Stageverslag

Or: How to occupy a trainee with menial and timefilling tasks.

It was hard enough to find moments where I was free as well as the ICT-coordinator, so I had to go back after my training had ended to do some more hours of ICT-coordination. I didn't really do two half days, but rather 3x3 hours.

I got the feeling the position of ICT-coordinator wasn't really that special, at least not here. The "ICT-coordinator's office" was shared with another member of staff, who had nothing to do with ICT, at all. The "office" basicly consisted of two desks, one for the other person and one for the ICT-coordinator. There was a table to work on, and the school's servers were also located here. (In a server rack)

There wasn't really that much to do, as I was told all I could do was "wait for problems to occur". So we sat around in the teacher's lounge, talking to other teachers for a while. Then Mrs Van Hauwermeiren remembered something I could do: Make networkcables. I hadn't done that in a while, so I thought sure!

After I made some cables of varying length (on my own! I'm such a big boy :x ) my first three hours were up. I wouldn't get a chance to catch Mrs Van Hauwermeiren again until after my training.

The second time I went to school to complete my assignment was much later, but some of the problems I encountered during my actual teaching hours were still unsolved, so I was allowed to try and fix those. (Un)fortunately for me, the problem was a bit annoying. Some of the computers in this part of the school's only IT classroom were unable to sign in using the network logon.

I'd already checked whether or not the pupils were trying to type their passwords with CAPSLOCK on, or if the keyboards were even plugged in at all, when I first encountered the problem. So I knew that it wasn't THAT obvious. A quick scour through the bios showed no issues. The on-board networkcards looked fine.

Maybe it had something to do with the cables? Luckily, I'd made quite a few of those a few weeks ago, so I went to get some, and tested those. No effect. Meh. Maybe the ports on the patchpanel were faulty? Nope.

This is a great way to waste time by the way; Troubleshooting. I opted to reinstall the motherboard drivers (as they included the on-board networkcard ones) - But to no avail. I was totally out of ideas, so I considered formatting the PCs, but my time was up and the school would close pretty soon, so I offered to come back later and finish it.

During my last session, I spent most of my time bringing the PCs from the (unoccupied) classroom to "the office", I managed to fit all three of them on the table, and swap one monitor between them. I deployed the image, and booted all three machines. Everything seemed fine. ("Deploying an image" is just another way of saying "waiting around for an installation to finish" if we're completely honest. Most of that time I spent waiting in the teacher's lounge, and helping some of my old teachers change some of their e-mail settings on the PCs there)

Anyway! The images were deployed, PCs tested, so I moved them back up to the classroom (up three flights of stairs, at the other end of the school) and hooked them back up. The teacher login worked, which was all I could really test. So I was happy.

I only have one question: Who puts the "ICT Office" at the other end of the school, 3 stories down from the only ICT classroom on campus? :(