Diary of a Network Geek

I’ve been extra introspective lately.
I don’t know, maybe it’s the therapy, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my life lately. I guess I didn’t do that as much at the end of the year, because there was so much going on that I didn’t want to have to look at just then. I’ve really done okay, over the years, with my career. It hasn’t always gone the way I’d like, of course, but, still, it’s been okay. I remember telling my Father at one point that I didn’t want to just bounce from job to job, but that I wanted to take control of my career and steer it in a particular direction. He kind of got upset with me, like I’d insulted him or something. It struck me as odd, at the time, because I’d always felt that he’d done a pretty good job of steering his own career, which is what motivated the comment. I think he thought I was saying the opposite.
Anyway, I’ve been going over my history with my therapist, so that meant a lot of talk about jobs. In many ways, as a man, my job has defined me over the years. But, as I went through the different places and the certifications, it didn’t seem like I’d been steering much at all! I just threw myself upon fate and lucked out! I mean, winning the scholarship to pay for my Certified Novell Engineer training was very lucky. Sure, I did the work to maintain it, and even get Linux+ certified, too, but mostly it was luck.
But, one thing I am very proud of is that my Father got me one interview. That’s it, just one. Everything else that’s happened in my career is either due to luck, or my own ability. Sort of bootstrap-levitation. My therapist commented on it and said, “So, you’re really a self-made man, aren’t you?” And, I had to admit with no small amount of pride, that, yes, I am. So, I may not have as much career direction as I’d like, but I have a good job that I enjoy working for a company that I feel good about for a change. In the over all scheme of things, that’s better than a lot of guys ever manage. So, I guess I’m doing okay after all.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."

Well, I’m back to something I’m comfortable with at work.
Yep, I finally got most of my end of the workstation imaging project done last week. The basic images for the hardware and the Novell client are all squared away. At least, they are for all the hardware that we have in stock. I still need to get images of one of the older Dell PCs and the engineering laptop, but that’s easy enough now that I have a good idea what I need to do. The hardest part of all this, so far, has been figuring out what should go into the dang image! But, the resident expert on workstation images got me all fixed up in that area and the rest was actually pretty simple.
Now, though, I’ve been back to the Linux-based ZENWorks Imaging partition. We had an “issue” with the restore menu I did. Apparently, if you have an existing partition and only restore one partition of an image, it doesn’t completely wipe the existing partition. In other words, it just copies the files over the existing install. Not good enough for our purposes. So, I had to devise a method for deleting the existing C partition, recreating it and then, finally, restoring it from the local backup image. Not a problem, right? Wrong. I needed to have a universal menu that could tell what size the existing partition was and plug that into the script which recreated the partition. Not quite as easy as it sounds. Well, thanks to sed & awk, second edition, I found a relatively painless and reliable way to get it done. Basically, I run an “fdisk /dev/hda -l”, pull the relevant information from those results with grep and use “awk” to spit out the correct information to populate the variable. Actually, I have to do some mathmatical adjustments to that, too, but, in a nutshell, that’s what I did. If anyone is really interested and doesn’t want to shell out the money for Learning the bash shell, second edition and sed & awk, second edition, I can put the restore menu that I use up on the site. I have to admit, it’s a pretty sweet solution. Hmm, maybe I’ll submit it to Cool Solutions for another t-shirt….
Well, that’s what I’ve been up to at work. If youse guys want to know more, just pop something into the comments!

Okay, so I’m almost done coughing up a lung.
Yeah, I’ve been sick this week, but not in the usual way. I’m not sure if it was a sinus infection or the flu or what, but horrible wracking cough is finally dwindling. I’m sure it was not helped by the long hours, or extra days, I was putting in at work. The good news is, though, that I mainly got my problems worked out and I’m starting to feel better. And, I now know more about Linux boot loaders and Novell’s ZENWorks Workstation Imaging solution than I thought possible. I feel like Dr. McCoy in that episode of Star Trek “Spock’s Brain” where he has an entire civilization’s medical knowlege dumed into his head. (Yes, I’ve had the same bug-eyed stare, too!) But, whatever, I got it more or less done. Now, we get to test. Yea! Incidentally, I don’t reccomend pushing yourself as hard as I do. I don’t plan on living to be as old a man as my peers. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Okay, so, maybe I’m not burning twice as bright, but I’m burning faster than I ought to be. Eh, what the Hell, I figure I’m losing the last years where I’m drooling on myself and don’t remember my own name anyway.
Oh, and for those of you who were interested, no, I don’t actually expect to get my Hilda back. That was just my way of expressing how crazy my week was. It felt like anything could happen! But, as always, I pray for the best and plan for the worst. Though, I am keeping an eye on what seems to be Hilda’s sister. Sometimes, volunteering at H.O.P.E. has its advantages!

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why."
   --Bernard Baruch

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!

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.

Well, I’m off to Panama City, Florida today.
It’ll be a week in sunny Florida, but I’ll be in the server room banging away at a keyboard and a mouse. I’ll be upgrading a Novell server there, along with “The Messiah”. (You know, I really need to get a picture of Mike so you all can see what I mean. He’s an athiest that looks like the classic portrait of Jesus. It’s trippy!)
So, since this is the first time I’ll be travelling with Oceaneering, I’m not sure how often I’llb e able to post, if at all. There’s a Fun Friday link all queued up, but other than that, I’ll have to post when I get back, I suspect.
See you next week!
(And, yes, I have someone watching the house, so don’t get any ideas!)

I know I’ve been sort of quiet this week, so here’s a tidbit.
I’ve been doing a LOT of bash scripting lately for the ZENWorks imaging project that I’ve been working on. Well, the first part of that goes live, or partially live, next week. Yikes! So, I’ve been refining and getting things ready for that. Busy, busy, busy! But, I did have time to notice someone asking for help adding color to the menus and such on a ZENWorks Discussion Forum at Novell. I posted a reply there, but I thought I’d do up something for the oh, so quiet blog, too.
First off, all this comes from the FAQs.org, Advanced BASH-scripting Guide, in the Colorizing Scripts section.

Now, remember, these are basically just escape sequences, just like from the old DOS days and batch files. (Thought you’d never have to do that again, right?) Keep in mind that once you apply one of these codes, it will be in effect until you cancel it out, one way or another.
Let’s start easy with a simple bold:
echo -e “33[1mThis line is bolded33[0m”;
Okay, notice that you need to append the ” -e” to your standard “echo” command for display. The actual “bold” code is “33[1m”. That’s it. Just add that to the begining of the quoted line and you’ve got bolded text. To “turn it off”, simply echo “33[0m”, either at the end of the quoted line as above, or on another line. Personally, I find it easier to turn off my codes ASAP. It cuts down on problems later on.
Now, we’ll make green, bold text:
echo -en “33[1mThis is bold and green”
tput sgr0

Okay, now notice that we “turned off” the codes with a different command. That command, tput sgr0, clears all the color and formatting.
Now, to do one color for the text and one for the background, do this:
echo -e ‘\E[34;47m'”This makes blue text on a white background”;

And, that’s really all there is to it. So, go experiment with your bash colors!

Here’s a table of some other colors for your reference:

Well, I’ve got another bit up on Novell’s CoolSolutions website.
This time, it’s a bit of bash code to let you choose which ZEN imaging server to use based on subnet. It works for any version of the ZEN for Desktops imaging system, since it’s pure bash.
For those of you who are not ” in the know” bash is the Bourne Again SHell which runs on Linux and has scripting capabilities. It’s pretty cool, considering that this will be the third or fourth thing I have up on Novell’s site and I get another t-shirt. Wooo! And, I’ve turned in enough articles that I have my very own Author Profile page. Cool!
Anyhow, go look at the article and vote it up higher, eh?

It always amazes me what people search for.

Especially when they end up with me, instead of what they were looking for in the first place! I used to check on this kind of thing a whole lot more than I do lately, but I looked yesterday and thought I’d put it up here.
Here are the Top 20 searchs that led to my site, with commentary:
1 “bootable usb linux” – Well, I have been working on this a lot lately
2 “crazy toys” – All my toys are crazy, yo
3 “geek pictures” – Er… Would anyone really want to look at me?
4 “linux resume” – Um, duh?
5 “strom thurman” – This one always gets me. Even after death, ol’ Strom is a draw
6 “virtual legos” – No idea at all here
7 “usb linux boot” – How is this different from #1?
8 “javascript encryption” – I am Geek. Hear me roar, er, type
9 “jim hoffman” – Well, DUH!
10 “zenworks imaging” – I am a Novell zealot, after all
11 “free cisco book” – Hey, a Fun Friday Link!
12 “geek art” – Must be me talking about the future ex-wife’s art
13 “hello kitty robot” – Hello Kitty is fun. Hello Kitty Mecha is more fun. Too funny.
14 “tales of hoffman” – Again, DUH!
15 “bootable windows cd” – Hmm, I think I talk about boot loaders too much
16 “case mod tools” – Never done it, but maybe in the future…
17 “linux resume software” – Gee, I guess I talk about Linux a lot, too…
18 “novell resume” – Yep, I’m a hardcore Novell geek allright!
19 “science fiction channel” – Or, maybe just a hardcore geek
20 “homebrew tivo” – Yeah, see the above comment.

Freaky! Well, at least no one is looking for goat-sex pictures and finding my website! You know, that reminds me of a story this Greek guy told me about somone from his village back home… Maybe another time.