Computer Report

July 3, 2006. Well, the time has come. I am retiring effective September 1, 2006. Frank Bernardo f.bernardo@hackensackschools.org has agreed to take over as webmaster. Nancy Maciag n.maciag@hackensackschools.org will take over as mathematics chair and Richard DelVechio r.delvechio@hackensackschools.org will take over as science chair. May they and you Live Long and Prosper. I can be reached at rcurtis1940@gmail.com and/or at rcurtis@rain.org.

April 25, 2006. We were down from sometime on April 22, 2006. This was due to an unknown problem apparantly with the Apache program.

Hits on main page of HHS site in April 2006

September 7, 2005. We were down from late in the evening of the 6^th until about noon today. Again this was caused by an overload of broadcast messages sent out by a computer on the network. Ultimately, the computer was identified and corrected.

July 1, 2005. Audey Bautista has joined the technology staff and is slated to be stationed at the high school. Valerie Darden is returning to the classroom.

May 2, 2005. Diane Menditto and Eileen Hooper have been offering an in-service HEA/Board course in using PowerPoint in the classroom. Lots of good tips and techniques are being offered!

February 24, 2005. It's the middle of Presidents' Week and we have a new more secure configuration of our routers. We were down for parts of yesterday and today for the reconfiguration.

January 7, 2005. The end of this week, our connection to the internet has been very rough with a lot of slow and down time. The problem seems to have been with Verizon and its service!

December 29, 2004. Apparently due to a power failure and firewall issues, we have been unavailable on the internet from early on 12/24/2004 until early morning on 12/27/2004. The weather station was not rebooted until noon on 12/29/2004. Best wishes that we will be on consistently in the future.

Hits on main page of HHS site in December 2004

December 21, 2004. It has been a few weeks of adjustments--to our new firewall, to more adaptation to the security wanted for our system due to including our financial matters on our regular internet connections rather than having a separate network, to network engineers who had never been teachers, and to the various needs of individuals who are confronting "Deep Freeze" on their classroom computers. I have adapted to the firewall issues by making available my own space to enable teachers to view absence and similar data from home. (The firewall would not permit the http host and get commands to work.) The weather station now only "pushes" data. I am trying to address issues as they come to my attention. Next will be the Guestbook: no one has been able to add data since December 8th.

December 12, 2004. In an effort to track down our network problems, I was asked to shut down our server for 48 hours. This was done from Wednesday at 3:00 pm until Friday at 3:00 pm. There are still firewall configuration issues! Right now our pages do not seem able to be viewed on the internet and access to our server accounts seem to time out. I am assured that Rino Tolentino is working on this.

December 2, 2004. For the last few weeks, we have been plagued with network problems: very slow internet connections. My home Verizon DSL has had similar problems which it had never had before. We have not yet been able to isolate the actual problem, but have worked on a number of possibilities.

October 7, 2004. At the high school, our network had a virus attacking the network in the part of the network which is home to halley.hackensackhigh.org and so our site has been down for the past few days!

August 19, 2004. Our system was down from 3:40 pm on August 18th until 8:30 am on August 19, 2004, due to a firewall problem. We were down again this afternoon and evening, but this time it was a Bergen Tech/Verizon problem.

July 19, 2004. Again, at about 8:30 am today, our system went down due to excessive activity which shut down the same switch. -- Today I officially decomissioned our Bulletin Board System. It had been in operation since March 1991. The number 201-342-5659 will no longer reach the bulletin board. -- Today, 45 new Dell computers arrived for the library.

July 14, 2004. Yesterday, our system went down again due to excessive activity which shut down a critical switch. Rebooting the switch got us back up. Today, Reno and I spent from 7:30 am until 11:00 am trying to find the cause of all the activity. He isolate individual computers which were creating high traffic. We then checked them for viruses and spyware. Found the begal virus and lots of spyware. I hope the problem does not repeat itself.

July 2, 2004. The direct fiber optic line between the High School and the Middle School/5ive6ix School/Administration Building is reaching actualization! The installation at the High School was completed today with the installation at the Middle School scheduled for Tuesday and then testing.... This should make these sites behave as if they are one! In addition, new computers are scheduled for the high school library, where they are badly needed.

June 25, 2004. Our server was down from about 1 pm yesterday until about 6:30 this morning when I could reboot it; there had been a power problem and I was unable to get to school sooner. TODAY, the new fiber optic line which is to link the high school and the middle school was installed. The electronics for it are still to come.

June 5, 2004. Our system (HPS) was disconnected from the internet from about 7:50 this morning until about 8:40 am. The reason is unknown to me, but it seems to have been a problem with the connection between the high school and our ISP at Bergen Tech.

May 18, 2004. School started today with a jolt! The network went down at about 7:25 am. It was the same old problem: the switch in room 231 was sending out more chatter than the network could handle. Is it a problem with the switch or one of the computers it serves? More investigation will follow.

May 12, 2004. Thunder storms this afternoon deprived the high school of electric power. Some of our circuits have come back up, but others have not. I have moved the critically important servers to the circuits that are up.

April 28, 2004. Today, due to new construction at the high school, the high school was without electricity from 8 am until noon. I was able to power down the servers ahead of time; most powered up ok afterwards. But the sports page server seems to need a new power supply. One or two other computers did not come up with full functionality. (The sports page server is very old: a pentium 100 with a 800 Meg disk drive....)

April 2, 2004. Yesterday, April 1^st, at about 1 o'clock p.m., our system was brought down by an excessive number of packets looping around; this was that same problem which occurred on March 1^st. Reno Tolentino, Valerie Darden, and I were able to get the system back up much more quickly this time! Thanks to our earlier experience.

March 18, 2004. Our system has been up and functioning since last Friday. We have had a big sweep in the high school to find and eradicate viruses. Today, Reno Tolentino installed high speed (gigabyte) switches in E.D.P. so the AS400 could benefit from the upgrades we had done to the system during the summer.

March 11, 2004. Wednesday our system crashed again. So our previously isolated problem must not have been the total cause of our difficulties. Reno Tolentino and I worked on trying to isolate the source of excess traffic which was bringing down the system. Again we narrowed it down to four of our switches. This afternoon, Val Darden joined us and we further narrowed down the problem and got the general office, attendance office, nurse's office and most of guidance working again. While we were beginning to enjoy some success, we got a phone call advising us that Verizon was having difficulties in Reston, Virginia, and that we should expect outages in internet service. Our work is still cut out for us over the next few days: searching for viruses, updating our scan programs and running them, and cleaning up the classroom computers. (While the problem could be caused by a defective switch in the system, we think the problem is much more likely to be one or more virus-infected computers at the high school.)

March 7, 2004. Friday, Reno Tolentino isolated the problem to one computer which had several viruses, including bugbear and particularly W32/Hybris.gen/MM. The next step is to scan and check all the computers in the school for updated virus protection programs. Bob DiAmbrosio has sent an email with his suggestions for virus protection.

March 4, 2004. Today, at about 12:30 pm, one of our devices, a computer or a switch, brought down the whole school system's network. By 4:00 pm we had isolated the problem to one section of the high school building and had restored network service to the rest of the system. The plan is to continue to narrow down the location Friday morning.... More viruses with spoofed return addresses today!

March 2, 2004. The problem on Sunday also affected our firebox. It refused to allow any access to web pages outside our system! Reno and I spent a few hours on Monday morning working on and fixing this problem. Now we are having a problem with a new virus which is using a number of our addresses as the return address on email containing the virus. The virus requires opening an attachment, so it can be handled, but the gullible see the address of a fellow teacher, or whatever, as the sender and are tempted to open the attachment. The virus is very dangerous and hard to get rid of if the virus program is not recently updated. The MORAL is to keep the virus program updated and to avoid opening attachments.... The virus in question is W32Netsky.b@MM.

February 29, 2004. Our power went down at about 7:25 am today. Evidently it was down for a while because the main servers needed to be rebooted. I got to school shortly after noon to see what happened and fix what I could.

February 21, 2004. Our server 168.229.236.7 has been crashing on a regular basis. I am now convinced that it is an internal problem, either with the power supply or the memory. On Thursday, I went to school and resurrected the computer, but by Friday night, it had crashed again. I did transfer most of the files from it. I put the activity point information on one of our more reliable servers. We will see how we can work this out. -- As of February 1, 2004, I took over as chairman of the mathematics and science departments and I await full time help with my responsibilities as computer education coordinator.

January 23, 2004. Work by electricians at the high school on Thursday (Jan 22) evening seems to have interrupted power and caused servers 168.229.236.7 and 168.229.236.12 to have crashed.

January 8, 2004. I am advised that Diane Menditto's website has received The Busy Educator's Award as an especially valuable resource.

January 7, 2004. Reno has rewired the Print Shop with new switches, etc., to speed up its internet connection and to add the new Xerox copiers to the internet.

December 24, 2003. Our data server, clavius.hackensackhigh.org (168.229.236.7), has been down for the last few days. This seems to have been caused by a power failure and resulting corrupted hard drive. After three days of fixing the errors, it is now back up. (This server provides the alumni directory, activity points, morning report archive etc.) Yes, I visited school today for the final touches!

December 12, 2003. From about 6 pm last evening until about 7:40 this morning our ISP was down and access to our sites and email was not possible. The problem repeated itself this afternoon and evening. It is a defective switch in the Verizon network.

December 10, 2003. Today, we had one monitor go up in smoke! A thankfully rare occurrence! Our internet connectivity is still much slower than we expected but has been rather reliable lately. Our ISP has experienced some DOS attacks, but we have had minimal impact. Our firewall is being updated. Spam continues to be a real annoyance.

November 18, 2003. Diane Menditto has run the second workshop this school year on incorporating computer technology into world language teaching for her department.

October 4, 2003. For reasons unknow, our ISP was down from about midnight Friday evening until about 3 pm today.

September 21, 2003. Since the last entry, school has opened! The computer labs of room 330 and 281 are no more. The library has 30 more computers than it had last year. Room 284 has five more computers for reading assessment. Room 205 (The Cisco Lab) has a new set of computers (Perkins Grant) with the computers that had been there moved to room 214, retiring some very old Gateway computers. The new classrooms now have computers, although all the ethernet drops have not been installed, and the new classrooms are getting printers. The weather station's camera has been repaired. This weekend, the weather station sensors seem to have failed: outdoor temperature is -103F and humidity is 0%. Something else to fix. There are now about 400 computers in the high school, and keeping them all functioning has become a real challenge. The teachers who help out with this are: Frank Bernardo, (laptops, Science and Mathematics), Irene Webb and (Technonlgy and Business Education), Diane Menditto, (World Languages), Valerie Darden, Lorelei Kaminsky, (Mathematics and Science), Chris Capone, (Social Studies and English), and Joe Gyulay, (room 406).

August 30, 2003. Today, Joe Gyulay helped out by working with me unpacking new computers for the five classrooms which were recovered from office space. The computers were not completely configured today, but a start was made! Earlier, I completed the configuration of the computers in the library. The network speed has been excellent the last two days!

August 28, 2003. Today, Audey and Francisco from Promedia and Reno from Hackensack Public Schools, completed our update of switches etc., for our infrastructure. At the end of the day, all was up and running! Ami Shah spent the day with paperwork and configuring computers in the library to print properly. There is still much to be done, but we are progressing....

August 27, 2003. From about 5 pm yesterday until this morning at about 9 am, our internet service provided was overcome by a virus attack and thus put us off line. At the high school, we have updated our system, replacing all of our 10 Mbit/sec switches with 10/100 Mbit/sec switches thus increasing our speed and connectivity considerably. But we have also experienced a failure in our own fiber optic backbone. Evidently because of poor installation terchniques, three of our fiber links are broken. You can check pictures here.

August 15, 2003. Working from 7:45 this morning, we have just about recovered from the power failure of 2003! Verizon, however, has not yet gotten our internet access up, so I am writing this from school at about 2:15 pm while I am working on cleaning the file systems on the server 168.229.236.7 (clavius). Verizon finally has us and all the Bergen Tech ISPees back on line! It is 5 am August 16, 2003.

August 8, 2003. The wiring for additional computers for the library was completed today. Now the electronics has to be installed and the computers set up and configured.

July 17, 2003. The big power problem of June 24^th seems also to have brought down our radio link between buildings and the WAP in room 291 (which I replaced on Tuesday). The rennovation of the building scheduled for this summer, has begun. Computer labs, room 281 and room 330, will be converted back into regular classrooms, as well as the offices in rooms 301, 326, 328, 343, and 212. The library will be rennovated so that it can accommodate 30 more computers and the offices will eventually be relocated in an office complex to be built where the balcony of the auditorium is presently located. Temporary offices have been set up as follows: Science/Math office is now in room 267A; Dr Gingold is now in the outer office in room 111; Special Education office is now in room 202; World Languages office is in the library conference room. All this has meant lots of extra computer work during the spring and summer. Steve Gelber has been an excellent and hard working assistant first as a student aide during 8^th period during the spring and as an assistant during the summer. Ami Shah is also working as an assistant during the summer. So far, six computers have been set up and configured in the 3^rd floor teachers' room (room 309), and computers have been moved and set up in the temporary offices.

June 28, 2003. Sometime after 3:00 am a power failure crashed our servers requiring a manual cleaning and reboot.

June 25, 2003. A major power failure on June 24^th wiped out our internet access and servers until about 10 am on June 25th.

June 16, 2003. A severe thunderstorm on Saturday, June 14, 2003, interrupted power at the high school with the usual voltage spikes and multiple interruptions. The power seems to have been off for quite a while. The school clocks, air conditioners, and many computers had to be reset and rebooted this morning. Our two main internet servers did not come back up automatically but had to be brought up manually. (Our other servers did better....)

May 24, 2003. A long gap in time between entries means that we have been very busy--not that nothing has happened! During the last few weeks, Verizon had another router problem, and we were down for the morning that day; new viruses have gotten into several school computers and had to be cleaned; hardware problems with floppy drives and power supplies have been common as well as monitors failing. (How many years should be expect to get out of a monitor?) Many of the computers we use everyday are now six to eight years old and are ready for retirement!

April 3, 2003. On March 30, 2003, (Sunday) our server gyulay.hackensackhigh.org was compromised at about 10:35 am. A hacker got into it and took it over installing a sniffer. When I discovered this (with FBI help) on Monday, March 31, 2003, I found that I could not access this computer from the keyboard or by telnet or by using its floppy drive! Eventually, I was able to access it by making some hardware replacements. This was by far the biggest hacker problem we have had so far. The server is now up and running Red Hat Linux 8.0, but the programs and pages of the AP Computer Science class and the Computer Club still have to be replaced on this server.

March 8, 2003. This week we have taken many small steps forward. Many new resources for teachers have been added to http://hackensackhigh.org/access.html so far as attendance records are concerned. Further, Beta-Testers continue to refine programs for the electronic submission of grades. Our plans for doing homeroom attendance by computer have hit a snag in that we have not had time for suitable in-service for teachers on how to do this....

February 22, 2003. One of our main 3Com switches crashed at about noon today! This interrupted a lot of our network services. I routed some of our main services around it, but our weather station and a number of classroom computers are still off the network. Replacing the switch will be a top priority for Monday.

February 21, 2003. Business Week has a collection of articles on the Linux operating system. Note that Hackensack High School has been using Linux for our email and www server since we began them in 1996.

February 20, 2003. Our server, halley.hackensackhigh.org, went down last eveing. I had to go to school today to investigate. The error message was "too many open files." I rebooted the server and it seems to be working fine. This was the first time we have gotten this error and its cause is a mystery.

February 16, 2003. Our network held up pretty well during the last week. New internet access has been provided for our cafeteria cash registers with added drops for four cash registers. I suppose even cafeterias move into the 21^st century's technology. I found an amusing hypertext link which you might enjoy at http://www.csa.usf.edu/journal/pringle/because.html -- especially if you have an apprciation of Nietzsche.

February 9, 2003. The New York times published an article about SPAM, that very unwanted form of email.

February 8, 2003. On Thursday, February 6th, Our email server was overwhelmed by a user who was trying to send an attachment to an email. The attachment was more than 11 MB in size and was not accepted at its destination and was sent back. This one email therefore required over 22 MB of space on the server, which had been running at 94% of capacity. (Much of this space being taking up by SPAM which had been sent to us!) The server crashed several times during the day--I would fix the problem, the sender would resent the email, it would be returned again and the server would crash again.... Finally the sender figured out how to make the attachment smaller so it would fit in the receiver's email space. To help prevent similar problems in the near future, I removed email for our users who had not downloaded their mail since last June. -- This afternoon, from 4:35 until about 4:55 our connection was down due to a problem with a Verizon router in Madison NJ.

January 25, 2003. Our Verizon connection (through Bergen Tech) has been down since about 3:00 am today. The problem seems to be the SQL internet worm and a denial of service (DOS) attack. Service was restored briefly about 4:20 pm and more permanently at about 5:15 pm. Anne Ganguzza of Bergen Tech had telephoned me and asked me to check our system. I went to school and checked the cirtical ports 1433 and 1434 for activity, but found none. Nevertheless, I used our firewall to block these ports. I also shutdown the computers in room 406 which were generating a lot of network traffic on port 137.

January 20, 2003. Bergen Tech (our ISP) was not serving us and was not accepting telnet or ftp access to our accounts from Saturday evening, January 18th, until Monday morning, January 20th, due (apparently) to a problem with Verison ATM routing! Due to a very mysterious problem with our own firewall, aol.com has been blocked randomly from individual computers on our system during the last couple of weeks.

December 30, 2002. Bergen Tech (our ISP) was down from about 7:30 Sunday evening until about 9:00 am Monday, December 30th.

December 28, 2002. The Hackensack school system's connectivity ground to a halt at 3:30 pm today. A phone call to Bergen Tech (our ISP) proved useless as no one seemed to be there. Finally I went to school and found that the problem was two-way, so it was either the router or the Watchguard firewall. I first rebooted the firewall, and that did the trick. We were back on at 5:30 pm.

Frank Bernardo

December 26, 2002. This last week or so of the year, our problems have shifted to concerns about a large number of Windows 98 based computers freezing (or hanging) excessively and to concerns with having our Compaq laptops repaired under warranty. Mr Francis Bernardo has become the laptop expert and chief laptop trouble-shooter, and a great help. Our firewall (Watchguard) has surprised us by blocking some perfectly good sited during the last week or so--there was no apparent reason and everthing was fine the following day. (It uploads a list of sites to block every night, so somehow that file must have become inaccurate or corrupted.)

Network Nightmare

December 7, 2002. During this week we had one 3-Com switch fail; this took a lot of time to find and to replace. We also have been fighting W32/opaserv worm which had gotten into our system. We have had to block port 137 as a result. But we seem to have conquered the BugBear virus!

November 20, 2002. The internet was down from about 9:00 am until 1:00 pm today. The cause was a hardware failure at Bergen Tech, our internet service provider. We seem to have vanquished the BugBear virus. I found it on a computer in room 426 on Friday, November 15^th and on a computer in room 402 on Monday, November 18^th. We are, however, still fighting the W32.Opaserv.worm! (PS Another instance of BugBear was found on a computer in room 424 on 11/21/02.)

November 16, 2002. It has been another two weeks of tracking down viruses, etc. Friday, November 15th, was the first day without an attack on our printers from the BugBear virus. On November 14th, I found the virus on Mr Frank Bernardo's computer in room 426. During this week, I also worked on computers in room 281 and had several repaired--blown power supplies and failed memory chips. On November 18th, the computer in room 402 was reported to me as being infected since it was acting strangely. Indeed it was infected with BugBear and QAZ viruses. I think and hope this was the last computer in the high school which was infected with BugBear.....

November 1, 2002. I found two more computers infected with the BugBear virus in room 205 (computers 13 and 14). Both also had W32.Opaserv Worm! Later in the evening, I had to return to school (circa 9 pm) because our firewall had frozen and would let nothing through it. It is now 9:45 pm and all seems to be working.

October 30, 2002. I found another incidence of BugBear virus. This time it was in room 205 on computer #7. Again, the computer has drive C set to be shared with no password. It also had no anti-virus program runnung on it. (Very sloppy network computing!) This room is the Cisco Lab. Another virus has entered our system: W32.Opaserv Worm. Like Bugbear, it was released at the end of September. It is imperative that we keep our anti-virus programs running AND often updated. (McAfee sdat4231.exe is the current virus dat file.)

Joseph Gyulay

October 26, 2002. I think I removed the BugBear virus from the last of our computers to have been infected. At least I hope so. Only time will tell. The initial infection seems to have come via email to the principal's secretary's computer and then spread to a few computers which had open hard-drive shares (without passwords), mainly in the drop-in center but also in rooms 408 and 410. The internet was not available on Thursday from about 1 pm until about 5 pm. This was due to a problem Verizon was having with its internet connection in New Jersey. During the last few days, the internet has gone down for a minute or two, usually at about 11:10 pm. This also seems to be a problem with Verizon. The computer club, has established its own server at http://gyulay.hackensackhigh.org with the help of its advisor, new A.P. Computer Science teacher, Joseph Gyulay.

October 21, 2002. The BugBear virus has attacked us. It started on October 15, 2002. Dale Houlis's computer was an early victim. Since then it has been found on Dominick Polifrone's computer, as well as Adele Howes'computer. Then on a number of computers in "Drop-in". Beverly Nelson's computer was also infected. My hope is that we have now gotten all of the computers but I fear there are still a few infected. Only time will tell.

John Piazza JK Computer of New Jersey

October 6, 2002. The month has been a hard one with the many computers at the high school and the number of them that did not work properly after the summer. This plus the number of new installations and the movements and reassigned classrooms has made for a very busy and hectic month of September. Many older computers had to go back to the factory (JK Computer of New Jersey) for repairs. The unstable power in the high school and the frequent power failures have also reaped their share of victims among the computers. The most recent power failure was at about 4 am on Sunday morning, today.

September 17, 2002. Morning Report for 9/13/02. This is an experiment. It is a 149Mb mpg file. Morning Report for 9/13/02 This is an experiment. It is a 26 Mb wmv file. This Morning Report presents the appearance of the singer James Taylor at the September 11th memorial in the High School Auditorium.

September 1, 2002. Saturday was spent working with the secretaries and other helpers in the main office setting up their computers now that the new furniture had arrived and been installed. Earlier in the week, a new computer was set up and configured for the attendance office, and our Windows servers were updated with the latest "fixes" from Microsoft. (We run a number of Linux servers and one Unix server for www pages and email as well as computer education in addition to the Windows servers.) The end of August also saw the setting up of additional network printers (HP 4100N) at strategic locations around the building. I think we have finally solved our proxy server problem. It was bad memory, but when we replaced and upgraded the memory the computer shut down too fast and (due to Windows software problems) the IDE hard drive did not received all the cached data in time so the registry was corrupted on shutdown.

Diane Menditto

August 17, 2002. The last two weeks have seen a lot of computer activity at the high school. Room 218's new computers have arrived. Irene Webb and Wendy Salkin set up and configured these computers. Wendy is my summertime computer assistant. She also unpacked and configured laptop computers for the World Language Department where Diane Menditto will use them in taking a different approach to teaching Spanish.

Robert Cohen

August 8, 2002. Painting in Room 202 has caused our server cisco.hackensackhigh.org to be down since the painters disconnected the computer! Thunder storms last week caused power failures which left orion.hackensackhigh.org (computer club server) down until last Monday. Our proxy server crashed again. It was down from Monday through Wednesday. Gary Scheffen returned to work on it. It seems to have had a problem with a bad memory chip; so memory was replaced and expanded. Wednesday, Promedia's Audey Batista also came and fixed a drop in the Health/Drivers Ed Office which had stopped functioning; this was a problem with the port on the 3Com Switch Stack. (3Com is replacing the Switch.) He also repaired the installation of the drops in the Woodshop Classroom, and replaced the battery in the UPS in the library's switch cabinet. Steve Ambruzs has successfully installed IBM's client access software on the computers in room 349 and in the woodshop. This leaves the rooms which are being renovated (room 410 and rooms in the Business Education department) as well as the cafeteria to be set up for homeroom attendance via computer. Computers have arrived and have been configured for Robert Cohen's ninth grade English classes which will take a new approach to English composition using hypertext, and storyspace software from Eastgate.

July 27, 2002. After a month of relatively smooth sailing, our proxy server crashed on Thursday, July 25^th. After recovering from the crash, the computer reported that the data on the hard drive was beyond repair. Then on Friday, bergen.org, our internet provider, blocked all traffic to the internet from about 4:10 am; this problem was solved by 9:30 am. It seems to have been some kind of programming problem with their firewall. On a happier note, the Library system was updated to newer software versions both for the online catalogue and for the processing of books. We have installed three new computers in our science area and are working on additional printers in the school.

June 23, 2002. Something strange with the power at about 4 am shut down our main www servers. (My home TV disk also went down!) I visited school shortly after noon and reset the servers! Earlier during the last two weeks, we had problems with stacks of switches which failed to function properly and needed to be rebooted. That could have been related to some thunderstorms and lightening strikes. The telephone service at the Middle School complex was seriously damaged at the same time, pretty obviously due to a lightening strike.

June 16, 2002. My www-html2 class concluded this week. We studied using frames, HTML forms, and Cascading Style Sheets. Our internet access remained good until towards the end of the week when we started to have trouble with our proxy server. Thunder storms interrupted the high school's electricity and I note that of this evening several of our servers are not functioning on line. This will mean a chaotic time of trouble shooting on Monday morning.

Steve Ambruzs

May 31, 2002. The drop-in center has been rewired by Promedia and their subcontractor, Global Cable. Bob Caputo (of Promedia) put on the finishing touches today as he configured the last of the new computers. As for the rest of the school, complications with individual computers were common: power supplies and memory problems were the main difficulties. Our mail server ran out of disk space, so I had to erase a lot of old, unread mail; what seems to work best is to have email forwarded to individual accounts such as aol, yahoo, etc. Steve Ambruzs has been quietly installing "Client Access" on our individual classroom computers so that we will be able to do attendance directly next year; at first, just during homeroom, but eventually class by class. My www-html2 class held it's second meeting of four yesterday; we explored using frames in www pages. ("And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form--www--takes three times longer to say than what it's short for) and we have yet another exciting new model." -Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt page 92.) I have tabled my original plan to study JavaScript as part of the course, and hope to deal with that in a future course. I intend to spend the next two classes reinforcing current skills, looking at using forms, and exploring cascading style sheets.

May 24, 2002. The last week or two have been very hectic. Our ISP went down at about 11:30 pm on Saturday, May 18^th and was out until Monday morning at about 8:45. A previous power failure at the high school had paralyzed a number of our computers in the library. Our ISP's router was not allowing connection to certain sites, particularly www.bergen.org and users.bergen.org. So things were rather messed up! Thanks to many hours on the phone during the week, our ISP had everything on its end fixed by Thursday, and we had our stuff working by the end of school today. Irene Webb's inservice course in advanced Word and Excel concluded on Wednesday, May 21^st; it was a highly successful experience for those in the class who really appreciated Irene's dedication and clarity.

May 3, 2002. This week's computer adventures were primarily the result of a problem our ISP was having with their Verizon connection. It resulted in total absence of internet service for periods yesterday, and much slower response times during the rest of the week. We hope they get things straightened out soon. By the way, we have been able to stream video of the Morning Report most days, although this is still being done on an experimental basis.

April 23, 2002. Our secondary domain controller is back and configured and working. This took a lot of time: Gary Scheffen worked on it from 9 am to 5 pm on Friday, April 19^th and today from 1:30 pm until 6 pm. The main problem seems to have been a corruption of the RAID array and some of the operating system on the SCSI hard drives. I look to the reopening of school on Monday, April 29^th, to be sure that everything is really working again.

April 9, 2002. The school play, Tommy, was produced March 21^st, 22^nd, 23^rd and 24^th. The rear screen projection was done by computer using a MS Powerpoint presentation, an LCD computer projector and a special wide angle lens.
On April 3^rd, we had trouble with our secondary domain controller. This is the computer which takes care of our firewall and WINS and which holds most of our network programs and installation software. It is a Windows NT 4.0 server. It refused to boot up, continually re-booting itself before it got into Windows. On Thursday, Bob Caputo of Promedia worked on it from 3 pm until 6 pm without success. On Friday, I brought it back to John Piazza of JK Computers, who had built it and who has been working on it ever since. Meanwhile, we have been limping along using only our primary domain controller.

March 20, 2002. The problem referred to below under March 9, 2002, with email and with POP3 email was solved by Gary Scheffen. It had to do with the IP addresses in the proxy server. New problems developed today particularly in the library with access to the internet and printing. Some computers in the library and the school generally worked fine while others could not make contact with the servers. We are working on this.... And the problem was solved on Thursday afternoon, March 21st, by Gary Scheffen and reporgramming the WINS services in our system.

March 9, 2002. We have noticed new problems with FTP and our server, as well as problems with our POP3 email server, when used by computers using our proxy server. --In particular, there is a great slowness to connect and the FTP signal is often lost.... Working on this problem is Monday's agenda.

March 1, 2002. The internet was down all day February 28, 2002. It was off from about 7 am until 4:30 pm. The problem seems to have been at Bergen Tech and/or Verizon. In addition, our home page seems to have come under attack from a hacker, on February 27th at about 1:57 pm and on February 28th at about 4:45 pm.

February 26, 2002. Click here to see a test of streaming video! - Works in Microsoft Explorer and now also Netscape

February 22, 2002. Yesterday Gary Scheffen and I worked from 9:30 am until 4:15 pm on our internet connection. Trouble shooting problems with our radio link to the stands and working on streaming video and solving problems with some individual computers took up the day. Michael Romba was also in and put freeBSD unix on "orion," the computer club's computer.

Gary Scheffen

February 18, 2002 - Presidents' Day. Trouble, trouble on the internet! Last week, bergen.org, our internet service provider, had all its schools go down on Tuesday, February 12th, from 7:00 pm until 8:00 am the next day due to a problem (i.e., "issue") with their ATM service. Then on Thursday, our proxy server went down preventing internet access, printing, etc., on our local network. So today, Gary Scheffen and I worked on the system from 10:30 am until 7:00 pm spending most of the time installing a new proxy server from scratch. We also upgraded WatchGuard Firewall so our intermittent FTP problem should also be cured! (But only time will tell.) The job is not entirely finished; we hope to finish on Thursday. But, in the meantime, all computers should access the internet and print. On Friday morning (February 15th), I attended a conference at SONY in Park Ridge on distance learning and use of teleconferencing on the internet. Bob DiAmbrosio '64, Antoinette Nappi Pacciani '75, and Michael Marseglia '87 were also there.

Diane Menditto

February 7, 2002. Diane Menditto's class concluded its last session yesterday; but that was not the end! The class took her out to dinner afterwards! Our next course is a repeat of Richard Rau's digital photography course beginning February 27th. The class is already filled! On the hardware side, the science department laptops have gone wireless! It's great to be able to print directly from the laptop while doing experiments using the various probes available. We are also working on preparing "multimedia carts" by installing computers capable of playing DVD's and computer projectors on them.

January 27, 2002. This week we conclude the second marking period and the first semester with mid-year examinations. This should give the computers a little rest.... Thursday, January 24th, was the last class of my WWW publishing and HTML course. The course was rougher than last time, and we covered less material and fewer techniques than in June, but as in June, there was a clamor for a second HTML course. Diane Menditto's course in using the internet in world language classes has one more session left. Plans are to ask Richard Rau to repeat his digital photography course beginning February 27th and to have Diane Menditto offer PART II of her course for those who have successfully completed, as well as to have me offer PART II of my WWW publishing and HTML course, and to have Irene Webb offer another course. The computer club is also running an HTML course for club members at their regular meetings.
In dealing with the computers and our network, we are still having problems with computers on which people have downloaded new.net applications (which causes all manner of "illegal operation" errors) and with our firewall, which occasionally decides to block all ftp transfers through it. This latter problem is a bug in its software for which we have a fix, but which will take some time to effect and so keeps getting put off.

January 3, 2001. Today was the first day of my WWW publishing and HTML course. I found it very frustrating, as I am sure did most of the class. (Much more so that the first day, the last time I taught the course!) The devil seemed to by everywhere: in the keyboards so passwords did not work properly, etc. The beginning is by far the hardest part, and I am sure things will go much more smoothly next week. Repetition will help as will practice using FTP. (Philip Greenspun is correct: the markup language is the easy part; the difficulty is in establishing conceptual structures so things make sense.)
On other fronts, computer repair keeps us busy: everything from floppy disks stuck in the "A drive" to mysterious changes in computers that took place over the holidays--one new computer was so bad I had to return it to the factory for help: it was as if someone had been using it and in the process messed up essential files, etc. And today I spent more than four hours working in room 281, the English/Social Studies computer laboratory, repairing and correcting software on the computers. A major problem recently has been with automatic updates of our McAfee antivirus software. There were also some computers infected with viruses.