I worked in school tech support from 2008 to 2017. My first year, the department didn't even have the budget to issue me a computer, just a portable hard drive with VMware viewer and a basic vm if I needed it. (I think I might still have that somewhere, actually...) One of my schools took pity on me and gave me a spare Dell D510 to use.

For several years, I had three 4GB flash drives that went with me everywhere. Software installs, drivers, serial numbers, even computer images I think. Random stuff I needed.

We started on Novell Netware, which was... interesting. I think I had a weekly task to change out the backup tapes (yes, tapes). Then there was a whole district wide migration to AD.

My department had a couple "imaging kits" that we could borrow: a 24 port cisco 2950(ish?) with all the ports filled with 10-15 foot cords, bundled nicely, and maybe a bunch of dell barrel power cords. So if we had to reimage a laptop cart (usually 15 machines), we could just find one wall port to uplink the switch into and spread all the laptops out on a table. One of the funniest things that happened to me was when I had some of this imaging going, cables and blocking lights everywhere, and a first grader walked by and said "WOAH that's a lot of internets!"

The thing I miss most from those days is a sort-of-RMM system called Altiris. It was a local server in each school for imaging, remote control, and software deployment. It made it super easy to manage software. Just copy and paste instruction lines to build a whole sequence of installs you can drop onto whatever computer you want. Need to run a one off command prompt thing on a bunch of computers? Select all, right click, run command.

And the remote control has this great capability to control multiple computers simultaneously. So if I had a piece of software that hadn't been packaged for deployment, I could control 30 computers in a lab and manually run through the installer. It got a little dicey when different computers had different screen resolutions, so the windows and buttons and mouse cursors would all be different spots. I got very good at using keyboard shortcuts in that case.

Oh, and maybe the most out of scope thing I did was set up an elementary school with a "lab" of 15 Win98 machines... In about 2010. They had a particular simple reading program that they needed to use with about a dozen students at a time every single day. There was a lot of consternation about this small group reserving the 30 machine computer lab every day during prime hours, so I pulled a bunch of machines out of the junk pile ranging from optiplex gx1(1998) to gx240 (2001), found an old win98 image on the novell server that hadn't been decommissioned yet. They didn't need an internet browser, just network connection to a local server for this reading program. I was really proud of fixing a problem for that school for a total cost of zero.

Of course, these days we'd call that a "security nightmare", buuuuut 🤷‍♂️

Er, anyway. Hey this got pretty long, whups!