The last few days have been busy, getting ready for this weekend. Talking to people about getting stuff moved and writing notices, making a few exceptions for people who need to be up, other things we can take down at the same time, etc. Then there's fixing things that broke before or making other policy changes... And tracking down a suddenly broken kiosk machine. Turns out some idiot swapped out the NIC (a PCI 3C905B) with an ISA version of the same card. Seems to work fine for us which is nice, but the old NIC is now useless and probably tracked on the local network. Given the history of most of our computer thefts, the culprit will probably try to register it on resnet or something, although this was someone who had the guts to go into the library with a screwdriver and replacement NIC and swap it out. They even moved the dust cover over to the old slot. They did leave behind the WoL cable, which is sorta funny. Last night was way too late reading work stuff and poking for the weekend. Tonight was a good break with movie night. A decent number of people came over and we watched Fletch. My Dock locked up today. Sorta weird, since that collapsed into Finder and then the Apple Menu. Of course then the WM locked and even Alt+Tab wouldn't work. I managed to open up a terminal window and kill it off, which also killed the window management and made all my minimized windows reappear. I realized this is the second time for that today. Earlier all my minimized windows suddenly restored when the background switched. I though it odd, but maybe it was predicting. This machine has only been booted for 5 days, what the heck is up with it? I also noticed that certain window/ui stuff was having weird lags today too (like a short beachball on opening a dropdown). I wonder how open that WM code is in there - I've been really annoyed that focus-follows-mouse isn't avaiable too, so maybe I'll have to go hacker mode for a while and fix it. Maybe I can start poking while waiting for stuff this weekend. Doing some miscellaneous new domain registration stuff I noticed that gandi now has some interesting antispam stuff available now. Sorta interesting, but obscuring the physical name and location may be a bit far... For fun stuff on one of the mailing lists I'm on there's been a "WTF?" thread for the last day or so which started off as oddest things found under a raised floor but has sort spread into odd computer stories. A short time ago someone posted this story. Enjoy.

The trip went well. I spent a large amount of time just sitting and relaxing while listening to music. It's nice to be able to be isolated while there are people all around... Also caught up on some reading of newsgroups and magazines, which was nice. Took a decent number of pics, although only filled up the memory card once (firework pics). I'll have to post my pictures sometimes soon. No good sunset pics over Metigoshe this year (it was rainy), although got some from Itasca. Also got some nice shots of the moon over the lake, as well as some decent fireworks ones. I left iStumbler open most of the way there and back, and found a decent number of APs. Never saw any long enough to use them, but that's to be expected while going down the freeway/highway. The weekend unfortunately ended up with some complications in fixing my dad's computer, but things could have been worse there. Then there was work, which was a bit of catching up, but actually not bad. Preparing for this weekend may be a bit of work though. Hopefully not too bad though, and with enough time to do a movie night.

The last couple days went well. I sorted out a lot of stuff with Exchange, and even managed to get scripted Exchange accounts done. Now once we decide which departments get Exchange rather than open mail by default, it will happen automatically when their account is created. Tuesday night I went and picked up my powerbook. It seems to be better so far - we'll see how well it works over the weekend. Wednesday was interesting. I may end up writing more on that later once I know details. It did get me to add in a bit more redundancy. If the main system which handles windows account has problems they should be able to switch over to a secondary with no differences other than some delays in password change propagation. I'm just glad that as of whenever I left work tonight I'm done until Tuesday, so I don't have to deal with whatever could happen. Tonight is also the big switch for the web people. Something about Bethel changing it's name and all the web pages needing to be updated. I think my part of the change ended up being 4 lines or something for now, and that was to make it automated for the conversion time. I feel sorry for Raadt though, whose plight has caused him to start calling himself the "css monkey". When the design people change things ever 10 minutes for layout and it has to work in a ton of browsers... Currently I'm in the process of ripping some CDs. I realized a few somehow never made it to my Karma. That included Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon (SACD), Radial Angel - One More Last Time, and Macy Gray - On How Life Is. Yea, my musical choices don't fit into anything resembling any single type of music... Tomorrow I get in the car followed by my parents' van, to come back into civilization sometime on Monday. My phone should work as a relatively decent (faster than modem) Internet connection up there, but the Mac doesn't recognize my cable and I never ended up poking long enough to get it working on the linux laptop (which is staying at home anyways). So you'll have to handle a few days without me. I'm well prepared with the Karma and the awesome E2cs (makes traveling bearable and sound great - I think even Ross may have reconsidered his thoughts on my purchase after he heard them), offline copies of some newsgroups and half a dozen magazines on the computer, another handful of magazines in the old style (also known as printed), the Rebel, and whatever DVDs end up in the van (probably too many). That may sound like overkill, but when was the last time you we're planning on 18+ hours in a moving vehicle? Now I just need to find out when the actual departure time is in the morning so I can get up and pack beforehand.

Monday was good. Lunch at C1 for the last time in a couple weeks. In a day they close for their yearly two week vacation. The Apple thing was today, but didn't pay much attention to that. They didn't provide much publicity for it. Finished off the day tracking down some crazy exchange stuff. Which reminds me I should restart all that is exchange... Meghan came back and was at Bethel today, so it was good to see her. I think she's glad to be back and seeing everyone again. After work was movie night, with quite a few people over. The movie was The Italian Job, played at reference level. Lots of good stuff in there. Of course the Pink Floyd in the soundtrack meant out came the Dark Side of the Moon SACD at even louder levels for the awesome surround mix from Money, as well as Time, which was then refered to as "alarm clock hell". I agree though, that song would be a good prank to pull on a roommate... Well, Exchange is back up and running now, but still appears to be a bit goofy. I think I may have to queue a reboot up for first thing in the morning (the old fasioned way, it doesn't come up right if it's done automatically)... :(

The powerbook is now in pieces. Or more precisely, he "finished disassembling" it and will proceed to put it back together when the part comes in. The part would be the left blower to keep the insides cool, and the ETA is tomorrow. On Wednesday Ted stopped by and we (although my part was mostly watching) took it apart and tried to track it down. After booting it up, starting a loop to peg the CPU, and then playing three movies in quicktime simultaneously as well as plugging it in, we were able to get the fan to come on and it made a clicking/scratching sound. Taking the top off really makes those things cool better. :) The sound changes when you press on it, so we're thinking that the presure from the top screwed down, combined with resonance from the metal casing and the weird noises from the fan is the source of the annoying clicks/beeps/squeaks that once one notices cannot be ignored. We'll find out in a couple days when I get it back though. Last week was more miscellaneous cleanup stuff. We got to the point where the first step became "is this something on our end or do we send it back", which is good in a way because it means the stuff that's really bustificated is probably fixed, but bad because it means we wore out/confused the Help Desk and they don't know what to send where anymore. I think I need to send along more detailed info ahead of time on the next fixes. Towards the end of the week I also started changing and reconfiguring things. I eliminated one of the domains (although even though it disappeared from the list on DCs, the clients still show it - I'll have to figure out what machine needs a swift kick to the power cable to loose that cache entry), which is good because that's one fewer thing to cause problems/confusion. Friday night I also made it a native 2003 domain, and recreated the entire DNS structure for the forest. No, I didn't do the DNS stuff by hand, I'm not that crazy. Basically I set up a new AD integrated zone which means we have multi-master updates available so stuff is more stable if things are down. I also set up scavenging to clean up old workstation records since those tend to build up way too much. Then it was a matter of moving over DCs one by one and forcing DNS registration, and once the forest was built to a reasonable and almost complete level bump up the old zone serial number and allow rollover into the client DNS system. There are a few oddities/old domain records which are finally gone, which is nice. The scavenging plus building everything possible dynamically from scratch means that I now know there's a reason for everything being there and nothing I didn't specifically specify will end up stuck in there. For those worrying, yes I did test domain logins after I made all the changes. I want a quiet Monday too. :) Saturday was setting up wireless at my grandma's place. That included 802.11b (appropriately locked down), wireless video, and wireless phone. Everything seems to be peacefully coexisting, which is pretty cool as I think the video is 2.4Ghz too. After that was attempting to fix my dad's computer too, and getting Qdoba for the entire family. Most people liked it, which was good. Today was sitting around, poking with my dad's machine more (looks like something with the registry so another rebuild), and a visit to Southdale to see chyron off. I ended up watching Trainspotting which is an interesting movie. Not sure how much I liked it yet, I'll have to let it sink in a bit I think. Since the mall visit today I've been using my linux machine again, and it's just serving to frustrate me as to what I'm missing on the mac. I've decided that much of the OS X UI looks nice but has issues. This machine, despite being in PIII 700Mhz mode and having only 512MB RAM, responds much quicker than the G4 1.5 with 1GB RAM. And It's dealing with 1600x1200 on a lower end video card than than the one driving the 1280x854 screen. I'm having a hard time believing it's the hardware, so that leaves the OS. Darwin/mach is pretty quick, so that leaves Aqua. I had turned off many things (Onyx is a cool but not nearly useful enough tool), but I think I need to figure out how to shut off more animations. People say that the windows open plenty fast on the mac, but when I've been used to the new window being completely drawn by the time my hand is off the mouse button... Plus the dropped keys when typing fast is annoying. I thought I was just really fatfingering stuff, but when another coworker commented about it while I was trying to log into a machine, I figured it out. Mostly happens on passwords, I think a little above the 5 keys/sec point (it'll miss like 1-2 characters over the course of a few seconds). When you know it well enough to type faster, but can't see what's actually making it into the machine... Oh well, enough OS X rants for now. I have around 18 hours in the car (minus whatever I end up driving) coming up in the next week to try and make my computer usable like a real OS. :)

Today was a lot more relaxed. It had it's share of stuff, but nothing too crazy. Ted stopped by to look at my powerbook and yea it's not normal. Next step he takes it apart to find what part is messed so it can be ordered. Did some moving of virtual machines and reconfiguring the host today. Hopefully I can eliminate the one domain quickly now. After work decided to try hooking up the HD VCR. Uncompressed HD is amazing in many regards - 1080i from 10 years ago... Yea, it's analog and thus occational VHS sparkles, but there's also no MPEG compression and the resulting artifacts so it has more of a film quality.

Everything has become a blur. Thursday evening the file server which was being phased out this weekend lost two drives on one of the arrays. Turns out one worked well enought I could bring it back up and get a backup, but some stuff was definitely lost. So starting at like 8pm I jump into trying to get that part of the weekend's migration done that evening. Without being able to script anything first... :( I did manage to get most of it up and running though, and wasn't up all night. Friday was squashing bugs from the night before. Permissions problems, restoring lost data from earlier backups, plus trying to plan for that night/weekend. Friday afternoon my new powerbook was dropped off at my office which was good news. The bad part is that the only thing I was really able to do with it was plug it in to charge it since I was so busy. Friday evening involved locking down everything, starting backups, and doing the active directory part of the migration. My part was active directory. Migrating the users and groups was the easy part. The hard part was then sorting out all the groups. This process involved matching groups up with the department and renaming to match our new official short name for it. Then finding all user login scripts, matching up the users to the groups defining new policy application, and then migrating all the scripts over into the policies. This process actually went pretty smoothly, and was working fine. The restores finished after for most things smoothly and the exceptions were dealt with. Sunday I was woken up by my phone ringing, alerting me to the fact my dad's computer wouldn't boot. That's never too fun to deal with, especially when backups are questionable. After working on more of the login script stuff (it went smoothly, definitely not quickly), it was family time since it's that holiday. We all went out to eat, and on the way stopped to get a new hard drive for my dad's computer. That was good, but setting up the thing again wasn't. Windows 98 can be a pain... The old drive did run well enough to copy stuff off it, although fsck didn't like some stuff and couldn't fix it (just exited). I'm curious how much of the data is corrupted. That was left in a semi-usable state for him to finish installing. Monday was worse than usual. Something about the policies and the users didn't get along well and people weren't getting their drives or in some cases were getting random drive mappings that no scripts pointed to (still not sure what was causing those). Ended up fixing that in a way I didn't want to (converted domain local to universal so it gets passed in their AD credentials), but at least it's working. So far my guess is something with doing the group lookups combined with tons of hits from SID History lookups effectively swamped the DCs for a short time, and the multiple retries kept them a little slow. Sometimes drives would map minutes after login when we were first troubleshooting. Had to sort out some manual drives people had done as well as just wrong login scripts too. Plus more restores since we lost those drives on Thursday. At this point most things are fixed I think. Hopefully no new surprised tomorrow. I have a few things to clean up, and ideas about how to handle other things before the next updates to try and eliminate as many items depending on the old SIDs as possible. It's interesting to see some of the weird looking permissions that can result though when multiple SIDs for the same object but with different permissions exist. I'll just be happy in a few months when the whole structure stabilizes from all this object moving (with the way AD works these changes mean two objects for each one for about 60 days for replication purposes). These next couple weeks will hopefully mean a semi-break from AD stuff though (finally). Anyways, I did get a chance to get the powerbook configured decently for my purposes. I'm managing to load the thing down pretty well (I had the CPU pegged most of the day and I was trying to be nice and close things I wasn't using). It makes this intersting sound when the CPU is loaded too, but Ted might look at that tomorrow so we'll see. Hopefully there's nothing really too wrong with it. For email I'm sorta using Thunderbird. I have issues with it's GUI. We'll see how long it sticks around before I go to pine or something.

Yea, I've been busy lately. Unfortunately this leaves me a little lacking on the just chatting with people side, but hopefully next week will be better. Saturday's stuff finished up decently, and it didn't go beyond Saturday. Not that it really could have either, as Sunday was moving day for my grandma. Got up and to her place by 9am ready to move stuff. A good chunk of that side of the family showed up too. I was there all day and ended up finally heading home around midnight I think. My dad was one of the people who brought a trailer, but he had to head out to work so I ended up having to drive the van and the trailer back and forth all day. I forgot how much a trailer can help you feel every bump in the road and remind you of it's presense constantly. Especially when loaded full of bricks... Anyways, the day included local trips and even a trip way out to Rogers to bring a table and chairs out there. I got furniture for my deck and an HD VCR out of the deal though, so not complaining. Gotta get that hooked up though. Monday was trying to track down some of the problems with Saturday's updates. The problem was mainly with people who left themselves logged in, although there were a couple other problems too. There were some other problems with the old domains too. Basically stuff didn't want to talk right. My guess is delayed effects of the network outages on Saturday morning (the logs pointed to that timeframe as the starting point). Oh well, the servers needed a reboot anyways. :) Got out of there at a semi-decent time, but did nothing but sit for the evening. Tuesday was more of the same, with some people having problems reaching another fileserver. I vaguely remember some log entry about someone wanting to be that machine on the network, but no details. Most machines can get to that fine though. I'm really don't like distributed the windows stuff and browse masters - it's just a mess, maybe we can change the node type to p-node this summer finally. That server had probably been running for a long time though, so again reboot time. Tuesday was also more tracking down the problems from the weekend (sometimes ITS is the hardest group to get decent info from - they try to troubleshoot themselves rather than just pass raw data). Anyways, left work relatively on time, heading to grab dinner at Qdoba and to my grandma's place to set up the computer, the desk, and try and get stuff working. I loaded up the bulk cat5 and coax along with tools and ends too. Comcast didn't come until Monday to install cable, the phone lines, and the cable internet. Turns out that they only had one cable outlet inside, and couldn't run more without approval from the homeowner's association due to their normal policies of going through attics or a new feed from outside and stuff. Anyways, I spent some time with the fishtape, but there were some goofy things in the house so it's back to wireless. For now until that stuff arrives there's a cable down the hallway - oh well. Then I finished putting together her new desk with my brother. I brought along the big cordless screwdriver, which made work much quicker with screws taking 2 seconds each rather than a minute or so. I was designed for hand assembly though, and I snapped the heads off two quick connect screws. They still hold together, but they aren't coming back out... Even so, the project took until after midnight, but stuff was up and running. Cable modem wasn't working though, and the registration stuff wasn't working ("can't locate account"), so I gave her the cable modem and computer MACs and said to call in the morning. First guys says you have to register with the software, and try again. Nevermind the software is from two company names ago, so probably doesn't work even if the account is valid. Next rep gets it registered and asks if it works, and when it doesn't says she can ping the modem, but not the computer, so it's a winsock problem. Turns out it just needs a reboot, but the rep thinks it should just work so doesn't even suggest it. Their support is worthless... To top the whole thing off, the rep she talked to prior to moving arranged for a transfer of service, said to bring the modem over, plug it in, and everything should work. We thought the "account suspended" email bounces were odd during the transition, but never expected the reason to be the idiot canceled the entire account. Of course they can't reissue the same email address either... Makes me want to cancel my cable modem. I see Visi has 1.5/1.0Mbps dl/ul DSL for around $50 including line charges. That's starting to look more attractive for a competant ISP and a static IP with servers allowed. Wednesday at work was more of the same. Planning for the weekend, troubleshooting random things people keep throwing my way, ACLs changing unrelated pieces when changes are made... This upgrade thing will be nice when it's done. I've been rebuilding the account management stuff for the Windows side with the new Windows Server 2003 tools, and have to say I'm impressed so far. They've really changed a lot of things for the better. Granted I have had complete control of the design and structure of this so far, so dropped things like IIS in favor of apache since I don't trust IIS, but at least some of their stuff is better. I keep finding new fun things to take into account though. I don't think most people realize how complex an upgrade like this actually is to pull off with as much transparency to everyone as possible, but hopefully the problems will be few. But yea, if you see me online, feel free to chat. If it's during the day it may get lost in the hundreds of windows I've been having open for the dozens of tasks I've been juggling lately, but I'll probably appreciate some distraction from the real world. That is if anyone is ever still online by the time I find the messages...

It was a long week. Currently I'm sitting in my basement listening to music and working. While it may not sound so bad, the music is only to pass the time. Although I do like just listening to music, and it is nice and cool down here. Today is the day that I move ITS over to the new AD domain and fileserver. The migrating the accounts themselves wasn't that bad. They went over pretty smooth. Once I figured out that the reason schdav's account wouldn't move is it was locked out - again. I finally tracked down the source of that today though - Ross, you should fix your server. :) Moving files went well too, but was just too much manual work to sort them out. This week is a captive audience though which is more to test stuff, which I can hopefully script almost completely by next weekend. The office drives are another story. I think we need to talk to people in our departments about cleaning that up before we can bug other departments too much. Between the two we use around a third of the entire administrative side (other than C&M). And that's only one of the 3 places ITS has fileserver space. What else did I do this week? Well after starting to set up another domain controller since it appeared ours would not be tracked down in time, I found them. They had been delivered to a random adjunct office rather than where they were supposed to go (and yes, the correct room number was written on the boxes). You'd think two boxes that are big and bulky would be noticable. Especially since most of the boxes they've been getting that size and larger lately have likely been going to us. Then I got to poke with Windows Server 2003, figure out replication problems (they're designed to work problems out over time, not by switching out your entire DC cluster in a few hours and instantly be stable), and set up a virtual machine as a domain controller at a remote location. Plus punching a few more holes in the firewall on the NAS, mounting things in racks (only to find some rails are missing), finding other places to put things in racks, and stacking servers on tables (aren't big jumps in servers while we wait for rack installs that we can't do until we get the correct rails fun?). The AC stuff on Tuesday went well. Moved one duct, and got them to turn on the old unit and just shut it off at the thermostat - that way if we have problems we can turn it on right away rather than overheating everything. Between the fan in the one spot and moving the ducts, it's in the low 60s at one end (the one with the ducts blowing out) and only up to around 75 at the other (the end with the return), so that's an improvement. Yes, there's a lot of heat generated in that room... Also did more account cleanups. We're discovering new fun things about adjuncts and making polices to fix them. I like the newest one, which will hopefully be formalized soon. I did get cleanup to the point that each username only has an account in one domain (note I said each username, not each person - that's another headache). Only another week or so and then I can delete a bunch more accounts too. The restore of department files finally finished, but it looks like I'll be waiting a while for it to uncompress. Should have waited until after they were moved to where they were gonna be permanantly so I could just leave it and let it go. I'll have to remember that for next week. Oh well, I'm gonna go find more things to do online while I wait for the bar to move all the way across the screen. From what i've seen so far, they've actually managed to make it only take one time across - it's a little shocking to see the time estimates at first, but then you realized that's how long it really took before anyways and it's not so bad. Especially on install when the defaults are sane (like Windows Server 2003 has no services that you'd want to unintstall up and running on stock install (other than messenger, but that's disabled by domain policy) - I was happy when I actually saw it happen). The cool part is it doesn't even ask on install so you can almost just let it install by itself. Tomorrow is moving day for my grandma, so I'll probably be busy with that most of tomorrow. Hopefully no surprises involved there.

Interesting day. Mondays (or the appropriate first day of the week) have been rushed lately. At least they're not boring anymore. My little email run got quite a few responses. That's why we send them out though - much, much better than assuming the data is all valid and just disabling accounts, especially when it's large numbers so you can't check them over by hand. Lunch was cattle company on another coupon. Multiple Bethel departments ended up going, which was cool (although we didn't see them there). In the afternoon I started poking with the server room cooling again (get to call about that after seeing what the morning status is), and hopefully get some fans set up to eliminate some hot spots behind the racks. Just redirecting air pulling through one of them into the return pushes the return air temp up about 10 degrees. The unit should be able to handle it, just a matter of adjusting the airflow so we don't overheat our servers anymore. To top off the work day I started playing with iLO and setting up the NAS box. iLO is a really cool technology. Basically I can connect over HTTPS and get console on the windows box. There are issues with cursor tracking, but I got it up and running and firewalled with VNC installed so I could use that to get it patched and stuff (gotta love specialized OSes where windowsupdate doesn't work). Will be handy if we need in the BIOS or anything as we shouldn't need to use a KVM to connect to it or anything. That thing is loud though. It's weird sitting across the room hitting the "virtual power switch" and it suddenly sounds like a jet engine is running behind the chair. Yea, I think I'll wear headphones while finishing up the config there. After I got home I set about inspecting the couch. No easy way to wire it internally, so trying a slightly different approach. It's all wired up and levels tweaked now. Also got the room rearranged, although I think I should build a platform for the rear speakers. I'm liking this setup downstairs though. It's very nice down here (like upper 60s), so I've been relaxing and listening to music. I should probably figure out a better way to isolate the floors though - it's probably not the most economical to try to keep the upstairs cool while so much cold air is getting to the basement. Ugh. Just looking at line voltage graphs. The voltage during the day is dropping like 2%. Anything under 10% should be fine for pretty much anything (it's the standard tolerance), but the graph is sorta funny looking. You can tell the AC units really kicked in today too. The weekends are like nothing, Tuesday through Friday last week are pretty even, but then today we see a big dip. Oh well, such is life. The output voltage on the UPS looks fine...