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Today we had an HVAC group come in to take a look at, inspect, and do maintenance on our air conditioning system because it was constantly running. When I mean constantly, I mean CONSTANTLY. Nearly 24/7 unless we turned it off. We weren’t pushing it either. We weren’t trying to push 60 degree air on 100+ degree days. We were trying to hit 70-80 degree air on 90 degree days.  We finally got fed up with it after 2 months of ~$400 power bills.  We contacted the property management company and told them that they needed to send out a group to inspect it and the property.

Boy, am I glad we did.

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Fire Alarm and Security Alarm panels are great devices.  Their central brain system allows a bunch of independent systems (smoke detectors, CO2 detectors, heat detectors, gas detectors, door open detectors, etc) to all report back to a central location and then have the central location call out to the Police or Fire Department and relay exactly what is wrong at exactly what part of the building.

In theory this is great.

The only problem is: how do these devices communicate with the outside world (the inside world being your building, the outside world being everyone else).  The answer for us is: a phone line.

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It works! It really works!  I’ve finally implemented something that works!

A few weeks ago I wrote up a post about my experiments with Domains and homelab and WDS.  I’m pleased to report today that it worked!  It worked perfectly.

My poor desktop chokes when running the three VMs (DC, WDSS, and Deployed Desktop) but it works (though this may be changing since Nick and I decided to invest in a Homelab setup for the apartment; a Dell R710 with 2 Xeon E5645 Processors, 72GB RAM, and 4TB storage).  The Deployed Desktop boots off PXE from WDSS via DHCP from the DC, and boom.  Boots into WDS and receives and image.  No interaction required (unless I require it).  A lot of this is going to be a link repository for my own use.

It was super thrilling to get the thing working.  There are a bunch of caveats and I’m going to try and outline them here.

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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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This is a recipe I found via Reddit.  The thread was here.  The actual recipe link is here.

I am posting it here so I don’t lose it, but so I can also amend some notes.  Specifically, I changed the amount of butter, and I also measured to the gram how much of a certain ingredient I used.  I prefer this to relatively meaningless quantities like “4-5 small potatoes” or “1/2 onion” which are basically subject to what size the ingredients are.  This is important for me because I use MyFitnessPal to log what I eat (yay weight-loss journey!).

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