Today was a good day. This morning it didn't seem all that fun. I started off by figuring out a problem with a machine sending mail (or at least talking to the mail server) a few minutes after I got holes punched in the firewall to get a good look at the thing. Apparently McAfee blocks outgoing SMTP to stop mass mailing worms, which is great. Given that nobody should be sending mail using port 25 but rather 465 or 587 it makes sense too, except for the fact that most ISPs are too brain dead to support anything but 25 yet. After that I reconfigured the software distribution DFS which involved making a GPO .adm to make sure the domain controllers had the right registry changes stick, and then manually removing and reimporting all the data. Also reconfigure replication, and it was all stable pretty quickly. That covered the morning. Lunch was Dinos which was good. Then was back for a meeting with printing people.

This involved the same server mentioned above. After a few minutes it seems almost everyone left except Ross and I, apparently with us supposed to resolve everything left. Then eventually Ross left, and I got handed the phone to talk to tech support to resolve integration issues. Figured out the email problem was using defaults on the testing that don't work with any properly configured email server. Apparently they were only used to dealing with Exchange (that's what they said). In the process I ended up configuring a local SMTP queue and set up all the proper routing and ACLs rather than it relying on talking directly to the smtp servers, which is probably good considering the software wanted the IP address. Second was LDAP, which in their software apparently is Active Directory. After going through options and telling them a lot of ideas were just not practical, it was agreed that they really should support it and they're gonna recode it to go off a standard unix LDAP tree with a specified BindDN and eduPerson records. I'm supposedly gonna get a call about that "tomorrow", but I'm thinking Monday is more likely. It's nice both getting to talk to people who know their stuff, and have the ability to do stuff like that. I'm still surprised that a company that has like 80% of the printing market and OEMs the equipment for pretty much every major printing company hasn't had to deal with unix stuff before. Apparently even the universities just use the Windows side. If only the other outside vendor I'm dealing with had ever heard of stuff besides ASP... Like having an idea of what ssh is used for would probably be a good idea if you're a web development company.

Anyways, while going to play with the new printer drivers I ran into the startup scripts issue that people have been complaining about for the past month or so. It annoyed me so I pulled out the sniffer, tracked it down, and corrected the script that was causing it, and the lab machines are down from like 10 minutes booting to around 30 seconds. When I tell people that something should be done a certain way, but other ways seem to work and require a little less typing... Anyways, so that was my day and I feel like I both got a ton done and got nothing done at the same time. I could have weeks worth of days like that and still not be caught up. :( Normally I have absolutely nothing on my calendar and can just work on projects all day and hope they don't get piled on faster than I can get through them, and I like it that way. As of now Monday is booked solid on the calendar though, and I have this sinking feeling that other days may end up the same.