I had this lengthy, detailed blog post written.  Then I clicked "Save and Close", and encountered a Security Timeout.  GAH!

The last two days at work have been pretty boring.  I just couldn't quite get into the swing of things after Finals.  Today kind of eased that transition by abruptly knocking me into whatever mode I was in during the summer.

 

I came in an hour later than usual, due to a rapid and highly planned covert operation that consisted of me whacking the alarm clock a couple of times and thus setting my alarm for an hour later when it first went off this morning.  Apparently my arm knew more about what was gonig to happen today than I did, because hindsight indicates that this was an unusually intelligent decision on the part of my (sleeping) arm.

 

Anyway, when I came in, the IT Director and Network Admin are sitting in the server room (within which my "office" resides), staring at the console.  This is A Bad Sign.  "SRVR8 went down."  The console displayed the reimaging tool off the restore cd's for that Gateway 860 NAS box.

 

It was at this point that I got knocked back into IT Pro mode instead of disaffected CS college student.

 

Apparently the box locked up between 11:48 PM and ~12:15 AM last night.  The IT Director arrives here first, and noticed that the drive mappings onto the server weren't working.  Since the system was locked, he powercycled it.  When it came back up, the OS couldn't be found and of course wouldn't boot.  And so the Network Admin was called in.

 

The Network Admin couldn't get the NAS box to boot off of what he thought were Windows Server 2003 and Recovery Tool discs, so he apparently fell back on the restore CD approach.  It was shortly after that that I showed up.

 

The good news is that the OS reinstall worked well.  The system was back online by 1 PM today.  It was also surprisingly painless, with none of the data being damaged (nice 3 hour chkdsk there...) and all the settings other than static IP, domain membership, and shares being pushed down via GP.

 

On the brighter side of things, everyone got their bonus checks today.  Now I can pay off a third of the taxes on my scholarships from last spring!

Well, this weekend I decided to make an effort to get VPN services working with ISA 2004.  And it worked!

 

It was actually pretty easy too.  ISA 2004 made it a snap to setup, and I found an article on Technet telling me EXACTLY what certificates to get to for the computers to allow L2TP and EAP to work.  The only snag I ran into (and it was a MAJOR snag) was getting the client certs.

 

For some reason when I try and get a certificate for any user, an error about "the specified user could not be found".  Since I was in a hurry, and only had one user account that needed a certificate, I ended up just having that user login to the CA computer directly, where the certificate issue worked fine.  Wierd...

 

The other problem I ran into was that the WinXP VPN client wouldn't work with cerficates created using the "Windows Server 2003 User" template.  In fact, the only certificate template I could use that resulted in a useable configuration was the Administrator template.  Again, wierd...

 

So there are a few issues that need to be looked into to get everything working perfectly.  In the meantime, at least I can connect in over the VPN and enjoy remote / WLAN access.

There have been a few things I've never managed to get working at all with Windows:

Paper (was) done on time!  Yay!

 

Now just to face finals week...

I have a paper for my history class due in 14.75 hours.  I'm at about 40% completion.  I'm averaging about 20% every 3 hours.  It's going to be a long night...

My roommate, Taylor (http://www.cs.purdue.edu/~tvenable/), runs Linux exclusively on his system.   Last Thursday, the following conversation occurred:

Taylor: "I sat here moving files around my computer all day."
Me: "That's because pushing the little pile of sand from there to over there is more interesting than watching the pile of sand."

At work I've been doing validation paper work (see https://www.ntldr.net/Lists/Blog/DispForm.aspx?ID=11), but that changed this Monday.  We've had some "productivity committees" working on making the company more productive since the spring.  Apparently, the latest finding of one of these groups is that we need better access/search to old reports and data summaries that are stored on one of the servers.  Ut-oh...that means these silly (waste of time, imho, since they don't seem to be addressing the real issues) things now affect IT.

 

So I've been reprioritized to be SharePoint-Intranet-Search development guy.  I started working on the intranet site during the holiday season last year, as a low-priority, "do this when you've got nothing better to do, like reimage perfectly good PC's", type of task.  Prior to my taking over, we had a basic intranet site that didn't work, and wasn't being worked on.  So my first task was to bring it forward 4 years and sit it on modern technologies.  Which is part of the reason I chose SharePoint.  I also chose it because I hadn't worked with it before, but had seen some interesting demos, heard some stuff about it, and figured I'd treat it as a learning experience.  As it turns out, SharePoint also had just about everything we needed in a Intranet site builtin, but the IT Director didn't like the UI, so I customized that a bunch, and got it looking decent.

 

So everything was going along great with the site and the test server it was on (our production webserver was still on NT4 with IIS4 limping along), until an instrument PC died.  The instrument actually makes money for the company, so I made the call and the test pc got appropriated.  This wouldn't have been a problem, except that the backup I shot of the test system, including site config, etc. turned out to be corrupted when I went to restore it after the instrument pc problem was permanently resolved.  I know, I know, VERIFY backups...

 

In any case, shortly thereafter it came time to upgrade the servers, and then do the validation, so work on the site got pushed back a bunch.  About a month ago I started work back up on the site, basically getting it back to where I was before the whole loss of the pc.  This included getting  the few custom apps I'd written (software inventory search, computer location on map, and basic document search) back up and running.  The one issue that I ran into here was that Kerberos seemed to not be working...impersonation was always failing when connecting to the db server.

 

It turns out Kerberos is completly broken in our AD domain.  I HAVE NO IDEA HOW THIS HAPPENED.  The network admin is going through the troubleshooting guides now and should have some answer for me soon.  In the meantime, it's back to Basic auth and debugging of the search stuff.

 

The current search mechanism uses the Indexng Service builtin to Windows Server 2003, and seems to do a fair job providing search results.  Large result sets do cause perf to take a bit of a hit, but I'm hoping that those wont be the normal search types.  Profiling and focus group testing should help clarify the extent of this problem.  The biggest problem isn't going to be coding related though, it's going to be dealing with the management personel who are advocating the search, since I get the feeling that this is more a reaction to the whole search phenomena going around the web right now.  Time to go get specs locked in...(but that needs to wait until finals week is over).

Today at work I just filled out more paperwork.  It was fun!  Look at screen showing report my custom data tools generate.  Copy column 2 to column 3, put a P or F in column 4, then initial and date column 5.  Oh the fun!  But it gets better!  If I put a F in column 4, I got to put a number next to it too.  Then at the bottom I got to write the number a second time (yes!  repitition!), and write a description (copy column 1, inserting "not's" every so often).  To finish it off, I got to sign and date each page.  The magical wonder of paperwork!

 

That process was repeated for ~50 pages.

 

And more pages to come next Monday.

 

And people wonder why I've come to think the FDA and drugs are evil conspiracies.

Note: this post is primarily intended for my parents, who keep asking me about it, but may be of brief informational use to those who keep asking we for it out of curiosity's sake.

 

Anyway, here's my list of desired birthday presents: