Work Journal
For Week of September 6, 1999
Page Updated Tuesday, March 21, 2000 07:18 PM
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I have intentionally not published any web page updates for the past two days as I really needed to get away from thinking about computers. I make a living working on computers, and also work on them as a hobby in my spare time. The effort of work and play on computers plus the constant search for more employment beyond my current contract which ended September 3rd, has taken the fun out of computers for me this week. So I took a two day break and now feel refreshed. I also got a 4 week extension on my contract which provides me with income, and less pressure to find my next job.
This afternoon my mother has called inquiring about getting an email account. I suggested she look at canada.com and hotmail because she can access her mail via any internet connection. She travels alot in the winter so can rent an internet connected PC at a cafe once a week to get her mail. While at home she has internet access while at work.
I downloaded Star Office 5.1 from the Sun site the other day and installed it this afternoon. I haven't spent much time with it but it certainly seems to be a nice package of all the applications the average user would ever need.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Decided to do a small project today. I had Windows NT 4 Workstation running on my test admin PC which is not really being used at the moment so I did an upgrade of NT4 to Windows 2000. The upgrade went very smooth, but as I did not have any applications installed on the PC yet I was not able to see how well applications work after an operating system upgrade.
The setup manager for unattended installs of Windows 2000 requires Windows 2000 to run. I took the opportunity to run the utility and create an answer file for unattended install of Windows 2000. The setup manager for Windows 2000 provides many more options to how you want to configure the installation. The utility is more like an install wizard instead of a plain graphical interface which the setup manager for NT4 provides.
I reformatted the drive in my test admin PC and setup an unattended install of Windows 2000. Setup manger creates a batch file to use to run the unattended install. I had to edit the batch file a bit to get it to work. The biggest problem is that it uses winnt32 which cannot be run in dos mode, and I am running the install from a Windows 98 startup disk.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Yesterdays unattended install of Windows 2000 didn't quite work out as I had planned. So I am trying it one more time before returning to work on my Windows NT unattended install.
I have changed my approach this time by writing a batch file which copies the I386 directory and the answer file onto the local hard drive before starting the install. This approach does not save me anytime, but is merely an attempt to try something different.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
The unattended install of Windows 2000 I did last night went very well. The only snag I ran into was that when it got to the point where the computer is to join the domain, the install paused till I manually clicked the next button. I am not sure if this is a bug in the software or if I missed something in the setup. I don't plan on revisiting unattended installs of Windows 2000 for a while, so I will have to wait and sort it out later.
Not productive evening for projects. I went to make a copy of the boot disk I have been using for unattended installs of Windows NT from my Novell server while was reading information Revenue Canada sent me. Well I used the wrong disk as the original, and used my good boot disk as the destination disk. I realized my mistake much too late to recover, so I had to find my gold copy boot disk which was in the disk case where I put it, but I could not see it for the proverbial trees. Well eventually I did find the disk, make a new working copy and modify it so I can boot and attach to my Novell server. Then at this point I decided to call it a night before I do any more damage.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Tonight I started to go through the documentation I have written so far on unattended installs of Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. I am cleaning up the documentation to create instructions for a very simple and basic installation using the default video driver, and NIC driver which comes with NT. Once I have that done I will work more advanced instructions to cover complex installs where 3rd party drivers are required. I hope to have the instructions for basic installation finished in a few days.
***
The latest version of Microsoft TechNet was delivered to me today. All the CDs now come in a nice large binder which has a zipper to hold it closed, as well as a carrying handle. With all these CDs I get, many of which supersede an older CD, means I have a growing collection of CDs for which I have no use. To bad there is no way to recycle CDs, as I hate to just put them in the trash. Maybe I can make decorations or something out of them.
***
I got to do a bit of SMS administration at work today. SMS is really neat in that you can remotely in real-time, without the user knowing make changes to the configuration of their PC. For example you can stop and disable a service such as Computer Browser (on Windows NT machine) with only a few clicks of the mouse. SMS also shows you quite a bit of information about a PC such as BIOS version, Operation System version, and service pack version.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I have found a problem with having StarOffice and Office 2000 installed on the same PC. Outlook 2000 is my default mail application but when I click on a link to a mail address on a web page StarOffice opens and starts a new mail message addressed to the link I clicked on. I uninstalled StarOffice and my problem was fixed, though I notice that StarOffice left 11 MB worth of files on my system after I uninstalled it. Part of the uninstall says that it is removing directories, well obviously the uninstall down not do perfect job of getting rid of files and directories.
I copied my work notes on unattended NT installs onto a floppy and sat back in the recliner with my laptop and turned my notes into a first rough draft of instructions for a basic Windows NT unattended install. I am having trouble trying to be a bit wordy in my writing, thus my instructions are a bit too short and lack details. I guess I have written too may meeting minutes and instructions for power users which were required to be brief and to the point, over the past few years. In school I always had to work at staying within a teachers word count, now it is a struggle to not write in point form.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I found out about an interesting product designed to help people learn how to program. http://www.codewarrior.com/ is the home page for Metrowerks Corporation which makes a range of programming tools. One of them is Discover Programming for Windows which covers learning how to program C, C++, and Java for the novice or beginner programmer.