The ramblings of Aprazeth, an recent convert to minimalism, enthusiast of computer technology – with an outspoken opinion about everything and everyone.
Archive for February, 2007
Nifty and interesting stuff
Feb 28th
Sorry, I hurt my hand so just a short post.
This is a very interesting read http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/02/14/raid_recovery/page5.html. Go over and read it while you backup.
.. and they said it couldn’t be done
Feb 26th
At work we have a child-domain, let’s call it for XYZ, in the main domain, which we shall call ABC. Now as you may know you can set up a 2way transfer. Somehow the trust didn’t seem to work properly; users authenticated in XYZ could not access resources in ABC without logging in with an user-account in XYZ. I managed to resolve this by creating a new group in XYZ, add the group from ABC and then had to locally (on each server) assign the usergroup of XYZ (which contains the users/groups from ABC) the correct accesslevels. Remote Desktop allready worked but some other things were required and this was the simplest way. In addition to that, it allows some granular control to what and where.
Apart from that I also did another batch of the laundry and whoopieeee! I only have to do 2 or 3 and then I am done again. Crap I had a lot of laundry to do ;)
Overall I am feeling good and hope my talks next week Monday will go fine. I also hope to take a couple of days off soon – so I can relax a bit. Anyways, I am going to try and figure out why my phone won’t sync properly anymore. Laters!
Choo-choo
Feb 25th
I think I saw the bigger part of the Netherlands this weekend. Friday’s I went over to a colleague to help out with a PC and spent the night there. Next day I went from Almere to Hilversum, got some of my stuff and went over to Den Bosch. Once there I decided to walk to Rosmalen, a good 45 minute walk.
And again, I tried a few stores along the way to get some headphones I can use with my phone – so that I may be able to use it as a MP3-player again. Nada. So I got at Rosmalen – ello mom! I had to fix up her PC, which now seems to be running smoothly again. Grabbed some munchies and went over back to Hilversum. So all in all I spent a good 5 to 6 hours just travelling across the country. But all-in-all it was a good day.
Today I watched Saw, which I haven’t seen before. And indeed – what a great movie. As per usual I also ironed my laundry and did another batch.I just have to do the dishes and iron the other batch and I am set.
I also managed to snag headphones for my phone/PDA. Apparently my mom had a pair she didn’t use. Well I’ll make sure to use them abundantly. Nothing like walking to work with your music on. w00t w00t. Amazing how hard a pair of 2.5mm stereo jackplug headphones are to find. Practically no one sells them. Which is odd, since a lot of phones and PDA’s actually use that connector. Oh well, whatever.
Got laundry?
Feb 22nd
Again… and WTF is up with the laundrymachine. I >know< I set it to a higher temperature but still everything is cold when I retrieved it. Gaaah! That, and the fact the bathroom was -again- dirty when I got home. Same garbagebags in the hallway. That’s it.
I’m leaving this place A.S.A.P. I already made a request for an appointment with my bank in order to get a mortgage going so I can buy my own place and be done with this… this… shit! I really am fed up with it. Gaah!
Asides that, I also had a nice little event this morning – so yeah! Another great day…
At work I managed to get the connection up again towards the servers I was working on earlier. I finalized the initial steps in Exchange, configured the firewall accordingly, and even managed to do some nice anti-spam integration and optimization (Go check out IMF, which is included in Exchange 2003 SP2) and did some initial work on SenderID only to again come to a abrupt stop – as we are unable to manage the DNS-entries as this is down by another 3rd party. Gah! Anyway, we couldn’t even enable the mail-backup at the internet provider as that somehow got mixed up as well. *sigh*. In good news we managed to implement and introduce 2 new servers at the data-center today. Always nice to see a nice new DELL PowerEdge 860 you installed take it’s place amongst the other servers :)
Asides that I haven’t got much to tell at the moment. I had a nice pizza (which I haven’t had for a long time so it was damn tasty :)) I also did some shopping so I get a nice full fridge at the moment. And for the rest, yeah well. I’m going to (finally) play a game of Supreme Commander in a few.
To top it all off; my internet connection just decided to just hang. Not to cut off, but to hang. I couldn’t reach anything, nor ping it. Nor could my gateway (I can have my router ping for diagnostic purposes) So reboot the router, then reboot the modem et voila! Internet. *sigh*
iTunes
Feb 21st
Advance notice; I am in a bit of a rant-and-rave mood so… Keep that in mind while you read.
What the f*ck? I think that sums it all up.
Today at work I had a pretty productive day and was even very proactive. I installed and configured all the required software for Exchange 2003. I did the forest and domain prep. Ensured there were 2 Global Catalog servers, installed and configured WINS on both DC’s and made them replication partners. Integrated WINS into DNS and configured all the servers to reflect this change.
In short, the entire works for Microsoft Exchange 2003. Installed it, updated it with all the latest patches, applied Service Pack 2. I also installed the SMTP Diagnostics, TroubleShooting assistant and Exchange Best Practice Analyzer. For matters of good measure I even installed Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.
After a few hours of installing and configuring the first sections of Exchange (store, transaction logs etc) and applying all necessary tweaks and improvements – the server disconnects me. Huh? I hate seeing that blinking “disconnect” in Remote Desktop. A few seconds later I receive email-alerts from the firewall that a NIC is down. I remote desktop to the firewall and LO-AND-BEHOLD; the ever-joyous ‘cable disconnected’ warning appeared on the LAN-port (I connected via WAN as I was doing remote monitoring/installation)
So I dial the place up only to hear they are doing some maintenance and had informed everyone; except us… Grr. Then again, I think we scored points in this scenario. It can’t be more then 5 minutes between their cable-yanking tactics and me being on the phone calling them. Got to love monitoring software :)
Since I was informed that it would take at least 30 minutes for them to get things done I figured I might as well seize the opportunity to work on the firewall and iron a few things out. 11 updates later on, and a reboot I can’t connect anymore. WTF? Then my own notebook started acting up so I figured as much and decided to call it a day.
I arrive at home to some really loud music, a vile stench and trash everywhere. Now, if you read my blog frequently you’d know that that is pretty much a given at this place. But now it just accumalated it all. I checked the bathroom where the sink was still a very unpleasant and unappeasing brown. You know, the kind of brown you get when you try coffee in it, but don’t run the tap to clean it up – so the coffee just dries up. Eck. I go to my room only to find someone has used the vacant room as their storage…? OK, GTFO my planet. Please!
15 minutes later I am so worked up I started to clean my own room, and in aggreviation I grab some chlorine, rubber gloves, a squeeky and some windex. I go to the bathroom and clean the sink and mirror…. Yeah I know, I was surprised too. I had almost forgotten we had a mirror. A couple of minutes later the mirror and sink are clean. And I mean C-L-E-A-N. I go back to my room, and take out the trash, picking up more as I go downstairs; since some of my roommates just put it in a bag and leave it outside their room for someone (me being that aforementioned someone 99.999% of the time) to pick up. So I bring it all downstairs and throw it in the bin, only to realize that there is more trash then I can put in my trashbag. OK, WTF?! Never fucking mind….
Walking back upstairs it dawned on me; my roommates really don’t give a flying fuck about this place or anyone as long as they don’t have to lift a finger…. Gaah!
Anyway, yesterday I performed a BIOS-update of my motherboard – which went fine. I also checked the BIOS and changed a few settings to see if I can tweak some more performance out of my system. Then it dawned on me again; I used the Resource Manager and had seen that I am getting 100+ page faults/sec at times, or in excess of that. Now, in layman terms that means – GET SOME MORE RAM! Well at least I know what to buy for my computer next then.
Today I also received my copy of Supreme Commander which I will be installing shortly.
I also installed iTunes and Quicktime today – which also reminded me Vista isn’t completely – blah blah blah… nothing is. Shut up and install. After installation it asked me to reboot. OK, WTF? Why would I need to reboot for a simple video and music program? Sheesh…
Still… Today was your typical – WTF!?! day. Gah!
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