Diary of a Network Geek

Okay, this probably isn’t big news anymore.

But, it was Friday when I read it. See, I usually queue up posts a day or two in advance, so I’m just a little behind. Still, I saw this article on Ping, which is AustralianIT’s newsletter, so I may have the jump on folks here in the States. It’s interesting to me because the things they talked about in the article were the Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate management system. In other words, LDAP. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Oh, yeah, it’s what Novell has been using for, oh, about five years or so. Looks like there might be some competition in the OpenSource-based network architecture product space over the next couple of years. I hope Novell pays attentiont to this and gets their shit together before Red Hat has a product to market. Novell really needs to maintain their slice of the networking pie. No, scratch that, they need to get working on a bigger slice.
In any case, the deal is expected to go in the third quarter of the 2004 financial year, so they’ve got a bit of time. Not much, though. I can’t imagine RedHat waiting too long before getting something out there.
I wonder what MicroSoft thinks about all this?

Well, it seems that I’m the “Lone Ranger” again.

So, trouble started brewing with my counterpart at work yesterday. Nothing personal, unfortunately, but rather something having to do with the company. Well, I say that the trouble started yesterday, but, really, that was when I became aware of the problem. See, he’s no longer with the company today. I’m not 100% sure what happened and I sure don’t have all the details from either side, so I’m keeping fairly mum about what I do know. Either way, I’m now the sad, sole captain of the S.S. “Let’s-Standardize-The-Remote-Sites”. It always happens, sooner or later.
The really sad thing is that the guy I knew who’d be perfect to take over is dead now. Parrish would have loved this gig and we would have gotten along famously. The whole company would have been talking about what a great job we did… Ah, well, nothing to be done about that now.

It’s a shame, really. This is just a nice job. For a big shop, they’re really low pressure and everyone is friendly. I mean everyone, too. People smile and say hello to me in the hall as I pass. People I’ve never met, mind! And, as a Novell guy, it’s a pretty sweet deal. I mean, I get to do all kinds of crazy things with Novell and Linux. Within certain fairly broad parameters, I can do pretty much whatever I want to get the job done, too. Just such a good thing. Well, I hope I don’t do anything to screw it up! I’ll have to put in some extra effort to make sure they have a good opinion of me. Just in case.
I’m sorry to be in this spot again, but I’m glad I’m still working.
Thank you, God, or Fate, or Whoever arranged this all for me. I appreciate the opportunity.

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.

A few comments about my Cool Solutions solution.

First, it’s best to run this as “perl –noscreen dfmail.pl”. Of course, this assumes that you copied this to your sys:perl\scripts directory first. I’ve gotten several e-mail (already!) about “errors”. Those shouldn’t show up with the –noscreen option. In fact, I think they’re just informational messages because I used the “-w” option in the first line of the script. That means “show warnings” to the PERL interpreter. If you remove that, just the “-w”, the script should run without those problems.
Second, you have to have the settings right on your mail server or it won’t send mail! If you’re getting a message that says “failed to connect”, or something similar, that’s what’s happening.

To be honest, I was somewhat suprised to see that this old thing had gone up on Novell’s Cool Solutions website. I actually wrote this stinker last year and posted an entry about it in February. I sent this to them about two months ago and just heard back. I had totally forgotten that I’d even sent it!
Anyway, it’s a pretty “quick and dirty” solution to an ugly problem at my old job. I ended up not even using it because we were so strapped for disk space that I had to actually delete PERL from those servers. Anyway, it’s a free monitoring tool that uses the “duct tape of the Internet”, PERL. You can see the actual entry here. If you like it, vote for it!

UPDATE: J�rgen Schmitz from Germany discovered that PERL version 5.06, which is native on netware 6 if you haven’t done any upgrades, etc., needs UCSExt changed to Perl2UCS
So, replace the first couple of lines with:
use Socket;
use strict;
use Perl2UCS;

my $server = Perl2UCS->new(“UCX:Server”) or die “Can’t get UCX:Server object”;
my $sname = $server->{“NAME”} or die “Can’t get NAME from ucx:server
object”;
my $volume_mgr = Perl2UCS->new(“ucx:volumemgr”) or die “Can’t get
ucx:volumemgr”;

That should do it!

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!

It’s like a GeekCruise, but just for Novell Geeks!

A co-worker told me about Gioffre Consulting, who run training classes for Novell products on cruise ships. It’s just like the infamous “PERL Whirl” which I’ve seen advertised in the PERL Journal before, but with really cool Novell classes instead. And, get this, they’re just as expensive as a regular Novell class! Well, okay, you might have to pay some extra airfare to get to New York, but still, the rest is the same. How cool would that be!?! A Novell cruise…. Ah, heaven…..

Ah, well, it may be Friday, but I’m still stuck at the office! Maybe next year!

Uh, part three, part four? How long have I been doing this?

Well, anyway, we hit a snag Monday. Our goal, of course, is to have a single base Windows XP image for all our systems, adding only smaller images for things like the Novell Client and machine specific drivers. We got really close on Friday when I discovered the Hardware Abstraction Layer, as contained in hal.dll. It seemed to be the key. So, I pull hall.dll for an XP laptop and make a little ZENWorks image of just that. Now, it’s time to test. I take our base image, which was made on a regular workstation, and slap it on a workstation. I follow that with the specific image for the laptop drivers and boot loader files. Then, I pop on the HAL image and follow it up with the ACU (Automatic Client Updater) image. I reboot and….. Ka-Pow! I have a working laptop! Yea!!
Then, on Monday, we tried it again using FAT32 instead of NTFS. Why, you ask? Well, because if a drive goes bad, FAT32 is a lot easier to recover enough to salvage data. At least, in theory. Want to guess what happened? The Amazing Blue Screen of Death! Okay, so now I’m questioning my own sanity and trying to figure out what I did differently on Friday, but I’ve slept twice since then, so I needed help. My partner in crime, and system administration, suggests that we do it all over again, but with the NTFS images instead. Blamo! It WORKED!

So, today, it’s another round of testing and experimenting to try and get the process to work with FAT32. Fun!

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.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately!

In between rewriting Novell’s ZENWorks imaging system in Oceaneering International’s image and watching cleaning up my personal office, I managed to get Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai read. Actually, I’ve had this one for quite some time, but I just got around to reading it this past week.
Now, for those of you who know me, I love Asian culture, especially Japanese culture. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of books about Japan and Japanese history. I’m most interested in their Tokugawa period and the years leading up to that time. Of course, that also means I read a lot about samurai, who made that era happen. Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai is a book about the philosophy that drove much of that time. I say much, because it was really the refined and codified philosophy of a warrior class that no longer went to war. The Tokugawa Shogunate, ironically, brought an era of peace to a war-torn Japan and forced the samurai to redefine their purpose. It is in that light that this book has significance.
I found it an enjoyable book, though I disagree with much of it philosophically. And, based on what I’ve read, it represents an ideal that very, very few true samurai met. In fact, at one point, the author is quite critical of the famous 47 ronin who are almost saints in Japan for their devotion to their feudal lord. But, that aside, it provides a good look at the severe devotion to duty and loyalty to one’s master that we associate with the samurai. The author, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, advocates a brutal disregard for one’s own life which, he says, should be sacrificed for one’s lord. The book is filled with advice about how to harden one’s self to the potential distractions from duty, including death. It shows us a strict code that few modern warriors could achive, even if the wanted to do so. But, again, it is a good look at how this ancient warrior caste saw the world and approached life.
Much easier to read that it first appears, and well worth it!

More soon!

Okay, here’s some more on that. The article was out Sunday night and based on this article on YahooNews, that’s helped Novell’s stock price up. Also, this article referred to the proposed “merger”, not a buyout. Of course, since Sun seems to have the bigger bank account I’m betting they’re going to be in charge.
When I checked Novell’s website, the last big news story was about Novell’s new software contract with the US Government. Nothing to sneeze at, but I’d have hoped to see something more about a potential merger/acquisition.