Diary of a Network Geek

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.

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.

Well, that’s one rumor.

According to this article on ZDNet, Sun has been talking about acquiring Novell. Apparently, they’re after SuSE, in part because of IBM’s heavy involvement in that particular Linux distro. On the other hand, Sun was outbid by Novell when Novell bought SuSE last year. Hmm, interesting…
But, I don’t think it’s going to happen. First of all, why force a company to buy a company that you “want” just to turn around and pay more to get that same company that you were out-bid for? Not really logical, is it? Secondly, the article says that Sun chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz was quoted as saying “…we’re considering all our options”. So, it may just be an “option”. You know, sort of like Oracle buying, oh, say, PeopleSoft was an “option”. An option that didn’t work out so well. At least, not yet.

Well, anyway, it sure is an interesting piece of news! I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

My eyes are practically crossed!

I’ve been going around and around with the Novell ZENWorks Imaging boot CD Linux partition trying to get it to boot a laptop via a USB CD-ROM for the past two days! I guess the good news is that I’ve made progress.
For those of you who care, but don’t know, the ZENWorks imaging boot.iso was built with ISOLINUX/SYSLINUX, which are pretty close to the same thing. I know because I’ve practically rebuilt the whole damn Linux disk image it uses when it loads! So far, I’ve added the menuing system that I worked on last week and added support for the USB drives on a Dell laptop into two of the Novell default menu items. Oh, and I also set it to pull DHCP settings when it boots off the USB drives, too. I’ve been testing that on a Lexar Media 256 MB USB JumpDrive, BTW. And we made that happen with ISOLINUX. When I get it all worked out, I’ll burn a CD and we’ll make sure it runs from there, too. It’s been a real challenge, but it’s pretty cool to have a real technical challenge to work on for a change. Sometimes it’s frustrating since I’m doing this on my own laptop and that means I don’t have a regular system yet, but I figure that it’s “motivation”!

Anyway, when I get it all done, I’ll post all the scripts so that other folks and use them if they want.
Oh, yeah, I also installed Mozilla earlier this week. I “upgraded” my Netscape and found that I couldn’t send or reply to e-mail anymore! Damn! So, I went to the “source” so to speak and, so far, it’s been great. Mozilla is what Netscape is based on and you can’t hardly tell the difference, at least in the UI. (Which is a fancy way of saying that I like it and I’m very comfortable using it.) I highly reccomend it to you, especially if you’re looking for an IE replacement!!

I never thought they’d come in handy with Netware!

But, they sure have this week. I’ve been working on a project at my new job that centers around ZENWorks. See, we have a whole bunch of companies now, and they all have their own idea of how to run their portion of the network. Well, we’re trying to get it all unified under one vision, namely ours. Toward that end, we’re establishing a standard, of sorts, for workstation imaging. But, we want to stay flexible with it. As I wrote on Tuesday, we’ve got a fairly good menu system worked out with bash shell scripts and yesterday I figured out how to make the default ZENWorks Imaging Bootable CD TFTP the menu script over from the ZENWorks for Desktops server and load it. (The menu itself runs the standard commands for imaging, but strings several images together into one menu item.) And, from the title of this entry, you can guess where I did all that work. Yep, on a Linux workstation.
Thanks to ZENWorks CoolSolutions and this article, I was able to figure out how to uncompress the Linux image, mount it as a filesystem, change it, and put it all back. I used a shareware ISO editor to change the boot.iso to include the new image and the settings.txt file. Then, we burned that and, ka-pow! We’ve got a solution. I’m refining it today, but it works well enough now, in my opinion.

Man, I love my new job! Novell and Linux together make a great team!

Wherever it goes, it goes too fast!

I guess I should have anticipated being so overwhelmed by my new job, but I didn’t. I mean, I really, really love it, but I’m so tired now. I guess part of it is the stress of adapting to a new environment and digging all those old Novell skills out for use. Of course, that’s one of the nice things, too.
In the past week, I’ve learned a whole bunch about ZENWorks for Server and ZENWorks for Desktops, since that’s what we’re focusing on right now. We’ve got to get the desktop images worked out for the remote sites. And, we have to test the system I developed for letting the monkies in the field to roll the images out with a minimum of thinking. So, how did I do that, you ask? Well, gentle reader, I learned shell script. I found the basic source for a menu system on the web and tailored that to our needs. I got a little help from my co-worker on syntax for the ZENWorks portion, and I still have to test the TID I found on integrating it into the PXE boot system, but, the way I have it set up, it’s very easily updateable from a central location. See, I made a shell script that TFTPs the most current menu to the local machine then loads it. That way, we can send a very static disk image to Dell and our users in the field can simply choose their machine type from a menu to get the latest image! It’s pretty damn good for my first two weeks!
So, anyway, even though I’m tired and I work in a closet, I’m really digging this new job.

More soon. I promise!

I work in a closet off the server room.

No, really, I do. I’m actually liking the new job, except for the fact that we don’t have offices yet. So, in reality, I’m sharing a storage closet off the server room with someone else. Okay, it’s not as bad as it sounds, but it’s starting to get a little tedious. I don’t even have my own office phone yet!
In all fairness, though, my new boss is working to get us both our own offices, but there aren’t any available near the rest of our group. So, soon, I hope, I’ll be better off than Melvin from Office Space. In the mean time, though, I actually am having a good time. So far, in the past two weeks, I’ve learned about Zenworks for Dekstops and Servers, both 6.5, and about shell scripting.
We’re working on getting an image down for the new sites that we’re going to be in charge of rolling out, but it’s going to take more than one image. Also, we need to have it set up so that local IT staff can reimage machines with a minimum of fuss or muss. So, we hit on the idea of making a text menu in a shell script that gives them choices on what image to apply. Between the two of us, we worked out a nifty little menu system. Now, we just have to figure out how to modify the standard Zenworks for Desktops imaging parition so that it TFTPs the most current menu from a server and runs it. Shouldn’t be too much trouble, now that I’m getting the hang of shell scripting. Not much different than batch files, really. And, a lot more fun that just being a backup monkey!

So, in short, even though I may work out of a storage closet at the moment, I really, really like my new job.

A quicker way to read updates…

Or not, in my case. Okay, so the new job has kept me fairly busy and I haven’t been able to do as many updates as I used to do. The good news is that means that I’m working at work, not looking for ways to not seem bored! Yea!
But, I do feel the need to share little “tid bits” with loyal readers (or reader, as the case may be). So, as everyone knows I’m a total, die-hard, Novell geek. I love using everything Novell, including GroupWise. In fact, if I could, I’d use the GroupWise client at home! (Hey, at least I’d be safe from all the worms out there!!) Anyway, I saw on Novell’s Cool Solutions website that someone has created an RSS reader for GroupWise. How cool!

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.