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This school year has been pretty different than most of the others I have been at this job. The biggest difference is the fact that I have an intern working for me. I have had student helpers in the past, but the results have always been hit or miss. This year, the worker I have has been doing an exceptional job and it is really nice to be able to free up my time to work on other projects.

Initially, the student was working four hours a day, one day a week taking care of different tech issues that pop up through the district. He is in the process of finishing up moving the remainder or our machines to Windows 10 from Windows 7. He has also put together a couple of Chromebook carts for me and will be working a lab today imaging new computers that were received via a grant.

At one point he approached me and expressed his interest to start working here two days a week instead of just one. I thought about it and I let him know that I was okay with it but he would need to come up with some things that he wanted to learn about.

Sometimes we are slammed with things to get done, and sometimes we are relatively slow. I didn't want him to just sit around twiddling his thumbs or playing on his phone when those slow times hit, so to justify the extra hours I needed him to focus on something new to learn.

He has some really good skills fixing machines and troubleshooting desktop issues, but not a ton of experience working with servers and networked environments. It was his decision to try and learn some more about networking, servers, AD, etc.

Putting it in practice

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I think it was a really wise decision for him to pick those items. Having some server management and user management skills along with group policy, etc. will go a long way for him down his career path.

I purchased this used Cisco router from an off lease vendor and I had him install Windows Server on an older desktop computer. I then had him setup another computer in his work area to be the client computer.

As I mentioned above, he is still finishing up a project, so he hasn't gotten to work on it yet. I am still working on getting the router set up correctly as well. I have never used a Cisco router before and I thought it would be a good learning experience for both of us.

I want his server and desktop to be on a separate network from the main one. I didn't want any of his learning to interfere with our production network (obviously). I still want his network to be able to take advantage of our Internet connection though. I have been able to get the traffic flowing all the way to our core switch, but I think there is still a route our service provider needs to add for that traffic to flow outside.

I have been contemplating taking a backup of the configuration once I get it working and then erasing the router so that my worker has to start from scratch and figure out what needs to be done. I am still on the fence about that one. I could be a good learning experience for him, but it feels really mean :)

I think getting this test network setup will be a really good thing and I am hoping even after my worker has graduated and gone on to college it will still be useful to myself and future interns I may have.

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