On Thursday I wrapped up work and MJ and I headed down to Palo Alto for an Ubuntu Hour at Antonio’s Nut House.
It ended up being a great venue for the meeting, we got a booth right near the door, it was relatively quiet, the food was good and we had plenty of space for our attendees (8 of us in total, but we had room to expand should we have had more). I had the opportunity to finally meet Jessica Ledbetter, who has recently joined several projects in the Ubuntu community that we work on together. It was also worth noting that of the attendees, half of us were women, and among those ranks we had a sysadmin and two programmers.
Friday I had the day off from work, so I got up bright and early to meet up with Christian Einfeldt and James Howard of Partimus at the Creative Arts Charter School on Turk Street here in San Francisco.
The plan for the day was to complete the installation of Ubuntu 10.04 on the 31 lab computers which were running 8.04. James had the PXE server which hosts the installation isos for the lab systems prepped (including the required ldap and nfs configurations), and had made the appropriate changes in gconf so the files in the home directories on the NFS share would not cause problems between gnome versions.
Our first step was to boot up all the machines in the lab to confirm they were all working and then grab a replacement for the one machine which wasn’t booting properly. From there we brought them all down and then booted them off the network to launch the installers in batches of 4.
Installers running:
While the installers ran Christian had a couple of folks come by who had an Ubuntu system at home which was failing. It turned out to be the harddrive but the system itself was quite old so Christian had a new system prepped for them. I was able to use DSL (available via PXE from James’ server) to get the drive mounted on the old machine, and luckily was able to salvage the user data.
I also took the time there to use the tools above to salvage another computer from the storage closet and get it prepped with Lucid to be a drop in replacement should any other systems fail. It was then that I realized that I need to rebuild my travel toolkit… until I remembered that I already did, I just need to remember to bring it with me! My friend, and fellow old hardware salvager, Jim Fisher also had some suggestions for a couple of cheap kits that will do the job and be even easier to manage, including this 27-Piece PC Tool Kit w/Pliers, Screwdrivers, Nylon Zipper Case.
I ended up heading out around 3PM after the Lucid upgrades were complete. One of the things James implemented during the upgrade was switching from Firefox to Chromium as the default browser for the lab systems at the request of one of the teachers. He’s also going to be seeing about getting more RAM (most of the machines have 512M, they’d like to increase that to 1G) and 10 or so graphics cards to use in some of the spare systems which need new cards from one of the local hardware recycling groups.
In all, a very productive day!
Sunday, Jan 2nd, 2011 at 4:43
Great job! I couldn’t help thinking that this would be a great job for a Clonezilla Server.
Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011 at 18:51
I’m actually not all that familiar with Clonezilla (my first experience with the server version on Debian was not particularly successful), but if it’s customizable and doesn’t have a problem handling different hardware configurations (including different harddrive sizes) it may be something worth looking into.
Friday, Jan 14th, 2011 at 21:37
It was great meeting you and MJ :) Love the travel tool kit!
Tuesday, Jan 18th, 2011 at 14:35
It was great meeting you too!