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Final Blog Post

This is my final blog post for the BAS-IS program—I'm about to graduate!  This week, I worked 40 hours, bringing my quarter total to 400 hours. I spent most of the week wiping down and resetting as many senior laptops as I could to ensure we have some clean, updated systems ready for next year. While this isn’t our top priority, staff laptops weren’t yet available, and no broken student devices had been turned in yet. Starting next week, I’ll begin collecting all student and staff devices. Once they’re collected, we’ll need to find space to store them, most of them will likely sit untouched over the summer. All I can say is next year is going to be a bit of a mess, especially with so many moving parts and deferred maintenance. I also repurposed four desktop computers that were originally used only for a four-week summer school program each year. For most of their lives, they just sat in boxes. I re-imaged them, updated them to Windows 11, applied all firmware and driver updates, an...
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Module 9 Progress Report

This week, I worked 36 hours and used 4 hours of personal leave to complete my new hire onboarding at the casino. This brings my quarter total to 360 hours. On Tuesday, we had our tech meeting and created a plan for wrapping up the school year. One of our main goals is to collect all staff laptops, perform a factory reset, and upgrade them to Windows 11. This will give us a clean baseline for next school year and hopefully help reduce issues—especially since some systems are still running Windows 10 21H1 from 2021. A major challenge we’re facing is that many staff devices across the district are old and technically don’t meet Windows 11 system requirements. Some of these models include Surface Pro 4s, Surface Laptop 2s and 3s, and older Dell desktops. For the Dell desktops, I discovered a workaround. Even though both Microsoft and Dell list the CPUs as unsupported, I was able to use Dell’s recovery image tool with the device’s service tag. After clicking "Advanced," it gave m...
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MOD 8: A Short Week with Big Decisions

This week was a little unusual due to Memorial Day on Monday, giving us a four-day work week. Even though I only worked 32 hours, I still got paid for the full 40. That brings my total hours for the quarter up to 320 . The week has felt a bit off—each day felt like it was one behind. Today is Friday, but it feels like Thursday, and not having class yesterday threw me off even more. Work-wise, it’s been fairly routine. I've mainly been resetting laptops to factory settings and reinstalling our standard software. State testing has officially wrapped up, so at least I won’t need to worry about supporting that anymore. With only about two weeks left on my current contract, I had been told I’d be returning in late August for the next school year. However, something unexpected happened this week—I got a call from the casino I had applied to earlier. I had originally applied for a Tech II position, but the hiring team felt I wasn’t quite ready. Instead of turning me down, they offered me...
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Q2 Module 7 Progress Report

     This week, I completed a full 40 hours, bringing my quarter total to 280 hours. Next Monday is Memorial Day, so both school and work will be closed in observance.      This week felt like it both dragged on and flew by. There were stretches where I didn’t have much to do, and others where I was extremely productive. As a tech department, we had several meetings to discuss how upcoming budget cuts and layoffs will impact technology across the district, and we outlined plans to adapt accordingly. We also created a list of projects to complete over the summer—tasks that aren’t feasible to do while teachers and students are present.      One major focus will be server migration. We’re still running some instances of Server 2008, 2012, and 2019, so we need to spin up and move services to newer servers. I’ve already created several VMs to temporarily host services and assist with the transition and backups. We’ve also migrated some services to...
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Q2 Module 6 Progress Report

 This week I worked another 40 hours bring this quarters total to 240 hours. As we get closer to June my contract is also getting closer to ending. I still don't know if the school is going to renew it or not. On the bright side I did have a in person interview at a Casino for a IT tech 2 position. I met with the interim IT director, the Network admin, the System admin, and a HR rep for note taking. Overall I think the meeting went well even if there was a few questions I couldn't answer as I did not have experience working with those particular systems.  This week I worked an a variety of projects and am having a hard time remembering what I did. I did my usual and fix laptops as they came in from students, and inventoried some more staff laptops in our software. We also had Dimensional come out and temporary re route all our AV system's to analogue as our band directory accidently reset the routing configurations in the Dante system. I could write about the whole complex ...
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Q2 Module 5 Progress Report

 This week I worked another full 40 hours bringing this quarters total to 200 and overall to 560. This week has been a long week. We decided to postpone the AD FS migration and role switch due to state testing as we didn't want to have any potential issues with the network. On top of that the School cabinet members decided to get rid of an Admin position to help with the budget shortfall for next school year. This admin happened to be my boss the director of IT, they cut the position entirely. How do you run a IT department without an IT head? IDK but I think its one of the stupidest things they decided to do. Our director of finance seems to think he can just pickup the reasonability of being a supervisor and delegate the other responsibilities to the IT team. They also said they are still making cuts so that they cant promise we wont lose another IT person.  Any who, I am looking at other employment at this time to be prepared to get let go.  State testing and Advanced ...
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Q2 Module 4 Progress Report

     This week I worked another full 40 hours bringing my quarter total to 160 and the two quarters together to 520 hours. This week I had mixed days of doing nothing then being busy. I finished installing language packs on another set of computers for testing starting this Monday. I had gotten an email asking to install on more computers but I never received the computers from the students or their teacher.  I also received a teachers Surface Laptop 3. They said its not working which was very vague but I discovered that it the computer won't boot all the way. It gets to the Windows logo for the Surface bios but then goes black immediately after. I tried all my tricks like holding down the power button for 30 seconds, holding the power button and the volume up for 15 to try to get into the firmware reset menu, took the type cover off, took out the RSSD to cut power from the battery and drain and residual power, all didn't work and does the same thing. I check to see ...
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