Nothing to see, move along

TGIF
Almost the end of another week….

Hmmm, so much for the posting regularly lark - last week was not a lot of fun
My new manager called our first team meeting last Wednesday - not a lot of surprises in it. He doesn’t really know what most of us do and will probably be more than a little concerned when he does find out.

In other news, the windows2000 platform that I look after the AD for, has gone very very unstable for one particular business unit which is proving rather ugly. Fingers being pointed in various directions (even a laughable suggestion that our Domain Controllers were proving the bottleneck due to the some applications making LDAP calls). Interesting though, the amount of information you can pull out of Windows2000 ntds object from withing perfmon.

Spent the last couple of days and the weekend doing my chemistry assignment which is almost over now, thank goodness.

And have had a lot of fun playing with mrtg. I am now graphing apache, seti and an awful lot of squid counters. Simply amazing the amount of information you can get from snmpd and with perl, any log file you can parse can be graphed - for some reason, that appeals to me.

And in site news, I pushed up my first screenshot in a year - and what a change from my old setup. I am now running Debian unstable on that desktop with Kde 3.1 - mainly due to the change in focus in Gnome2 to a “simpler’ model didn’t suit me. KDE is very very nice and, to be honest, I find myself more productive in it than Gnome2. I still love gkrellm though as is quite obvious from the screenshot.

And a very nice application for taking screenshots - scrot from Tom Gilbert aka LinuxBrit (you can find it at his site). Lots of other good things at that site - it was what first got me into procmail, bash stuff and other interesting things.

The rain never seems to stop at the moment - well, at least it doesn’t down the South Coast of NSW which is where I am having a rather nice relaxing weekend. Given up doing my Chemistry assignment for a bit and am reading Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. A very very good book by one of the new wave of British sci-fi/fantasy authors that I am enjoying greatly. I know he has written a second book and I’m eagerly looking forward to it.

The rebuilt machine seems to be behaving well (well, at least my Seti stats are showing a rather nice increase at the moment). After my Tyan TigerMP board died, I decided to get another ASUS board and couldn’t get a athlon MP/MPX board for love nor money (and didn’t want to get another Tyan frankly).

The Asus a7v8x-x is a very very nice board and with builtin via-rhineII lan and a lot of space around the cpu (including mounting holes although I am not using them) is working well. I’ve dual-booted XP and my old Debian install (from the smp days) and it is behaving itself. The Vantex HSF is performing very well indeed with the best temps I have ever seen from a air-cooled AMD chip (including my own AMD Duron900).

Time to start looking at rrdtoold and what else I can graph with mrtg You can never have too many statistics and graphs are always nice to look at. This site is rather good: http://www.campin.net/DNS/graph.html - talking about graphing DNS server information using rrdtool - very nice looking indeed.

Now for some more chemistry…..

The week was not a lot of fun:

Monday - only person in my team actually at work (one is away on holidays, the other was working night shift). A rather busy day then eventuated with my back starting to play up. It kept getting worse all day and didn’t help the amount of work I had to do (creating 15 sites in AD Sites and Services and adding folder redirection into policy for those sites along with DNS entries).

Tuesday/Wednesday - wasn’t at work due to the above-mentioned back problems. Probably some flu type stuff as well as I felt like I had been run over by a train for most of that 48 hours
Thursday - the grand restructure announcement finally happpened. Short version - I’m now back in a server support team although supposed to be doing what I am doing now. But of the 3 people in my team, 1 is now in “project services” and the other is in “server support” along with me. And this is supposed to be “compentency based” roles? The three of us have spent over two years doing AD management and implementation work and have just about succeeded in keeping things afloat. The result? We get split up and probably still have to do the same work except two of us now do all the mundane stuff and day-to-day operational tasks which the other does whatever the new role of “projects” is. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

What this does make me think though is it is time to do something about leaving my current situation. I acquired my RHCE a couple of months ago and now need to quickly acquire at least my MCSA, then start seriously looking for a new role. This “server support” team is what I was doing two years ago, I don’t feel like taking a backward step at this stage.

Friday - fun fun, normal crap. Spent some time in the evening looking at some other mrtg things I can graph which I will look at implementing on my home gateway shortly (you can never have too many graphs )

I’ll post again later.

One of the little toys I picked myself up recently is a Sharp Zaurus 5500. I loved the idea of having a linux based pda (not that my palm vx was a bad thing at all but was getting a bit old - besides, no colour…)

Sharp have just released the new 3.10 rom for the 5500 which takes it to the 5600 software revs - including what I am using to enter this text - Opera 6.

From only playing around for a few hours, a very nice upgrade. Kudos to Sharp.

And yes, the rain continues in Sydney.

There is something about walking to the train station in the morning when it is not only dark but raining as well. I’m not 100% sure what it is, but the phrase “bloody awful” springs to mind. This makes the third day running it has rained on me on the way to the train station and then the walk from the station at the other end to the office. Oh well, enough complaining
Had some minor amusement - mentioned to a manager friend of mine what I was told yesterday and he looked rather unhappy. He wasn’t even aware of the move out to the Western suberbs (well north-west anyway) and is heading off to go and talk to his boss about it.

Now why is the new Mozilla (1.4bwin32) only giving me a 3column wide field to put this entry into mt? Very odd….

You have got to love working for large companies sometimes. Where I work, we are in 4 teams devoting to supporting a particular account. These teams are divided into functions but, oddly, enough, when the last restructure happened (about 15 months ago), a rather large amount of functions were overlooked - probably because the restructure architects didn’t bother to actually ask anyone what they did.

So now we find ourselves over a year later with teams like the one I’m in having to pickup tasks that have nothing to do with us in order to keep the customer happy. But, of course, the customer isn’t happy and neither are we.

So another restructure is decided upon - well, so the rumour goes, Rumour and conjecture is definitely rampant at the moment and no-one actually knows anything. We have heard that our 4 teams are to become 2 - function and membership undecided as of yet and I shouldn’t even know that.

The great thing about today is a friend of mine also working for the same organisation but on a different account and not involved in this went to a meeting today about this whole restructure (because it affects some of his team members).

So they get told and we get left in the dark? I really love working some days….

Last week was as bad as I thought it was going to be. Monday ended up starting at 07:00, ending at 00:30 on Tuesday. Got back into work for 07:00 on Tuesday then went through under 01:30 on Wednesday morning.
My main complaint about all of that was simply I shouldn’t have to do it - myself and my other two cohorts (who worked similiar) hours were supporting remotely (via dialin ) a simple implementation of a Windows 2000 server and some ris’d workstations. Nothing major, nothing hard.

But, of course, in this day and age, nothing is ever that simple. Our company outsources the actual implementation to another arm of our company who decides this is a bit big and so outsources it to a complete third-party.
The third-party gets pretty happy when they work out that “all problems not resolved can be escalated back to”, you guessed it, us.
Now, of course, my company didn’t think this would happen…why not? Who knows? So they didn’t have anyone planned for this support - 3-5 sites a night, hours on the phone/mobile solving really basic problems.
So it came down to the team I work in and we have ended up in a very shitty position. One of the other two is currently onsite because the project team decided they liked even more hand-holding than before and my management have no spine
Now, what was I acutally going to talk about? Oh yeah, perl and vbscript.

Hmmm, well after that vent, maybe not tonight. Suffice to say that vbscript sucks and perl is good

Well, another lovely Sunday down the south coast of NSW and I’m bloody well stuck inside doing a Chemistry assignment which is due in on Wednesday
There is rather a lot of work to do and I’m really not feeling like doing it….

And to add to the fun and games, I’m back on call this week which promises to be busy - changes on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday it looks like at the moment.

But the good news is I have discovered new and interesting things that I didn’t know in perl, so my education in that lovely langauage proceeds. Doing arrays of arrays and arrays of hashes is rather fun

Ah well, normally this would be mid-week but due to a nice Easter Friday sorta thing, only one working day left in the week.

Doing group policy changes first thing in the mornings (circa 07:00) is always a fun way to start the day especially when you finished doing a prod drop and a dcpromo (including DNS and making the DC a GC) at 23:00 last night.

These are the entries I like to see in a Domain controller system log - what fun:

SRV-xxxx\domain,There are two or more objects that have the same account name attribute in the SAM database.

Aka what happens when you give third party morons the ability to be able to create things, they make a right mess of it and someone else (read me) has to fix it up.

Ah well, eventid.net here we come to look up id: 12292