Great quote yesterday by Brent Flaten (one of the student workers) on our way back from lunch:

"I'm really just a secret agent disguised as a stupid person."

I don't remember the exact circumstances leading up to it, which causes it to loose some of the effect, but that's most of it. Now I get to go figure out why my Grandma's cable modem is allowing her past her gateway to talk to the DNS servers, but no farther (and I can ping her gateway, but not her machine). I have a feeling this will be interesting...

Woohoo! It's done! The domains are totally merged, and all servers are up and running. It went rather smoothly, with only 3 temporary glitches and one that required the reinstall of a machine (is it bad that's considered smooth when dealing with windows machines?). Now it's just cleanup next week, and hope everything's replicated everywhere by monday so there's fewer delays for looking up data. Next week/weekend we start weeding out people who have accounts in multiple domains - even more fun stuff. At least when we're done we won't have to deal with it near as much.

Finally an upgrade that's gone rather smooth. We successfully upgraded an NT4 domain to a domain under an existing tree. We still have the original 2 DCs in case we have to rollback, but we'll redo them one at a time tomorrow. Snag 1 - NT4 BDCs are quirky. After isolating the original controllers the new BDC (whiterice - it's someone's nickname) didn't want to see the accounts and computers right. After deciding that if the accounts were really over we could copy the login scripts manually, we took the new BDC off of both networks and promoted it to PDC. This fixed the account problems, and allowed us to get working (we'll retrieve the scripts later). Then there's the having to "cancel" the upgrade to install SP2 so it doesn't keep crashing... Finally it was all done except replication, and we discovered the NTFRS database was corrupt (apparently not too uncommon). Now members of both original sides can sse and log into both domains, so the rest of this should go rather smoothly...

Well, my laptop got shipped off today. Apparently the person taking down the info on the phone yesterday got it wrong, and sent the driver on a wild goose chase. Oh well - at least it's on the way now. I've been hanging out at work for my computer time - guess that will have to do for now. Mainly just miscellaneous stuff. I made the polls look a bit nicer now.

More making crazy stuff. This time it's polls. You can even make your own polls, and there's some stuff in there to help prevent casual ballot stuffing. A test poll.

Well, I get to send in my laptop to get the display problem fixed. I don't think it's the LCD, and it seems to be either the video card or the cable down in the base. Of course this will apparently take 5-10 days, so that'll be great fun... I have to take out PC Cards, batteries, floppy drive (if it was in), and basically everything that is in any way removable. They must have gotten too many complaints about losing them or something. I guess I'll be hanging out at work so much it won't matter too much, but it's still a bit of a pain not having my computer. Oh well, had to be fixed at some point. Maybe this means I'll actually get this other machine installed and working somewhat though.

Long day, finishing up a long week, but it's over and the weekend is here. It started off with me waking up to 61 new emails since 2am, most of them email copies of pages. By the time I got to work I had practically as many more. We ended up turning off paging since it was rather pointless anyways. We went to Chipotle for lunch, I fixed a pretty major security bug, looked at a really messed up solaris box (it's clock liked to sit within the same 3 seconds continuously, causing rwhod to send out stuff confusing all the other rwhod's on the network triggering the paging flood), and got some other stuff done that just needed to get done. I just better get to sleep in tomorrow...

Hmm, http://www.mac.com - As of right now it's redirecting to http://itools.mac/unavailable. I'm hoping that's a typo somewhere, since .mac doesn't exist...

Well, today started off with going to work and waiting for my computer to sort 903 new messages, so me and a coworker discussed/planned upgrading one of our NT4 domains to W2K and integrating it into the existing W2K AD tree. Because of the current setup we can get the thing 90% upgraded and still drop back to the old setup effectively instantly if something goes wrong. Hopefully we won't hit th issues we have been hitting as we're not upgrading hardware (although tomorrow is lunch at Cattle Company on our vendor for the hastle, so I'm not too bitter). Then I spent an hour and a half going through and responding to email. Luckily I only had 4 voicemails. So far the day's going pretty good for the first day back from vacation, so I look in the IncidentBase and see a simple request for account combining for a student worker at the Seminary and figure, "Oh, I can do that quick for a change of pace". Then I find out the person's second account isn't listed in her name, but rather a former student worker. Nobody has received a request to change it to her name either. I try calling the head of the department the student worker says she works for, but he's out of town for the week and his voicemail list's his assistant's number. Her phone's forwarded to VM but says nothing about being gone, so I leave a message and ask for her to call back.

After lunch I ended up talking to some Help Desk people about things different users had complained about and stuff we want changed before fall. I get back and no response. My boss had in the meantime talked to the student worker again, and she said her supervisor had called and left a message with someone, which he figured was me so he commented in it and assigned it to me. I spend the next half hour talking to everyone who her supervisor would have called trying to find out if someone did indeed call, and whether everything was confirmed. No such luck. After setting everything up so it'll take about 5 seconds to actually complete the change when I get confirmation, I still haven't heard from anyone. I finally resort to query the student employment records comparing the old person and new person for a position or supervisor. I find it and find a 3rd person is actually the supervisor as of about two years ago (which explains why we haven't gotten any updates in about two years).

Luckily he was there today and it only took a minute to confirm that the old student worker wasn't coming back and the new person was the replacement and reassign all the permissions. Turns out he left a voicemail with the HelpDesk, but I still haven't heard anything about that. I think I convinced him of the importance of telling us when students start and leave in the future. :) I somehow doubt it will be consistent though, and am still looking forward to the day when the group assignment is grouped to the employment records automatically (we're hoping for early fall, but who knows).

Hopefully tomorrow will be better...

I found the history of slashdot while looking for some other stuff. :)