Visiting Engineer

Matt from Toucan arrived and spent the day setting up the new mac OSX server, transferring users and data across from the old one and configuring clients.

It was exhausting and I only learned a fraction of what he was doing, and not yet enough even to be able to administer the new system yet.

The colourful upgrade management plan which I had drawn up was completely ignored, as he pushed ahead to try and get everything up and working on the new server in one day.

At the end of the day, we have the old iMacs running OS9 and Mac Manager 2 to log in to the new osX server, some users and passwords have been changed and shared directories work a bit differently. So it's business as usual tomorrow, fingers crossed. The one new eMac ( osX )is also configured to log in to the server and should share the same user data, but this doesn't seem quite right at the moment.

At least I have Matt's email address and I asked for another visit to be booked soon.

While it's nice to have a decent operating system underneath it all ( osX is based on FreeBSD, in turn a flavour of UNIX ), which is great having that sort of power and reliability back again, I feel that extremely technical work is something that necessarily belongs to my past and I much prefer to concentrate on the education side of things at this point in my life.