots up after a rebuild.

Once I get the commands sorted I might ask Martin to write a little CLI app that'll do all of this in one go.

Turns out I lied. I tried to image the Win partition with NRH just now and had nothing but failure. I found a post on the forum that said to try it from the CLI, like this:
1. Get the list of disks, note the one with Windows
diskutil list
2. Check to see how much space we could save if we resized it
/usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize --info -f /dev/disk2s3
3. Clone to Windows partition to a disk image
/usr/local/sbin/ntfsclone --save-image -o windows.img /dev/disk2s3

First run through was a test. Results:
Rebuild:sbin admin$ sudo /usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize --info -f /dev/disk0s3
ntfsresize v1.13.0 (libntfs 9:0:0)
Device name : /dev/disk0s3
NTFS volume version: 3.1
Cluster size : 4096 bytes
Current volume size: 31868277248 bytes (31869 MB)
Current device size: 31868280832 bytes (31869 MB)
Checking filesystem consistency ...
100.00 percent completed
Accounting clusters ...
Space in use : 14566 MB (45.7%)
Collecting resizing constraints ...
You might resize at 14565183488 bytes or 14566 MB (freeing 17303 MB).
Please make a test run using both the -n and -s options before real resizing!

So I did a test run:
Rebuild:sbin admin$ sudo /usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize -s 14565183488 -n /dev/disk0s3
ntfsresize v1.13.0 (libntfs 9:0:0)
Device name : /dev/disk0s3
NTFS volume version: 3.1
Cluster size : 4096 bytes
Current volume size: 31868277248 bytes (31869 MB)
Current device size: 31868280832 bytes (31869 MB)
New volume size : 14565179904 bytes (14566 MB)
Checking filesystem consistency ...
100.00 percent completed
Accounting clusters ...
Space in use : 14566 MB (45.7%)
Collecting resizing constraints ...
Needed relocations : 902174 (3696 MB)
Schedule chkdsk for NTFS consistency check at Windows boot time ...
Resetting $LogFile ... (this might take a while)
Relocating needed data ...
ERROR: Extended record needed (5232 > 1024), not yet supported!
Please try to free less space.

I need to come back to this. In the meantime it's back to Winclone.

Two annoyances regarding a polished deployment:
1) When users choose Mac OS the windows partition should not be visible/mounted.
2) When Windows users log off the machine needs to reboot in order that Bootpicker gets launched for the next user.

Problem was that for (1) Leopard has deprecated things like fstab, /etc/rc and the like, which I was inclined to use. Rather, Leopard uses launchd and a control panel for it called launchctl to do this. One can create plists that will handle lots of tasks, so this will be my first stop for running commands on login/startup etc. Rather than struggle with hand writing it, I built my plist with a GUI tool called Lingon (written by the same guy that wrote Smultron, an awesome text editor for Mac OS). It seems to work a treat. FYI, the plist lives in /Library/LaunchAgents/. I called it com.hcmc.UnmountWindowsPartition (catchy, eh?). It looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.hcmc.UnmountWindowsPartition</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>diskutil</string>
<string>unmount</string>
<string>/Volumes/Windows\ XP</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Problem for (2) was that all of my logoff scripts (shutdowm -r etc.) either didn't work at all or would kill the desktop, but not restart the machine (wallpaper and cursor remain active, but no icons or functionality). I downloaded psshutdown from sysinternals and set a group policy in the "User Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Scripts (Logon/Logoff)" section of gpedit.msc. I point to the script, which I have currently placed in the C:\Windows\ directory (and there it shall remain until someone explains why it shouldn't live there), and give it the following parameters:
-r -t 1 -v 0
This will run the following command at logoff
C:\Windows\psshutdown.exe -r -t 1 -v 0
Parameter explanation: -r = restart, -t 1 = do it in 1 second (0 seemed to hang the machine), and -v 0 = no messages (without this there is a message informing the user that the machine is shutting down). More on the app is available at the above link.
So far, so good.

Had a chat with UofA regarding the two Sanako packages and found out a few things.

1) Study 1200 is not a low-cost option. We can expect it to be many tens of thousands.
2) There is no group conversation available in Study 1200 so telephone calls are out.
3) Latency is noticeable, especially when students can see and hear the teacher speaking.
4) If we move the labs and replace our existing headsets, we should purchase MB Quart MBK C 800 USB electret headsets (we are currently using an old version of the MB Quart headsets).

To make the decision (move Lab 300 vs. switch to Study 1200) we will need to get a quote for the Study 1200 (headsets for all stations and teacher/student station software licenses) and compare it to a UVic provided ballpark guess regarding the cost of moving the Lab 300, plus buying new headsets and extra licenses to cover the extra stations we add.