What's Happening at Ranken Technical College

Ranken's Latest Video

Check out the College's latest video on YouTube. This video features information about the College, our five technical divisions, and our campus life.

Ranken Honored by Cisco "4R" Award

Ranken Technical College was recently awarded the 2008 Cisco Networking Academy "4R" award in the category of academic rigor.

The "rigor" category recognizes institutions who:

"...challenge their students to meet the demands of the Networking Academy curricula, which map to national and state standards in math, science and language arts and who encourage their students to take advantage of the articulated nature of the courses by pursuing post-secondary degrees."

The Cisco Networking Academy 4R Recognition Awards program stems from a broader education initiative addressing the connection between academic rigor, relevance, relationships and results. Academic institutions, teachers and the students themselves all play an integral role in leading the positive transformation of education. Nominations were solicited from the Networking Academy community, including schools, instructors and students. A review committee made up of Cisco Learning Institute staff selected winners in each of the four categories. Ranken was the only institution awarded in the "rigor" category.

Ranken Information Technology instructor Alan Poettker will accept the award on Ranken's behalf.

Scottrade offers Information Technology Career Fair to fill 50 open IT positions

Scottrade, a leading branch-supported online investment firm, is holding an Information Technology Open House and Career Fair from 3 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 14. The event will be held in the Bulls and Bears Café at Scottrade’s corporate headquarters at 12800 Corporate Hill Drive in West St. Louis County

Representatives from Scottrade’s Information Technology, Recruitment and Product Development departments will be available at the fair to provide information and answer questions about the company and its nearly 50 IT job openings.

Ranken @ Warfactory LAN

2 5-man teams of Ranken Tactical gamers attended the Warfactory LAN at the Science Center on Saturday, June 9th. This was our first tournament playing as a team and, while fun was had by all, our performance didn't exactly blow anyone out of the water!

The event was great overall though, and you can see some video from it here. Our teams will spend more time on our dedicated Counterstrike server this summer, and hopefully make a strong showing at tournaments this fall.

If you'd like to join us on Ranken's server then please feel free! The IP is 208.75.82.163:27015

(left) Department head Charles Corrigan observes a students progress at the LAN event.

Installing Server 2003

'This week of class I learned the process of how to upgrade and migrate to Windows Server 2003.  Sure it sounds as simple as popping in a Windows CD in and running the install wizard Right?? Wrong! What if you are a credit card company who is using an old NT 4.0 platform to run your servers, how do you upgrade it?

For normal computers a person could put in a CD and choose upgrade.  However, with Servers acting as domain controllers in the domain, it is important to know that there are many things to worry about.  For instance, if a clean install is done all the user accounts, passwords, information, and logical domain structure is destroyed.  However, if an upgrade is used most information is retained but all accounts need to be migrated, passwords can possibly be lost, and the domain and forest function level needs to be changed.

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is.  When upgrading a server there are many, many things to worry about. From what I have learned is that significant obstacles such as upgrading or installing on a server take careful planning and a backup of the server in case anything goes wrong.

Using Backups

'This week we went extensively into backup utilities and how they work. The backup utility we are using is called Ntbackup.exe.  It allows the use of many options when choosing to backup data. There are options such as compress data, backup data everyday at a certain time, and whether to backup 1 file or the entire computer, and many more.

One of the interesting things I learned was how to do an authoritative restore. This is important because in a domain environment with multi-master domain controllers (servers), data is overwritten by the other domain controllers once synchronized.  To keep the servers from overwriting data once they have synchronized or replicated, an authoritative restore must be done.  This gives the restored data authority over other data that the other servers think are current.  This is helpful when something is accidentally deleted and needs to be restored. This may seem a little insignificant, but the day you accidentally delete a critical file, or your server crashes and fails, you will really be glad you knew this piece of information.

Group Policy Objects

'This week in class we learned how to implement Group Policy Objects to configure User and Computer settings. 

For instance, if I were given a scenario a week ago where I had to manage 300 workstations, and 18 servers, and 400 users who all needed certain restrictions or allowances to different resources, i wouldn't have known where to start. 

This week I learned how I can restrict either some or all the users or computers in a Client - Server environment.  I also learned how software can be assigned to be installed in a way to where an administrator won't have to manually install software on 300 different computers to get something like Microsoft Word installed. 

I learned that all these settings and implementations take place in Group Policies.  Group Policies allow an administrator the ability to completely lock down a PC to the point where the user cannot shut the PC down, log in or do anything the administrator doesn't want you to do.  Aside from being able to lock down the PC, group polices can be used to assign software such as Microsoft Word on a specific computer when it boots up.  Or it can be configured to install Microsoft Excel at every computer user John Doe logs in to, so that the user has access to the program on any computer in the Domain.  There are many options as to how Group Policies can be used depending on your needs, or your companies needs.

'Phi Theta Kappa

Today I was inducted into Phi Theta Kappa!  For those of you who don't know, Phi Theta Kappa is an International Honor Society committed to providing opportunities and advancement among scholars. 

The requirements to be in Phi Theta Kappa are to have and maintain a 3.0 GPA or better after completion of 12 credit hours and pay a one time $65 fee. In my opinion, I think anyone who can join this should join.  I say this because it encourages scholarship based purely on academics, and yields scholarships for many 4-year colleges upon transfer, and members are automatically nominated to be in the national Dean’s List. 

For example, I have been considering transferring to Webster University because as a Phi Theta Kappa member they are offering one renewable full-tuition scholarship fully paid, and many partially-paid, renewable scholarships ranging from $2,500 to $8,500 just for being a member. 

I never in my life thought I would join a fraternity, but since this is based on academics and scholarship, I am glad I made the choice to join.

Fall Job Fair

This past week was all about jobs.  Last Friday Ranken held the annual Fall Job Fair.  From 11:00am to 1:00pm employers gathered in anticipation of hiring graduating students, or hiring part-time interns.  Companies like Anheuser Busch, Monster e-Commerce, Ameren, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, UPS, Rejis, and many other employers were at the event looking to hire fresh employees.

In fact, the majority of companies there for the Information Technology field specified that they are not looking for just one lucky candidate.  Many of the businesses I had a chance to talk with said they were expecting to double their staff and business over the next few months.  In particular what I liked was the fact that most companies did not require experience and/or required little or no certifications.  They anticipated fresh graduating students who were willing to be trained.  In addition to that, another reason I particularly liked this was because after trying to find a job outside of school in either newspapers, or online databases, the vast majority of employers on average wanted at least 3 to 5 years experience in addition to certifications such as the MCSA, MCSE, A+, and CCNA to name a few. 

Another plus is Ranken's Lifetime Job Placement policy.  It is just what it says Lifetime Job Placement.  So if a Ranken student ever at anytime lost his or her job there is a system in place to get you back on your feet.

Simulated WANs

'This week in third semester CNT, we stepped up our class's lab activities.  This week’s goal was to simulate a real business networking environment. 

We set up an environment that would simulate a medium-to-large-sized company, which would have three networked sites.  These sites in the real world could represent different branch offices in different physical locations. 

For example, if Ranken were the simulated company, St. Louis would be the main site, or headquarters – then suppose Ranken had branch offices in L.A. and New York, those would be set up as separate sites also.  Physically they would be separated by WAN (wide-area networks) links and logically they would be set up as different branch offices in Active Directory. 

This week I learned a lot of mind-boggling information about how to set up three completely different domains in a logical forest, and configure these domains as child domains to a parent domain.  If that sounds complicated, well that’s because it is.  However, I think this was a great learning experience. 

I also learned how to install a server and configure it as a DNS server, global catalog server and Forest Root Domain Controller.  Now it might sound as simple as click the "install" button after inserting a program CD, but I’m afraid it’s not that easy.  The first step is to install it, yes, but after that the task is to get the computers and users to talk and communicate with each other.  That in itself is a whole different ball game when talking about replicating or copying information to different servers, and making sure certain users have access or don't have access to certain resources.  That was my biggest problem when setting up this lab.  In order for a server to use certain resources and create a centralized user account on the domain in Active Directory, the DNS server and Global Catalog server had to be already up and running and replicating before my server was turned on.

I’m not going to go too deep into the specifics but like I said I learned a lot.  And in fact since I ran into so many issues and problems here at Ranken on this simulated lab, I am confident I won't make the same mistakes in the field in a real environment.