Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

This week has been a struggle of getting Lion to play nicely with Windows Server 2003 based print queues.  After numerous visits to a variety of forums, trying everything from forcing them out with Workroup Manager to IP Printing, I have found a (somewhat) simple solution.

Scenario:  I would add a printer that was hosted on a Windows share, send a print job and the printer would act like it was going to print, then pause.

It usually would never prompt me to enter a username and password (as required with Windows Server, even when group EVERYONE can print.) and would just set the print queue to paused.  Having had an issue with Keychain entries not working, my first step was to delete any keychain entries for the printers, which made no difference.

The logs would be generally full of this type of error:

Backend returned status 1 (failed)
[Job 58] Printer stopped due to backend errors; please consult the error_log file for details.
[Job 58] End of messages
[Job 58] printer-state=5(stopped)

This didn’t help much because I was consulting the error_log file, and this was the error. I tweaked just about every imaginable setting, even attempting to add it via the localhost:631 web based CUPS interface.  No matter what I tried, I never got much further than this.

Eventually it dawned on me to check the config files using the command line.  One thing I noticed right away was that in the /etc/cups/printers.conf file, there was a line called AuthInfoRequired and the value was negotiate.  I had an old printer that was working that I had added prior to the Lion upgrade, and that value was set to username,password instead of negotiate.  Surely it can’t be this easy.  I made the change in vi, saved it, tried again and it still failed.  It then occurred to me that since I was modifying this file, I needed to restart cups.   Even after this, it never prompted me for the username and password, which made me believe it wasn’t the solution and I moved on.

Fast forward three days and it’s 3:30 on Friday afternoon.  I just kept going back to that printers.conf file knowing there had to be something with that one difference.  Nothing else I found in three days of working on this was different, that was the only piece.  I tried it again, and made sure I cleared out every Keychain entry for the variety of printers I had tried.  I completely cleared my printer list and started fresh.  Step by step, here is what I did:

1. Cleared all references to the printer out of Keychain.
2. Deleted the printer(s)
3. Click + to add Other Printer or Scanner.
4. Click the Advanced Tab.  (If Advanced Tab isn’t available, Control-Click in the toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar and drag the advanced button to the toolbar)
5. Under Type choose Windows printer via spoolss
6. In the URL, make it smb://servername/printername
7. Give it a Name in the Name: field.  I stuck with the same name just for kicks, but it shouldn’t make a difference.
8. Choose the printer driver/model and click Add.
9. Jump over to Terminal and edit /etc/cups/printers.conf and change the AuthInfoRequired negotiate to AuthInfoRequired username,password using vi or text editor of choice.
   
10. Save the changes and restart the computer
11. Print a test page and you should be prompted to enter Windows credentials.  Save them in Keychain and bask in the glory of a functioning printer.

If you are not familiar with how printers.conf looks, each printer is included in a section that will start with <Printer the_printer_name_here> and all settings between that tag and </Printer> apply to that printer.  If you have multiple printers, you may have to scroll through it to locate it.  The AuthInfoRequired is about three lines down, directly under the UUID field.

By now, you’re probably wondering why didn’t I just click Windows and add it there.  For whatever reason, when I did, it would eventually show the domain, but only one or two random computers.  Thinking it was taking a bit to scan the network, I let it sit and think.  Nothing.  Once the server happened to be one of the random computers that showed up, so I clicked the printer and added it with no problems, just as in Snow Leopard.  For whatever, reason it doesn’t work the same in Lion, especially (it seems) when the server is on a different subnet than the client machine.

As background of why I discovered this, we moved away from central print queues due to some networking/territorial disputes/politics on our Macs and moved to strictly IP based printing.  If the printer was not networkable, we would use direct USB connections.  We are now moving to a managed printing system that requires it to go through a server to track page counts for supply replenishment and billing.  We are also moving toward using PaperCut to monitor and eventually attempt to reduce unnecessary printing.  Both of these tasks require a hosted print queue.

The IP based printing works flawlessly.  With my Snow Leopard machines, moving to the Windows print queues has been painless and worked (so far) without any problems.  Part of the problem with our old way of managing them had to do with some integration issues with the Macs.  Over the course of the past few months, I believe we’ve solved most of them.

Today I had to make a very difficult decision.  At the beginning of the year we updated most of our student computers in one building to OS X Lion.  Our district participates in the Apple program to get the latest updates for all Apple software and the move to Lion was a natural step.

In the beginning I noticed some problems with Wifi staying connected.  My computer would randomly drop the wifi connection and sometimes just seemed to just “hang” a bit.  I knew from experience that with the first version of a major software upgrade sometimes you have to put up with a few bugs.  All in all, though, it was a good trade because I really did (and do) like Lion.

Shortly after the problems seemed to increase in frequency, 10.7.1 came along that had a fix to supposedly solve the wifi issues.  For the computers I used regularly, it did solve them.  For others, we had a few workarounds such as PRAM and SMC reset, removing the network and adding it again, changing the location, adding odd DNS entries, believe me, we tried them all.  For most machines, various gyrations of this solved the issues and they have remained trouble free.  Once in a while I run into issues where my computer will not connect after waking up, but that is the exception.

We had some lingering issues with student MacBooks (which are different models – Late 2009) and sometimes entire classes would be put on hold because of the issues of this dropping wifi and the inability to log in.  It has finally reached a critical point because the MacBooks are just not getting used because they don’t work.  This was a critical problem because this was why we decided on Apple for our student computers, they were very low maintenance and reliable.  For the past two years, they have been and I have become quite the Apple snob.

Today, I sat during an entire period and discovered the login issues we had in one particular class were due to corrupted mobile accounts on the local computer.  That was a simple fix, delete the mobile account, have the student sign on again to re-create the account and we were back in business.  Certainly, this is not the best situation, but one with a simple fix. The computers stayed connected during the entire hour and we thought we had a solution.  I was pleased because I thought we had finally resolved it.

The next class period rolled around, and the wifi disconnected on most of the students before they could even log in.  What makes this more difficult is that the wifi would reconnect if I logged in with the local administrator account.  However, when you rely on a directory server to authenticate network users, that doesn’t do a whole lot of good.  Determined to figure out why Lion was doing this, I pulled out every one of the machines and tried to update them one last time just to make sure that we were on 10.7.2 and all new updates.  Long story short, I couldn’t even stay connected long enough to complete downloading updates.

After about 30 minutes of this, I made the decision to take them all back to Snow Leopard.  I imaged about five computers, tested them out, and no problems whatsoever.  I was not at all surprised, but I was extremely disappointed.  I feel like we are going backwards and I don’t know what other option we have.  Just limping along like this is not an option.  It doesn’t seem to affect anything and nothing has changed with our wifi infrastructure.  The common problem is Lion and there is just no way around it.  We have made a significant investment in technology and it all needs to work like it did before.  When a student grabs a notebook, they should open it up and log in.

Today I imaged the entire 30 machines in that cart back to Snow Leopard and we will make plans to do the same for the remaining 60-90 machines that have Lion.  I had already determined that our XServe would not be making the jump to Lion any time soon because the server version of Lion is not what I had hoped.  I had such high hopes for our student computers and the ability to use some of the features in Lion.  I remain a Lion fanatic on my work and home computers, but for our students, not so much.

Apple, if you read this, I am begging you to figure this out.  There is no explanation I can see, and the forums are full of this same type of complaint.  Nothing has changed with hardware or configuration and yet we see these problems.  I will be here waiting for a fix and be the first one to try it out.

Over the past two weeks, my team and I have had the opportunity to get some training using Apple’s professional development program.  We have one more two-day session next week.  This is an excellent resource and I cannot speak highly enough about Apple’s Professional Development program.  It’s not cheap, but it’s well worth the money. For us, we are wrapping up some spending of technology training dollars that was part of a grant I obtained.  Initially, I had wanted to include several teachers in this training to increase the amount of people to help build a training program.  However, I ran into the same problem I have had for most of the year: getting time to get teachers in a training environment is all but impossible.  I understand the difficulty in taking teachers out of the classroom.  For these two sessions, there simply weren’t enough substitutes to go around.  This time of year is busy with other training throughout the district.

My team and I have all of this valuable information, resources that would really help teachers in their classrooms.  All we would need is an hour here or there to be effective.  Besides money, time is the other scarce resource.  Earlier in the year, I provided some after hours training opportunities for our staff.  It was a total of 8 hours, two hours per evening and we provided recertification credit.  We did not have many takers, and the second round of classes, we only had one or two people enrolled.  I opted to take a different approach and create some video tutorials and post them in our district Moodle.  If a person went through all of the material I created, they would be able to get the same information as we covered in the class, possibly even more.

It occurred to me that these video tutorials were a very powerful medium.  I was able to obtain some video equipment so we can produce some high quality professional videos.  Now the hard part is getting people to find time to watch them.  It is especially difficult this time of year as the weather warms up.  When my day is done, all I want to do is work on my new blog, so I completely understand.  Lately, my interest in technology in my downtime has faded significantly.  I know it’s because it’s beginning to warm up, the days are longer, and my passion for growing food is renewed by the time of year.

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.

I am excited and nervous and annoyed at the complexity of it all, this whole grant thing.  I got a big one… a BIG one for our district.  A lot of it will be devoted to upgrading some equipment, providing training and a few other items.

I was invited to attend an event put on by Apple called Reaching All Learners.  Amazing, that’s the only word I can say.  I have thought about nothing since then – how to start this.   I also realized that I have way too much going on at the moment and need to step back and focus.  I’m trying to do too much, too soon.  I need to organize and prioritize what I’m working on so that it can receive the utmost attention.