Diary of a Network Geek

I saw this on Slashdot.

And, I think that means that Novell is finally getting their marketing right! First of all, there was this story on Slashdot, which, of course, generated all sorts of anti-Microsoft chatter. Then, I followed the link over to Novell’s site, which redirected me to this SuSE news release. So, not only is Novell developing for Linux and supporting OpenSource projects, but they’re getting plenty of exposure in the IT community.

About damn time.

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 love the smell of burnt circuits in the morning!

Actually, no, I don’t, but it was a good, catchy line. So, it turns out that, yes, my DSL router got kissed by lightning and cooked. Actually, just the DSL modem part got cooked, but that was enough to keep me from getting to the Internet. And, to add insult to injury, I also lost several network cards. So, I spent the better part of the week scrounging up network cards, testing them, findind drivers for them, and replacing dead cards at home. Saturday afternoon, I had a tech over who took all of about 10 seconds to confirm that it was, in fact, my DSL Router that had gone all crispy.
In fact, his whole visit lasted all of about 15 minutes. I wore my new Novell Cool Solutions Tip T-shirt, in lovely Hunter Green, which arrived Thursday night, just so he could see I was a real geek. He took one look at that, my Wall O’ Computer Books (most of which are terribly out of date), all the equipment laying about and basically got out of my way. He metered the line, then offered to sell me a router out of his truck. It cost at least twice what it was worth, but saved me the hassle of configuring it and let me test while he was still there. Another 10 minutes to change out the last bad network card and reconfigure my BorderManager firewall, then I was back up and running.

Actually, I did get a bit more reading done than I would have otherwise this past week. And, I was less obsessive about the new game I’m playing on-line (more about that on Friday). Still, it’s nice to have e-mail again. And, I think my wife likes having access to the ‘Net again, too. So, it’s back to wasting time as normal for us. Wee!

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.

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!

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.

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!