Date:  June 08  Type:  New Install  Difficulty:  Challenging  Numbers:  15  Image Need:  No

Here is a breif overlook of what I've been doing at work when installing different ICT suites. Many of these are going to be similar so sorry for the repetitiveness of the articles.

Creating the R.E. ICT suite was slightly different just because it used to be 2 separate offices which have now been knocked down into one room (guess who did that). Well it was the first task of the summer break, we were given the task of creating the R.E. suite which meant planning from scratch where network ports had to be, how many switches we needed and where they could go and finally the layout of the room. I'll also try to go a little more in-depth, I'll try not to bore you to much. We were in discussions with the caretaker and electrician about what needed to be done by each individual and when, first off the room had to have the dividing wall removed in which us (the 2 ICT technicians) were given the task of completing along with emptying the room. I had to get measures meants of how much desk space was needed for a thin client along with enough work space for pupils to write on, after some measuring up and number crunching the caretaker ordered some kitchen worktops that were suitable for our needs. After knocking down the wall (which was great fun btw, apart from the cleaning up part) we waited for the caretaker to install the tables and desk while we sorted out network issues with the electrician regarding the new room. We had the electrician install 20 network ports to accommodate all the thin clients along with the teacher workstation and printer, this left a few ports spare for expansion.  

Now this is where things really started to kick in for us, once all the ports had been tested and patched into the switch (seen: top right) we could go about installing the thin clients. We had the delivery a few months before this project so each box had to be removed from storage and taken up the lift to the second floor (similar to the P.E. room) which was quite some task with there being 31 boxes that needed moving. Each thin client comes in 3 separate boxes, the thin client, monitor and monitor bracket. With all that unpacking it doesn't half take some time just to get 14 machines out of the boxes with that it also leaves a fair amount of undesired polystyrene and American plugs. All these then had to be taken to the skip which was around 50 metres away and 30 steps. We still had to drill holes into all of the base plates of the monitors to make sure they could be secured to the worktop, this was also fairly frustrating as yet again there were screws in the holes we needed to drill in. Once the bases were all sorted we then needed to attach both parts of the mounting brackets to the monitor and thin client which meant in total a 112 screws had to be screwed in (4 per each monitor and 4 per each thin client) and 56 had to be removed (monitors came pre-screwed). Before attaching the monitors to the bases we made sure we drilled the holes into the work top and screwed them in as we learnt in a previous suite if you put the monitors on first its almost impossible to line up and drill the holes needed. Imaging was simple but still took time as you have to type in around 10 commands in Linux on each thin client then wait 5 or so minutes for all the files to be configured. After install the teacher PC along with printer we went around testing each computer to make sure it would login and be ready for use in the coming weeks. The picture above shows how the room is laid out and all the hard work we had done but it's missing the other 7 thin clients which were behind me at the time of taking the picture.