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Cebu Week 1 [2016-01-23]

Goodness, time really flies quickly!  We’re already a week into our 2016 Philippines trip!  We’ve had a few small glitches, but overall it’s been a great start.  The highlight of the week was completing the installation work at Consolacion National High School.  We also spent a couple of days at our “home school”, Compostela National High School.  It is definitely wonderful to be back in Cebu!

We began the installation work on Tuesday at Consolacion NHS.  Jade had helped them get set up for our arrival, so the eight computers and monitors donated by Reneal were already in place and the network cabling was completed.  We worked side-by-side with the IT teachers, Ma’am Fritzie and Ma’am Eda, to set the BIOS and do memory checks.  Happily they have already been using Ubuntu on the computers there at Consolacion NHS, so it seemed to be an easy transition for everyone to go to the new Reneal system!  Neal got the server set up, so by the end of the first day, we had everything running together.  Wednesday we did testing, and the students designated as Computer Specialists came in for a while to work with Neal.  Thursday we had four sessions of orientation training for about 75 teachers, organized by department.  They were a very enthusiastic bunch, so it was a wonderful day!

Unfortunately Neal wasn’t able to get the video streaming working there, so he’s still tinkering with that.  One of the donated computer seems to have a dead power supply, and another one hangs up soon after start-up (cause still unknown).  I also managed to goof up the student list, mistaking the 8th grade students for 7th graders.  Otherwise it’s been a smooth start for the new installation work!

Neal has been wrestling with a couple of other hardware issues as well.  One of the servers we brought with us kept shutting itself down.  Thankfully we have multiple servers with us at the moment, so he’s been carefully testing the individual parts in other servers to try to isolate the problem.  Interestingly, it looks like all of the individual pieces are working properly.  Another quirky, inexplicable issue, but it’s looking promising that everything is okay.  In any case, we are thankful that Cebu has a multitude of good computer stores so we can easily get what we need here if there’s a hardware emergency.

Yesterday the Computer Student Specialists at Compostela NHS helped us replace the really bad CRT monitors in the library with some of the flat-panel displays donated by Free Geek.  In the course of doing that, we discovered that the library server wasn’t connecting with the network switch.  It looks like the LAN card in the server went out sometime in the last week.  So, while that’s bad news in a way, we’re thankful that we were here to troubleshoot it and fix it.  Thankfully we have an extra LAN card in our trusty green tool bag, so we’ll pay a visit to the library later today to replace it.

Next week we’ll be at Tipolo NHS in Mandaue City for our second installation.  We are excited to return there – they have a great lab already, and we look forward to putting in the Reneal system for them!  We have three more installations after that, and then we’ll begin visits to the 15 existing schools.  So… there won’t be lots of time for R&R, but we’re happy to have this precious time here in Cebu to do our Reneal work!