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April 30, 2004

The Derby, Oaks, Windows Servers, and other fun stuff

There's almost too much going on at once at work. I really hate this time of year. Everyone has a short temper, they're worn out, and definately ready for a vacation. I sure know that I am.

Now that Derby is almost under wraps, I have elections to deal with in the next few days. Thankfully its mostly an Indiana election that I really don't have to deal with. We won't be doing the special setup that we normally do ... just need to make sure that we have the important stuff up and running (i.e. Leader and graphics). In addition, there's a special training session that I need to get ready for on Wednesday ... as if I wasn't busy enough I have to get this thing figured out as well.

Even though I knew that I had tons of crap still ahead of me, I still made a trip down to Churchill around 10 this morning, stayed for a few hours and placed a few bets, and came back with Neal and Bill. I got to see some of the houses that Neal has bough and is now fixing up and renting out. I was really impressed with the first one that he showed me, and when we left I joke with him about not seeing him as a slum lord anymore. Heh, I'm funny.

When I got back, I discovered that Kyle opted not to head down to the track, which was good news as far as I was concerned. If he wanted to go, I definately wasn't going to stop him ... but once I heard that he was around I decided that it would be a good idea to work on a few things since everyone else was going to be out of the building early. We were able to get quite a bit done too ... moving the remaining Dell server to its space in the rack and joining it to the domain, moved all of the Dell servers to the UPS units (which was a breeze thanks to redundant power supplies), hooking up the Crusade server and joining it to the domain, and working on tape backups. Since there was NO ONE there to bother us, we were able to get a shitload of work done ... amazing what happens when you're not being pulled in 100 different directions.

We've come a long way in our little time at WHAS. I reflected back on the changes that we've made in the past year and a half, and the list is rather extensive:

- Changed out the network infrastructure, going from hubs to switches
- Created a brand new server room out of a junk room
- Replaced a 30 year old UNIX phone system with a modern Linux system
- Replaced all "workstation" servers with REAL rack mounted Xeon servers
- With the renovation of the 2nd floor, put in cable trays and CAT6 cabling and a new server closet
- Replaced 80% of the PCs in the building (there's only a few Win98 machines left now)

And its not only the physical changes that have made a big difference. I was also reflecting wtih Kyle the other day how much perception makes such a dramatic difference in our jobs on a day to day basis. We've gotten the respect of people that were weary of us at first. We've proven to many people that we're not a flash in the pan operation ... and that we actually care about what we're doing and how it affects the rest of the building. As a result, people are much more willing to work with us, and we don't feel like we're the 3rd leg of an operation anymore. It's really a nice feeling to have when you sit back and think about it.

Anyhow... enough reflection for one day. I'm heading off to bed. Night!

Posted by ed at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2004

APT and Synaptic for Fedora Core 2 Test 2

I've felt a bit lost over the past couple of weeks without APT and Synaptic. While Mandrake's RPM update tool, URPMI, is a nice piece of software, I honestly feel that APT and Synaptic are just way out of its league.

Since I installed Fedora Core 2 Test 2, which has been awesome might I add, I've been looking for a compatable version of APT and Synaptic. I found it today at FreshRPMS.net. Here's the link:

http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/testing/2/

Now, I found that in order to install APT and Synaptic, you need to actually download all of the packages from the FreshRPMs site. I tried initially to download just APT and install Synaptic from the terminal, but it gave me all kinds of dependancy issues. Instead, I installed Synaptic from the RPMs manually, and everything worked just fine. As a matter of fact, I just finished with some software updates that I've been wanting to do for a while now.

Man, I've missed Synaptic.

Posted by ed at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)

Another Week From Hell Is Over

I knew this week would be a huge challenge for the IT department, but there were things that I just didn't anticipate.

The news printers not working properly: This one has been one of the biggest annoyances thus far. I can't figure for the life of me why these damn newsroom script printers aren't printing properly. For some reason, they keep printing scripts out of order. For example, it would print pages 1-8, 10, 9, 11-17, 19, 18, 20-25. Now why it's doing this, I'm just not too sure. I've been e-mailing and calling Lexmark since Tuesday trying to figure out a solution, but even they seem to be stumped by this problem. Come Monday, I'm going to call them back and have them send down someone to get this thing working properly.

At least I got Optraforms Director to stop crashing.

Posted by ed at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2004

84Online No Longer

Learned today that Bob Sokoler was let go as morning host at WHAS Radio. As a result, 84Online is also no more. The Web page was down by the time I heard of the news this morning, and e-mails started flying around as early as 11am.

The 84Online team, as they were, is now no more.

I somehow doubt that this will stop us. We've become a very close group of friends over the years, and I have a feeling that in some way, shape, or form there will be something to continue on the 84Online legacy, just under a different name.

Here's to hoping that if it does continue, that it will be stronger than before ... and won't have a stupid sounding name like "Byte Talk" or something like that.

Posted by ed at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2004

Windows 2003 and a very long weekend

I've just finished the longest weekend project to date at the station this past Saturday and Sunday. I was there from 10am till 1:30am on Saturday and 10am till 12:30am on Sunday. Grand total of 30 hours for the two days. What really amazes me is that I put almost an entire weeks work of work into two days.

Anyhow, the reason for the long weekend was our changeover to Windows 2003. I'm happy to say that the move was a smashing success, with only minor issues that needed to be resolved today. The biggest headache throughout the day were the people that came up to me expecting help when they didn't bother to follow the instructions that I sent out on Thursday. I would ask people "did you print out the instructions that I sent you?" and when they replied no, I told them to find someone that had them and have them help.

It sounds mean, but this is how you have to treat these people.

If I spent all my time showing people how to log into the system, when they should've had the proper instructions in the first place, it would've taken away from more important things like making sure that directories had proper permissions, printers were mapped properly, and keeping a close eye on the new file server to see how it was handling the load. I told Neal that I was going to make people who followed instructions the top priority, and make my way down from there. What was really nice was that he stepped in when necessary, getting people off my back when they weren't following directions.

I have great bosses.

We encountered a weird issue towards the end of the day with the NAS. It locked out of Explorer and it was physically impossible to log into the system. I'm not quite sure why, but it definately caused a few problems for me. So, we setup something that I've never tried before ... using a scheduled task to run a script that reboots a remote machine. I'm having one of our domain controllers reboot the NAS remotely, using the new shutdown.exe that comes with Win2k3. What's really interesting about the new shutdown.exe is that it reports why a machine is shutting down, keeping track of everything in a log. So, we had to setup a script that had the following flags:

/r - reboots the machine
/m \\server - reboots a remote server
/f - forces the shutdown in case if there's anything running
/d p:00:00 - logs the shutdown and the reason behind it

Anyhow, our NAS is now scheduled to reboot tomorrow morning at 12:30am. If everything goes correctly, the machine will be booted within roughly 5-10 minutes and no one will even notice that the system was even down. I choose the specific time as there's really no one at the station around that time, and the people that are don't really need much access to files or printing, nor will they be logging in and out of the system.

Well, I'm tired now so I think I will retire for the night.

Posted by ed at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2004

Lynx In Da House

I'm entering this blog from a command prompt via Lynx while I'm installing Gnome 2.6. Neat, eh?

This weekend is the big changeover to our new servers. Kyle and I have been busting our asses trying to get prepped for this Sunday. He's been working really hard on getting some new machines ready to go out, in addition to acting as my backup server configurator. I, on the other hand, have been concentrating heavily on server configuration, directory cleanup (both department and users), scripting and overall general automation. I'm pleased to say that the system is roughly at 95%, and it should be ready to go 100% by this Sunday. In addition, Brenda from corporate is on her way down as I type this, getting in to town sometime later this evening. We're going to meet up tomorrow at the station around 10am and work on getting the files transfered over, in addition to some last minute tweaking of the system. I think Brenda is going to be impressed by what we've done thus far. Now, if she can get the Exchange 5.5 server to integrate properly, we'll be all set.

My biggest concern thus far isn't really about this weekend, although there's quite a bit of work ahead of us yet. Instead, I'm worrying about what'll happen come Monday morning when all of the users try logging in for the first time. Sure, we'll have a few people over the weekend who'll be able to log into the system and we'll get a good feel for how everything is working by they're reaction ... but there's no real way to test the load that the machines will be taking on Monday morning until Monday morning happens. I'm hoping that everything will go smoothly and there will be no problems. I do have a feeling, however, that I'm going to have to get to work extra early on Monday just to make sure that everything starts off as smoothly as possible.

On another note, tomorrow is Thunder Over Louisville. We were originally going to be doing the entire event, but at the last minute management decided that we were only going to be doing the airshow, but not the fireworks. I was really wondering if we were going to back down at all, but I guess that the bad press that we've been getting over the past few weeks finally made some hard decisions for us. Don't get me wrong, I'm for whatever management is for, but only as long as it doesn't hurt the reputation of the station and the employees that work there. I was concerned that some people might take something out on an employee just because they work at the station. Something like keying a car because it has the station parking tag or something of that nature. Regardless, things seem to be calming down a bit now, although I hear that the festival isn't thrilled that we're still doing the airshow. I guess that they need to just chill a bit themselves ... they got the part that mattered most, at least in
my opinion.

Anyhow... back to compiling. This is going to take a while.....

Posted by ed at 08:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 08, 2004

A server called Windows 2003

Well, I'm waist deep into my Win2k3 server project and my brain feels like mush.

Mush mush mush.

I've been working on so many different things lately its hard to keep track of it all. I've managed to get quite a bit of stuff setup on the servers thus far, and amazingly enough everything still works like a charm. I've gotten all the user accounts created, department groups with assigned users, department OU's with sub-department OU's, and enough GPO's to gag a maggot. Here's the breakdown of how the OU's and user accounts are working:

--Domain
----Dept OU
------Dept Job OU 1
----------Employee 1
----------Employee 2
------Dept Job OU 2
----------Employee 1
----------Employee 2

Now, as far as the policies are concerned, I've gotten them figured out as well. The way that it works, policies are inherited from child to parent. The higher priorities are loaded last. Any domain policies are loaded first, followed by the Department policies, then job policy. This allows me to assign specific policies to specific job functions, in addition to assigning specific login scripts. As a result, I can make it so that each group gets the specific printers that they require. An example being Producers ... I can assign a login script that assigns them the Genicom printers and Newsroom1 and Newsroom2. I can assign other people in the newsroom, such as directors, only Newsroom1 as they don't need the Genicoms. What's really nice is if I choose to do so, I can make it so that the Directors get the Genicom printers with a simple addition to the script.

What's even better is that I got the drive mapping structure figured out as well, and it is part of the specific login script for any specific job. Here's an example: say that you're an Engineering technician. You would get the following mapped directories on boot:

M:\ = home directory
N:\ = job specific department directory (i.e. engineering\technicians)
O:\ = department directory (i.e. engineering\ )
P:\ = public directory (heh... it's assigned to the letter P, isn't that fun? :)

Kyle and I were able to do some testing with a test user account. We found that a few things required some tweaking, specifically the con2prt program. This application is what allows you to add/remove printers via script. Best of all, it works REALLY well. After some testing, Kyle and I determined that the con2prt program has to be executed from the workstation in order to add the printers. We had to put the con2prt program in a folder on the public drive, making it readable for all users. After chaning the script to point to P:\utilities\con2prt.exe, the printers magically added themselves and set a pre-determined default printer.

Woohoo!

Anyhow, my brain is requesting time off, so I'm going to grant the request.

Posted by ed at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2004

DVD Burning and Linux

I bought a new DVD burner today, and I must say that I'm quite happy with the performance of it thus far. After careful consideration, I decided on the Lite-On LDW-851S model, which to my complete surprise, Linux completely recognized with name and speeds without any special configuration what-so-ever. I opened K3b immediately after I installed the DVD burner, and sure enough it had "LITE-ON - DVDRW LDW-851S" listed. As my first test of the device, I decided that it was time to compile my collection of CD-R backups into one single disc. Here's the result:

The DVD burning in process.

DVD burning completed successfully.

Now, I've made backups of my files over the years, roughly making 3 full CD's per year with important documents, pictures, music, and things of that nature. What I was surprised to find when going through all of these CDs (and there were quite a few) was that I replicated alot of things in my backup procedures. I had alot of the same documents, downloads, and other misc files on different discs, just wasting space. Once I got it all into one folder and recategorized, I was able to get it all down to 1.6GB of data. It would've been a bit more, but I opted to keep a few things out, like old WMA files and some applications that I wanted to keep separate for future use.

I'm in the middle of debating if I want to make another copy of the DVD I made today as a backup to the backup. Since I have everything in one CD now, if something were to happen to that CD I'd be 100% screwed. I'm thinking that I might make one or two more copies and keep them in a separate place somewhere in case something was to happen to my CD holder (i.e. it got lost, etc). Only problem is that I feel like it's a bit wasteful at the moment using up too many DVD-R discs, as they're not too cheap ... almost $2.00 per disc. I remember when CD-R discs where that much, and I hated wasting them as well. Eventually the price bottomed out on those and I would have one of those big ass spindles that would last me a lifetime. Guess it's just a waiting game for the DVD-/+R discs as well.

Posted by ed at 01:40 AM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2004

Playstation Emulation and Linux

I just finished playing around with a program called ePSXe, which is a Sony Playstation emulator for Windows and Linux. I've messed around with emulation in Linux before, mostly for older Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and a few arcade games like Pac-Man. I've never really thought about messing with Playstation emulation until today. Amanda and Jared were in the other room playing Tony Hawk on the Playstation, which got me to thinking about emulation in Linux and I began to wonder how good the PS emulators were. So I downloaded the stuff I needed, and here's the results:

Final Fantasy IX via Playstation emulation on Linux.

And there you have it, Final Fantasy IX running in all of it's glory. There's still some tweaking to be done with it, but the results out of the box were pretty interesting. Fast, crisp, and without question... playable. Now it looks like I need to invest in a PS controller adaptor kit for my PC so I can play some of my older favorite Playstation games, like Resident Evil. Heck, it might even be worth a trip down to the local game shop to see what's in the used games bin. I already have FF1 and 2, FFIV, FFIX, and Chrono Trigger thanks to Kyle letting me borrow them. Maybe I'll get some game time in soon.

I thought that I'd throw out some links, as there's really no good documentation on ePSXe out there at the moment. I did, however, find two really helpful Web sites:
ePSXe on Linux HOWTO
Pete's Homepage (for necessary video and audio files)

Posted by ed at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2004

A Long Week That's Finally Over

Okay, where to begin...

Gnome 2.6 was released this week. I'm stoked by the release notes on the newest version, as it seems that they've made some great strides recently. I'm sure that the Novell aquisition of Ximian has been a great help in that department. I'm currently debating downloading and installing it on my machine, but I think I'll wait a little bit to see if there's a Mandrake 10 RPM in a few days that will make the install go easier. I've had some issues in the past downloading and installing Gnome ... and it's not the fault of Gnome or its developers. Even though I've been using Linux as long as I have been, I'm still uncomfortable with certain things like installing a major desktop.

Anyhow, here's some links:
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/ <-- Gnome 2.6 Page
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/rnwhatsnew.html <-- Changes from 2.4 to 2.6

Speaking of Gnome, my second round with Mandrake 10 has been a better experience than before. Gnome has yet to crap out on me as of yet. The more I think about it, I really believe that an update package that I downloaded may have been corrupt, and was most likely causing all of my problems in the first place. Either way, I still have XFce installed as a backup, so if this thing does decide to crap out, I can always go to XFce and try to install Gnome 2.6. :)

Work this week was interesting, to say the least. I found it to be extremely challenging the entire week, and I'm not ashamed to say that I'm glad to have the day off tomorrow (yay). I really feel that I deserved to take a breather, as I've stayed so busy that I really felt that I didn't know if I was coming or going at certain times. Between getting the wiring for C-Gontrol and the audio booth finished and having to make someone do their job instead of making me do it (and trying to get my bosses to get me to do their job, I might add), I definately had enough of work this week and was ready to take a day for myself. Although I busted my chops this week with the G-Control, there's something about a job well done that makes me very proud of what it is that I do on a day-in and day-out kind of basis. When it was completed, the networking and phone wiring for G-Control and audio booth was neat, clean, and looked really good.

I learned something this week while at work that made me feel really good as well. While I always suspected that my bosses would stick their necks out for me if I needed them to do so, I've never had any issues that required them to do so. This week was different, and Bill took charge of the situation and told me that he would handle everything. He asked good questions that I was able to explain thoroughly and offer specific details with examples, which he took and charged head on into the problem with. As a result, I felt like a true part of the Engineering department more this week than I think I have since I started, and it was a nice feeling.

The problem that I've had since day one is that I've been seen by most people as the outsider, and alot of people didn't want to accept me. This was mostly due to my predicessors and their behavior towards others in the Engineering department. Because of their actions, I've had to prove to others in Engineering that I wasn't like the rest, and was commited to teamwork and making the place better as a whole. Some people understood this from the get-go, while others took a wait-and-see kind of approach. It's taken a year and a half to get there, but I've finally started to find a groove with others in Engineering, joking around with them and having some great conversations about the past, present and future. Little do these individuals realize how much I appreciate their work and their professionalism. I'm almost always in awe by the vast knowledge and years of experience that each of them brings to the table. Now that they're starting to open up to me, I'm learning more than I ever hoped to. It's definately a nice feeling to be finally accepted as part of the team.

Oh, one last thing to note ... I got my paycheck stub today (it's direct deposited, so it'll actually hit sometime tonight), but I saw that my backpay was included, in addition to my raise. Now that is a really good feeling to get a decent check like that just when you need it.

And boy, did we need it.

Posted by ed at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)