Practicum Day 1

Today was the first day of my practicum. My host, being an independent contractor, took me to one of the businesses that his most frequent client, Accurate Security, owns: Mark Anthony Academy of Cosmetology. The school's front reception desk computer had lost it's operating system due to a power surge, and before today Darren had re installed windows 7 onto the machine. I was tasked with setting the computer in place and installing the usual connections, and then installing a bunch of programs that the receptionist will use (Microsoft office, Google Chrome, Adobe Reader, CutePDF, and AVG protection). The key that we installed office with actually ended up being incorrect as the suite would not activate, so we learned how to change the product key of office through Programs and Features.

 Then came our most daunting task of the day: installing the printers. The computer had to communicate with two printers in the building: A Xerox printer, which I never actually got to touch, and a small Epson tm-t88iv (which is a thermal receipt printer). The xerox was easy, I merely had to install the drivers that Darren brought, but the Epson was more difficult. First we had to find the driver software online, then when we tried to install the printer via a parallel port, the computer wouldn't let us, so we had to go through the BIOS and enable the computer's parallel port. That worked for printing locally, but unfortunately we weren't done yet. 

You see, the Academy, and a few of the neighboring buildings that re owned by the company, have to communicate with the servers located at Accurate's head location in New West Minister. The computer we were working on runs on the server via Remote Desktop, and jobs from the server had to reach this printer as well. After a lot of tinkering a playing with ports, we got in running. Then after we were done Darren took me to Accurate's head location in New West where we did a virus sweep of the system for a Trojan virus that was being held at Bay by their SonicWalls. MalwareBytes had not solved the problem by the time we left though.