TEST DRIVE OUR CONFIG!

Howdy, everyone---

So, here in the Labs & Classrooms Office, we are diligently toiling away at our new computer lab configurations that are going to be deployed onto the labs & classrooms computers across all of Lesley's campuses..


To TEST these machines, we are placing them in various locations around the campus... at the Library, Science Room(s), Kiosks, etc... and if you see one, please feel free to give it a test drive!
If you notice anything kind of suspicious (e.g. a popup, notification, setting, etc.), OR if you want any additional software, please let us know by posting on our facebook page: 
http://facebook.com/lesleylabs

Be on the lookout for these labels:

Also,...
I recently wrote a letter to the faculty....

This is Richard Phung, the Labs & Classrooms Coordinator with UT here at Lesley University.
You are receiving this message because our records indicate that you meet at least one of the following criteria:

• You are a fac/staff who has used- or scheduled- one of our computer-equipped classroom(s) in the past year.  --- (e.g. Doble 3rd, 4th, Wolf 2nd, Training/Reading Room)
• You are a fac/staff who has used one of our mobile computing resources for checkout for a class or an event. --- (e.g. Laptop Cart, Classroom in a box, Loaner Laptops)
• You are a fac/staff representing a group that oversees/manages kiosk/public-access computer terminals, special purpose computing workstations and/or related facilities.  --- (e.g. Library, Math/Science, Media Center)
• You are a fac/staff representing an academic department or academic support entity (for both faculty and students) who use computer tools for learning or content access. --- (e.g. Instructional Support/eLearning, Academic Achievement, Accessibility, etc)

I am writing to fill you in on some innovations that we have made in the Labs & Classrooms Office and to invite you to join me in a collaborative effort to cater to our community with more efficient and better equipped computer tools.


The first major initiative that I have been working on is a Master Image, a customized computer configuration including the Operating System (MacOSX and/or Windows 7) and desktop applications.  This Master Image be applied to all Lab & Classroom computers on the Cambridge campuses, thus ensuring that no matter what location the end-users are sitting-down at, they are greeted with the same User Interface and updated desktop environment. 
*The 2nd phase of this initiative will be to custom-cater individual area computing resources to fit the needs of certain areas of academic focus.--- Please contact me directly if this is you.

I invite you and your colleagues to participate in our Master Image TEST DRIVE to get a first-hand look at some of the quality of life improvements and next generation configuration!

For this test-drive, I have installed a Vanilla installation on a handful of Dual-Boot iMacs, Dual-Boot MacBook/Pros, and IBM ThinkPad Laptops.
I will be placing these units in public areas/offices, and they will be available in our office for testing between Nov 10-Dec 1.
It would be helpful to take a minute to do the following:

• Review your curriculum and course materials on the workstations:
  • Test your media on the machine (including classroom documents, video/audio, etc)
  • Test your web content:  webpages, plugins, myLesley, other content sources
• Note any suspicious behavior:  pop-ups, dialogs, prompts, etc.
• Leave feedback

*IF you are a fac/staff and you have your own computing resources,  I would be GLAD to install our latest master image on any of your workstations to test-drive (so long as they meet our system requirements).  *Please contact me for details.

The important dates to note:

November 10, 2011 - December 1, 2011 -  I will be collecting feedback on these computer configurations.
Software purchases must be completed BEFORE December 1.  *normally, this is October 1, but we extended it.
Final Master Image(s) completed by:  December 7
Final Area-Specific Image(s) completed by: December 13
Early-bird Image Roll-out:  December 14 - December 20
Semester ENDS:  December 20, 2011
Image Roll-out:   *Varied between December 21, 2011 - January 20, 2012 --- *I will post these date/times on a calendar.


Additional Resources:
For information about the computers on the Cambridge Campuses, please visit the Labs & Classrooms website:
http://www.lesley.edu/ut/academic/software_labs_class.html

To see SPECIFICALLY what software is installed on the Master Image, please visit the Labs & Classrooms Image Version History:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0Ak0iCSXaWrKadGlCMC11WDVEQ2FJYTBBVFpzX0Vvcmc&output=html
  NEW! To see the evolution of the Master Image since 2009, please visit this site:
https://docs.google.com/drawings/pub?id=1y6O5O1yzmBI7GvKilvxoGFoEJd9OpvsUsAcICmtbz8E&w=960&h=720



Thanks! And look forward to hearing from you soon.

--- Richard Phung, EdM
Labs & Classrooms Coordinator
University Technology

And there you have it!

Lab Machines Ready for Testing!

Students, Faculty, Staff---

TEST YOUR PRESENTATIONS ASAP---

We have recently re-imaged computers in Wolfard and Doble.
As we understand the software configuration is stable and functioning, it is not unreasonable to expect technical difficulties with opening or viewing files and media on these machines.  These are often due to discrepancies with the version of software used to create the media, the format of the media, and codecs/plugins required to view the media.

*Even though we try to cover MOST bases with our installation, we cannot always guarantee that your media will work on our computers like they do your own computers.---- a common misconception.

To serve the community, we have provided sample machines from each of the computer areas on campus here in our office.
ALL members of the Lesley Community are welcome to come-down and test our computer configurations to see if they will work for your files or presentations.
If there needs to be any updates, we will be here to take requests in-person.

The longer you wait, the less likely we will be able to fix ANYTHING before your presentation or class meeting.

EVERYONE who uses ANY of our computers for any WORK should make an appearance in our office.

We are located on the Lower Level of University Hall (LL-010) and these machines will be here until March 4, 2011

---

In a letter to the faculty:

Hello, Faculty--

I hope you all had a splendid holiday.

You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you have been assigned one (or more) of the following classrooms as your designated teaching-space for the Spring 2011.

DOBL-309; DOBL-413; DOBL-415

WOLF-203; WOLF-204; WOLF-201

As many of you know, these are rooms that contain computer systems.

To update you on what’s going on, we are in the middle of re-configuring all of the computers, a process that is anticipated to take up the majority of the month of January. 

In an attempt to alleviate any software/hardware problems that may arise with your classroom materials, we have set-aside sample computers in our office (located at the HelpDesk Suite on the Lower Level of University Hall, LL-010) so that you may test your course materials and media PRIOR to the start of the semester.

We invite you to bring your course materials, multimedia, and a list of web-resources and give the computers a rigorous testing.  Any issues that come-up now will be documented and resolved before you start your class.

Here is a list of software that will be present on the computers:

*please keep in mind that without physically testing your media on our machines, there is NO guarantee that your media will function as expected regardless of whether it was made using the same software version or operating system.

On Mac

Adobe CS3 Design Premium -- Acrobat Professional, Bridge, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Reader 9

Ilife 09 -- Garage Band, iMovie 09, iMovie HD, iPhoto, iDVD, iWeb, iTunes

MS Office 2004 – Excel, Powerpoint, Word

MS Office 2008 -- Excel, Powerpoint, Word

Safari 5, Firefox 3.6 +SilverLight

Google Earth, Google Sketchup, Picasa, Epson Scan Utility

FileZilla, QuickTime 10 +Windows Media Components, VLC, Audacity

Inspiration 8, InspireData, Tech4Learning (KidPix, WebBlender, TimeLiner, Geometer’s Sketchpad, Twist, ImageBlender, Frames, Pixie), Skype

On Windows

Adobe CS3 Design Premium — Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, Reader X

MS Office 2007 — Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word

Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6 +SilverLight, iTunes

Google Earth, Google Sketchup, Picasa, ArcGIS, Kurzweil 3000, Epson Scan Utility

FileZilla, VLC, Audacity, BurnIMG

Inspiration 8, InspireData, Tech4Learning (KidPix, WebBlender, TimeLiner, Geometer’s Sketchpad, Twist, ImageBlender, Frames, Pixie), Skype

These machines will be available for you to test up until January 23rd, by which time we cross our fingers that everything is copacetic.  

Any questions, feel free to contact me directly.

Thank you, and have a great rest of the winter break

P.S.  If you, or anyone else you know, uses the laptop cart for any part of your instruction, a sample laptop cart configuration will also be available to test.

-- 

Richard Phung

Labs & Classrooms Coordinator

University Technology

Lesley University

Ph:  617.349.8819

Fax:  617.349.8989

About the Laptop Cart

I recently wrote a letter to concerned faculty about the laptop cart... you all are welcome to read it too.

BELOW:


====================

Hello, all--

This is Richard Phung, the Labs & Classrooms Coordinator with University Technology.
I have just been forwarded a rather discerning message about the perceived state of the Laptop Cart.
I am terribly sorry for the troubles that you have experienced in your class due to apparent hardware and/or software failures associated with this particular classroom technology.

You have been attached to this email because our records indicate that you often employ the use of the laptop cart for your courses.

I am the primary person responsible for assuring that the Laptop Cart workstations are equipped with the software necessary for your courses and that the desktop configurations allow the machines to function at their fullest potential.  Looking forward, I would like to propose that together, we re-examine your individual curricular objectives to determine whether the Laptop Cart is suitable for your needs.  I would also propose that you as faculty reserve time with me well in advance to your course start dates to examine the hardware and software configurations for what you consider "acceptable" operation and prepare contingencies accordingly. 

We have computer classrooms with exceptional desktop hardware and software that should be considered first and foremost for classes where computers comprise 30% or more of your classroom activities. Entire courses built around the use of the laptop cart should be strongly discouraged as this reserve item has been on a first-come, first-serve basis for its life time.  This may leave your class at a disadvantage when it is unavailable to you. 



The message below is an attempt to address some key issues that you or others may be having with the workstations and some of the methods we are taking to remedy these problems.

------------------------------
--- They are old. ---

These machines are Compaq nc6400 workstations.  The NC6400 was originally launched in 2006, and contains the following hardware:
Intel® Centrino® Duo processor technology
• Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T5600
• 1.83 GHz , 2 MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB
Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950

Details can be found here:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ca/en/sm/WF06b/12139188-12139280-12139280-12139280-12434660-12401288-77983407.html

As they are reaching their 5-year operational lives, we have run into some complications when considering their replacement.  One issue is that these machines were originally obtained by a grant.  Their upgrades and maintenance are provided by our department.  Replacing these units (~estimated $20k for hardware alone) will have a significant fiscal impact outside of our normal upgrade expenses.
I will work with my supervisor, Charles Cooper, to devise an appropriate solution and proposed timeline for replacement.




More technical details about these machines' computing power is presented below:

------------------------------------
--- They have really slow network access:

I have forwarded a message to networking about latency issues, but we have been unable to replicate any connectivity issues.  It may be beneficial to record where and when connection problems arise so that we can better troubleshoot these slow network access problems.

The machines have a built-in wireless G and gigabit ethernet card(s):
Wireless Technologies
Intel® Wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g MOW1 mini-pci card, Bluetooth

Network interface
Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit (10/100/1000 NIC) PCI Express Ethernet Controller

Their hardware suggests that they would have no problems accessing the network(s) at Lesley.  When my assistants test network connectivity within the classrooms, they will often utilize one of these machines.

Using standard benchmarking tools (e.g. speedtest.net), I am able to achieve download/upload speeds of 2.9Mb/s and 4.83Mb/s, respectively, from the wireless network.  *See attachment (speedtest.jpg)

These speeds are consistent with broad-band internet connectivity.

Further investigating, we have conducted rigorous ping-tests to local network resources (e.g. workstation-to-print server(s), workstation-to-workstation via wireless/wired, workstation-to-AIB & Brattle), and have found speeds within campus to be consistent with 100/1000Mb ethernet.
*See attachment (networkandmemorytest.jpg)

------------------------------------
--- They do not have enough Random Access Memory (RAM). 

Although these machines originally came with 1GB of RAM, we recently (August 2010) upgraded their memory with a full 4GB of memory (the maximum that they can hold). 
Using the latest benchmark tools (PCMark05), we had determined that the Read/Write speeds for a 16MB data packet on this memory is about 4069MB/s and 2800Mb/s, respectively.

The same benchmark tool ran on the latest MacBookPro with 2GB of RAM from our circulation which yielded 5809MB/s (read); 5282MB/s (write)  
This test is an example of how "more" does not equate to "better/faster."


------------------------------------
--- Loading a simple Word document takes up to 5 minutes---

We have had reports of Word Documents taking a long time to load or crashing the machines altogether.  Our current installation is Microsoft Office 2007 with the Compatibility Pack (version 12.0.6425).
*See attached (officeversion.jpg)

Testing our current version Our test process involved opening documents created with Office 2003 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), Office 2008 (for mac), and Office 2010.  We have also tried opening a battery of XML-standard doctypes from OpenOffice, office templates (*.dotx, *.dotm, *.potx, etc), and documents with advanced mail-merge fields.  Everything seemed to work fine for us, despite the complexity of the document.  You would think that testing this issue would uncover problems with files of various formats created with different versions of the Microsoft Office Suite, but this is not consistent with our findings.  This is not to say that there are no problems at all-- load-times vary dramatically, as to be expected with any computer.

We have discovered a few key updates to the software (which will be rolled-out for the Spring 2011), that may have prevented certain features to work correctly, but the only way to be sure our software configuration works for your files is to simply test your files on the machines. It may be to your benefit to update your course materials (re-saving or re-selecting their compatibility modes) to assure backwards compatibility with a multitude of machines.  It is much easier to modify and redistribute a few documents than it would be to change an entire system configuration.

It is also possible that processing file-format changes is too intensive on the internal hardware.  There is very little that I can modify (RAM included), that can resolve processing capabilities.  This is simply a limitation of the machines.

------------------------------------

As far as the machines themselves go, they are not bad computing units.
Accessing the internet seems to be fairly normal, and launching non-intensive applications seems to be as expected.
Compared to other machines (namely Dual-Boot Intel iMacs and Dual-Boot MacBook Pros) on pure hardware performance, they are only marginally inferior.
Attached are the system profiles and rigorous benchmarks for both
*See attached (SystemProfiles.zip and Benchmarks.zip)
https://sites.google.com/site/lesleylabpublic/home/SystemProfiles.zip
https://sites.google.com/site/lesleylabpublic/home/Benchmarks.zip


Depending on your class activity, you may want to look for alternatives to the Laptop Cart.

As I had mentioned briefly before, utilizing our installed classroom technologies has many distinct advantages over the Laptop Cart. The Dual-Boot Intel iMac desktops are vastly superior to any mobile computing units we can provide at this time, and when these teaching spaces are reserved, it guarantees your students access to computing amenities.

The Spring 2011 Laptop Cart Image will be built from scratch and will model the MacBook Pro software configuration which includes Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (v 12.0.6425), and a variety of other productivity tools. 
I will begin collecting data and configuring a machine for this area starting the week of November 22 and finishing the image creation process on December 13.  If you would like to be a part of this process, I would strongly encourage that you make an appointment with me.  In this time, we will be testing our software configuration with your file types.

Thank you for making it to the end of this dense technical documentation.
I appreciate your time, and I look forward to your feedback.


--Richard Phung
Classrooms & Labs Coordinator
University Technology - Lesley University
617.349.8819 | x8770
rphung@lesley.edu

via Outlook Web Access




=====================
So there you have it.

Boosting Start-up & Shut-down Speeds

well, folks..
we are currently working on building a new computer image for the various computing areas across campus..
one of the key features that we are investigating is the Start-Up and Shut-Down times, particularly when using WindowsXP.





Our preliminary research finds:

Start-Up time(s) for the various computer sets (using Windows XP):

• 1st Gen iMac - (Doble 413, 415, 309, Reading Room, Kiosks, 24-hour Lab) -- 
• 2nd Gen iMac - (Wolfard 203, 204) -- ~03:00:00 - 03:30:00+
• 3rd Gen iMac - (University Hall training Room, Reading Room) -- ~01:30:00 - 01:50:00
• MacBookPro (for CheckOut) -- ~01:30:00 - 02:00:00

Shut-Down time(s) for the various computer sets (using Windows XP):

• 1st Gen iMac - (Doble 413, 415, 309, Reading Room, Kiosks, 24-hour Lab) -- 
• 2nd Gen iMac - (Wolfard 203, 204) -- ~00:45:00 - 00:50:00
• 3rd Gen iMac - (University Hall training Room, Reading Room) -- ~00:45:00 - 00:55:00
• MacBookPro (for CheckOut) -- ~00:50:00 - 01:05:00

I hope to tweak with the configuration of these machines to squeeze-out a significant change.

We'll let you know how it goes!

See below:

After our enhanced configuration:

COMING SOON!

Start-Up time(s) for the various computer sets (using Windows XP):

• 1st Gen iMac - (Doble 413, 415, 309, Reading Room, Kiosks, 24-hour Lab) -- 
• 2nd Gen iMac - (Wolfard 203, 204) -- 
• 3rd Gen iMac - (University Hall training Room, Reading Room) -- 
• MacBookPro (for CheckOut) -- 

Shut-Down time(s) for the various computer sets (using Windows XP):

• 1st Gen iMac - (Doble 413, 415, 309, Reading Room, Kiosks, 24-hour Lab) -- 
• 2nd Gen iMac - (Wolfard 203, 204) -- ~00:45:00 - 00:50:00
• 3rd Gen iMac - (University Hall training Room, Reading Room) -- 
• MacBookPro (for CheckOut) --

Network 'acting up'??

We have tried to apply some fixes with our Symantec Antivirus causing machines to lose their network connection.

This affects computers on the entire campus.  If you are using Symantec EndPoint Protection, make sure that your machine isn't losing its connection due to False-Positive Denial of Service attacks caused by Network Threat Protection being too hardcore.  When a DoS attack is detected, the NTP shuts off access to that IP address for 10 minutes thus causing the page to time-out when loading websites

The issue may appear to be the "network being slow..." but in reality, it's just a bunch of crap running in the background making it to where you're not getting all of your packets.

We are applying this fix to the Loaner Laptops for checkout, the Sherrill Laptop Cart,... and any other office machines just sitting around on wireless and obviously any future installations.  Fun times.

Please be mindful of this fix.

This applies to any computers running Symantec EndPoint Protection v11-12.x and with Network Threat Protection installed (by default it is).