Accomplishment

Well, Kate and I finally got all of the machines in the photo computer lab imaged, and set up. We got the printers going, OpenDirectory works just fine, the drobo's doing great (3x500GB disks = 900GB of disk space for userfolders and other supporting materials.) and in general, the photo room's technology should be ready for another school year's worth of usage.

It's worth noting that setting up OpenDirectory on a Mac OS X network is ridiculously difficult. Surprisingly, it's more difficult than setting up ActiveDirectory on a Windows network, it's even more difficult than setting up and managing an old Windows NT4 domain, which I find to be ridiculous. It takes me a few hours to set up a fully functioning Windows NT 4.0 domain, with a server, three clients and roaming profiles. Mac OS X didn't take too terribly long once I got everything figured out, but it took a generous amount of time to figure everything out.

While I am definitely happy about my accomplishment at the photo classroom last week, I think the biggest accomplishment will be at the end of next school year, in spring/summer 2009, when I come back to Kingman and hear about how well it all worked, and about how we won't need to reformat the server again. At that point, I'll definitely start to trust the Leopard Server environment. I'll believe it though, when I see it. In the meantime, I would really love to get my hands on a few machines I can use to test out my own Leopard (and eventually Snow Leopard) server environment, but that's a project for later on.