WHEEE… An interesting job to do… sort of

Well, I finally came to do something interesting and useful… Well, at least it is more useful than the basic stuff. We got some thin clients and I worked with Graham to make them able to deploy the next week.

The Thin Clients can be set up either everyone for it self, or, to make it easier, they can be configured remotely, once they have been deployed to the network and they find the corresponding server. Last was what we did… tried to do. First we had a few struggles with the clients not connecting to the network and after we managed to have them find the correct network they still refused because of the firmware that was pre-installed. It was to old for the server we created, which had the newest version, thinking it should have been working that way.

At that point I want you to ask a question and be honest: would you think it would not work? I mean, basically if a server firmware is updated, than, that’s my point of view, the server should still be able to recognize the old clients, shouldn’t it?

Well, non the less, we managed to update them each to a version where were able to find them on the server. After that we tried if they do what we want the to do and show a Windows remote session. Let me put it that way, it worked, but not exactly the way we wanted, because instead of the windows screen popping up we saw a Citrix home desktop and had to activate windows as startup program.

That in it self sounds rather easy, but the logon screen is saved per client and per user that logged in onto the client, meaning that every user that every user that logs on onto one of the clients will have his/her preferences saved separately. Not a big deal, but it’s not a nice way, since the users will need to be informed about the changes and the new method.

Luckily Graham thought ahead and asked me to write a short manual about how to use the new clients. That was very easy because the client I took some screenshots from had VNC activated which made the instruction writing fairly easy.

So, I think I deserved my weekend. I’m interested to see what’s about to come.