We talked about motivation today, and touched on what motivates people. The main point to remember is we are all motivated differently, and we all respond differently to positive and negative reinforcement.
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Our first day of PC repair was spent taking the 2nd checkpoint exam and then learning about Hijack This. I passed out CDs with software on them and we diagnosed Scott’s computer and found some spyware to clean. Next week, we’ll start actually working on PCs, so make sure if you have one that could use some work, to bring it in.
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Just the test today. Next week, we’ll come back and tackle chapter six, which deals with wired and wireless networking capabilities. Come prepared to make some Cat5 cable!
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Yeah. Class sucked tonight. Sorry.
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Today we started a brand new topic – the implementation of Active Directory (AD). We started the class be discussing several concepts, including what AD actually is, some terms associated with it, and some simple concepts in how to make it work well for us. Next, we actually set up AD into a structure where we had two separate forests, each containing a parent and a child domain.
Afterwards, we delved into the chapter on Sites. Sites are ways for AD to recognize the physical limitations of our network so that we aren’t constantly trying to replicate over an expensive WAN connection.
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We opened the class today by talking about our experience last week at the mall — several of us saw some of the same people and it was interesting to hear some of the conclusions you guys drew about them.
The point of the entire exercise was to learn how to catch ourselves performing the same stereotyping so we can recognize it in ourselves and stop it before we make those unconscious judgments about people.
Next, we tackled a couple of issues, one of which was the world-famous “Who Gets the Organ?” discussion, where you guys, in groups, had to decide which person out of a list of five was to get an available organ. Nice, good discussion. 
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Today we finished the book! Be ready for a checkpoint exam next week and be ready to start repairing some PCs!
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Today’s class covered various networking operating systems, or OSs that are designed to run on networks. There are four basic families of NOSs that we talked about today: Windows, Novell Netware, Unix/Linux, and Macintosh.
We discussed the pros and cons of each system and how each system interacts with each other. The class ended on a high note talking (slightly off topic) about the newest Macintosh computers and their general beauty. I think everyone agreed that if money were no object, we would all go out and buy them.
Remember guys, checkpoint exam next week over chapters 1-5! Study your books, homework, handouts and notes.
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Tonight’s class talked about clustering — the combining of two or more physical computers into one network node. The advantage of doing this is that it lets “one” server take the brunt of any activity you wnat to throw its way. In this context, we used it to set up a “single” mail server that was actually made up of two servers that shared the responsibility of the packets that showed up for processing at the node.
We talked about two distinct types of clustering. The first, the Microsoft Clustering Service, was described as the “big daddy” of clustering. In simple terms, it’s application aware, and determines not only which server is the least busy, but it determines which physical server would be the most appropriate to handle any given single packet. Using the MS Cluster Service, you can have anywhere between two and eight nodes in your cluster, and you have to have specialized hardware designed specifically for clustering.
The “diet” version of clustering we discussed is called Network Load Balancing. With NLB, you are allowed between 2 and 32 nodes and you can use any Windows 2003 server without specialized hardware. The downside is how it handles its load balancing: it ignores what each server is “good” at and routes incoming packets to the server that’s the least busy. Technically, it does balance the load, but sometimes that balancing leaves something to be desired in terms of efficiency.
After our cluster — ahem — we moved on to back-end and front-end servers. In Exchange, every server is considered a back-end server by default. A front end server is one that is exposed to the Internet — so, as such, we need to make sure we take certain security precautions on our front-end servers. Specifically, we need to not have any mailboxes stored on the front-end servers — we store those on the back end servers and let the front-end servers divert traffic to them. The back-end servers sit safely behind our corporate firewall, where life is cozy and warm.
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We started out the day by covering what is arguably the most important aspect of the book — the day-to-day maintenance of your network infrastructure once you’ve set it up. In the afternoon, we took the checkpoint exam. Next week, we’ll start the AD (70-294) class! Make sure you bring the correct books!
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