Re: Free-lance - office move stuff-o-rama
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Dresser" <mdresser_l@windsormachine.com>
To: <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: Free-lance - office move stuff-o-rama
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, BruceG wrote:
>
> > 3. Move PCs to new building. This is just a short walk, so they could be
> > carried.
> > Insert floppy in drive to prevent failure. (is there a command to
park
> > the hard drive?). Move the PC, keyboard, monitor, cables and mouse.
>
> Are you using 5.25" drives?!?!
>
> If not, don't worry about parking the heads on a floppy drive. In all the
> years I've kicked about 3.5" floppy drives, I've never had issues with
> them going bad from that. I do remember the days of 360k floppy drives
> shipping with a cardboard insert, but these had a much different
> mechanical mechanism to lock the disk in.
>
> Hard drives are autoparking, unless you've got a bunch of really
> really ancient dinosaurs there.
>
> Easy way is don't drop the machine.
>
> > 3 LAN printers are on lease. Have leasing company move the LAN printers
to
> > make sure we don't void warrantees.
>
> This part is pretty sad, but I guess that's what the leasing company
> wants?
>
> > Okay - if you guys were doing an office move, what else would you
include?
> > It's a MS shop, so Linux would only play in there as a Samba server for
file
> > sharing and for backups.
>
> Doing something similar to this now, smbtar works very nicely for backups,
> Windows 95/98 can be restored on a hard drive right from the .tar.gz and
> it will work perfectly. Just have to partition the drive, sys c: it, and
> restore the .tar.gz.
>
> Win2000/XP, you have to rebuild the OS, and restore the data files from
> your backup though.
>
> Definately leave enough time to restore a backup/rebuild a machine. Are
> the machines powered up all the time, or shut down normally at night? If
> they're powered 24/7, you can possibly expect to see a hard drive not come
> back after being powered up.
>
> Mike
Yeah - I used to work with some OLD stuff! But no, none of the equipment is
that out of date. The office is using PII's and PIII's with Win 98 on most
of the desktops. There are 5 desktops running Win98 and 2 laptops running
WinXP. There are a few more in the building we would move the office to. The
other building isn't currently cabled, but if it where - then we'd put the
other desktops on as well.
Currently there is NO backup strategy. I would hate to see the payroll PC
go, there would be no way to rebuild. Even worse, the
births/deaths/marraiges/baptisms PC has no backups. It would be a paper
trail to rebuild in the even of failure - and the poffice staff has been
trying to get ALL their records on the PC. So those 2 HAVE to be backed up.
The router acts as a firewall, and no desktps are runnng firewall software.
Since we also have wireless - that's a big risk. Also - some PCs have
AntiVirus software, some don't. Some of the PCs with AntiVirus have expired
subscriptions - so the filters are out of date.
Finally - wireless is only acting as a bridge, as the old building is
pre-revolutionary war they don't want to do a lot of drilling. So it's
wireless between groups of PCs, the wired to the desktop. The payroll PC
talks across the wireless bridge sending and receiving data from banks. The
bridges are not running encryption. So - wired is required, it's just asking
for trouble to have wireless LAN access on PCs that need to be secure.
I'd recommend Linux and OpenOffice for the desktops - but don't think that
would fly. I would like to grab a spare PC and set it up so folks could get
familiar, though. Kind of a kiosk PC.
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