Matt McCarrell's MP152 Spring 2007 Profile

Projects this semester:

Lab Management (As of 3/10/2007)

• I came up almost a week early to clean the lab and to begin setting up equipment in the server room. Zach Shepherd and I cleaned off all the desks, cleaned the monitors, blew out all the dust from inside all of the ITL machines, and moved some furniture around in the lab.

• I had planned to begin setting up the routers and servers on the ITL rack; however, it was mounted at a slant which resulted in nothing being able to be mounted. Currently the racks have been remounted to the floor and we are planning on mounting the equipment once we have time.

• I had also planned to begin learning to configure the internal network; however, the networking never took place over break as expected and has yet to be finished.

• I am currently maintaining all of the Windows side of the lab build and part of the Ubuntu Linux side of the build. This semester we started with a completly new lab build. I implemented a few new things such as using the Windows XP Shared Computer Toolkit and NewSID. I have been using the User Restrictions Tool in the Shared Toolkit to lock down the ITLGuest account and I tried to implement Windows Disk Protection but ran into complications due to the number of partions required to have both Windows and Linux on the lab build. I have incorporated NewSID into the script that runs on the Windows build after the lab is ghosted to generate new SIDs for each of the computers since sharing the same SID is a major security flaw and does not allow for computers that have the same SID to attach to the same domain. Sometime this semester I am hoping to figure out how to set up Active Directory on Windows Server with a DNS server that is already set up. On the Linux side, I only update the build before I ghost and prepare the build for ghosting. At the beginning of the semester I had UDPCast (The free ghosting program that we use) booting from the grub boot menu but since then a new kernel was released for UDPCast and I have unsuccessfully been able to get it to boot.

• This semester I was finally able to get the server formally know as Ernie working again. Last semester I took it apart to clean everything and put the ITL's four 250GB hard drives into so that it could be the ITL's primary file server; however, after doing so I could not get anything to install correctly and was unable to have the computer detect all four hard drives. I recently discovered that the problem was that the onboard raid was turned off and that the memory was bad. Currently I have it working and I'm in the process of configuring it with Windows Server 2003 as a temporary solution. I plan to eventually make it a linux server that will run Samba once I have the time and experience to do so.

• I am working on updating some of the content on the ITL website such as the list of current software on the Windows side of the lab build.

• I am going to be working with Jim Owens on the Server Room Temperature Monitoring.

Other Side Projects

• Learn more about writing html.

• Learn more about Linux.

• Improve on this profile.