One more week of school down, even though it was ...

One more week of school down, even though it was a 3-day week after Labor Day and drill. Nothing too interesting happening there. Drill was actually a bit more interesting at points. I actually got to use some of my MOS job skills.

Friday my task was to set up for a miniature SRP, a paperwork field day meant to make sure every soldier is up to date on their personnel, finance, insurance, and medical documents. Between SGT Lant and myself, we learned a lot of things we're not able to do without admin priviledges, and so we had to settle for a few less-than-perfect things. For instance, the printers. Important for a paperwork event, right? Well instead of just hooking one up to the network and mapping all the computers to it (very simple and elegant), we were forced to tell all the users to save their documents to USB keys, walk it over to a single computer hooked up to a printer, and open it up from there. Much less elegant, but workable. Saturday my mission was just to babysit the event and make sure none of the computers spontaneously combusted. None of them did, so I studied a little Arabic.

Sunday was slightly more interesting. The SRP was finished, so instead I was able to join the rest of the section in attempting to fix some of the computer problems around our building, fixing our defunct laptops, and the like. At the end of the day, SGT Lant took all of us to the Network Control Center where they keep the network patches and a couple of the servers, and taught us a little bit about it. That stuff really gets my juices flowing; there's a lot of power in that room. I haven't seen that type of equipment since my Cisco class, and I've never dealt with a VoIP phone system. We were supposed to fix the phones while we were there, but it's been a while since SGT Lant has worked with the PBX machine, so rather than mess up the entire phone system, we just let it alone.