iPads at the Admin Level

At my school district we are starting to deploy iPads just as many others are.  While managing the vast number of iPads is still a difficult task there are several solutions and I hope that in a year a robust solution will be available.

However, what I haven’t seen is a decent business case for iPads.  When you have administrators that have all their documents in a folder on the server, shared documents in their department networked folders and a wealth of sensitive data that needs to be used by various people there just doesn’t seem to be an easy way to tackle this with an iPad.

Beyond simply email, calendar and Internet access how can we make these devices more useful in an everyday environment?  My Assistant Superintendent of Education Services has a goal of getting principals and assistant principals out of their office and more intimately involved in the daily activities of their schools.  To this end they have been given iPads to use in their job.  However, when the iTunes store is the first place users look for apps to utilize, syncing data with iTunes on their desktop computers, non-networked file access, etc this becomes a real challenge.

To this end I have attempted to find out how we may get tools in the hands (forgive the pun) of our staff that take advantage of our networked file infrastructure, Active Directory for authentication and authorization and vast wireless access across our school sites.

Check out my video where I presented our model to the CETPA CTO Mentor Program, of which I meet once a month in Sacramento with other education CTO and IT staff members.

http://vimeo.com/mattpenner/ipadsforadmins

We have had a lot of great interest in our model from the various school districts as well as Apple and Microsoft.

Next week I will be presenting the same topic geared towards developers at the Inland Empire .Net Users Group, of which I also am a member.  At that presentation I will be getting into the nitty-gritty detail of how it all works.  Plus you will see a production ready implementation rather than the proof of concept in the above presentation.  I’ll record this one as well and post it as soon as I can.

More as it comes! Smile

IIS7 Won’t Respond Over SSL if No Certificate is Selected

Ugh, while the title of this post doesn’t sound like that much of an issue chalk this one up to an experience I hope someone else doesn’t have to deal with.

We had an issue with our A/C unit in our data center last night and several of our servers were shut down due to excessive temperatures.  We are slowly brining them up as we are managing the cooling and they are all fairly coming up as normal. Some of the older servers reported errors with batteries or failed drives but these are fairly routine.

However, we had one of our brand new servers start up with seemingly no issues but IIS 7 was not responding to web requests.

This server serves up only two web applications over SSL and has worked fine for the last month that it has been in service.

Looking at the IIS logs, event viewer and any other sort of diagnostic tool we could think of reported no errors at all…and no connection attempts either.  Connecting from the local host offered no error messages.  Connecting through Fiddler2 only showed the cryptic message, “the server has actively closed the connection”.

Finally after restarting the entire server, the IIS service, the web site and the app pools we were grasping at straws.  Bindings were correct, permissions were correct, doing a “netstat –an” revealed the server was indeed listening on port 443.

In the end, what solved it is in the binding settings the Certificate dropdown showed None.  I selected the self-signed server certificate and the whole thing suddenly came alive.  I attempted to set the SSL certificate back to None, which wasn’t an option anymore.

Of course that makes sense.  How can you serve up SSL traffic when there is no certificate to authenticate the request with?  However, why a server restart caused the certificate to no longer be selected is beyond me. 

And why did IIS never throw an event or some type of log error that said, “Hey, you’re trying to serve SSL but no certificate is selected!”???

Anyway, hopefully this will show up on a Google search for someone else.  Cheers. Smile