CTP Skill Center

Today we learned about different physical ports on a computer. These are the actual ports for video, audio and the other peripherals your common in a modern day computer. For example video can use VGA, DVI, HDMI or a Display port. Parallel ports such as DB9 and DB25 has mostly been replaced by either USB or serial ports. Some ports are also in the decline such as Firewire.

We also learned about looking closely at the information in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in the browser address bar which contains the protocol, domain name, sub-domain and other resources. The information use delimiters to separate information known as comma separated values (CSV) and may contain name value pairs for sending and receiving data through the web.

Today we continued the phone circus exercise we did yesterday. I did a few calls as a customer for the IT and delivery department for Berkmart. I also reversed the role as IT support and received several calls and processed the transactions using Square. The exercise got the easier this time around because we practiced it the day before.

We also did some role exercises rotating roles either as customer, employee or coach in a group of three people. Jacob provided the scenarios we worked on. It is not easy as it seems especially when a customer is distressed and you want to make it right. However, there are limits on what an employee can do and sometimes a customer walks away dissatisfied.

We continued the role play in front of the class which added a bit of nervousness on the people in the exercise.

Today the CTT class worked with the PRO class. First we practiced with a partner on how different emotions in answering phone calls can define a mood that can affect the overall tone of a conversation.

Next we took turns being a customer and the one answering a call for a made up store called Berkmart. The CTT students were the IT support desk. Other PRO class students were assigned to either the Delivery or the Information/Complaints desk.

The customer role was pretty straightforward. The support desk role required us to take note of the customer information including the email in order to ring up the Computer Repair Deposit using Square. Square is a Point of Sales (POS) system that uses an Ipad. It sent a receipt via email when the transaction was done. Finally, we watched a video titled “Listening Under Pressure”.

Today we learned the difference between a local account and a domain account. A local account is for the local machine and the domain account is for joining the domain account using active directory which is a database of users and the permissions they have for the domain.

We also learned about the pros and cons of the different Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks (RAID) arrays namely span, mirror, stripe, stripe with parity and hybrid.

Finally, Alex discussed low level format, partitions, formatting and different file systems such as FAT32, NTFS, EXT 3/4, etc.

Today we registered to join a Career Fair to be held in Oakland on February 27. There was a long list of companies and most where service related. I found only 2 technology related job openings sort of closely related to Information Technology technician. We were also given a research assignment for 4 potential companies that one can picture applying for. I did a basic draft but will have to fill in more details.

Aubrey also gave a few of us some useful pointers and advise on how to proceed with the informational interviews.

Today Alex introduced the Troubleshooting Methodology that a Computer Technician should adhere to below:

1. Identify the problem
2. Establish a theory of probable cause
3. Test the theory to determine cause
4. Establish a plan of action to resolve the problem and implement the solution
5. Verify full system functionality and if applicable implement preventative measures
6. Document findings, actions, and outcomes

This serves as a guide or process to troubleshooting a computer system by gathering relevant information and excluding other possibilities to hone in on the mostly likely candidates for the failure. The next steps would be implementing the solution, verifying that it solved the problem (as well as checking that the solution did not create other issues) and documenting everything to reduce the recurrence of the same failure while serving as a reference for future concerns.

Alex practiced this methodology by simulating problems via question and answer to come up with the probable cause and solution in which everybody participated..

I ran CrystalDiskMark on our server which has a server oriented Intel SSD. Sequential read/write is decent but the Random (Q= 8,T= 8) test results are very good. Nearly 10X the performance of the desktop SSD in my office computer.

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 644.455 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 385.032 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 222.781 MB/s [ 54389.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 157.542 MB/s [ 38462.4 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 247.959 MB/s [ 60536.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 172.229 MB/s [ 42048.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 21.618 MB/s [ 5277.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 37.563 MB/s [ 9170.7 IOPS]

Test : 500 MiB C: 90.4% (270.8/299.7 GiB) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2019/02/07 10:44:41
OS : Windows Server 2012 R2 Server Standard (full installation) 6.3 Build 9600

Today was a continuation of our bench marking tasks of SATA drives that we need in order to replace the failing ones in the class and lab computers. Most of the hard drive we use nowadays use a SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) interface to connect to the computers’ bus. The PATA (Parallel ATA) is rapidly becoming obsolete.

Similar to different versions of USB, SATA also has different versions which support different data transfer speeds. SATA 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 theoretically have 1.5 GBps, 3 GBps and 6 GBps speeds respectively. One must always consider if the port or interface can support the transfer rate of the device to be connected to assure optimized performance while avoiding ‘bottlenecks’.

We have identified 5 computers from the class and the lab area that need to be replaced. Working in groups we tested out the replacement hard drives and identified the most promising ones using our bench marking tool. This required us to research how to service and open the brand and model of the class computers in order to gain access to the SATA and power cables and attach them to our replacement hard disk to perform the tests. I found one with a good performance which I installed as the primary or C: drive replacing the old ‘failing’ one. I started the imaging process with Acronis TrueImage but did not have enough time to finish.

Alex also shared a video of how to get into Safe Mode in Windows 10. Safe Mode boots into the Windows OS with a minimal set of drivers. This serves as a diagnostic tool to eliminate the cause of a fault in the OS, driver or hardware. I tried out two of the three methods in the video.

Today we worked on cashiering and we learned to do a blog post on the student website. We also learned how to edit a post.

Today was a continuation of the lab assignment we did yesterday with a twist. Alex asked us to benchmark all the classroom computers as well as the lab area. The purpose of which was to find out which hard drive is failing in the computers so that we can replace them with ones that are good. Afterwards, we segregated promising hard disks from the lab area which we are going as replacements. This was a group effort which everybody participated in. We put the information in a google sheet. When we were done, Alex showed us how to color code the information using conditional formatting with the use of color scales.

Alex also discussed the difference speeds for USB 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1 being 480 Mbps (60 MBps), 5 Gbs (625 MBps) and 10 Gbps (1250 MBps) respectively. However, these are ideal speeds which must be confused with the actual transfer rate which depends on the port and the device used.