Re: OH that computer...
To be fair the PC tech was between a rock and a hard place. I'm Apple friendly (they are all computers after all) so the department that had previously been told to sort their own shit out if they wanted Apples suddenly could be integrated into the rest of the school. But the previous IT support company maintained that Apples a) could not be networked because b) they would cause the servers to explode and rains of frogs to fall. Said PC tech was supplied by that company, and needed to toe the company of line of "Apple bad".
Mind you, they where also pretty mystified when I was trying to get them to build lab PC's from a remote image from a PXE boot. Again an argument over what was possible, after reading my instructions and not following them.
This time it was :
- You can only build a PC from local media (he conceded that maybe a USB drive could work, but the first five minutes he insisted that DVD/CD was the only way)
- You can't boot a machine using a network image (whilst I had just done a PXE boot in front of him)
- The network cannot be reliable enough
- It will take longer, and thus isn't worth the time.
He managed to do ~10 machines in 8 hours.
Again I summoned my pair of winged monkeys (or " year 7 students" as they are sometimes called) and we got the remaining 118 machines done in about 4 hours the next day.
The It company was very keen to "borrow" my images and setup. So keen that I got a call from another of their clients, asking why their rebuilt machines had the school logo as the background image of their desktop.
Of course, no tale would be complete without some proper management fail. After being there a year, at a rate 20% below my usual, I asked for my usual rate or I'd walk. Manglement thought I was bluffing, so didn't budge and I left.
The IT company is still getting a six figure sum from the school each year. Domain admin password is still the same as when I left ~5 years ago.