Well, I survived opening. Now I’ve moved on to disabling random URHnet ports that have virus and worm infected machines connected to them. I think I turned off somewhere around 80 rooms today.
And, on a completely unrelated note, I must resist the urge to build a new computer, but how can I with such flashy new hardware available?
This is the earliest we’ve ever opened the labs and, knock on wood, this is the smoothest one I’ve had in some time. Very few people are actually here,
The only bump in the road was easily solved, once I thought it through: URHNet users were getting told that our print servers didn’t have drivers for the printers we were sharing. This is not true. Since they are coming in as the Guest account, I figured something had to be up with permissions. The share (servernameprint$) had Read permissions for Everyone, so that’s good. The underlying file permissions, on the other hand, were missing Everyone. So, I re-added that, and all is now good.
And, had I looked in the Microsoft Knowledgebase first, I would have found article 271901.
Since my searches on Google came up dry, here’s how you clear existing MAC addresses from port security on an HP ProCurve 5308xl (from pg 237 of the Access Security Guide):
#configure terminal
(config)#show port-security H6
(config)#no port-security H6 mac-address 00b0d0-46b139
(config)#show port-security H6
Copy and paste of the MAC from the output of the show command works just fine.
I’ve been busy rebuilding lab machines, hammering the network, as this graph shows:
That’s the gig interface on a Dell 2650 server, working hard. And those spikes correspond to about 120 workstation installs across 5 sites. Graduate sites, that have to be scheduled, start tommorrow morning.
And we get to find out how people are going to react to losing the (free) dot printers. With cheaper laser printing, more lasers and color lasers available in 3 sites, hopefully it will go well.
Just so this gets into google: If you are creating a Windows Certificate Server CA to use with FreeSWAN/OpenSWAN/etc, don’t set it to be valid past the end of the unix epoch (ie 2038). FreeSWAN barfs on the RootCA cert, with nothing resembling a useful error (mentioned here). Now, back to running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off getting the labs ready to open.
Working my tail off, getting ready for opening, as usual. Lab rebuilds are progressing nicely, close to go time, but I should probably roll in the latest (out of cycle) security bulletin from Microsoft first. Hopefully it doesn’t require any strange things to install properly. Now I just need to hope for no critical patches on patch Tuesday.
In what will probably be the last chance until September, I took Friday off, and spent most of the day working at Hoopeston, getting my linux desktop closer to moving over to new hardware and other misc tasks. And we had one of those 10 minute tasks turn into an all afternoon clusterf$%k. But, in the long run, it was really just moving up the schedule for a reinstall, not creating work. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Saturday I took advantage of the wonderful concrete floor and air tools to rotate the tires on the Dakota and spent some time working in Hoopeston again. I picked up Alisha’s new hamster, Stinky, from my in-laws and brought it home. He seems to be happier in his plastic habitat than in the cardboard box. Maybe I’ll get some pictures this week.
Looking for the answer to a problem we found with our lab printers today, I went searching the Microsoft Knowledgebase for “DisableStrictNameChecking”. An interesting result comes up: 298692. Why is this article so interesting? It doesn’t contain the string, but it is applicable to the problem you are trying to solve if you are searching for that string.
Odd. Very Odd.
We’ve had many requests for better international language support in our labs, especially in our graduate halls. Many years ago, I tried and miserably failed to get something going with Windows NT 4.0 and Internet Explorer 5.01. In the last couple years, we’ve gotten international fonts working in Internet Explorer 6 sp1 (and Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox) without too much trouble.
This year, we’ve made some pretty good headway using some good documentation from Microsoft. While some of it is straight forward, figuring out which of the many locale ids/Input Locale combinations correspond to what is not. For example 0804:00000804 is Chinese_PRC with the US keyboard, while 0804:e00e0804 is Chinese_PRC with the PinYin IME. Thanks to this page, I know I need the second one to be able to enter Chinese characters. Chinese_Hong Kong was similar, with the first being a US keyboard and 0404:e0080404 being the one with the IME. Japanese and Korean both install IMEs without anything special.
As for AutoCAD 2005 that I mentioned earlier, it seems to be working pretty well, but the multiple install server support is still untested.
Next up is testing somewhere besides our limited test machines.
On Friday night, after driving to my parents house and then on to Hoopeston (to eat), the Honda decides it doesn’t like it’s original battery anymore. My parents jumped me from their Honda, drive over to the grandparents house and see my aunt for several hours. Playing poker at 10:30 pm, so my parents were nice enough to let me drive their car, and they took mine. It even started using the headlight trick. Saturday morning, Dad hooks it up to the roll around battery charger, and nothing. Oh well, it’s got 7+ years and 67,500 miles on it, more than you could expect from most things anymore. I’ll drive it back to Champaign and run to AutoZone in the truck and pick up a new battery, no big deal. Broke even at poker, got to sleep at 2 am.
Dad has been slowly fixing up his loader tractor, an Oliver 1755, replacing parts here and there to get it to run better and start more reliably. He noticed that there was no fuel filter, even though the shop manual said there should be one inline after the sediment bowl. Looking at the fuel line routing, it seemed like we could get one in there with some creative thinking. We ran over to John Deere in Hoopeston and picked up one for a 3020 Deere, came in a CarQuest box, so I’m sure it’s probably just a standard part. Once we got back, we cut out a couple chunks of the steel fuel line and slipped in the filter, not too tough, but it took quite a bit longer than we thought it was going to. It started easier and ran better than it has in almost as long as I can remember.
Next, we went over to Fred’s house and picked some sweetcorn for me to bring back, and he gave us a whole bunch of jalapeno peppers. Guess I’ll be bringing most of those in to work to give away. Then we went home and had lunch. During lunch, mom happened to get up to get a soda from the fridge in the garage and looked out at the shed door. Sitting there next to the door was a groundhog. Of course, he chose to run IN to the shed. We spent 15 minutes finding him, and the dog finally tipped us off that it was under a pallet with dual wheels stacked on top of it. And, without moving a bunch of stuff, there was no way to get the forklift to the pallet. We managed to tip the first wheel off without too much trouble, but on picking up the bottom wheel, dad dislocated his pinky finger. After that, we spent some time beating on and trying to chase the groundhog. He didn’t want to leave the pallet, probably didn’t help that the dog was barking and biting at him. After a bit of stabbing and prodding, we decided to lift up the wheel and pull out the pallet. That worked, but he ran the wrong way, back into the shed. The dog cornered it again, and we ending up having to stab the groundhog and kill it to get rid of it. Haven’t heard how dad’s finger turned out yet, they were headed to the emergency room as I headed back to Champaign.
Changing the battery went smooth, $49 later it’s got a new economy battery with a 1 year free replacement warranty and a 6 year prorated warranty.
And now I’m at work because one of our SDLT librarys decided it didn’t like life anymore late last night. Hopefully the firmware and driver updates for the SCSI interface card will fix that.
I got quite a bit accomplished for our lab rollouts today: upgrade to MatLab Release 14 and a good start on AutoCAD 2005.
MatLab has to be one of the easiest installs ever: it runs just fine off a read only share on a server and needs no files outside of what’s in that directory.
AutoCAD has been a serious pain in the past, but this year seems to be better, with baked in support for network share based installs, very similar to Office 2000/2003. Now I just need to make it work with our multiple distribution servers model, but I think I’ve got a way to do that.
And a random bit of news: Drug companies are pushing doctors to prescribe drugs people don’t really need?