Software

AD is New Again

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We had problems with one of our active directory servers the other day. No big deal since we had more than 2 of them. A redundant back died. We rebuilt it, but that got us looking at our other AD servers wondering if we wanted to rebuild them. I tinkered with the new box today, and looked at our AD layout to see how we can juggle servers a bit.

This change in box’s also got me to start our project of moving our servers to a new ip block. This is mainly for tidiness. Our other office is newer and has a better internal ip layout. We are just taking our office and getting it up to standards with the call center.

Vindigo Vs. Zagats

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I have had both Zagats and Vindigo over the years. I have bought yearly subscriptions to both systems. When Zagats was actually featured on Vindigo all was well with the universe. Now I pay for Zagats (since it is no longer on Vindigo) but I miss some features. the other day I wanted to check movie listings. Rich and I were out and wanted to see what was playing near him. it took me 15 minutes to find a site that I could browse to on my Treo. if I had Vindigo I would have downloaded all my listings already. The question is whether or not Vindigo’s restaurant review is anywhere as good or as comprehensive as Zagats? Or is the movie section of the free Vindigo good enough for me to keep paying for Zagats and just use the free Vindigo?

Once I get my Treo 650 I will download the Vindigo trial and give it a whirl.

The Queue Of OS Demo’s

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I have a list of OS & utilities that I want to demo. I have downloaded or want to download a bunch of stuff. I never will have enough time to try everything out.

I downloaded and installed the Novell Linux Desktop. It didn’t work in VMware so I had to put it on a physical box. It is basically SuSE 9.1 with some new logo’s. I will go back to SuSE 9.1 sometime soon.

Jayson got and suggested Knoppix for troubleshooting disabled desktops and servers. it is a self contained bootable Linux CD that allows you to boot from and run the OS from a CD. Also lets you mount hard drives to get data off even if the OS is not working right. I downloaded the ISO, but I can’t seem to remember where I put it on my hard drive. I am searching for it now. Once I find it I will burn a copy and try it out. Sounds great.

Running with the same (or similar concept of Knoppix, I found UBCD4Win. It looks like a mini windows environment with a ton of utilities on a self booting CD. I am going to try that out when I get some time also.

Last on my list (for now) is building a Smoothwall firewall. It is a free (at least for the express version) Linux based firewall. I have been interested in this ever since I saw a demo of it on TechTV. I have no real need for it at home. Interesting maybe for work? I don’t know. But it is interesting enough idea that I want to try it out.

This list is enough to keep me busy for a year or so, but I want to at least browse this stuff sometime soon. So many cool items out there, and not enough free time to look at them.

Wild Wild Wiki

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My department at work just deployed a wiki. I finally got Danny some time to work on it, and so far I am very happy with the results. Since getting the wiki online late last week, I have spent hours putting documentation into it. If you don’t know what a wiki is, it is a free flowing knowledge base sort of application. Check out Wikipedia for what a fully featured wiki looks like.

We are going to use our wiki as a knowledge base for all things technical. Eventually we hope to have our call center adopt the concept for the KB they have. So far I have placed a bunch of documentation into the wiki. I still have ton’s more to go. Tomorrow I will demo the site to the entire department. We need everyone to start using it, or else the concept will be a bust. I have high hopes for this. Gus is also very excited. It was his original idea to go with a wiki over other KB or forum programs.

So far the two or three people that have seen it can’t wait to use it. I will know tomorrow how well it is received by everyone.

System Monitoring

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I spent most of the day yesterday trying to fix a problem we had with Whatsup Gold monitoring system. One developer group said they were not getting pages. We saw tons of pages for them, but we looked into it. Well turns out the system was working, but had trouble with reboots to the server we had it on. After a reboot the monitoring system didn’t start up properly, even after we initialized it. While I was looking at the system it completely stopped sending pages. I got fed up and moved it to a different box. now it is all happy and working. Not sure why it wasn’t working properly. Maybe it was Backup Exec running on the same box, or Windows 2003 (even though we have used it on 2k3 before). I don’t know. I just know Gus wanted it working, and now it is.

While I was investigating my problems I checked (for like the 10th time) to see if Microsoft posted Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) to MSDN. It finally had, and I downloaded it. I really want to see if it will solve my other issues I am having with Whatsup Gold. We have the guys over at BMC also giving us a demo of their software, but I haven’t had time to run a test server of their BMC Patrol. I will look over MOM in a bit more detail next week.

My New Favorite Browser

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I have mentioned before I am no longer a fan of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Maybe it is the features it doesn’t have. Maybe it is the fact that MSFT decided to stop making a Mac version of the browser. Maybe it is just because it is a Microsoft product that someone has created a comparable product. I have been known to use alternate products to a Microsoft product if it is (to me) as good, just to say Microsoft I love your stuff but you should not be making everything under the sun.

I have been a fan of IE since version 4.0, but I think it’s time has past. Over the past 2 years I have seen myself using Mozilla almost exclusively. Some products and websites require IE so I still use it, but only when I have to.

The people who make Mozilla have come out with a new browser. it is their next generation browser. What they did was separate the browser from the mail / newsgroup client and created 2 products. The web browser is Firefox. It hasn’t exactly gone gold. Gold in software terms is the final version of a product. They have a new version out, and called it 1.0PR (preview release). So it is kind of / sort of the final version but not really. For me it was enough to download on my Mac. I have been using it since a day or so after it came out. So far I like it as much or better than Mozilla. I only installed it on my main Windows PC tonight. It is very similar to Mozilla, but I have noticed it loads allot faster. I think I may have found my new favorite browser.

I will put aside my disapproval of the naming convention of the browser since I like it so much. If it is not the final version then don’t call it version 1.0. Just keep it in beta. I am not a fan of software company’s using wide spread releases of software as their final beta’s or “preview releases”. I guess I am just one of the million’s of guinea pigs for Mozilla.org. At least the software works, and it is not painful being in a lab experiment…

Classic VMWare

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I have babbled on about VMWare for the past 2 days. I know, I have. Well I will probibly continue to do so for the forseable future. Why? Because that software is so cool. But in the short term I will stop my raving. I have finished installing Windows 3.11 for workgroups, Windows 95, 98, & ME in virtual machines. All I really need to create is a Windows 98SE vmware. Probibly no real reason to do it, but I will probibly do it anyway.

All the virtual machines work great. The only one with an issue is Win 3.11. I am not sure if the network card is properly configured. Since it didn’t come with an option to install a TCP/IP stack I will need to find that somewhere and give the network on that VM a try. it came with Netbeu, and IPX, but no TCP/IP.

Now that all that work is done I need to offload the virtual machines off my laptop since I only have 2 gigs of space left on it now.

This entry was written while listening to 100 Years from the album The Battle For Everything by Five for Fighting

Really Old School Virtual Machines

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After getting Win 98, and 95 installed I gave a crack at Windows 3.11. First off OS’s built when the 386 or 486 were common install on a P-4 with 750megs of ram (even if it is in a virtual machine) rather fast. I got DOS 6.22 installed in the Virtual Machine in 5 minutes. It took longer to get the virtual disk to be formated with FAT16 and the install files onto the disk than it did to run the install. Windows 3.11, actually Windows for Workgroups 3.11 took like 15 minutes total to install. Probably less. I didn’t test the network settings, but I was glad that the thing installed. I have saved all the configurations. I have no real use for them, except for having them and making sure they actually work. You never know when you will need and old OS.

It turns out the problems I had installing all of the above mentioned OS’s was not me, but my AMD Atholon 1500+ desktop. Some piece of hardware is crashing windows, and vmware. it was doing similar things a few months ago when I was trying to install win95. Now I think it is the machine. When it happened before I thought it was what I was trying to do. I got everything to work just fine on my Thinkpad T40.

Old School Virtual Machines

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I am in the process of installing into VMWare Workstation 4.0. Win 98 went ok, so I am working my way backward now. I am building up to trying Windows 3.1. I got the install files for 3.1 off MSDN a few years ago but haven’t been able to get it to install. I am on a role so far with older OS’s, so maybe I will get 3.1 to install ok. I need to track down an old version of DOS 6.x or 5.x also.

I wanted to get an original Windows 95 install, but the only legal disk I have of original windows 95 is an upgrade. So I am sticking to the Windows 95b flavor since I have a ton of licenses for it that I have not used in nearly 8 years.

I can safely say that Windows 95 takes less than 30 minutes to install on a new computer. I was surprised how quick the install took.

What does suck is having an OS (Windows 95) that doesn’t support network devices out of the box. It was easier today to install a newtwork driver on 95 than I remember it. But it was still a pain in the ass. From what I have dealt with on 95, I am not 100% sure I will want to get Win 3.1 up and running.

Server Crash

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Yesterday Jay and I had to deal with a domain controller crash. it is never good when a box crash’s, but it is even worse when it doesn’t come back after a crash. A rather important domain controller (they all are important I guess) totally died yesterday. We ended up spending 3 hours at our lovely (and very cold) data center bringing online a replacement. The good news is we sort of know what we are doing, so we had alternate DC’s online, but we still acted quick to get a replacement server up. I never like running with less DC’s (Windows Domain Controller) than normally. If you loose all of them, no one can log into the servers.

Due to that yesterday was kind of stressful. To users, nothing really was down, but we were busy. Along with the DC being gone we have to re-setup 2 applications that will take a while to get exactly like we had setup before. I just love having more work.

Today was taken up by meetings. I maybe had 1 1/2 hours of no meetings today. Have I mentioned I don’t like meetings? These meetings were actually productive, but I still don’t like meetings.

I should have gone home right away after I heard the Subway flooded. It rained allot last night. I waited while at least 3 subway trains went by totally full. I was dripping with sweat from the heat in the station. By the 4th or so train I just pushed into one, like everyone else. I got luck and room opened up further into the train and I was not too bad off. that is why people do push into trains people. Because it is crowded by the door and opens up a bit further inside the train. Lesson is move into the middle of the train. I ended up even getting a seat halfway through my trip. The down side was it took me almost 3 times as long to get to work as it normally does. That should have been the sign to go home and get back into bed! Speaking of bed. It is time for me to turn in. I got little sleep last night, and I have a poker game tomorrow night that may go late. Sleep is a premium recently!