T11M

During my time at the University of Oregon I spent a large number of hours maintaining our computer lab.  The Honors College maintains 8 iMacs with dual-boot 10.5 and XP along with 7 other Mac computers that run 10.4.  Maintaining dual-boot lab machines has proven to be fairly time consuming.  Once a term I would apply the most current patches to the OS and software, and once per year I would update our image and completely reimage the lab.  This proved to be quite time consuming, but necessary due to our use of roaming profiles.  For management of the 7 Macs that did not dual-boot we used Radmind.  In ths case I would update the Radmind image on the server once per term to patch the OS and software and then simply reboot the client computers.  The updates were then applied and all was well.  In the last three terms I have only had to solve network connectivity issues with those computers.  Otherwise, they consistently work as needed and maintain a steady, stable OS that is not bogged down by the roaming profiles. 

Radmind is designed for Unix workstation managment and is very similar in function to Deep Freeze (a Windows workstation management software).  When run, Radmind will completely examine the client file system and return the workstation to its original state.  This is incredibly useful in a Lab environment.  At the same time it allows you to pick and choose which files you want to be managed by Radmind, thus allowing you to enable users to have selected preferences.

Configuration of Radmind is by no means simple.  In fact, it takes hours and the process is poorly documented.  You first begin by installing the Radmind Server software on whatever machine is going to act as your server.  The box you install it on should be able to handle (at worst case) all of your client machines connecting simultaneously.  Therefore if you are only going to use it for a few computers you can use just about any computer as a Radmind server.  Best practices of, course, would be to install it on server grade hardware to prevent failure of the system.  The next step is to load the Radmind client software on the client machines and create the main transcript files.  There are two types of transcript files – positive and negative.  The positive transcript contains the information for all of the files on the client machines that should always be equivalent to what is stored on the server.  The negative transcript lists the files that should never be touched by the Radmind software.  For instance, you want Radmind to keep your main OS files the same regardless of what a user may do to them, but at the same time you may want the list of printers to be managed by each user.  Once you have created the transcripts you then create a command file that tells which transcripts to apply and to which machines.  This allows you to manage multiple computers and have different software configurations on different groups of computers.  Thus if you have a computer lab that is supposed to have a certain software set and a group of office computers that are supposed to have a different software set you can set Radmind to differentiate the two groups and maintain their software accordingly. Finally you install the Radmind client side software on the client machines and connect them to the server.  The machine will then be updated to the configuration pushed down by the server.

I really like Radmind.  It is an effective solution to mass computer deployment, but it requires some serious tech chops.  If you decide to use Radmind be prepared for some long days of frustration and suffering as you learn how it works.  I have been working on a wiki posting concerning Radmind, but that is slow going and done only in my free time.  If you have questions feel free to post and I will do my best to help you out.

I posted a while back about having installed Greasemonkey to give it a try.  Well after about a month of use I’ve decided to let you know that I struggle using the web without it.  I use Google Reader all day to keep up with news and blogs, so that is where I have used Greasemonkey the most.  My first most used script is “Secure Connections On Sites”.  This script forces an https connection on a number of sites.  That way I use secure connections on all of Google’s pages as well as a large number of other sites without having to think about it.  Second and third on my list of great scripts are “Google Reader Minimalistic” and “Google Reader Preview Enhanced (patched)”.  Minamilistic strips all of the unnecessary chrome on the Reader page allowing many more stories to be displayed on the screen at one time.  The preview script then allows me to view the story in its original form without opening tabs.  Sure the page displays in an iframe and I have to scroll a little more, but it is much faster than having to open, closing, and switch between tabs – not to mention it reduces the number of tabs I have open at any one time.  The last very functional script I want to mention is “Google Account Multi-Login”.  This script replaces the logout link with a drop down menu that holds all of your separate Google accounts.  This works great for me since I have two main Google accounts that I use and bounce back and forth between a couple times a day.  It would also work great for those people who share a computer and trust each other with their login info (you know, like husbands and wives ). 

Just as a warning for those of you who care about browser speed – I have noticed a small reduction in Firefox’s speed rendering pages while using Greasemonkey.  But remember you can specify the pages that you don’t want scripts to run on.  Thus I only see a small hit in my browsing speed and it’s only on a few pages where the benefit of the script restructuring the page far outweighs the performance losses.  I also haven’t had any problems with crashing in Firefox (well, no more than usual) with the use of Greasemonkey.

I am. Every time I try to use their service it is always really slow and parts of it are not working. My solution: go over to Identi.ca and sign up with their service. It’s not as well known, but it’s an open source platform that spreads the user load over a number of servers.  If you have a dedicated web server you can install your own instance of Identi.ca which you can then either limit access to or eventually will be able to link into the overall identi.ca network.  Identi.ca is still early in development so it will only get better as more people use it and the developers improve it.  Oh, and did I mention it supports OpenID?  Well it does.

I’m a big open-source software fan. Not gonna lie, I might be addicted to testing, configuring, and using it. My most recent find (well I knew about it, I just hadn’t tried it yet) is Songbird. It’s a media player similar to Windows Media Player or iTunes, but that’s as far as the similarities go.

The Songbird developers basically integrated together a media player and a web browser. Since the application is built on Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine the interface and extensibility is very similar to that of Firefox. Extensions expand the application beyond anything that iTunes could dream of doing by allowing users to customize the media player’s interface in just about any way possible. Some cool extensions that I installed immediately are Last.fm, LiveTweeter (Twitter support), Lyric Master (downloads lyrics), Mac Remote Control Support, Media Keyboard Support, SHOUTcast Radio, Song Notifier (displays song and artist info every time the song changes), and then a couple of different skins to customize the interface. Oh, did I mention its not bloated and slow like iTunes!

Another outstanding feature of Songbird is it’s ability to import your current iTunes library. Songbird will import all compatible files, but not only that, it will also keep up with changes you make in iTunes. This is critical for me since I have an iPhone and want all of my media available in iTunes. Now I can use iTunes when I must and the rest of the time I will use Songbird. Man I love open-source!!!

Hacking your Firmware on any device is always risky but that’s part of what makes it fun. On one hand if you mess up you are left with a “brick” (a damaged/not working device that is about as good to you as a brick) but if you succeed you gain some amazing capabilities.

So for those of you who enjoy a bit of a challenge and the benefits of enterprise grade routing software check out DD-WRT. It’s an open-source firmware platform that extends the functionality of consumer grade routers. I had flashed my router to it about 4 months ago and after struggling with it gave up and went back to the original Linksys firmware. The only problem is I’ve noticed a very large difference in the quality of wireless the router puts out. Today I set out to fix the problem and flashed back to DD-WRT. After about 20 minutes of installation and configuration I was back up and running with my WPA/AES encrypted wireless network. The speed difference is incredible. I would say at least a 100% boost in bandwidth. Why I went back to the original Linksys firmware I’ll never know.  If you have installation questions or want to know more hit me up in the comments.

So yesterday I got my invite to the Boxee alpha.  It is based off of the XBMC (Xbox Media Center) platform, and currently runs on Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, and the Apple TV.  For still being in alpa I’m really impressed with the interface, functionality, and lack of crashes.  I’ve used it for probably 3 hours and so far not a single crash.  There are a couple of bugs in the features (scrolling issues mainly) but other than that I have been able to stream Netflix and Hulu as well as listen to internet radio.  Here are a couple of screenshots:

If you want an invite to Boxee leave me a comment.