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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Work

  • Not one of my better days.

    I was dreading Monday all night last night, for various reasons… one of which actually did come to pass. But I’m not here to talk about the personal stuff… not today anyway.

    My workday was deceptively mild for a Monday, until midafternoon. Then I got a call from one of the salesdudes who fancies himself something of a computer expert. He took his usual pleasure in informing me that the email server seemed to have “taken a crap,” in his pithy phrasing. Unfortunately he was right, but it was kinda weird: The server itself was ticking along as fine as you please, no indication given whatsoever that anything was even the slightest bit out of the ordinary. But since nobody could connect to it, a rebooting was in order nonetheless. Even afterward I couldn’t determine what had gone wrong.

    But that wasn’t the worst of things, not by half. The last of the three “events” of my day landed just a few minutes before five o’clock… the main fileserver fell over.

    Yes, that’s a technical term. Go look it up if you must.

    I spent three solid hours of intense frustration fighting to get that machine back online. The alternative was to wipe the machine clear and start over… with no backup of the valuable metadata that actually makes my network run. You know, little things like user accounts, passwords, groups, print queues, application objects, permissions. Who needs all that nonsense, right? *cough*

    Historically speaking, I’ve experienced great results by searching Novell’s support site when I have problems with one of their products. Not this time, though. While I learned to work around some of the symptoms, I couldn’t find a cure. Until, of course, I turned back to good old Google. In the past, Google searches usually found me a bunch of Usenet posts along the lines of, “What are you doing here, moron? Go to Novell’s support site!” This time, I found the one vital piece of information needed to bring everything back online with one changed setting.

    See, unbeknownst to me an important SLP setting was at its default of 2 when it should have been changed to 4.

    It was that simple. The scary part is that nobody seems to know what the “2” and “4” settings do. It just works that way.

    I know my job involves what most folks think of as arcane gibberish, but please! I like to actually understand the settings I’m changing! Is that so wrong? Is it?

    Oh well. I came home, went shopping for lunch stuffs and also snagged some comfort food to make my night go better. Tomorrow had better damned well be a better day that this was. Bleah.

  • GXP II

    One of those little side projects I’ve been working on in my spare moments for, oh, the last three months is a replacement for the server formerly known as Mihoshi. She’d been in service longer than four years, actually, originally built to be the chat server for KNRK. She took on other duties in time, and with the demise (twice over the course of three years) of the chat room her primary function became that of a file transfer depot and Cacti host.

    Problem is, she was getting old and slow. Big (physically, not in terms of capacity) old slow hard drives and a puny old processor were impeding her ability to take on new tasks, and I have a slew of new functions I want to use that box for. So I started prepping Mihoshi’s replacement, known as GXP. (For the record, ever since we lost the ability to use kgon.com for in-building subdomains Mihoshi has been known to the outside world as GXP… but that was just an emergency stopgap name change.)

    And because I’m an insane dork who can’t just do things the easy way, I built the new machine around a Linux distribution I’d never seriously tried before: Debian.

    I will say this: The apt-get system is the cat’s pajamas. Hell, half of why I tried Debian is because of how much I’ve recently enjoyed using apt-rpm on my Fedora installs. I was able to apt-get everything I needed to make GXP happy, including Cacti itself. Now that’s impressive. For the first time I haven’t felt the need to hand-roll Apache, PHP, MySQL or any of the library dependencies just to satisfy my obscure requirements. Damned nifty, that.

    Yesterday it came down to crunch time. Corporate wanted a special new project, and I was the logical guy to implement it… but the machine I wanted to implement it on wasn’t ready yet. So I made it ready and flipped the switch. Oddly enough, almost everything transferred with complete ease. I didn’t drop any data, lose any configurations or piss off anybody who uses that machine for vital business purposes. (This doesn’t count Cacti, which I’d been wanting to reimplement from scratch anyway. And yes, it is working better on the new box.)

    I even got to learn how to implement and administer phpBB, which is most assuredly quite the nifty message board system. It has some minor quirks, but generally it’s quite straightforward from the administrative side. Very nice.

    Not all eleven-hour workdays are bad, see?

  • Eighteen Hours In A Nutshell

    I was tired by nine o’clock last night. Very tired. I almost went to bed… but then it hit me: I needed to listen to music. These cravings come to me less often now than in years past, but they’re no less powerful when they do. So, on went the headphones.

    (I’m guessing that my mind needed settling after spending a couple of hours visiting the rugrats. Yeah, this separation thing is hitting me a lot harder than I thought it would. Ugh.)

    I finally rolled into bed around midnight-thirty and conked out.

    My phone woke me up sometime shortly after two in the morning. There was a major network problem that required my presence at the office. So, dressed and out the door I went, can of root beer in hand to give me a sugar boost. Turns out the central 39-port ethernet switch that runs the office network had gone on the fritz. Power-cycling it did the trick, and I was back home and in bed by four AM. It took me a bit longer to get back to sleep, of course.

    The alarm went off at seven-thirty like normal… and I finally got up to turn off the alarm when, a few minutes later, it chimed again. Nope, I certainly wasn’t getting up right then.

    My phone woke me up, yet again, at nine-thirty. Turns out the Welchia.D worm was running rampant within the company network, and one of the high mucky-mucks had set a two o’clock deadline for having it eradicated.

    Oh, that’s two o’clock east coast time. So there I was, with an hour and a half to complete a high-profile job, still completely naked and unshowered. Whee! And they were sending a car to retrieve me ASAP!

    Into the shower I went, post haste. I threw on some clothes, grabbed my jacket and phone, but forgot my umbrella until after I was halfway to work. Whoops. Have you seen the weather out there today?

    Thanks to the power of Novell’s ZENworks, I was able to “push” the Welchia removal tool to almost all of the PCs in the building. Getting it to run involved a bit of social engineering, but when you have the weight of the general managers on your side it’s not nearly as difficult as usual to get the rank-and-file to do your bidding. (Bwahahaha. Ahem.)

    The damned worm turned up on three computers, which is two more infected machines than I thought we’d find. Argh. Once I was comfortable with the reduced stress levels, I took off for lunch.

    Because, dammit, that much stress and having my sleep schedule totally screwed up and still dealing with personal emotional crap, all on an empty stomach? Faugh!

    Near as I can tell, though, life has returned to whatever passes for normal in our office building. Maybe tomorrow I can get some real work done.

    Yeah, I doubt it too.

  • Batting .333

    This is the sort of Friday that makes you truly appreciate weekends.

    Before I arrived at work today, I had two simple tasks to accomplish: Finish the computer I was prepping, then take the computer replaced by the first computer and prep it for a new sales hire. Easy enough, especially if I’m left alone for most of the day.

    Oh, but no, it can’t be that easy. For starters, the most recent new computer I placed has turned out lemony, and not in that “fresh scent” sort of way. (It’s either bad RAM or something between the drive and the controller, not sure which, but luckily we have 1 year on-site service for these machines.) Well damn, now I had three computers to bring to life, and I lost more than an hour on troubleshooting.

    I finished up the original computer I was working on and got it placed, then took the replaced computer back to my office to begin a clean install of Windows 2000. It went well for the first couple of hours… install, patch, network, patch some more, start installing apps… and BANG. It went to lunch. I don’t know precisely how, but given that it happened less than an hour before I had to leave work to go home and mind children… argh. And in all the excitement of trying to figure out why that computer died, I couldn’t finish the replacement computer for the lemon I’d given out earlier in the week.

    Double argh.

    I’d go in this weekend to work on those machines but I already made plans to be in Seattle the entire time. I hate dropping the ball like this. On the other hand… dammit, I just don’t think I should be blamed for having two Acts of Gawd land on me in the same day. I worked my ass off today, and have almost nothing to show for it.

    Again I say, argh.

  • Well, why didn’t you say so?

    “So-and-so needs a computer, right away!”

    “So-and-so is moving into their office, and there’s no computer for them yet. That must be remedied ASAP!”

    “So-and-so doesn’t have a computer yet. That’s your top priority!”

    Fine. Who needs a standby server for the digital audio system that keeps us on the air, anyway? Here, let me spend four hours (not counting interruptions for stupid emergencies, which ballooned that time up to seven hours) prepping a computer for this so-and-so who, until I started getting the aforementioned flak, I had no idea existed and nobody accounted for when we were buying computers. Yeah.

    “Oh, that’s nice! But so-and-so is gone this week and won’t be back until Monday!”

    Urge to kill… rising…

  • Geeky Tidbits From The Workplace

    I’m starting to like CUPS. I managed to print to three very different printers in two different ways with something resembling ease, from my Fedora-based test rig known as Frederick. Fred, by the way, will probably replace Zero (my current woefully-underpowered Linux desktop) within the week.

    On Friday I disassembled the AS/400 that hosts our traffic system. This morning I managed to hook it back up again without screwing anything up. Go me!

    Ryoko, my Windows desktop rig, has completely lost its USB ports. I don’t know precisely what caused the failure (though it happened at the time of the office move), but right now this means that I still don’t have an OfficeCam. I’ve been contemplating a rebuild of that box anyway (Twin 18-gig hard drives? Not enough!) so there may be a very radical solution to that problem in the very near future. Who knows? Maybe both of my office computers will be radically altered Compaqs before the month is out.

    For the first time in weeks, I’ve enjoyed a workday during which I haven’t had to bother with the email server or any part of Enco. Whew.

    Now if only I could empty those moving boxes without generating a ton of clutter, I could maintain this nicely clean office environment…

    UPDATE: Spoke too soon. Goddamned piece of crap Beast is crashing again. Oh, did I mention that it was the backup on which we were relying because the main server had crapped out last week? ARGH.

    UPDATE II: While waiting for my next set of marching orders, I installed the updated drivers for my motherboard’s USB 2.0 ports. Guess what? The “onboard” ports may have died, but the USB 2.0 expansion ports are just fine… which means that for the time being, at least, the OfficeCam is back. Take what joy you can in this fact. Me, I’d rather be home eating dinner.

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