greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • “We are worms, sir!”

    Here’s the brief rendition of the last 24 hours in capsule form for easy swallowing:

    So yeah, somebody took their precious work laptop home, got infected by that bleeping worm, brought it back and made my day a living hell yesterday. I answered my cellphone blocks away from the office and knew that my day would consist entirely of fixing and patching, patching and fixing.

    And so it did. Occasionally I sat down to nibble on some snack food, but generally speaking I was on my feet and scrambling around from about 9:30 on. Fun, wot?

    I finished up at about 3:30, and Lilith (bless her heart) swung by to rescue me at 4:00… but first I was obliged to give the nickel tour to her and the “eldest demonspawn.” Nothing shatters a 14-year-old girl’s illusions about the radio business more effectively than a quick tour through the broadcast facility.

    The evening was spent in the companionable environs of Lil’ and Geoffrey’s place, mostly spent cracking wise at various Animal Planet programming.

    Today I’m attempting to reconstruct The Beast, a.k.a. The Standby Enco Server. Wish me luck, I think I’m going to need it.

  • Sometimes they say nice things about me.

    Lilith called me this afternoon to tell me the strangest thing: They talked about me. Gustav and Daria, they are, also known as the KNRK morning show.

    If you want to know what was said, you’ll need to click the following link…
    Daria Talks About Karel

  • Beastly Predicament

    Remember that power zap a week ago? Did I mention that Beast, the standby Enco server, has been misbehaving since then?

    It’s not misbehaving anymore. It’s totally dead. Yes, I realize that this is a fine distinction.

    So I’m going from dealing with the Win2K/XP RPC worm (it only hit Ryoko and Washuu, no biggie) to rebuilding the standby Enco server from the ground up. Did I mention that I don’t have a current backup of its Samba config or any of its scripts?

    If you need me I’ll be in the other room, ruing the day I was born…

  • Past, Present, Future – Round Twenty-five

    PAST: What truly bad-for-you snacky treat were you addicted to as a child?

    PRESENT: As adults we’re supposed to be responsible, watch our diet carefully, blah blah blah. It would be boring if we did that all the time, wouldn’t it? Go on, share with us your guilty-pleasure snack food.

    FUTURE: I haven’t pushed your creative boundaries lately, so how about you describe a brand new snacky-treat that you’ll become famous for throughout the land?

    This week’s PPF is brought to you by Henry’s root beer, a bag of Wavy Lay’s chips and some french onion (with bacon) dip. No, I won’t be kissing anybody tonight, don’t worry. As always I implore you to comment with your answers or a link thereto, and if you link back please use http://greyduck.net/ppf. Thank you!

  • And you didn’t even think I was at all evil.

    Once again I’m following slavishly in Dawn’s wake as she takes all of these silly quizzes…

    Another mystery revealed. Let’s see, what sort of creative evil should I engage in next…?

  • I may love my job, but my job hates me.

    Following up on the excitement of the other night, here’s some more fun and frolic at Ye Olde Office:

    • Remember how the Snap! server died during the power glitch? That was my main backup device, followed by tapes (which I trust much less than I do a nice set of spinning drives). I now have to run tape backups directly off of the main fileserver. There’s no live standby from which to easily pull files, and I have to hope that the tapes themselves are okay. I’ll have to start doing partial restore tests I suppose… when they give me the time. And heaven forbid somebody important needs something important restored from those tapes. Bleah.
    • Guess what I found out today? The version of Tapscan (the main sales software package we use) currently installed has a major glitch, and the new version won’t be ready for months! I get to spend the night at the station tomorrow! Yay! I’ll be going from computer to computer all through cubeville and through various sales managers’ offices and so forth, uninstalling the Tapscan client on each. Let’s see, 60-some-odd computers, that shouldn’t take more than… all night, right? Oh, but then I get to install an older version of the software and make sure it installs and runs okay! Yay, fun. Let’s not forget sticking around for at least a few hours the following morning to troubleshoot any major issues.
    • I’ll be escaping from that hell midday on Friday after putting in what could be a thirty-hour day, only to return on Sunday morning, bright and early. Why? For another round of attempting to make correct AS/400 backups. We tried this last weekend with only partial success, and we must have a complete set of backup tapes ASAP before we can proceed with upgrading the server. Which, of course, they want to do ASAP.

    And that’s just the three biggest issues that have come up this week. Don’t you wish you had a job as grand as mine?

Calendar

September 2025
S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  

My Links