The week is finally over. I'm quite happy about that. Not only were both Brent and Mike gone all week, but it's the time for students to start using our resources again and for faculty to come back and start complaining about things. And of course everything has to be done "now". Monday night started off with a movie night. brooke did a decent job of picking a movie, that movie being Dead Poets Society, even though it's not quite good enough for the number of times I've seen it. It was a good time though. Unfortunately most of the other nights of the week were just relaxing to keep my sanity.

The big project for the week was to get lists stuff up and running. The problem with that is that is mainly coding at this point, which means it doesn't work well when I'm covering for things. I installed Windows XP and some management tools on my powerbook, so I shouldn't have to VNC into the servers near as much anymore. SP2 breaks mmc if exchange stuff is installed though, which is a bad thing. We managed to chew through a ton of backup tapes too, and one of the tape drives really messed itself up and took a good amount of time to fix. I managed to forget about a lot of other tape swaps now that I think about it too. And you don't want to know what our restore window is now - just don't delete stuff accidentally. :)

There's also this whole Windows architecture thing to finish before school. So I rebuilt an old server up as our new Apps server. I figured out which Mac apps only run in classic mode and archived those, and the native OS X ones are in the process of being migrated. Stupid macs and slashes in file names, and stupid windows for not allowing slashes in file names. Neither is a good idea to encourage I say. I also started tweaking the domains, and disabling lm announcements on servers to which users shouldn't be directly browsing (they shouldn't be using browsing at all, but...). I think I may be able to completely control what shows up in the lists anyways, but we'll see on that. Also experimented with turning off netbios on some windows stuff. Apparently macs still use smb over netbios rather than smb though to connect (even though they say smb). They've only been doing it for a couple years, I don't see why they went for the old technology. Half my file servers aren't accessible from half the places on the network either. It's not my fault though, and I can't do anything about it, so I don't worry about it. People don't like when my reaction though - "Yea, they can't get to that. It'll probably be like that for a few days. Have them try again next week." Overall that part is good though. We could start school without any big problems right away I think. Other than apparently someone followed some really old instructions and mathematica 5 doesn't work in some places. 2 years was more than enough time to transition that one...

The lists stuff. I didn't do more course testing or anything, but I think that's stable. I still need to do automated membership for courses. I did write and install a new module after I got home last night that does sending location verification. Basically a message has to come from on campus (including webmail) or be sent with authenticated smtp or the list servers will bounce the message for most lists. It also bounces mail flagged as spam. Those two should make a lot of list managers happy. The management tools for list moderators are greatly improved as well. For when users send a message to a list in multiple ways (such as to multiple addresses) it also detects and bounces all but the first one with a note about watching the recipients when replying to all. There are other cool things in there too, but they're my secrets. The wonders of procmail and perl and what can be achieved. I still need to get automatically populated lists up and running. I think I may try and do that Monday. I think that means Monday is get-stuff-done day, which means I may not check Incidents at all. If you work for the Help Desk sorry, they'll have to wait until the next day. It probably isn't a big deal. Like that "had to be done within 2 days" restore a month ago that they just noticed the restore wasn't what they needed.

Saturday was more work stuff. I went in and actually got some stuff done (thus the plan for continuing it on Monday, but I can't break stuff then). I changed the lab logon notice to prevent people clicking close right away. It does go away, and you can put stuff over it. Hopefully people will actually take note of it now. Most of my other stuff hasn't broken anything yet, so things are still working. I need to get an old machine and test some last stuff though. Apparently we need to keep Windows 95 and 98 machines working like they're part of the domain for a bit longer. :( We'll see if I get motivated to actually do stuff on Sunday. Maybe I should do a couple smaller movie nights this week just to force me to to take a break after last week.