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We just received our first Dell Optiplex 5040 Desktop for the summer refresh at the Middle School.  Boy this thing has fought us from the beginning.  It’s been very frustrating.

We encountered a bunch of problems (and solved them all, thankfully):

  1. Windows 7 would not install from USB media.
  2. Windows 7 would not detect any USB drive, but would power and respond to mouse/keyboard on the same ports.
  3. Windows 7 keyboard driver strangeness including not responding to Num/Caps/Scroll Lock keys.
  4. Windows 7 keyboard driver strangeness including keys responding to input but not working properly (typing in a password and finding that you could not login despite KNOWING that the pressed the right keys).
  5. Altiris Deployment Services not collecting the image (Failed claiming “RDeploy: The EFI variable could not be read”).

Our solution to these issues is presented below.

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So, we’re getting ready to deploy Windows 10 next year by preparing for it this year.

Well, everything sucks and is miserable while trying to do it with Altiris Deployment Services and Ghost, so I took it upon myself to work on alternatives. WDS here we come.

This is the start of the project, and it starts with testing it in the Homelab. Well, the first part of getting the whole process started is: setting up the Homelab, which I’ve never done before.

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Sigh.

It’s been a week.  I was going to follow-up on a previous post about Zabbix API and getting a working status display going, but either Dell or Pitt-Ohio threw a wrench in the works today.  We’re not sure who mucked it up, but someone mucked it up and we’ve spent the last two days cleaning it up.

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About a week before we were slated to replace a Cisco 3560G switch in the Middle School, we had a catastrophic pipe failure above one of our racks.  The failure was so bad that water flooded the floor above the rack, seeped into the cracks, and eventually found it’s way through a light fixture into the rack.

What followed was incredibly unfortunate and predictable:

2016-04-28 20_37_52-ZBX_ CMS Music Wing 3560G (WS-C3560G-48TS) is in a problem state - msantangelo@c

Yep.  The switch is down.  Crap. Crappy crap.  Crappity crap.

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I’ve been talking a lot about Zabbix lately (mostly because it’s a lot of what is on my plate at work)  and I keep finding little gotcha points that I understand but are very frustrating.  Last week (and into this week) I’ve been setting up trigger dependency.  Here’s an example, just as a hypothetical situation.

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This guide modified from 2DayGeek’s post available here.  Some of the steps (namely 7) didn’t work, so I wanted to publish my own step-by-step guide because Zabbix’s provided instructions of build from soure and hope for the best were found lacking in my view.

For your information, this guide is written for upgrading Zabbix 2.4.7 to 3.0.1 on an Ubuntu installation.  The steps will be slightly different for different flavors of Linux/Unix and completely different for Windows.  If you’re doing a Windows Zabbix box you should already know how to manage it because .exe is simpler than this.

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