9:00am Monday morning Ron and I met all the participating students at Okanagan College to help load up the cube van we rented with all the laptops, switches, servers etc. Clinton went and picked it up that morning but will be driving back mid week to hold down the fort at OC.
Trevor & Matt had completed the configurations as part of their 299 project and had spent most of Saturday familiarizing themselves with the configuration again. They are now both working at Telus and so they had to clear out the cobwebs and dig deep to remember how all this stuff works. Anyway they had tested a client and everything seemed to be working. Then Matt was to have the assistance of a couple of students to help configure the rest of the laptops generously donated by OC in the same way. We had planned on leaving at 11am, but for whatever reason Matt only had 1 1/2 of them done. We left anyway, stopping to pick up some food and supplies and made it to the Delta Sun Peaks by about 3:30pm. We then spent the following 7 hours configuring and installing all the equipment, breaking for pizza around 6:30pm. The install actually went fairly smoothly, although there were a couple of unexpected hiccups. Turned out the wireless authentication was still required from Sun Peaks, so we decided to remove our authentication. In addition we had a DNS problem and a routing problem connecting our network to the Delta Sun peaks network. Of course that was routing 101 and after a few minutes thought we turned on NAT on our router. After that everything seemed to work beautifully. So we headed back to the hostel around 11pm and had a nightcap.
Today we made it back to the hotel for 10am. Ron had been up since 6am to say goodbye to his kids who had come up with yesterday to help out. He then managed to fit in a bike ride since he has to maintain that buff body he has been working on for the past year. However all the students left Ron and I stranded at the hotel and we had to have Elker, the guy looking after the hostel, drive us up to the hotel. Anyway, the only thing left was ensure that the Logon VBScript Matt and I were working on added the printer to all clients. It took a couple of tries, but after some help from 'the scripting guys' we managed to get it to take.
Ron and I then put up a schedule for the students and now here I am, sitting in the computer lab doing my turn at the support. The IODA members have made us extremely welcome and are absolutely thrilled with what we have accomplished and providing for them. As a result they named us the official sponsor of the French Canadian night tomorrow night. Should be a lot of fun. There were times where Ron and I were wondering if having a project outside of classes was such a good idea, but the enthusiasm and professionalism shown by our students have demonstrated the value we can bring to an event and certainly something our department and Okanagan college can be proud of.
We've run into a couple of people from Thompson Rivers University who have wondered why we are doing this event and not TRU. The main reason is of course that we are the only department in the region that specialize in networking and telecommunications. However it was also a testament to the benefit of the conferences and trade shows we attend, since Ron made this connection while at a Science education conference in whistler.
0 comments:
Post a Comment