Back when dad and I were installing our new webcaching server (using Mitel Networks SME server – a flavor of Linux – and free!) we kept calling it Johnny as our personal joke. And then when it came time to name it, I decided that JohnnyCache should be its name. (It’s a name that is rightly feared at school. Yup, the Man in Black is immortalized in the server that blocks our school game sites.)

It was built out of the same computers that were installed in my computer lab last year. And that was used in the elementary lab. And that had the batch of Seagate harddrives that die. So the poor server was just a ticking time bomb. When would the HD die, we all wondered? Um, the answer is “Today, dammit!”

I had one main tech task I was going to do today – set up the computers for the elementary special education teacher. Well, when I discovered the HD had expired, I called dad in and he took care of that one classroom while I put in a new HD (Western Digital this time – we’re not gonna put in a replacement Seagate) and reinstalled SME. Of course, wget needed to access our proxy server in order to download SquidGuard, but I couldn’t get that to work easily. After half an hour or so of faffing about with wget and .wgetrc, I finally got SquidGuard installed. This is the software that does the actual content filtering.

The next task was the blacklist. I actually had a sort-of up to date list of game sites. And when I went to start typing them into the web interface, I discovered to my delight that IE remembered the other domains that had been entered in the before. So I think I did get everything entered that was there before. (There were a few overlaps between what the browser remembered and my text list o’ domains). Once I got everything entered, I saved a text file of the list in case we have another crash.

So JohnnyCache crashed this morning and I had him repaired by the end of the day. Way to go me! (Not bad for a tech who works 1 period a day. Except that I usually work 2 periods a day – using my “plan period” for tech.) The next goal for dear Johnny is to also become our Pop Up Blocker. I know you can do that with SME, but I don’t know an easy way to do it, yet.