Our school’s technology partner, Dean, was once interviewed for a school paper. When asked to summarize computer work, Dean said “It always takes longer than you think.” Amen to that, brother!

Yesterday, our school had the day off (in lieu of Columbus Day). But I went in to work on FINALLY switching the Fileservers. Dean showed up around 1:00pm, so that’s when I officially started working. We started by testing out the permissions and shares and found out the original plan didn’t work to copy over the permissions (though a registry export/import transferred the shares without a hitch). We tried Winders Backup on a single file and found that it could transfer the permissions. So I backed up all the user files and sent them to the new server.

Meanwhile, I took Dean and dad down to the main computer lab which had been giving me grief this week. Each day, another computer would “die.” At first, I thought it was dead HDs. Then later dead graphics cards. Actually, I believe now that it was a combo of the graphics card, Macromedia, Clean Slate and the dreaded Microsoft Debug Mangler Manager. I uninstalled Clean Slate, disabled MDM, uninstalled the graphics card, reinstalled it and Clean Slate, and the computers are back to normal. Phew!

So I did that in the lab of 22 computers (thankfully only 12 had the MDM/graphics card problem, but they all needed the upgrade of Clean Slate) while I was backing up and restoring the user and software folders on the new Fileserver. I left at 7:00pm and had supper at Taco Hell.

Today, I actually went to Curves for the first time since August. Then, after lunch, I returned to school to make sure the restore worked (it did) and to check the shares and permissions (all were fine). I then turned off the old Fileserver, renamed and re-IP-addressed the new one, and logged onto a machine with my account. Yay! Everything in my account was there! The new Fileserver worked!

Now, the old Backup Domain Controller crashes more than doesn’t, so I turned it off and decided to put in the new PDC that we also bought this summer but had no time to finish installing. Unfortunately, when Dean installed WinNT4 on it, he made it a PDC at the time. But the old PDC refused to acknowledge the fact that it was a server in that case. After some research, I discovered there was no way to demote to BDC with this situation. So I thought “I’ll just reinstall WinNT4.” Ha!

There’s never a “just” about it. Firstly, I tried the upgrade, but it remembered the old settings. Then I started from scratch – but when it came time to log onto the Domain, it couldn’t be found. The Intel NIC, I figured. But that’s no problem, Dean made floppies of the NIC drivers. Except that for some reason, the new PDC doesn’t see its A: drive anymore. ARGH!

After an initial bout of frustration, I thought “I could make a CD of the NIC drivers” and did so. Finally WinNT4 finished installing and the new PDC was now a BDC on our network. It will stay this way until I’m ready to promote it to the new PDC and demote the old to a BDC.

Next was installing the graphics drivers, but of course, a higher service pack was needed. No problem, I’ll update using IE. Except IE doesn’t work. Argh! So I download the service pack on my PC and save to a CD. Except there’s two different encryptions – and I’d downloaded the wrong one. New download, new CD burn (same CD-RW, thankfully) and finally I got the new PDC/BDC updated and ready for action. PHEW!

All in all, it ended up being 10.5 hours of work – and that’s just me. Thankfully only about 4 hours of Dean was needed. I’m merely $25/hr, but he’s $60/hr. Hopefully on Monday I can finish the last 4th grade rooms and be nearly caught up to where I should have been at the end of summer. Woohoo!