Lab Notes, 3/9/04
Present: Carl Madzelan, Njoki, Mike Cook, Tom Brown; 6:00 - 10:00 PM
:: New Volunteers
Carl works at Notre Dame Office of Information Technology (OIT). His
consuming tech interest is network security. Njoki works at Federal Mogul
at the Help Desk and wants to learn Linux. Neither Carl nor Njoki can
attend every lab, but we'll see them often.
I gave Carl the 5 cent tour of the lab and the Upper Room. Njoki will get
the tour next visit. Tom and Carl gave Njoki a walk through the GNU/Linux
filesystem and scanned a couple of /etc config files. Njoki's background is
100% Microsoft. Our daemons are her services, etc.
:: Workbench Design
Olin attended a professional meeting and missed the lab. So we were unable
to finalize the workbench design. We'll try again next week.
:: NetVista Trials
Mike demonstrated the converted NetVista 2800 to Njoki and Carl. They loved
it. As he connected the NV to the network, Mike explained the background of
the NVs and how FGM plans to use them.
:: NetVista Howto
After Mike answered Njoki's and Carl's questions, he and I replicated
converting two randomly selected NVs to ethernet and LTSP thin clients. I
typed the procedure as Mike explained what he was doing. Mike gave Njoki a
CLI lesson during the frequent pauses while I typed -- Mike can talk and
convert a NV much faster than I can type. btw, Mike is a good teacher.
The only hitch we ran into was not waiting for memory to clear after
resetting the bios to factory defaults, including wiping the bios password.
To save time we didn't rewrite the compact flash.
Mike discovered that there are fewer bios changes than we earlier thought
necessary. In fact some of the previous settings slowed the bootup. The NVs
now boot in about the same time as the regular PCs in the lab and perhaps a
little faster. Mike has more changes to the howto. He didn't bring hard
copy to the lab so we'll merge his additions and edits into the howto
during the week or at lab next week.
If you'd like to read the updated howto, check the following url.
http://www.michianageeks.net/2004/netvista.xhtml
Tom
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