Diary of a Network Geek

I had some minor setbacks at work this week.

I say minor because, as far as I’m concerned, anything short of termination or death is minor. So, first the ZENWorks imaging thing that I thought I’d worked out last week didn’t work this week. Or, rather, it didn’t work all the time or even consistently. So, I’m working on that. Again. Oh, joy.

Then, I’ve been doing a lot of Linux server work lately and that had some small snags. Mainly, it was me being tired, a little depressed, and somewhat distracted. I forgot a couple of little, “detail” items, like chaning IP addresses and cleaning out temp files before running a backup. Stuff like that. The only “show-stopper” was something entirely out of my hands. (Hey, that seems like a theme in my life these days!) The server that I’d been working on, and getting prepared to install on a remote SAN, can’t be shipped until we get the additional processor and power supply from Dell. They’ve been on order for almost a month now. *sigh* Oh, well, my end is almost done. Just a little bit of testing left to do and then…. I wait. (Unfortunately, that seems like a theme in my life right now, too. Always waiting…)

All in all, though, it’s not been a bad week. Nice and quiet. So far…

After some long struggles, VICTORY!

In recent weeks I have posted less and less about my job. Why, you ask? Well, aside from a serious bout of depression, things have not been going well on my projects. Oh, the Linux stuff was okay, mostly, except for a nasty little problem with that mkCDrec program and our SAN. Something about the way it makes the boot partition on the ISO just didn’t like the drivers for the QLogic cards we use. It would never recognize more than one partition at a time. Even after we recompiled it with multiple LUN support. But, I digress….

So, I’ve been banging away at this ZENWorks desktop imaging system deal for weeks. Well, it hasn’t been smooth, but we have a way that *seems* to work well. And, get this, we use snapshot! Yeah, I know, it sounds crazy, but it works. So, here’s the thing, we want to have one base image for XP and then just have addon images for everything else. But, we have at least one SCSI-based workstation. So, what does that mean? Trouble, that’s what. Ultimately, here’s what I did…

I started with a base XP image then added just enough to get it to boot on the SCSI machine (a Dell Precision 670). Next, on a second partition, I loaded all the snapshot files and started that process. Then, I loaded all the Dell drivers and such as appropriate and capped off the snapshot. Finally, I make the app and use filedef.txt to create a BAT file that copies the converted files to their original names and directories. From that, I make the ZENWorks image. And, viola! It works like a charm. Okay, so it’s a bit ’round-about, but it *does* work and a whole lot better than using sysprep, too. At least, for me.

So, all in all, it was a pretty good week! Now, all I need is to get a working car….