#it manager

[techav]

On Working From Home

It's around this time of year that I normally start work on preparing new software images for deployment over the summer. Given the current pandemic, I — like so many others — have moved to working from home Using a laptop with VPN and and RDC I can access the tools necessary to put together packages and compile the image sequence. The challenge is — how to actually test OS deployment when the distribution point servers are only available behind that VPN.

I think I've come up with a solution:

Work laptop built-in Ethernet port connected directly to home internet router

USB Ethernet adapter connected to the WAN port of an old router

Router SSID set the same as the campus open SSID with MAC whitelist enabled

Laptop connected to VPN, using Windows internet sharing to share that connection to the USB Ethernet adapter

Initial tests are promising. A work laptop brought home for testing connects to the router, since it sees the SSID it's expecting, and it is able to access firewalled resources as though it were physically on campus.

Time to start testing deployment.

(just don't tell the infosec team)

[nixcraft]

The bosses/IT managers we remember:

provided safe space to grow

opened career doors 

defended us when we needed it

recognized and rewarded us

developed us as leaders

inspired us to stretch higher

led by example

told us our worked mattered

forgave us when we made mistakes

Credit

[randomactsorg]

Vacancies!

Random Acts is currently recruiting for an IT Manager and a Staff Writer. All of our volunteer roles are remote-working and require a stable internet connection.

Find out more here. 

[techav]

Reasons Outlook has Crashed This Week So Far

User attempted to copy a meeting from one calendar to another

User attempted to paste an image into the body of an email

User attempted to type the body of an email

[techav]

A little bit of a different project for me. I was tasked with building a small studio for recording podcasts. I've done classrooms and conference rooms and other such meeting spaces, and I've worked in television studios. I've never been the one hanging diffusers on the wall though.

The end result is better than I expected, but there is still some air handler noise that comes through when all four mics are live. Those Shure SM-7B mics are very sensitive.

I do hope to revisit this project soon. I had to order parts before project stakeholders had decided on a space, so my cables ended up too short. I would like to install proper wall plates, rather than having cables run along the walls. I also intend to install some preview speakers as well.

[techav]

IT Problem Solving

At work I have a hundred laptops to reimage this summer. Without PXE set up, I have to start them all manually, and only have space for three at a time. So of course today when I have the whole day free to work on it, our imaging server is down. While the server team sorted that out, I finally got OpenVPN working on my Raspberry Pi at home. I tried before, going through the steps manually, but never could get it to work. Today I used the PiVPN script and it ran without issue. The fun part though, is I'm doing this via SSH remotely. The final step is forwarding the necessary port in my router at home, which is a web interface incompatible with Lynx and the like. I'm not set up for X11 forwarding (and not running a window manager on the Pi anyway), so my remaining option is VNC. So tunnel VNC over SSH to my iMac and just use Chrome. But first, Etherwake to send a Wake on LAN magic packet to wake the iMac. Which ... didn't work. I could do all this remotely, but sometimes a text to spouse at home is necessary for that one last button press. (Thank you, dear!) But it worked, and now my ad blocking DNS, via Pi Hole, follows me wherever I go.

[techav]

IT Manager Things

I just connected to the campus VPN so I could remote into my computer at work so I could look up and remote into a front desk computer so I could troubleshoot a late-night issue a student worker was having ... ... from my phone.