Critical Thinking – 4/16/2008

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was the main topic of today’s class. This is slightly different than the DiSC assessment you have gone through in your Strategies class and it tells us some slightly different things about you. Whereas the DiSC assessment taught us a little bit about your behavioral preferences, MBTI teaches us about our personality preferences.

There are four “categories” that MBTI help us discover about ourselves:

1. Attitudes: Either Extraverted or Introverted. Do you like people, or do you derive energy when you can be left alone?
2. Information Gathering: You either have great ease in gathering individual facts, or you trust your gut instincts. You would be either Sensing or iNtuitive, respectively.
3. Decision Making Style: Now that we have our information, how do we act on it? If we just look at the facts and make a cut-and-dry decision, we are likely Thinking types. If we take into account how the people who are effected by our decisions and how they will feel as a result of them, we are likely Feeling types.
4. The final reading used in Myers-Briggs theory, Judging or Perceiving was developed to make the whole thing easier to comprehend. Basically, the reading tells us whether we put forward the S/N part of our type, or the T/F part. When you boil it down, it basically means do you like to make decisions, or do you like to contemplate them. Judging types tend to be much more organized than us Perceiving types.

So why study all of this stuff? Knowing MBTI and how you operate and how others operate will help you in figuring out just where everyone is coming from. Just like the three friends we looked at from our text, we can circumvent awkward situations simply by being able to understand where other people are coming from and meeting them on their levels.

Oh, and you extroverts out there: SHUT. UP.

See you guys next week!

Dreamspark

Check this out.

If you haven’t heard, Microsoft is giving away (yes, giving away) full versions of a handful of its products to students for free.  Free.  The idea is: get you hooked while you’re in school and you’re more apt to have your future companies pay for the new versions of the software when they come out.

You’ll have to sign up and verify your status as a student, which doesn’t look like it would be that big of a deal.  Check it out here: https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/.

Troubleshooting – 4/15/2008

Happy tax day!

Now that that gloom and doom is behind us, let’s talk about what we, well, talked about today.

We covered Chapters 3-6 today, which was admittingly a pretty rapid pace.  We covered a myriad of topics ranging from local users and groups, Windows desktop support (stuff like the Notification Area and Quick Launch bar, etc.), accessing files and folders and securing or compressing those folders and files, and dealing with hardware inside of Windows using either Device Manager or System Information (msinfo32).

Next week, we will be having our first checkpoint exam!!!  I’m not sure about you, but I personally can’t believe that we’re already at this point, even though we are peeling through this book at an accelerated pace.  Anyway, make sure you study chapters 1-6 for next week, but know that you will be able to use your books and computers (no Internet!) so don’t lose sleep or anything.  That’s all we’ll have in class next week, so if you’d like to take the exam early (as early as 10:30 a.m.), let me know and you can take the afternoon off.

Homework:

• Chapter 3: Review Questions
• Chapter 4: Review Questions
• Chapter 5: Review Questions
• Chapter 6: Review Questions

Network+ – 4/15/2008

The process behind computer networking can be broken into seven distinct layers.  These seven layers are known as the OSI Model, and the seven levels are listed below:

1. Physical
2. Data Link
3. Network
4. Transport
5. Session
6. Presentation
7. Application

It’ll be pretty important to know what each of these levels do and what hardware, if any, corresponds to which level(s).  For example, switches exist on the Physical and Data Link layers, while routers exist on the Physical, Data Link and Network layers.

Homework:

• Chapter Two: Review Questions

MS Exchange – 4/14/2008

Tonight we actually got to install Exchange, and we checked our Server 2003 installation to make sure that it could handle it. Some requirements that we enabled:

• SMTP, NNTP and WWW services and ASP.net running via IIS6 installation.
• /forestprep being run on parent domains (in order to update the schema to handle Exchange objects)
• /domainprep on each domain intended to have mail-enabled users, which in our case, was all domain controllers.

After all of these requirements were met, we went forward with installation, installing Exchange on the parent domains first, naming the two mail organizations, appropriately, Hagar and Roth. Next, after the parent domains were finished, we installed (or attempted to, sorry Cartney!) Exchange on the child domains, joining the existing Roth or Hagar organization that was created on the parent domains. Fun was had by all.

Homework:

• Chapter 2: Review Questions

Critical Thinking – 4/9/2008

Today we talked about Jimmy and his four siblings, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Critical thinking is not about thinking critically (“God, I hate his shirt.”), but it’s about thinking “outside of the box”, in a non-traditional sort of way. This can mean anything from simple brain teasers all the way to tough no-answer situations, such as the army scenario we discussed.

Implementing NI – 4/14/2008

We discussed last quarter about how IP addresses exist as a form of shorthand so that we can simply remember 192.168.0.1 instead of 110000001010000000000000000001. (Check it, it’s correct.)

But let’s be realistic. Remembering dozens, if not hundreds of different IP addresses isn’t exactly intuitive either. That’s where DNS, or Domain Naming System, comes into play. DNS allows us to assign English names to those IP address. As well as being easy to remember, DNS provides the added beauty of being able to remain constant even if IP addresses don’t. Some of you may remember that this blog used to be hosted on blogger.com instead of WordPress. Thanks to DNS, all you guys had to do was remember www.benbedo.com, and you were fine.

For our discussion today, we prodded DNS all over. We talked about the physical places that DNS records are stored, called zones, and the different types and behaviors of them. Remember that forward lookup zones take English names and translates them to IP addresses. Reverse lookup zones do exactly the opposite, taking IP addresses and converting them to English. The zone types include primary, which are read/write, secondary, which are read-only, and stubs, which are Win2K3/8 only and allow us to retain the SOA information for another zone in the organization so we aren’t sucking up all of our company’s valuable bandwidth making queries everywhere. It’s just better for everyone.

After lunch, we looked at a number of maintenance possibilities for DNS, including listing, adding, and deleting records via the command prompt using the Support Tools-provided DNSCMD. In addition, we discussed the need to secure DNS and looked at a number of ways of doing that. Integrating our servers with AD gives us the benefit of transfers that piggy-back AD replication, but won’t play nice with DNS running on Unix.

PS, I have no idea why I posted a picture of a ram into this post. It’s late, back off.

Homework:

• Chapter 3: Review Questions
• Chapter 4: Review Questions

Troubleshooting – 4/8/2008

We started our first installation of Troubleshooting class with, well, uhm, installations!  We covered two types of Windows installations: the attended installation and the unattended installation (we discussed, but didn’t actually do the network install, via a RIS server).

Homework:

• Chapter One: Review Questions
• Chapter Two: Review Questions

Network+ – 4/8/2008

An introduction to networking was the discussion on hand in class this morning.  We discussed what networking actually is (sharing is caring) and took a look at the two methods of sharing computer data over networks: peer-to-peer and client/server.

The main advantage of peer-to-peer networks is their relative ease of setup; it’s just the administration that is so much of a pain (every machine has to be individually configured with user accounts and passwords and then permissions as well.)  The chances of human error being introduced into that process is huge.

On the flip-side, the client/server method of networking is a little bit more trouble and expensive to setup, however, the centralized administration capabilities it supplies makes it well worth the extra effort.

We also talked about the different topologies — the four (or five?) physical topologies and the 2 logical topologies.  None of the physical topologies are alive in the networking world in their purest form — only the logical star-bus and star-ring are in use today (representing 90% and 10% of currently installed networks, respectively) .

Homework:

• Chapter One: Review Questions

MS Exchange – 4/7/2008

Tonight’s class was a general overview of AD terms and how they will relate to Exchange server.  The main thing to remember with Exchange is that it is not a standalone program designed to run on Server.  It’s an all-out integration with Server, and because of that, sever things must be in place.

Tonight we set up two forests.  Todd and Cartney make up the parent and child domain of the contoso01.com domain, while Clay and I make up the parent and child domain of the contoso03.com domain.  After setting up our domains and forests, we then upgraded our domains to the Windows Server 2003 Functional Level.  Replication occured, then the forests were raised as well, and now we are ready to install Exchange Server.

Angels sing in chorus.

Next week, we’re starting class @ 5:00, which seems to be the earliest time we all can get here.  That means we get out an hour early, so I am definitely down with that.  See you guys next week.  (Some of you tomorrow!)

Homework:

• Chapter One – Review Questions