Diary of a Network Geek

Well, that was exciting!

I fried two power supplies last night. And, I think either my DSL router is toasted, or two of my three PCI network cards are. Apparently, we got hit with lightning yesterday. I say “apparently” because I wasn’t there, but my wife described at “big flash and a boom” that sounded like it was “right here”. And, of course, right after that, my DSL stopped working. (So, yes, I’m posting this from the office.)
Anyway, I was up until about 1:00am troubleshooting that, but with little effect. I’ll try and scrounge a new network card at the office, but I’m not holding out much hope. Oh, and I blew the two power supplies while trying to get everything into a new machine, just to elminate that as a possibility. I finally scrapped my poor wife’s Linux machine and made it the new firewall. Unfortunately, I still can’t get it to see both network cards! Ah, well, I guess I’ll work on that tonight…

So, I have one entry in the queue and that’ll be the last one for a bit. At least until I get the firewall working again. *sigh*

I have no idea what this is.

They tell me I should put this in my blog:
This is my new blogchalk:
United States, Texas, Jersey Village (suburb of Houston), English, , Jim, Male, 36-40, writing speculative fiction, Novell Netware and Linux. 🙂

I’m assuming this is like warchalking, but softer and gentler. And, for blogs.
No seriously, I know this is about driving the right kind of blog reader to my blog. Maybe it’ll mean I have more than three readers soon! If you click on my BlogChalk over on the right-hand side of my blog’s front page, you can get your own.

Too much of a good thing!

I have installed, played with, and uninstalled way too much Linux in the past month. We’re still having “fun” with the ZENWorks imaging boot disk. Now, we’ve moved on to other machines and discovered that there aren’t any drivers compiled for the particular kernel that Novell uses for the boot cd. Okay, that’s not quite true. There has been an update to the boot iso which actually fixed at least two problems. But, not, I’m afraid the one that is currently kicking my ass. Namely, the SCSI drivers for a Dell Precision 650. So, we’re going to have to find the right kernel version and complie these bad boys ourselves. Oh, God, save me!
So, if you downloaded my USB boot iso, it’s obsolete now. The newest, non-beta, non-6.5 boot iso from Novell Forge is correct. Use it!

Er, well, actually, it’s specific to ZENWorks.

I’ve been yapping about all the ZENWorks desktop imaging stuff that I’ve been doing lately and, apparently, a couple of you have been listening because you’ve asked for the CD. Well, I’m pleased to provide it for you.
A couple of notes, though…
1) You’ll have to edit the ISO to update the “settings.txt” file to reflect your own default server.
2) If you choose “Automatic” from the first menu, you’ll get an error because this shell script has been modified to TFTP a menu to the local server. (This link let’s you grab an example.)
3) The script that pulls the menu tries to hit ZFD1, so you either have to change that or add a DNS entry for it.

I think that’s it, but I’m not going to support this, ya’ hear? Y’all are on your own! I spent the better part of a month working this bit out and I know that it’s not perfect, but it works for us.
Oh, yeah, here’s a link to the ISO. (Be warned, it’s about 10meg. It didn’t shrink when I ZIPed it, so I just uploaded the ISO straight.)

Good luck!

Note: I removed the ISO due to lack of downloads and space issues. And, also, it’s probably so far out of date that it’s not really useful any more.

Okay, now this is funny to me.

Last month, according to my webhost stats, my top four key phrase seaches were “Strom Thurman”, “linux resume”, “babydoll”, and “title generator”. This apparently goes back to when I mentioned that Strom Thurman had passed on, but, for some reason, this still shows up as a big “hit” for me. I wonder why “Freemason” isn’t bigger in that list? After both he and I are, or were in Strom’s case, Freemasons. The only other one that is a bit confusing is “babydoll”, but that’s just because you don’t know my wife.
So far this month, my top key phrases are “javascript encryption”, “slavemarket”, “babydoll blog“, and “free cisco book”. Okay, now, this is even more mystifying to me… I don’t remember the last time I mentioned javascript based encryption, but it was a long, long time ago. (In fact, according to this post it was back in January!) I don’t ever remember talking about a slavemarket. Hmm, maybe it was my wife…. And, of course, the others make perfect sense. Man, people search on the craziest things!

Anyway, I thought it was interesting. Yeah, I think I need to get more rest, too.

Hey, it’s fun to me!

Yeah, so this is what I’ve been working on for the past two weeks. Well, not so much the USB part, but the rest of it. Along the way, we did a lot of work getting the boot image we were working on to run of a USB JumpDrive which was pretty cool. There are a lot of tools to use for this, but we mainly worked with SysLinux. This also seems to be what Novell used to make their boot image with, so I figured it was a good choice!
First, though, I had to use a tool from HP. I used an older version, but the one currently listed as Windows-based Format Utility for HP Drive Key or DiskOnKey USB Device, version 2.00.006 A (6 Feb 04) should still do the trick. But, once you’ve done that, the tutorial at SysLinux should get you along the right path.
Or, if you just want to try out Linux, or Unix, you can try UnixKit for Windows. I saw this the other day on the ScreenSavers. Actually, it was one of Leo’s Tips. Last damn thing good about that show.

Anyway, if you’re a hardworking network geek like me, you deserve to have a little fun with a USB drive. It’s Friday, go for it!

Updated 04-17-09: Link to HPDriveKey utility had gotten outdated, so I updated it.

Well, that’s one rumor.

According to this article on ZDNet, Sun has been talking about acquiring Novell. Apparently, they’re after SuSE, in part because of IBM’s heavy involvement in that particular Linux distro. On the other hand, Sun was outbid by Novell when Novell bought SuSE last year. Hmm, interesting…
But, I don’t think it’s going to happen. First of all, why force a company to buy a company that you “want” just to turn around and pay more to get that same company that you were out-bid for? Not really logical, is it? Secondly, the article says that Sun chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz was quoted as saying “…we’re considering all our options”. So, it may just be an “option”. You know, sort of like Oracle buying, oh, say, PeopleSoft was an “option”. An option that didn’t work out so well. At least, not yet.

Well, anyway, it sure is an interesting piece of news! I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

My eyes are practically crossed!

I’ve been going around and around with the Novell ZENWorks Imaging boot CD Linux partition trying to get it to boot a laptop via a USB CD-ROM for the past two days! I guess the good news is that I’ve made progress.
For those of you who care, but don’t know, the ZENWorks imaging boot.iso was built with ISOLINUX/SYSLINUX, which are pretty close to the same thing. I know because I’ve practically rebuilt the whole damn Linux disk image it uses when it loads! So far, I’ve added the menuing system that I worked on last week and added support for the USB drives on a Dell laptop into two of the Novell default menu items. Oh, and I also set it to pull DHCP settings when it boots off the USB drives, too. I’ve been testing that on a Lexar Media 256 MB USB JumpDrive, BTW. And we made that happen with ISOLINUX. When I get it all worked out, I’ll burn a CD and we’ll make sure it runs from there, too. It’s been a real challenge, but it’s pretty cool to have a real technical challenge to work on for a change. Sometimes it’s frustrating since I’m doing this on my own laptop and that means I don’t have a regular system yet, but I figure that it’s “motivation”!

Anyway, when I get it all done, I’ll post all the scripts so that other folks and use them if they want.
Oh, yeah, I also installed Mozilla earlier this week. I “upgraded” my Netscape and found that I couldn’t send or reply to e-mail anymore! Damn! So, I went to the “source” so to speak and, so far, it’s been great. Mozilla is what Netscape is based on and you can’t hardly tell the difference, at least in the UI. (Which is a fancy way of saying that I like it and I’m very comfortable using it.) I highly reccomend it to you, especially if you’re looking for an IE replacement!!

I never thought they’d come in handy with Netware!

But, they sure have this week. I’ve been working on a project at my new job that centers around ZENWorks. See, we have a whole bunch of companies now, and they all have their own idea of how to run their portion of the network. Well, we’re trying to get it all unified under one vision, namely ours. Toward that end, we’re establishing a standard, of sorts, for workstation imaging. But, we want to stay flexible with it. As I wrote on Tuesday, we’ve got a fairly good menu system worked out with bash shell scripts and yesterday I figured out how to make the default ZENWorks Imaging Bootable CD TFTP the menu script over from the ZENWorks for Desktops server and load it. (The menu itself runs the standard commands for imaging, but strings several images together into one menu item.) And, from the title of this entry, you can guess where I did all that work. Yep, on a Linux workstation.
Thanks to ZENWorks CoolSolutions and this article, I was able to figure out how to uncompress the Linux image, mount it as a filesystem, change it, and put it all back. I used a shareware ISO editor to change the boot.iso to include the new image and the settings.txt file. Then, we burned that and, ka-pow! We’ve got a solution. I’m refining it today, but it works well enough now, in my opinion.

Man, I love my new job! Novell and Linux together make a great team!

Kind of goofy, but fun.

Well, those crazy Swedes have finally done it. They went and invented the self-parking car. At least, according to this website they have. Apparently, a mechanical engineering school in Sweden has a senior project and this year someone created a car that uses Linux to park itself. They worked with Volvo on the project, so there’s no telling if it works with an American pickup-truck, but it’s a cool idea! Lord knows, I’ve seen plenty of people that could use a little extra help getting into a tight parking spot. Myself included!! (Oh, and I’m kidding about not working on a pickup. I’m sure it can be adapted to any size passenger vehicle.)

Anyway, it’s a fun site for a Friday! Go have fun!