April 13th

My final day at ITS has been super slow. I'm not sure the phone has rang once yet, surprisingly. Will came down and we talked about our scripting project for a bit. We decided on trying to get a special account so we can set up our website on Luminis. This would make it easier for ITS to add on information in the future to the site.

In addition, should they push the site out to students for public use the content will look similar the web pages already in use at the university. I hope our project serves a good foundation for a help desk knowledge base. This way it saves techs time when answering questions or escalating them to the proper people. Eventually student may be able to look up the answers to their own questions and not even need to call in to the help desk at all, giving them more time to work on more difficult issues.

I've also started the groundwork for our PowerPoint presentation next week. Hopefully we can brainstorm a bit this week as a group and fill it up with information that will prove it's usefulness to ITS and our project leaders.

April 6

I missed my time at ITS today in an effort to help my group in MGMT441 get some work done that we were struggling with. I did however participate in the Luminis training offered to our class on Thursday. I was surprised at how many class members did not show up. I thought Curt did a great job explaining the features of Luminis and why it's in use at the university. It seems like there is always some technology issue when someone presents in the classroom, usually due to an authorization problem. Most people cannot download and install software on campus computers because they don't have administrator privileges. Overall though it was an excellent learning opportunity and I hope we get to use Luminis before the semester is over.

March 30

Today I spent time with the Help Desk reviewing my Luminis script to see if it will work the way I had planned. I realized there are some slight changes that need to be made, including the addition of an escalation procedure should the problem remain unsolved by the help desk tech. Now, if they are unable to solve the problem, they can direct the end user to the web management site which contains and email form. This e-mail will be directed to Curt Price who does most of the support for Luminis issues.

On a side note, I read an article today about the Korean government cutting off online gaming for kids. Every night, kids must choose a window (12-6, 1-7, or 2-8) that their online gaming will be restricted. This is because they are worried about kids staying up all night playing games and not getting any sleep. I don't game as much as I used to, but I know if I was playing one of the 19 games that are being restricted ( the 19 games represent 79% of all online games played by Koreans) I would be very upset.

March 23

Last week in class we had to try and fix computers that were intentionally broken. Our group unfortunately receive a broken monitor as well so we spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why our video was not working. It was quite funny. After that problem was taken care of with help from Darren, we managed to get the PC in working order.

The first problem we noticed was that it had a floppy disk in the drive. This usually interferes with the boot of the PC since they are often configured to boot from a floppy before the hard drive. Secondly, the PC had no RAM in the banks. We found the envelop it was hidden in and had a time trying to figure out the rank of the memory banks to get the machine to boot. Next we had to do some configuration in BIOS, detecting the hard drive and configuring the boot sequence.

After finally getting into windows, our task was to navigate to http://www.siue.edu website. We had to enable the network connection, set up services on the machine, and change some settings Darrin had fudged purposely in the network card. Overall I thought it was a good experience and look forward to class later today.

On the project front, I have added configuring mac mail and Thunderbird to my script. Will and Jarred worked on setting up a website last week so we can put scripts there instead of creating the videos, which we have little to no expertise in. I will be glad to hear feedback later in class on my scripts so I know what may need to be added to them before we finish off the project and start working on our PowerPoint presentation to ITS.

March 16

On this day I had scheduled a time to meet with Curt Price to discuss common issues that arise when trying to update web content through Luminus. While waiting for Curt to arrive at his desk, I worked on the rough draft of both scripts I am writing.

I let Curt know in the e-mail setting up the meeting that the work I am doing is to try and lessen the dependency on him for Luminus support. Currently, only 2 people are listed as support for Luminus, Curt being one of them. I asked him what general problems occur that prevent changes from showing up on the site. He came up with a couple more reasons aside from the fact that it may take a few minutes for the updates to appear. One being a table width issue, the other being users going to the wrong website and trying to update using the old version of Luminus.

After my chat with Curt, I finished the rough draft of my Luminus script and asked Mike if he had any work I could help out with. He had three computers in the back with issues, mainly virus problems. The machines had been cleaned already but they wanted to rescan them for viruses before calling the owners to pick up their machines, which is a good practice. You wouldn't want to have your machine returned to you just to realize it's still broken.

March 2

The phone scripting project is now coming along nicely. Last week after class we decided to make a change to our scope statement and we will now be using CamStudio as opposed to Camtasia. CamStudio is a free video recording software that will be able to produce our streaming flash videos. Unfortunately, we cannot install it on machines at school because of privilege issues so I will be working on my videos at home.

I have finished outlining the script for accessing your SIUE email through other email clients, and plan on having the video done before spring break is over. I also sent an email to Curt Price, who is the listed support for Luminus, regarding issues where changes made are not showing up. I hope to meet with him March 16th once school is back in session. At that time I will pick his brain for issues which may delay or cause published changes to not show up. Once I have a handle on how wide the Luminus issue can be, I will outline the script and begin work on the video.

I hope to have the videos both done by March 23rd so I can either begin or help work on our presentation to ITS.

February 23

Another quiet day at ITS. Mike asked a few questions about how things are coming along, hopefully all the project scopes will be approved by the end of class today. He planned on having Azhar and myself move some monitors and PCs around on carts but time slipped away from us and we did not get to it before the end of the shift.

I have been assigned two issues to investigate and write phone scripts for. The first involves setting up your SIUE webmail through an email client, and the second involves publishing web pages in Luminis. I was able to set up the e-mail rather easily, so now all I need is to write out a phone script. Luminis has a delay after your first publish something, a few seconds to 15 minutes, which may result in some of the phone calls that support receives about changes not showing up. I plan to research Luminis more however before beginning on that script.

February 16

I missed my scheduled ITS internship and class on February 9 due to four inches of snow. Today I came in and talked with Mike a bit about the scripting project going forward. Our group plans to use Camtasia to record screens for the script. I jotted down some information I thought might be pertinent to have in the script. We should have our scope statement finalized today and after that we will have a more defined view of our project. I also took some time to check out the OIT/ITS sites of other universities for some ideas.

February 2

This morning I was informed by Mike that the missing hardware has been ordered for our OIT Loaner machines. Since Azhar and myself were unfamiliar with Symantec Ghost, Mike asked us to observe Jason Hart work on some support tickets. Jason is the tech for Rendleman Hall.

While observing Jason, we first went to inspect a machine on the third floor that had some spyware on it. Jason began some scans on the machine using programs called Malwarebytes and Superantispyware. While the scans were running, the end user happened to have a laptop that there were unable to access because of a password issue. It turned out that the laptop was not set up in the campus domain, therefore her login and password were not working. Jason logged in using an ITS account and got the laptop set up on the campus domain. During this, he noticed the machine was running unusually slow so he checked what processes were running. A few processes were running that he did not recognize so he decided to scan the laptop as well for malware.

Leaving the scans to run in the background, we went back downstairs to the first floor to help someone sync their new smartphone with Outlook. This was the first HTC Hero Jason had worked on syncing. He read some instructions from the phone's website and began working on the issue. Surprisingly, Sprint's website did not have the latest version of software posted for syncing the phone. After trying for half an hour to get the phone to connect with the software, Jason got the idea to check the software for upgrades and noticed it wasn't the latest version. Finally, after downloading the new version the software recognized that the phone was connected to the PC and Jason was able to sync outlook successfully. Azhar and myself returned to the library and clocked out for the day.

January 26

Today was my first day interning at ITS on the SIUE campus. I will be working two hours per week on Tuesdays from 10 to noon. I expected to be taking phone calls and resetting passwords, but Mike got Azhar and myself started on the projects right away. He took us to the setup room and asked us to look over five OIT Loaner machines which we will be using for our Windows 7 project. Some of them are missing hardware, for example, hard drives and/or memory, one was unable to load windows, and another was unable to recognize that a mouse was connected.

We swapped parts around the different machines to see what wasn't working properly in each other them, continuing work that had been started on Monday by two other CMIS interns, and making notes. I think once the projects are better defined and teams are set up, we will be in a more comfortable working environment.