Intern

What an eventful span of two days.

As you know, I am in the technology department of my school as an intern for the next four weeks, and two days have passed since I've entered. Now everything I've been taught last year in networking classes is starting to flood back into me.

Basically the routine will be like this for the next few days: I'll pick up my lunch, hang out on the boom as usual before the session begins, and then retreat upstairs to the data processing room. This room, as you may have guessed, is probably the most enigmatic room to any IT student as it's where the MySpace blockage, Clean Slate woes, and computer maintenance executions originate. When you actually enter the room, however, it's a very orchestrated disarray. Due to the transformation of the entire network, as I've explained before, we've needed to get whole new servers and fiddle with models in use to see how things would work. Combining this with the official release of Windows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer 7 results in a trunkload of maintenance requests, many of them being fifteen-second reinstatements of the proxy settings from before. (The proxy is 10.10.1.5:8080, and the installation of a new switch affords only the principals of the schools subject to the network and the police officers unrestricted Internet access; supposedly the Macintosh computers are affected as well. I'm not going to throw my dice on it just yet.)

As far as it has been, it's been quite lively and never falls short of an opportunity to move, except in the case of the IT head, who enjoys being able to monitor every device from one laptop (Alienware, which I seriously need to consider come September). We, though, have been moving from computer to switch to computer or any way around; today was mandatory reconfiguration of the switches in the three buildings that comprise my school and the school next door, while yesterday we gathered IP addresses and subjected computers to external drive capability. (The latter required the use of a master password to suspend Clean Slate...no, do you think I'd really tell you that?) I work alongside two paid workers, one of which seems to have some website plan in mind involving Flash and has congratulated me for 'coming to the good side' after the proxy mess from last year.

I hope this blog qualifies for the journal assignment that had been mentioned but never formally administered.