Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

I’ve been struggling to figure out two problems, one personal and one for work, but both nearly identical. It’s a question of backups. At home, I have an Apple Time Capsule that backs up automatically using Time Machine on all of our Macs. This works great and is completely effortless on my behalf. If my computer were to crash or fall in the bathtub tomorrow, I would be secure in knowing my data was protected. Forever the pessimist, though, I asked myself what if the house burns down or is carried away in a tornado? Then I would be out everything. I have had this nagging desire to have an offsite backup solution for quite some time. Previously, I would burn DVDs of family pictures and other memories and take them to the home of a relative periodically. Sometimes months (or a year) would elapse before I would add to the collection, so in the event of a catastrophe I would be completely out of luck.

I kept hearing advertisements for some of these third party sites like Carbonite and Mozy. I love the idea of automated offside backup, but just have a distrust of dumping all of my personal data off to the cloud and having no control over it.  For my work it’s easier to accept because most of what I do is a matter of public record anyway.

CrashPlan was another provider that I heard several times. I downloaded a trial version and was fully expecting to just bite the bullet and sign up for the hosted offside backup and wait the months it would take for a complete backup to take place over the Internet.  What I discovered, however, is that CrashPlan lets you back up to other computers over the Internet for free.  The backup is encrypted on the drive and in transit (according to them) and you can build your own automated offsite backup.  So here is what I did:

1. I backed up to my 2TB External Drive on each of my home computers. It took several days.
2. I installed Crashplan on my work computer and added it to my CrashPlan account, but not backing up anything on it.
3. I then took the hard drive from home to work. Using the process to copy a backup archive, I made my work computer a destination for my home computers.
4. I then removed the local folder destination on my home computers so that it wouldn’t report a failure.

All three of my home computers now do automated offsite backup to the hard drive on my desk.  It took some time for that initial backup on each computer, but that was the bulk of the time.  Seeding the backup by doing it locally saved months of uploading, and probably a nasty letter from my ISP since it represented about 1.5TB of data.  For me that solution didn’t cost anything extra because I already had the 2TB drive.

Now, on to the backup solution for work.  CrashPlan offers a Pro solution as well, and provides server software so you can host your own backups on site.  I see a possibility for this as a solution to some of our mobile computers, but for now, it’s going to solve the tape backup dilemma.  We still back up to tape, and someone takes that tape home on a rotating basis.  This works, but an automated solution would be much simpler and expandable.  Since we have a good network connection between our buildings, bandwidth would not be an issue.

So here is my solution:

1. I took an old PC desktop computer and installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and enabled the remote desktop option so it can be headless.
2. Purchased two 2TB Hard Drives (~$150 each) and attached them to the PC, formatting them for Linux.
3. Installed CrashPlan Pro (part of a 30 day trial) and modified it to use those two external drives as storage.
4. Install CrashPlan Pro client on server and set the backup to automate.

Once the initial backup completes, I’ll move this setup to the network closet at one of the other schools.  I realize that if a fire or tornado wipes out both of our schools, well, we would have some data loss.  However, if this were to happen, the data loss would probably be the least of our problems as a school district.  Our Student Information and accounting systems are all hosted offsite, so all that would be lost is Active and Open Directory, network home folders and some share points.  I think it’s a risk that’s reasonable.

After the 30 day trial, we will purchase 5 seats for CrashPlan Pro.  There is a discount for educational institutions, and for that small fee we will no longer have to swap tapes.  The great thing about CrashPlan is that it will just run in the background and is automated.  It’s just one more thing the machine can do.

It’s always exciting to be at the beginning of something new.  Our school district is embarking on many new areas, some exciting and some scary.  Whether it’s the technical side of implementing programs, or the being a part of the logistics of making sure it all works out, I just love new activity.  As I’ve said before, I’m not a teacher by trade, so the whole academics side of things is a new process for me.  However you look at it, though, change is unnerving for many people, regardless of their background.

On the one hand, you honor successes of the past and build on them.  On the other hand, you have to take a critical look at the past performance and be willing to face inadequacies and shortcomings in order to make the corrections.  It’s sometimes easy with technology to get caught up in the “if we just bought this” or “if only we had money for that” game that sometimes you can let it consume your strategy.  If that happens, instead of focusing on correcting the things you can, you get stuck in a defeatist attitude.  Even with what we have, it can always be better.

As I look at the many shortcomings of our technology infrastructure, I see that we have all of the makings of something great.  I was thinking a lot about it today in particular, since it was one of those days when everything seemed to be just itching for conflict.  I’ve been running this game of trying to tweak things just right, make adjustments here, and little corrections there.  I know others on my team have been doing the same thing.

Today it became even more clear that sometimes you just need to have a fresh start.  It really solidified my decision to make my task over the course of the next few months to take a look at the services, functions that we need and focus on making them work.  At some time – summer or a break – we’re going to shake the etch-a-sketch and just start drawing again.

Crazy, I know.  However, we’re reaching that critical point where the tweaking is taking as much time as a rebuild.  We’ve got workarounds for our workarounds when a simple redesign would solve the problem.  I think part of it is battling several years of patches and duct tape solutions that just build and build and then become entrenched ways of business.

Rather than spend energy focusing on workarounds, I want to spend energy building something great.

The cluster environment is settled – Rocks.  Here are a few pictures of the progress so far:

A couple of projects have taken my attention this week.  One of which is nearly complete and that entails some cleaning of our technology items.  The amount of “stuff” that’s accumulated over the years has reached a point where it needs to be thinned signifcantly.  Some is just recyclable junk that has no useful purpose left in it. Some of it, however, is reusable for students or families that don’t have computers at home.  How that will work out is yet to be determined, but it’s on the table.

The second project deals with content filtering for our schools.  We use a product that is included in our hosting.  It’s perfectly fine and does the bare minimum, but not robust enough to meet some of the demands that are on the horizon.  I’m not one for censorship, but schools and libraries are required by federal law to filter “obscene” content.   What it determines is obscene is sometimes at odds with common sense and I know that the students can find whatever they want on the Internet if they are determined.  I have had it demonstrated to me how easy it is to bypass these filters with just a few mouse clicks.

While I admire the resourcefulness of our students, I am also in a position where I must take steps to mitigate these easy, but creative, workarounds.  Whether or not I agree that this is the right thing to do with my time aside, the most obscene thing I’ve seen in the past week is just how much a robust solution costs for a school district.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d think people passing these laws had some financial interest in content filtering appliances and services.

I am completely turned off by the prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars upfront and then subsequently forced into annual licensing agreements.  In this time of budget shortages, teacher layoffs, and a necessity for more technology, it pains me to spend anything on censorware.

Thankfully, there exists Free/Open Source software to meet these needs.  Rather than invest tens of thousands and be on the hook for annual renewals, it makes more sense to spend a couple thousand and never have to pay a fee again.  So this has been my task these last few days, finding and tweaking a solution on a test system.  It seems promising and just in need of some tweaking and should be ready to go when we have some downtime.

On a bright side, our cluster seems to be on the way to becoming a reality.  Yesterday they got the master system up and running and today they were able to image one of the compute nodes.  It seemed like a simple process, or at least they made it look simple.  I am always impressed by these two guys and what they create.  Check out the blog they made.

It’s been a long time since I posted, but no shortage of things happening.  In both personal and business lives, it has been an insane few months.

Over the summer I received approximately 200 Macbooks in addition to the 100+ I already had.  We also purchased some carts so they can be mobile.  I tried to incorporate them into our existing network infrastructure.  The previous Macbooks had been integrated into the Active Directory domain.  Over the summer, the AD server decided to randomly change all of the mobile account user ids to a string of numbers that did not correlate to anything.  If users could log in, they had no permission to view anything.  So as if there wasn’t enough work, add this to the mix, fixing every machine.

I researched this extensively, and had no logical explanation.  At ISTE I listed to a session by the Maine IT people that are behind the MLTI and they take  a completely serverless approach.  So since I was having to touch every machine to fix Microsoft’s epic failure, I decided this is a good approach for our district.  The model fits to the way our users use, and things like a down server no longer take the entire workforce with it.

Add printers into this mix, with local print queues and it was a big project.  As school started and I saw the ratio of macs to PC labs in our district, it occurred to me that we were going about it backwards.  We have almost 3 times as many macs as PCs yet we’re trying to force the macs to work with the haphazard configuration of the PC network.  I made the decision to make the PCs work with the Macs instead.  This has caused some stress and lots of work, but in the end it will be worth it.

During this I also had the opportunity to participate in some professional development sessions sponsored by Apple and it has certainly encouraged me for the year.  I am proud of the work we’ve done and I know we will continue to do more.

I will have the opportunity to attend the ISTE conference in Denver this month.  I’m excited about this opportunity to learn all I can about education technology, meet lots of people, and just immerse myself with people who I can learn from at every level.

I signed up to blog my days, so that will also be a new experience for me.  Watch this blog from June 27th-30th for information about the ISTE conference.

As I watch some area schools struggle with technology more than others, it seems like there is an opportunity here for everyone.  With budget cuts looming and schools struggling to prepare for the coming storm, it’s a difficult prospect for school boards and leadership to justify hiring more tech people to hold hands.

However, that is exactly what we need.  What I see happen is technology is purchased and placed into classrooms without any clear direction.  There is an expectation that this new “stuff” be used, but no instructions given.  In fact, there are really not any instructions, even of the printed kind.  I know, because I was looking for a manual the other day for one of our interactive whiteboards.  I couldn’t locate one online, and, apparently, not even in a hard copy form.

I thought about this for most of the day, how fortunate we were that our district obtained grant funds to pay for tech support for all of this new stuff that was delivered over the summer.  Truthfully, it’s probably what makes the difference in all of the world in terms of utilization.  There are some teachers out there without so much as an operator’s manual.

Even though I’m the support director, I recognize that you don’t have to use it every day, in every class, and for every lesson.  Our approach has been to identify opportunities to  use the technology, without being overly demanding or even confrontational, as some tech people tend to be.  I consider myself not a “techie” in this realm, because I admit that technology, sometimes, just makes things worse.

But wait!  That’s your job, this promoting technology!  True, I agree completely.  But it is also my job not to get in teachers’ path when they’re trying to educate children.  What I constantly tell my team is that we’re there when they need us – we are available.  I have given my team direction to meet with every teacher at least once per day, just to say hello.  We are customer service over tech savvy in my district.

This causes some disagreements at times, because sometimes tech people are not always…. what’s the word… customer focused.  My goal has been to be available when teachers need us, to help enhance their lessons and provide a pathway to vent frustrations, if necessary.  I recognize that there is not enough time in the day as it is.  Spending a half hour trying to get something work wastes everyone’s time.  The last thing I want for technology to do is hinder the classroom.  Teachers have enough challenges without computers and us to get in the way.

So what does that have to do with anything?  I’ve recognized that not everyone has what we have, and I want to share.  I don’t want to run like crazy, teaching classes every evening and weekend to make extra money.  I want to provide the tools for our schools to collaborate and to obtain information and resources.  What started as a menu offering of services has become more of an exercise in getting everyone together.  We’ll see what happens.  Drop by www.arkvalleyedtech.com and help fill up space with useful blog posts.