Sunday was good. Started off the day by going to Salem. A bit crowded there, and there was this old lady at the end of the pew who didn't seem to know what was going on and didn't want to get up for communion so everyone had to go around and try to get past each other and stuff. After that found out that at my parent's church they had some bad problems with their server and lost everything and may not have backups. They were looking for me, and I left a voicemail with the guy that's working on it but haven't heard back. Hopefully they won't lose too much. After that went into Bethel for a bit and sent out ineligible emails for employees. Judging by the responses we need to work on the adjunct eligibility a bit. But if 10 or so out of 250 is all we see, I'm not gonna really complain. After that went with my parents and met my brother and sister to load up the van and trailer with stuff. This stuff included a couple nice couches, some end/coffee tables, and a color laser printer. Most of that ended up at my house, so I'm not complaining. This laser printer isn't fast, but it's color and as most things under linux are, I just plugged it in and it worked (why do windows and macs have such a hard time printing again?!?). In between loading it all up and unloading it at my place it sat in my parents' driveway for a bit as we went up to an aunt and uncle's place to visit some relatives who were in town. Wasn't too entertaining, but it was pretty decent. After we got back to my place and unloaded everything my dad fixed my air conditioner too. It seems to work quite nicely too, which is good considering 50% of the forcasts for the coming week (which seems to change 10 times a day). All in all a good day I'd say. Now I just want this picture to print so I can turn off the printer and go back to non-flickering lights.

Thursday was Staff Appreciation Day, which was good. Twins game so that part wasn't too entertaining, but just sitting around talking with people and not having to work is always nice. Got to go home early too. Thursday was also National Hunger Awareness day, and as many of you probably know that means a free Chipotle burrito if you bring in two canned food items. So a bunch of Bethel people went there in the early evening. Free Chipotle is hard to beat. Later that evening I went to pick up my sister and bring her down to the Airport to pick up a friend's car. Given that I picked my sister up in Maple Grove and didn't really take the most direct way home, I basically made a big loop around the west/central cities. Only like 70 miles, but sometimes it's just fun to drive in the middle of the night on roads with like no other cars and the tunes cranked. Friday I started doing more account audit type stuff. This is cleaning up the old accounts before we do merging. I'd rather just get them out of there or at least flagged to basically ignore since we may have to do manual tweaks and stuff to the active accounts as glitches come up. Friday night was movie night, which was good. Pizza Hut were being jerks about prices so we ended up getting pizza from two places again. Oh well, such is life. Movie was BIg Fish which is interesting. Godo story, but not sure if I liked it yet. It seemed long even though it was only 2 hours. I think part of that is they jump around a lot. Yea it's to set the mood and understandable, but it doesn't seem to be done in a good way. Oh well. Saturday was sleep in day of course. This was followed by a trip to MG and then out to Rogers for my cousin's grad party. When I got there I found out I had to leave in like 15 minutes to bring my other sister to meet my grandma to go to a game. Unfortunately due to road construction this involved more driving than it should have, which wouldn't be bad except that it took some people longer than it should have to say hi to people so we were running late. After that it started raining very hard. Like can hardly see 50 feet in front of you hard. I intended to go home, although due to the aforementioned road construction that route was closed, and the detour route they had is normally bad and the rain didn't make it any better, so I had to go out of the way a bit to get decent roads. That was cool, other than the rain turning into can only see the guy 30 feet ahead of you because of his taillights. Good thing I know that route pretty well, because I couldn't see the signs over the road even as I drove under them. I like rain better when people drive normal in it rather than driving 10 under the limit and hitting the brakes randomly for no apparent reason too. As for the weather otherwise, it's getting too hot. The hot part isn't that bad, except for the humidity thing. Hopefully I'll get my AC running before this next week. As for other fun stuff, the exchange server was acting up the last couple days again. After getting the stuff copied I kept moving boxes over. Then due to old logs the drive filled up. Moved them over to another machine and was able to free up a couple dozen GB and keep the migration going. After all that finished was able to do an integrity check on the old store which returned no problems (funny since it's been complaining for the last few days), followed by a defrag which just builds new files and copies the data over and moves them over the old ones. Now we have around 50GB free, but it's still complaining there's corruption in that store. Crazy thing, at least there's not much in it anymore.

So I'm sitting here watching a document roll itself up, move a few inches, and then unroll itself. This is all happening in a small grey box. This part is only like 35GB (it totals 52GB, but I got the rest already), but it's the part I'm worried about. Windows is apparently flaky with large files - this is only two files, one 24GB and one 13GB. It kept complaining the source wasn't there anymore, or the path was two long, crazy stuff. Always in the middle of the copy. Seems more stable now though. The data that's being copied is part of the storage for an exchange server. This past Monday the Information Store (process that handles storing all the data in these funky database files) "terminated unexpectedly". Odd, but MS stuff seems to do things like that occationally, so just started it and let it go. It was acting a little odd, but just let it go, especially due to the other email issues it probably was getting pounded with email traffic. Then it happened again. And again. And got really slow randomly. Yea it was occationally spitting out error messages, but the documentation when you looked them up said stuff like permissions not right or that the Information Store isn't running (imagine that, seeing as the error was generated when it crashed). So finally (in the sense that only people who have done lots of computer troubleshooting understand) today it gets a few errors which point in the direction of database corruption. The fun part is that the backup guy's been fighting with exchange and the tape drives trying to get a complete backup for way longer than we'd like (so restoring would be bad). Of course it's the middle of the day and it's still running, so gonna leave it up. I immediately created a couple other stores and started migrating boxes over (the enterprise versus standard license is probably worth it just for that ability if you're serious about using exchange). It's taking forever, but the more mailboxes out of the half broken database the better. But we decided better safe that sorry, so at 8pm shut the exchange stuff down totally until 7am tomorrow and are just doing a copy of all the important exchange files. At least we'll have a backup then. After that I think I'll try to have it migrate all the boxes to other stores and then we can unmount and repair the other one without downtime. I don't normally mess on that server much so didn't realize how much they had on them. I think I'm gonna push for a few smaller stores rather than one big one. The idea of a 35GB Jet database on an NTFS filesystem doesn't give me the most piece of mind... As long as this rate of people posting to the outages list doesn't keep up. Although I still find the one about someone taking out one of our office buildings by knocking an uplink cable off in the closet with big orange road cones sorta funny. Almost like the people who kept accidentally unplugging the switch which sounded like a industrial blower by practically sheering off the plug at the outlet and then not noticing and wondering where their network went a couple years ago (yes, it happened like 3 times too, and we did tell them why between times - shared closets suck). Other things that happened today include we packed up the NAS that we're sending back. Now you can move in the front half of my office and that's about it. It should ship out Friday though since tomorrow is the staff retreat, so don't have to live with it too long. Last night was more AD cleanup and emailing people about their accounts. Hopefully not much more of that left. Woohoo! The 13GB file just completed successfully, now on to the 24GB file... We announced yesterday our plans for Windows and this summer, and no complaints yet. That's a good thing. To wrap this up, today for lunch Ross and Nick and I went to Cattle Company. They messed up our order though, so we had to wait for new food to come out. Sorta annoying, but it was the 3 of us so we just sorta shrugged it off as don't go back to work as quickly. We did get more free bread out of the deal though.

Long weekends rock. It's nice to have a bit of a break sometimes. Friday was more Windows stuff. I'll be happy when everything is a bit more stable. Was there sorta late just poking at stuff, did move some accounts around. Then I set up the new domain, and went crazy with security policies. Most of the domain controllers in the existing system are talking IPSec to each other whenever possible, which is nice. The goal is to get that up before moving accounts around a bunch and before the new password requirements go into place. Also password policies, machine policies, default permissions on stuff in the domain, automatic locking down of domain controllers as soon as they are promoted, etc. We'll see what other interesting automatic stuff I can do. I think I have the naming set for now, but still not totally satisfied. We'll see if I get bugged enough to pick something better. Went home and started poking with VoIP stuff. Got way too involved with poking there, and ended up not going to bed until like 6:30am or something. I knew it was too late when my brother was getting up to go to work. I learned about SIP, IAXtel, different codecs, asterisk (very cool all-software pbx), and lots of other internet providers. With the right asterisk routing config and a handful of well chosen VoIP-PSTN gateways you could get really cheap long distance rates. The rates on most of the gateways (even international) are dirt cheap... Like 4c a minute or less to places like UK and AU. Apparently a lot of people outside the US use them to call back to the US too since you can get that really cheap (like 1.1c/min or even free sometimes) and if you have a decent (even reasonable dialup) internet access, it doesn't matter where you are. Plus you can do crazy stuff with routing and wireless and stuff. Finally went to bed with a box able to route on at least 2 different VoIP networks, make calls to toll free numbers for free, and accept calls through various local gateways. Actually managed to run my phone's battery all the way down and use it plugged in for a while. Finally decided to get some sleep, and slept until mid-afternoon. Gotta love Saturdays. Then went geeky on telecom stuff among other things for the rest of the day among other things. Went grocery shopping, which was very needed. Found these IBC things that taste good but are IBC so too pricey. Cherry Limeade though, you should try it sometime. Also oiled my garage door so it's not all noisy and stuff anymore. I don't thing the previous owner did anything to it really. Sunday morning was church at Salem. It was pretty full. Not sure if that's the date or the fact that it was the first day with two services. After that chatted a while with my grandma about computer and phone stuff since she's moving. I still think it's sorta cool that like half the people I know either have or are seriously considering completely dropping their normal phone line to go cell only. The phone companies keep bumping up the price, so what do they expect. The average bill these days seems to be around $30 and that doesn't include long distance and ties you to a location. Between the cable company phone (a dedicated VoIP), places like vonage and packet8 over broadband, and cell phones, I wonder how long it'll be before the local phone companies end up mainly handling data lines or private phone trunks rather than individual lines. Anyways, ended up learning about this cool company who actually will give you a free phone number that routes to any SIP (a VoIP protocol) address on the net. You may wonder how that's possible, and the reasoning is that phone numbers don't actually cost the phone companies anything. Yea, thats right. The only thing that costs is interconnection. Although then that's shared, and calls are done in peering similar to how ISPs work on the net. While the US has enjoyed unlimited local calling for a long time, the catch is that the calling phone company actually pays a small amount to the receiving end - you may have heard of this as part of the reason long distance rates stayed so high for so long - they had to pay the interconnection charge on the receiving end. This balances out with traffic both ways in many cases and the companies call it a wash (balanced peering), but if it gets more than whatever's negotiated, the caller pays. It's apparently enough to cover the VoIP gateway costs too. So anyways, I now have a free voicemail box number to give to companies when they need a phone number to reach me at. Since it's probably to telemarket and I don't want to deal with telling them to leave me alone on my cell, that should be cool. I also have one that I'll probably use to play around. Maybe integrate it with some other useful stuff since US cell companies see fit to offer free minutes but no free sending text messages. So anyways, if you call 360-516-2134, it gets routed over the net to a machine in my equipment rack downstairs which currently just does some funny stuff. I'll probably add stuff to it eventually. The monkeys and weasels and listening to my music be repeated back to me are funny though, so I recommend calling it if it won't cost you anything. My brother's car was dripping antifreeze when he came home today too, so I spent a long time on the phone while under the hood with rags, flashlights, and screwdrivers. Enough that I ended up making my phone go dead again. A couple hours of talking plus a day of being on and poking on the keypad... Yea phones get great standby these days, but you only get the two weeks if you don't make calls, and only a few hours of talk time. Fuel cells will be nice... Also ended up reading about NANPA and the number relief proposals today. Apparently when we go to 12 digit dialing they'd expand the numbering restrictions and it'd be mandatory 12 digit across the country. Given how some people are still so attached to 7 versus 10 digit, that'll be interesting. It'd be nice to be rid of the artificial restrictions supporting 7 digit dialing keeps in place though. Also spent a ton of time cleaning up the desk and sorting mail. Followed by going through my palm and cleaning/updating stuff. If you think I might not have your correct info, feel free to let me know there. Mainly it was a sync to remove old addresses and get phone numbers transfered from the cell so the palm/computer is up to date. What in the world did we do before electronics? Anyways, since I'm on line 89 now, I think I'll wrap this up. Anyone actually read the whole thing? :)

Wednesday was more tracking down accounts as well as poking with AD. Sorta got the new domain up and running. If you're gonna set up a new domain for all your user accounts, do it right. No, that's not edited other than to blur out the other domains. And no, I don't think they'll let me leave it that way for very long, but because of fun AD stuff I couldn't call it Users... Wednesday night was movie night with Matrix Revolutions, which isn't all that great of a movie. First big movie night of the summer though, so that's cool. Mr. Boyum didn't show up so everyone sorta slashdotted his cell phone with calls and text messages. Apparently he was buying groceries at the time too. Didn't get him to come over though. Thursday was more tracking down accounts and stuff. It's amazing with only a few people how many random accounts we can track down off the top of our heads. Still a bunch left though. I'll be happy when that's done, as once we have all accounts associated with something specific they can be audited automatically. I need to track down all these accounts as well as set up the new domain structure pretty quickly. Hopefully the hardware and software will all be here early enough that it's nothing to worry about, but at least I have plans to get domain stuff together beforehand. I'd like to test a lot of locking down heavily by default policies though before it goes production. Thursday night I spent time trying to figure out what's up with the computer talking to the cell phone. I think it's just windows being crazy. I think I need to look into virtual machine stuff there to do snapshots of the system and make troubleshooting easier. Oh well, we'll see if it's worth it (if I can figure out the data init codes it won't be needed).

Well, tonight at work I finished the first round of auditing duplicate accounts. Glad to get that done, as I was working on it late last night too. Basically everything I could do without asking the users first. Glad that's over with though. We still have old and unused and invalid accounts and stuff, but only like 40 more accounts to deal with before we can actually get this summer's work done. Hopefully I'll get the rest done anyways though. JL! posted and interesting entry on Straight Pride which seems to be generating some traffic. You should check that out. Today at work the new toys came in, but there were two of them. Wouldn't be a bad thing except given the price and the fact we only ordered one I'm guessing they'll be wanting one of them back pretty quickly. Oh well, they look cool for now. I got sick of what was up on outside since Ross took down his computer which served it (not that the quality was that great to start with), so updated it with a nice view out over Lake Valentine... Seriously though, I think I'm gonna have to find a good place to put a webcam so we can get that up and going. If we do there are good ideas of what to do with it.

Nothing too exciting, thus the lack of posts. Lots of just has to be done stuff. I started an account audit for Windows accounts to clean up for the summer. We have way too many people with duplicate accounts, and then there's the whole really leanient on student accounts so we have like 2700 that aren't current students (I just cleaned those up last year too - I didn't realize our turnover was that high). We'll see how that goes this week though when I actually dive in and start doing things with the accounts. Friday night brooke invited a bunch of people over to her place for dinner and then a movie. She made some good soup, despite her claims of not being able to cook (granted it was just opening cans and stirring, but...). Not too many people showed up - besides the 4 obvious it was just Dan and I. After that I went to BestBuy with brooke and Joe to get Joe's graduation present sorted out. He ended up returning the gamecube and got an Xbox instead. Also ended up getting a couple games, an extra controller, and the dvd remote. After unpacking it and starting to play it promptly overheated though. brooke and I spent time alternating between playing the game and trying to figure out why it kept overheating even after cooling down while Joe checked out of his place. Eventually Travis came over and we found the fan making noise attempting to spin. So the thing went back in the box to go back to the store the next morning. Hopefully he got a new one that works now. Saturday was relax day. Slept in a bunch, sat around the house, and watched The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I'd have to say the reviews were a bit off on that one. Yea it wasn't the greatest movie ever, but it was actually pretty decent. It's not a movie to be expecting a plot, but more of just a fun pulling together of a bunch of classic book heros to conquer the evil guys. Standard fun no-thinking action flick. I'd have to recommend it. Sunday was Salem, followed by going home and sitting around some more. Still raining of course. I like rain a bit, but I think the biggest thing is the big storm aspect. I just keep looking outside hopeful for lightning and thunder that shakes everything and stuff blowing everywhere for high winds, and all I see is rain hitting and bouncing off the ground and a world of highly saturated color. So it became time to listen to music downstairs some more. I need to get a more comfortable chair down there. It's always good though, sometimes music just needs to be cranked up a bit. Eventually started watching Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, which was recommended to me at some point. It's a good thing I don't remember where, since that thing was boring as heck. Didn't take long to reach over and grab the computer and start surfing the net more. I let it play through, but didn't pay much attention to the last hour and a half. Doesn't help that it was 160 some minutes long. The guy seems a bit odd. Oh well, at least I didn't suffer through it all. Then there was the season finale of Alias, which seemed to try to cover too much and jump around more than normal. Sorta makes sense to try and tie up loose ends for the summer, but they seemed to do less of that than opening up a bunch of new things and then finishing quick and going to something new. Oh well, we'll see what next fall brings. Tomorrow is back to work, and hopefully only deleting the accounts on my list...

Thursday I got this Caribou ad in the mail. I just glanced at it, something about their new location and stuff, no big deal since I don't buy overpriced coffee all that often. Then I noticed the map on it - oops. You know, you'd think a company would keep better track of the location of their local stores. If you're gonna make a map covering a 600ft diameter, put things on the right side of major roads and railways...

Nothing's been too exciting so far this week. Work has mainly been trying to get a good overview of what's happening for this summer as far as a timeline goes. And lots of just little things coming up. Investigating MS security best practices and suggestions for their products and stuff. Hopefully I can change what I'd like to this summer for security and ease of maintenance, and it should make the entire structure more reliable and faster. It may also allow a lot of cool new things. We'll have to see on that though. One thing I found out about today is this article called Help: I Got Hacked. Now What Do I Do?, which is written by the same Microsoft guy who was at the security conference. Basically it's why after getting any sort of virus or worm or whatever you should just wipe and reinstall the machine, and not a whole list of other possibilities. Finally someone from Microsoft who actually says it (doesn't surprise me who wrote it either - someone like that high up in the MS security group makes it easier to believe they may actually go in a good direction overall). But yea, pretty boring if you're not a geek, but that's my life I guess.

The bonfire was good. A lot of people didn't show up, but we had a big fire so they were the ones missing out. Sunday was Salem as usual, followed by just reading online. There was some interesting stuff on slashdot today. I think my favorite quote of the day in reference to impossible things is "but moores laws and fry's electronics has certainly changed that." Finished off the day by watching The Untouchables. Good movie, although not my favorite type of movie. It's stormy outside now though, and lots of thunder and stuff. That's always fun.