Software

Managing User Devices Can be Difficult – Puppet to the Rescue

January 23, 2013 – 11:14 pm

My very first limited exposure to Puppet was surprisingly at an Apple Event about mobile device management.  The very last presentation  of the event was from a Technology Director of school in Ohio.  The technology director was actually leaving the school district to move out to Portland and work for Puppet Labs.  While I was sitting there listening to his presentation, at the time I had no idea what Puppet was, I was thinking to myself how does this tie into device management.

 

Then he flashed the goods.

 

He installed java on 1,000 Mac’s

 

My mind was blown. The fact that there was actually a good software utility to manage software for Mac is great.

 

Running a Windows network you can push most software installs through Group Policy.  At work  that’s how we push(ed) out software.  Often though we have to force a group policy update and the client machines normally take about 2 or 3 restarts before it finally installs the software.  Even after that we still get issues with the software not installing correctly.  So the department line was “Do a couple more restarts and if it still doesn’t install put in another ticket and we will manually install it”.  For the most part I was ok with that response.

 

Not anymore.

 

So I did a lot more research on Puppet and how it can  help my department better manage our devices/desktops across the district.  The results of that research will be posted in a three part series.  I’ll go over installing the Puppet Master (server) and installing the Puppet agent on Windows XP clients.  Some of the common mistakes when running Puppet with Windows.  I’ll also demonstrate how to push out software to Windows machines and some other great stuff that can be done with Puppet.

 

More to come….

Permalink | Comment (0)
Software Technology

Configure ownCloud to use Active Directory Authentication

May 7, 2012 – 10:26 am

OwnCloud (http://owncloud.org) is an open source product to create your own Dropbox like software hosted locally on your servers. If you are running Active Directory on your network there is little documentation on how to setup ownCloud to use Active Directory for authentication. Below are a couple different configurations that work.

read more »

Permalink | Comment (0)
API Code iOS Software Technology

Short Introduction to FRAPI

April 18, 2012 – 9:50 pm

This is a follow up to Creating a Barcode Checkin App

To get started you must have a basic knowledge of how web services work. Most common web services use RESTful APIs that implement HTTP and the principals of REST.  The most common public APIs literally just let you retrieve data to manipulate in your own application i.e. Twitter Public API.  If you look in the table at RESTful Web Service HTTP methods it states what all the HTTP methods do with RESTful web services.  All these methods are implemented in FRAPI.

read more »

Permalink | Comment (0)
API Code iOS Software Technology

Creating a Barcode Checkin app

April 5, 2012 – 3:55 pm

I’ve been struggling with creating an API for some of my web sites. Recently I stumbled upon FRAPI (http://getfrapi.com) which is based on the Zend Framework to help expose your web app.  Their video (see below) is a great tutorial on how to get started very quickly with FRAPI but I suggest really comb through the documentation how to get everything setup correctly.

 

I wanted to get started with something easy that didn’t need much of an extravagant database.  So I had a project from my junior class advisor, I work at a school district, who wanted a better way to keep track of who is currently at prom instead of the people taking the tickets and putting a check mark by their name on a printed excel file.  All the tickets are numbered and have the students on them with a printed label.  Right away in my mind I thought why add a barcode on the label that is simply just the ticket number.  Then when the students come to the prom we can just scan the barcodes with a device and have them as “checked in” to the prom.  They also “check out” of the prom so we know that they have left dance.  When the student checks out of the prom the have 40 minutes to get back for post-prom otherwise they are not allowed to attend.  This logic has to be used with the app too so they must be also check into post-prom and also check out so we know they left. The junior class advisor thought this would be perfect so I got started.

 

I will be posting on how to use FRAPI and ZBar in later post.

 

Resources

 

Video

 

 

Permalink | Comment (1)
Projects VMWare

Along comes a couple more (BIG) projects

March 10, 2012 – 12:01 am

When I first started working at my current job its been project after project.  Although the projects were decently sized they were never the magnitude of the projects I have coming down the pipe now.  Four years ago my first project was moving from Novell NetWare 4.5 to Windows 2003 server architecture which included removing the netware client from all the machines in the district.  We als0 replaced 100 ten year old desktops, which included a few Windows 95 systems.

In 2009 we virtualized our servers using VMWare, we went from 5 physical servers to, at the time, 23 virtual servers.

In 2010 we stopped using the email service from our ITC to setting up our Exchange Server and installing well over 45 SMARTBoards.

In 2011 we setup a document management server for all our records and setup disaster recovery for our virtual server setup.

We recently passed a levy for new school facilities that will be a total of a three to four year project.  We are also moving our current student information system to PowerSchool from Pearson.

It seems the projects never end.

 

Permalink | Comment (0)
Uncategorized wordpress

Themes – who needs themes

March 23, 2009 – 3:16 pm

Well after some lack of time I finally gave up and decided to download and install a theme. I will look into theme development down the road but right now I need to concentrate on what is more important. More post to come.

Tags | Permalink | Comment (0)

Twitter-bot for business/department use

March 6, 2009 – 6:39 am

Twitter, a micro-blogging web application that takes a 140 character post, has made a big splash in technology recently. Twitter has overcome all the naysayers saying that there is no real business model set to use the application and recently landed some major funding by big names (Twitter – Opportunity Knocks).

I’ve been using Twitter for about 4 months just trying to wrap my head around its applications, it wasn’t until a few tech coordinators in the state came up with the idea to use a “twitter-bot” to communicate with other tech people at a conference about cool sessions or vendor give-a-ways (Ryan Collins – Group Twitterbot). It was a good experiment and sparked some interest for me on one of my drives into work. Someone mentioned the hash tags for Twitter and how they are cumbersome (eTech Ohio Twitter-bot) and I thought what if the hash tags where used for tagging events or tasks.

read more »

Tags , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
wordpress

New Design

March 5, 2009 – 8:37 pm

So theme development is not as easy as I thought, to say the least I’m not happy with what I have designed thus far.  I think I need to put more thought into the design as I hope someone else will find it useful and it won’t just be a design specific to my site.  Don’t get me wrong I’m a web developer at heart and would love to do that everyday but I’m a Technology Coordinator first which involves more than just software development.  I hope to have a new design by next Monday.  Here are a couple designs:

Permalink | Comment (0)
wordpress

eMoxter.com Redux

March 4, 2009 – 8:30 pm

I’ve been looking into blogging again and just erased my old database and even upgraded from WordPress 2.2 to 2.7.1. Expect a new post tomorrow as well as a new design. It’s going to be my first shot at a theme design so check back tomorrow.

Tags | Permalink | Comment (0)