Diary of a Network Geek

Ah, the old days…
Yes, this past week or two sure has felt like the old days. Long, long hours that are appreciated only by a select few. Coming home to an empty house. Being at work late on a Saturday night. Yep, it sure seems like old times. The joys of being a Professional Network Geek. Well, at least I solved my little “issue” and, with the help of an equally dedicated co-worker, I have just a bit of testing to do tomorrow and we should be good to go for the mini-rollout.
In a nutshell, my last problem was getting the LILO information to update on the Linux-based ZENWorks Imaging partition on the local drive. Everytime I would get the damn thing installed, then added an image to the disk, the menu that let the user go into the recovery mode (ie. the Linux partition) would go away. So, after chasing my tail for a week, while sick as a dog, incidentally, I finally noticed something in the documentation that indicated a particular order to do things. Yes, once I read the “fine” manual, it was clear that I had to first enable the ZENWorks partition, then apply the updated LILO config that gave the user a boot option menu. Since I know that “once is luck, but twice is skill”, I tested this on a desktop and a laptop and a second time on a second desktop. All three worked like a charm. Yea! Now, I can go back to my regular 45 hour work week. And, maybe, I’ll get a little rest and get over being sick.
Just as soon as I finish the laundry and ironing and pay my bills and go grocery shopping.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.”
– Robert Frost

It’s a fine line between idiot and hero.
I’ve crossed that line. To the hero side, you weisenheimers! Notice that I’ve been a little quiet on what I’ve been doing at work since I got back from Florida? Well, that’s because things have gone horribly wrong. The whole idea of having a single base ZENWorks for Desktops Imaging installation of Windows XP just didn’t work out the way we’d planned. It was taking too long to make the “addon” images to customize everything for the individual models. And, every little, tiny change Dell made in the chipset was making the addon images fail, too. So, about two weeks ago, I was told we were abandoning that line of thought and going with what I originally suggested, namely, an image per model. And, that I had until Monday the 14th to get it all working.
Yikes!
Well, I got it pretty well there until Monday a fatal flaw was found. With the Dynamic Local User option enabled, when we installed Groupwise as one user, none of the other users could access it. Not even the local administrator of the machine! WTF!? So, I rebuilt the image, twice, each time making sure that all the updates were included. No go. Then I tried every variation of installing the Novell Client and the ZEN for Desktops clients. Same thing. As soon as I hit the network, in any way, only the user that installed Groupwise could access it, or the directory it was installed in. After almost a week of this, you can image how stupid I was starting to feel! Though, no one else could come up with an answer for why this was happening, either…
Well, this evening, at about 6:00pm, I found it. The answer was in the Local Security Policies. The setting was unser Security Options, Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts. It was set to “Guest only: local users authenticate as Guest.”, but should needed to be set to “Classic: local users authenticate as themselves.” As soon as I changed that, BAM! It was all working just like it was supposed to work. I tested it twice and got out before something else went wrong!
So, yes, it was a fine line between idiot and hero, but by the end of my very long working day, I was the hero. Again. Yea, me!

Hey, I almost missed this!
It was on this day in 1910 that the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated as a youth organization in the United States. The idea for the Boy Scouts came from a British Army Officer named Robert Baden-Powell who returned from a war in South Africa to find that the young people in his country had grown soft and undisciplined in his absence. He created the Boy Scouts as an organization and wrote a book called Scouting for Boys that became the Boy Scout manual.
I was a Boyscout. In fact, I was an Eagle Scout. (That’s the top rank a boy can earn, in case you were wondering.) Oh, my, that was years and years ago, it seems. But, you know, I still use things I learned in Scouts every day. Things like the motto: Be prepared. That has led me to have an umbrella in every car I’ve owned and to always travel long distances with at least one roll of toilet paper in the glove box. Also, that motto has motivated me to carry a pocket knife most of my life, not to mention a lighter. And you should see the things I have in my carry-on bag when I fly!
I was a “boy leader” when I was in Scouts, too. Not only a Patrol Leader, but the Senior Patrol Leader, in fact. That experience, along with the skills I learned while managing my Eagle Service Project, has served me well in business. (Alas, none of it helped my spelling!) I’m told that Eagle Scouts get an automatic chevron when they enlist in the Army. Now, if it only gave me an edge meeting attractive, interesting, young women…. Ah, well, maybe that’s a little too much to ask!
Anyway, Happy Birthday Boyscouts! Many happy returns!

Well, I’m home again.
I got in last night around 10:00pm, which, after a stop at the store for milk, got me home around 11:15pm. I was supposed to get in three hours earlier, but, well, getting back to Houston from Panama City was rather like Orpheus returning from Hades. In fact, the entire trip became Hell when we ended up staying up until 3:30am Wednesday night to get the server changed over. That was about 6-8 hours later than planned due to a wierd problem with DNS on the Netware 6.5 server and a couple of gigabytes of new data that had to be copied to the new server. Apparently, someone felt the need to backup a bunch of MPEGs, many of a dubious nature. I believe that many of the movies in question got deleted, but it still messed up our plans.
The rest of the trip was okay, but colored by the lack of sleep that Wednesday night. I feel like my soul is only now catching up to the rest of my body. Someone once described jet lag as the time it takes for your soul to catch up to your body. That, of course, is based on the idea that air-travel moves your body faster than your soul can keep up and the gap while the two resync is why you feel all wonky after air travel. I’ll buy it.
Anyway, much to my relief, nothing was wrong with the house when I returned. Everything was in its little place and all was well with my little world. Though, I would have been happier if my dog had been there to greet me. Ah, well, perhaps there’ll be another dog one day.
Oh, speaking of “one day” I have pictures, but I’ll post them next week sometime. Right now, I’m still readjusting to my soul having arrived sometime after my bags.

Hmm, that’s a good quesiton….
A friend asked me why I blog the other day and it really got me thinking. Why do I blog?

Well, the reasons have changed over the years. Originally, I started “blogging” to chronicle my search for a job here in Houston. Well, it was also a way to try and drive traffic to my website so that the search engines would find my resume. That was almost five years ago, back before there was such a thing as blogging software. In the early days, I hand-coded every page and uploaded it. As one might imagine, I tried to make every “post” count back then. It was a real hassle! But, I kept posting things about my work. Often, I found myself out on the road doing strange things or going odd places for my work and I wrote about it. I tried to focus on the technical side of things, but every so often, I would throw in something strange about my personal life, like getting married.
Then, back in September of 2002, I heard about Moveable Type, which was the first really good blogging application. It ran on PERL and MySQL, which were things I wanted to learn, so it seemed like a good choice. And, it was. I was able to post more often and more easily than ever before. And, I was out of work, again, so I moved from work war stories back to the seemingly endless search for work. It was the Summer after Enron and IT work was hard to come by, so I started posting more and more about my own personal thoughts, hopes and dreams. The blog started to become much more personal. It was a place to vent my frustrations, though I did so carefully as I was ever mindful that a future employer might read my postings.
Somewhere in there, I also started my other blog on Fantasist.net. There I posted things that were purely fun for me. Nothing but cool science and fantasy stuff, some of my fiction and poetry, and just plain cool or weird things. It was there that I originally started posting my “Fun Friday” links. That carried over here and I’ve done my best to maintain that to this day.
Now, I’ve upgraded to WordPress and blogging couldn’t be easier or more fun. I’m still carefull about what I post. I have a fairly varied audience, some of which include family that might be under the age of 18, so I do my best to be intelligent without being insulting to too many people. I do my best to keep the profanity and “adult material” to a minimum, too, for the same reasons.

So, why do I keep posting? Well, I can always use the traffic, even if I am the #1 hit for “CNE Resume” on Google. But, mainly, it gives me a place to think out loud when no one is around for me to talk to about things. Blogging let’s me share my thoughts and dreams and, sometimes, fears with a larger world. A larger world that often responds with surprising kindness and sympathy, I might add. It’s my way of reaching out to fellow geeks who are stuggling with their own careers or lives and offer a bit of hope that they’re not alone.
Also, it’s a way for me to create a bit of immortality. To feel like a part of me will go on beyond my own limited life. To get my words and thoughts out into a larger world so that I might be remembered and understood.
So, why do you all read my blog? And, if you keep one, why do you blog?

I admit, a lot of us probably need one, but…

Okay, first off, I hate those stupid tests that some employers make you do during the interview process. My value lies not in being able to pass a standardized test, but my ability to solve real world problems. That being said, I have seen people in IT who couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, so maybe a general IT literacy test isn’t such a bad thing.
In any case, there is one. A company called ETS is offering an Information and Communication Technology literacy test. And, based on this note to employers, they’re selling it right to the kinds of people that would hire guys like me.

Not sure how I feel about this, really, but it seems like a growing trend. I guess it’s a good thing I take tests well!

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!

Tomorrow, it’s back to the salt mines.

Today is my last day off before the new job. My beard has grown in fairly well, so I’m comfortable there. I got a couple of financial things taken care of that I needed to do before I was comfortable travelling. And, I got us both new phones. That’s actually more important than it sounds! Over the weekend, my old phone got dropped into a puddle and was reading “Headset” permanently, which made it useless. So, now we have two, nice, new GSM phones and a new, cheaper calling plan that starts on th 17th.
Today, though, I plan on taking it easy. I do have a little ironing to do before work tomorrow, but the rest of the day is going to be nice and slow. The wife and I might take in a movie, since I’m off. Some low-impact shopping, too. Nothing too fast paced or stressful.

I’m pretty excited about starting the new job, but a little apprehensive, too. I mean, it’s the “prefect” job for me, so if it doesn’t work out well, I’m sort of sunk. The job description reads like my resume, which is good, but if I hate this job for some reason, where would I go? Of course, most of that kind of thinking is just fear talking. I’m sure that everything will go swimmingly. And, really, I am looking forward to it.

I’m sorry I missed a “fun” link yesterday.

Yesterday was my last day at Loomis, Fargo & Company. It was a bitter-sweet day, I have to admit. I’m glad to be moving on to something that I think will be a much, much better job for me, but I’m really going to miss a lot of the people I used to work with there. It’s sort of ironic, really, that I’m going to miss this place, because when I started, I never planned on staying very long. I always saw this as a place-holder, or stepping-stone, to somewhere else on my way to a better job. It was just something to pay the mortgage while I waited for the market to recover. Well, the market still hasn’t quite recovered, but it’s getting better and I’ve spent about 18 months treading water.
Okay, that’s not quite true. I did learn a lot more about Linux and I got my CompTIA Linux+ certification. I also updated my CNE (Certified Novell Engineer) to version 6.x. I haven’t quite completed my CompTIA Security+ certification, but that’s been mainly due to the upheaval of changing jobs. After I settle in, I’ll start working on that again and bang it out. It is, after all, a single test that will certify me for life. And, of course, I also learned more about Unix in general and the Veritas backup program on Sun Solaris in particular. All of which has been very, very cool.
But, one of the things I was “promised” was that I would be working on more Windows 2000 servers. The plan was to be replacing all the 35+ Novell servers with Win2K servers at all the branches. Well, that never happened due to budgeting problems and a CIO that didn’t understand why remote sites needed servers. (Yeah, I know, I can’t believe it either!) So, what that meant was I did a lot of backup administration and played nursemaid to a bunch of old, cranky Novell Netware servers. Not a great “resume builder”, is it? Well, I didn’t think it was a great use of my CNE either. So, when the rumors of outsourcing started, I started paying closer attention to the job-list e-mails that I got. And, well, the rest is history.
So, I found myself another job, but I also managed to place a friend of mine from the “old days” at Harbor at this position. He’d been out of work for 15 months. It was a pain that I knew all too well and I was very happy to help out a fellow CNE who was down on his luck. Also, this guy used to report to me so I knew he could do the job. It was a really good fit. And, in 90 days, I get a kickback from the recruiter, so it’s all good!

I’m really going to miss working with a great bunch of people, but I really look forward to meeting some new friends and working in a new, challenging environment that will really use my skills.

Well, it’s official. I’ve given notice, both in e-mail and on paper. My last day at Loomis will be Friday, June 25th. My first day at Oceaneering International will be July First. I’m going to have to wait a week or so before I start growing my beard back, though. Some kind of crazy insurance policy thing that might mess up my current boss if I started growing my beard before I’m almost out. Eh, whatever. I can wait a few more days to be my old self again.
And, finally, a job using all my Netware skills and my shiny, new Linux skills, too!