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So, it’s been awhile since posting to my wonderful blog here. As many of you may remember, I took on a new position as a Technology Coordinator at a public school. Needless to say there is a lot more work needing done, than in my previous position as the CMS administrator at the local college, Arkansas Tech University. It was one thing to manage a single system, but quite another managing several systems across a couple of towns. Hopefully soon we will have most of the labs set up completely and we can get back to fun stuff like program evaluation. One of our favorite activities. There is nothing like setting something up, and it actually work as advertised. This is a feeling we got when we tried the ghosting software from Symantec. I know ghost has been around awhile, however this is the first time I really needed it.

While trying to set up a distance-learning lab at the high school, we realized that the IT guys before us, really didn’t plan the lab very well. So we decided to start over. Moving desk’s computer systems, planning for the network drop, then we fired up the first system to test our plan and realized all the computers were different on the inside. So we decided to strip computers from another lab, and began the painstaking process of installing the XP-Flash-Shockwave-Java group. XP was an easy enough install, but when we tried the Flash, then Shockwave and Java installations we realized that those companies had started practicing the install-from-server thing. I hate that. It sucks, and rarely works correctly. It is also undeniably SLOWWWW! On top of all this we had older systems which were slow to begin with, finding stand-alone installers wasn’t easy but we eventually did and found the installation got to be much easier. Roughly 1 hour and 20 minutes per machine.

Then we discovered a package laying among the technology rubble in our office. Symantec Ghost and a liscense for it. We started looking at it, reading the material and got very excited. We set up our network, and four systems, and loaded the boot disks and began multicasting to 4 machines at a time. In practically no time at all, we had all 11 lab computers installed with the entire lab package. How amazing was this?!

If you havn’t had a chance to mess with ghosting, I highly recommend it. One more week, and we get to start playing again.