August 21st is the deadline. The computers (and software, and countless other things) must be ready to use.
Summer time in our department is probably unlike anything a non-educational organization’s IT department must face. It’s a curse and a blessing. We get an opportunity to do large upgrades, taking down servers for multiple days if necessary. We must maintenance every computer (about 1500) to get it ready for the students to use over the next school year. Once the students come back, it’s prime time, the reason we even exist.
But why is that so hard? Well, other departments use the summer to do their major work. This generally isn’t a problem, however each building’s custodians must clean all of their rooms.
Their tasks consist of:
Remove ALL items from EVERY classroom. Including computers.
- We ran out ahead of the custodians to properly unplug the computers.
Scrub and wax the floor and wash the walls:
Wax takes about 24 hours to dry (best case) but often I think they apply multiple layers to the floor. Wings of the school buildings are ‘off limits’ because they will wax the hallways of that wing as well. This is about 80% of the summer time.
We run around doing to the computers floating around in the hallways and the stationary computer labs:
- RAM upgrades
- Cleaning:
- Computer desks
- Computers (Inside and out)
- Monitors
- Mice and keyboards
- Whatever else…
When a wing is finished:
- Wheel the computers back into the room they came from
- Hook the computers back up
- Verify network access
- Install Ghost boot partition (so we can deploy an OS and Software)
While all of this was going on this summer I was working on server projects. Now that it’s all finished, it’s on me to do my part.
Continued in part 2.