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...