Ran Windows Update for Computers 15-22

Yesterday, I ran Windows Update for computers #15 through #22. That updated Windows XP to Service Pack 3 (SP3) and upgraded IE from v6 to v7 (now Yahoo password recovery should work).

Martin & I also agreed to leave the computers on over night so that Windows SteadyState can download any necessary updates at 3:00 AM. This will enable Windows update to automatically apply the fixes. When the next set of patches come in, I'll double check to make sure they're applied properly.

We'll slowly work through the computers to update all of them to SP3 and IE7.

Turned on Firewall and ran AVG Free

Today, I logged into all the VG Lab computers as admin and:

• Turned on the Windows Firewall (enabling "No Exceptions")
• Updated AVG Free and ran a complete scan

I couldn't log into computers #5 and #15 as admin and thus didn't perform the above tasks on those machines.

Cleaned up network wiring

Last Thursday (Feb, 19th), I neatened up the network wiring so that the Valencia Gardens LAN setup is a little easier to understand and the computers won't lose their IP addresses and require staff and volunteers to rejigger their DHCP leases as per this post.

Most of the work involved rearranging Ethernet cables and the Intel hubs into which they were plugged.

The major thing was to decouple all three hubs from each other in order to clarify wiring and avoid a single point of failure. Originally, the hubs were daisy-chained to each other through their "Uplink" ports, with the leftmost hub plugged into Ethernet wall jack 4-D1.

There was a weirdness though, as the rightmost hub also was plugged into wall jack 7-D1. This is a typical no-no as you'd want to either daisy-chain or direct connect but not both

I unlinked the hubs by disconnecting their uplink Ethernet cables and plugging them into the nearest wall jack. (While doing that, found that 6-D1 doesn't work.)

I also found an extra network cable and used it to connect computer #14 to the LAN. It was unconnected before.

Use your email address as a backup for your clients

When clients get a new email address with an online email service (e.g., Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc), they're often asked for a backup email address. The online service typically use this address to perform password recovery & administrivia.

Since our clients are first time users, they typically don't have a backup account and thus leave that field empty. You can help your clients by giving your email as the backup account. That way, at least they have one more recourse when they need to recover their passwords.

Gmail has a feature that makes this easier. Gmail allows you to create arbitrary email addresses based on your username. For example, if your Gmail account is

yourname@gmail.com

you can use any email address of the form

yourname+XYZ@gmail.com

where XYZ can be any sequence of alphanumeric characters (e.g., student, backup, ctn, shopping, amazon, ebay, etc) and messages will still be delivered to

yourname@gmail.com

Thus, you can let your students use "yourname+ctnstudent@gmail.com" as their backup addresses. You can even get fancier by using "yourname+studentname@gmail.com" so that they each get a separate address. If you ever get spammed at one of those names, you can simply block one without affecting the others.

Lab computers losing Internet connection

Occasionally, one or more of the lab computers lose their "external Internet" IP address (range 10.x.y.z) and cannot connect to the net.

[geekspeak]
I think the DHCP lease expires and doesn't get renewed properly. Then some Windows domain controller on the internal network takes over and assigns the machine IP addresses in the range 192.168.x.y, but those IP addresses are useless for accessing the outside network.
[/geekspeak]

The solution is to

1. Login to the machine as "vgadmin" (get the password from Martin)
2. Fire up the command line "cmd", and at the command line,
3. Release the DHCP lease: ipconfig /release
4. Renew the DHCP lease: ipconfig /renew (you may have to do this multiple times until you get no error).
5. Logout
   

Keep a Kid Occupied

A mom came in with her 6 year old boy today. As you can imagine, a computer center is probably one of the most boring place on Earth for someone his age. He started running around in circles - I would too if I was in his place. So I had to come up with something fast to keep him occupied.

Luckily, on the other side of our whiteboard is a pad of paper with a ziplock bag full of water based markers. I got him to sit down and draw. He would get bored every now & then, and I'd go over to his drawing and ask him to fill in the blank spots. Eventually, I had to bring up a Matisse on the screen to show him how drawings can be filled in.

Next time, I'd use someone other than Matisse as an example - too many nudes or near nudes to filter around.

Setting up Skype for guests

Helped an older guest set up Skype so that he & his wife can communicate with friends & relatives back in the Philippines.

Ironically, I set up my own Skype only a day earlier.