School Mac Technician

K1LLSW1TCH

K1LLSW1TCH

K1LLSW1TCH

Caporegime
Joined
12 Mar 2009
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Hey guys, so after half term is up I have a meeting with the headmistress of a local school in regards to some IT work they may have. They only use Apple hardware and I was wondering what sort of things I should swot up on before I meet her. In the three and a half years I have owned my MacBook I've never had a problem with it which wasn't resolved by a reboot so I'm a little bit apprehensive about the whole thing. Most peripherals that I've tried with my machine have worked without fuss, printers, cameras, iPod, iPhone, external drives, everything basically.

What sort of things will I need to expand my knowledge on? :)

Cheers in advance.
 
You don't want to use/rely on Time Machine in any corporate environment.

I imagine they have off-site backups of some description, if not a robust on-site backup.

I'd just look at legacy hardware and swot up on using Rosetta for older apps, as there's no guarantee they've got Intel machines? Unless there is? How much do you know about the position?
 
K1LLSW1TCH said:
I was thinking Time Machine would probably handle the back ups automatically?
Click to expand...

Problem I can see with Time Machine being relied on is that it keeps on making backups until the drive is full.

So if you had ten machines all doing that to one drive, it might not work too well!
 
EVH said:
You don't want to use/rely on Time Machine in any corporate environment.

I imagine they have off-site backups of some description, if not a robust on-site backup.

I'd just look at legacy hardware and swot up on using Rosetta for older apps, as there's no guarantee they've got Intel machines? Unless there is? How much do you know about the position?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure of their set up, I won't know anything until I meet the headmistress in a couple of weeks time, I'm sure they are Intel based machines as they have only recently had the new computers within the last year or so. If they are Intel machines then Rosetta is just as simple as click on the icon of a program, CMD + I and then check the Rosetta box isn't it? I'm guessing that is designed so stuff designed to run on the PowerPC hardware just works on an Intel based Mac? I vaguely remember using it once for something.

Skully said:
Problem I can see with Time Machine being relied on is that it keeps on making backups until the drive is full.

So if you had ten machines all doing that to one drive, it might not work too well!
Click to expand...

Yeah that's something I didn't think of. D'oh! :p
 
Have you got any experience with Windows networks on a similar scale? The first thing I would try to do is get an inventory and a decent understanding of the layout (don't forget printers) and logic of the network.

You're expecting Macs when you get there, but you may well find Linux or Windows boxes doing web-proxy, DHCP/DNS roles on the back end so network configuration settings might be something you want to brush up on and generally expect the unexpected.

My advice would be to draw up a list of what you want to know about the network before the meeting. They're not going to expect you to get to work right there and then and I very much doubt the headmistress knows a lot of detail about what's going on, so you'll have time to absorb what you've discovered and you'll have a much better idea about what you need to learn.

You could also do with grabbing whatever documentation they have, regardless of how outdated or scrappy it may be. They might not know where it is so I personally would phone ahead so they can have it ready.
 
No experience of Windows networks on a similar scale sorry. Helpful post though, it's half term here so I doubt she'd appreciate me calling up during the holidays, I'll give her a call after half term, it will probably be as an understudy to the current technician so she'll probably just pass me in his direction. Apart from the actual networking and backups I can't really see that there would be a great deal to do? There'd be ordering consumables and stuff no doubt, but I'd imagine that there is far less maintaining of individual machines if they are running OS X, would that be a fair assessment or am I wide of the mark there? :p
 
8t10 said:
Software licensing and data protection are the two things I can think of straight away.
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cheef said:
Backup regimes.
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EVH said:
You don't want to use/rely on Time Machine in any corporate environment.

I imagine they have off-site backups of some description, if not a robust on-site backup.

I'd just look at legacy hardware and swot up on using Rosetta for older apps, as there's no guarantee they've got Intel machines? Unless there is? How much do you know about the position?
Click to expand...

These are the three main points that I also can suggest you look at.
 
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K1LLSW1TCH said:
I'm not sure of their set up, I won't know anything until I meet the headmistress in a couple of weeks time, I'm sure they are Intel based machines as they have only recently had the new computers within the last year or so. If they are Intel machines then Rosetta is just as simple as click on the icon of a program, CMD + I and then check the Rosetta box isn't it? I'm guessing that is designed so stuff designed to run on the PowerPC hardware just works on an Intel based Mac? I vaguely remember using it once for something.
Click to expand...

Rosetta has to be installed from the OS X DVD, if it hasn't been installed by default.

Doing this on 60+ machines could be time consuming, but then, I was only mentioning it as a curveball suggestion.
 
K1LLSW1TCH said:
There'd be ordering consumables and stuff no doubt, but I'd imagine that there is far less maintaining of individual machines if they are running OS X, would that be a fair assessment or am I wide of the mark there? :p
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Get over to edugeek.net and have a poke about.

Also bare in mind even though there's apple on the desktop, it doesn't mean the backend will be entirely apple.

I even know of one school who buy Macs and then only run windows on them :rolleyes:.
 
K1LLSW1TCH said:
Apart from the actual networking and backups I can't really see that there would be a great deal to do? There'd be ordering consumables and stuff no doubt, but I'd imagine that there is far less maintaining of individual machines if they are running OS X, would that be a fair assessment or am I wide of the mark there? :p
Click to expand...

If there is somebody already on site that knows the network then you're laughing, because you'll probably end up doing the donkey work which is absolutely the best place to start.

In regards to maintaining machines, if anything I'd rather look after 100 Windows boxes than 100 Macs because Windows is a lot more mature in that sort of environment. But having said that, if it's a good setup to begin with then you shouldn't have a problem. As mentioned, things like software licenses will probably do your head in long before any specific problem with the OS.
 
K1LLSW1TCH said:
What sort of things will I need to expand my knowledge on? :)
Click to expand...

You could be in for a whole world of hurt, ours never ever worked properly.

Printing constantly jammed
DHCP would stop working
Wouldn't authenticate logons
Clocks would randomly loose sync
hated networks that weren't 100mb

all so people could use facebook and youtube :(

MW
 
EVH said:
Rosetta has to be installed from the OS X DVD, if it hasn't been installed by default.

Doing this on 60+ machines could be time consuming, but then, I was only mentioning it as a curveball suggestion.
Click to expand...

Meet remote desktop - select all, deploy package, make coffee. Job's a good one...

Which leads to - learn Apple Remote Desktop, it's powerful and not well known and any serious size of installation will likely use it.
 
As it's a school you will need to be aware of child protection/safeguarding issues around using the interweb and IM style applications too.
 
We have Mac's "on" the corporate network here in work. NONE of them are actually domained to the corporate network. We can't remotely connect to them, SMS (microsoft system management server) doesn't work on mac's... it's a whole world of hurt.

But, in schools (which is what I support), macs are user friendly for kids. There's only literally 4/5 Mac's in the entire Authority mind you. And they are standalones (there's none setup to the schools servers).

What experience do you have?
You'll need to know the following, which has been mentioned;
Networks (DNS, WINS, DHCP, Active Directory, Printer Deployment, Software Deployment (SMS).)
You'll also need to know how to setup a server.. What happens if their server (if they have one) goes down?
Internets (proxy settings, local proxy server? or just off-site proxy*)
*- only Comprehensive (Secondary) schools in the Authority have their own proxy servers onsite (they still connect to our proxy also). This causes us a right pain in the bum when the Technicians at the schools know nowt.
Comms experience would be handy (Network switches, modems etc)

Get swotting ;)
 
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