May
19
Could the Third Time be the Charm?
May 19, 2009 |
We’ve done two sessions lately of installs on machines with our more standardized and rationalized methodology. For the most part it’s gone well. There are some things that we improve on each time and so my hope is that when we do the third session (not this week) we have it down. To do this we need to create a definitive specification and that’s what I’d like to work towards this week. We can talk about it as we do the ThirdThursday Desktop Scrum event and then write the document over coffee and donuts.
One of the new wrinkles in our latest install came out of having the machine join the domain. As a result there appear to be two different accounts on the machine depending on whether the user logs into the domain or the local machine. Of course this is less than cool when you have a laptop and unplug from the network, right? So RiverValley Kevin will take a break from being a Baseball Dad and join us to work this through so that when it comes to the last machine to renew we get it all right the first time.
We (or maybe I) also need to dump out our stuff (no, not junk) in the basement to find the MS Publisher install CD and get this updated on the machines re-kitted during the first two install sessions. Really, I had no idea that Publisher was so well used an application. It took about two days before the first query about it came in.
In other news, I came across an Intel Gig-NIC, so we’ll swap that into the server backbone network for the data server and see if we can make things work at gigabit speeds on the third effort. The backup currently takes 7 hours over 100Mb network, so anything faster will be much gooder. Pass the donuts wouldya?