Journal For Week of July 10, 2000
Last Update: Sunday, July 16, 2000 07:59 PM
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Monday July 10, 2000
Up bright and early today. Finished up my weekend posts and been out to survey the damage from the heavy rain last night. Lots of gravel deposited on the road from the rain running down the back alleys. The hail does not appear to have done any damage.
Time to head off to the new job. Hopefully I'll have some interesting things for tonight's post. TTFN.
Update: Day one at the new job went well. They already had my desk, phone, Network ID, and building pass all setup for me. All I had to do was fill out all the paper work for taxes etc. before digging into work.
Starting working on settings up some new Dell desktops to deploy and already have a short list of issues with the build started. Minor stuff, but it is stuff that will cause problems down the road which should be fixed now before they grow into bigger issues.
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Tuesday July 11, 2000
Tuesday came and went quiet like a mouse. So quiet in fact that I it passed uneventfully under my nose.
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Wednesday July 12, 2000
The bosses from what I have heard want to setup an Exchange server to manage internal and external mail. A fine idea till while reading Dr.Keyboard's journal reminded me that Exchange 2000 requires Windows 2000 server and active directory. Now we can go with Exchange 5.5, but I have a feeling that with the webified world we live in, the powers that be will want to do more than just send and receive email. Things like web folders will tease them, and lure them towards Exchange 2000. Then do we run a mixed environment of Novell NDS and Active Directory? Though I don't mind the idea of having to learn to massage all this technology and get it to work together as seamlessly as possible, I am not sure if this is the best thing for the business. When the time comes I better remember to raise some red flags.
Right now those who need external email are given an account with the ISP which supplies our DSL connection. Then for internal email we use Noteworks which is a very simplistic email system which if all you ever needed was internal email for your office it would fit the bill. There are no bells and whistles in Noteworks, just simple sending and receiving of email.
Took a laptop off the storage shelf this morning and headed up to the switch closet to check out the switch I was working on yesterday. I tried all the ports I had trouble with yesterday and they all work but one. My boss was interested to learn that only one port is actually malfunctioning, as the switching gear is only about 18 months old. He did not want to hear that such new equipment was failing big time.
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Thursday July 13, 2000
My chair is slowly melting as the air conditioning in my part of the office continues to not work. This provides me with a good reason to go and work in the lab or server room.
The backup we scheduled to run this morning on the development server failed as Arcserve did not like the tape media for some reason. I setup a new backup to run immediately using the same tape and it ran problem free. Arcserve is new to me, and it is quirky to me in the way it does some things.
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Friday July 14, 2000
Had to do some minor user account administration today, which lead me to finding that some of the account setup is not consistant. So I put together a policy for user account creation which after some polish I will show to my boss next week.
I believe I have finally figured out Arcserve. Like other enterprise quality backup software packages, Arcserve uses media pools. A media pool is a group of tapes which are assigned to be used together for a particular job. For example you may have a production and a development server. Each needs it's own set of backup tapes which constitute a media pool. To assist in managing the media pools, Arcserve lets you create and manage pools of tapes. When you format a tape you are asked to name the media, what media pool it should be a member of, and then Arcserve assigns a serial number to the tape. Each media pool is assigned a unique set of serial numbers, and when you do a backup if the tape is not a part of the media group used by the backup you are doing, the backup will not run. This is the problem I believe I am running into at work. Either the media pool is broken or some tapes got miss labeled. I have created a written backup log so I can record what tapes are used, if backups were successful etc. Over the next little while I should have all the backup problems sorted out and have reliable backups running every day.
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Saturday July 15, 2000
I have installed FrontPage 2000 on the living room PC which is the machine I spend most of my time working with as of late. Once again it has taken multiple attempts to install FrontPage 2000 as the installer for the upgrade version has some quirks I keep forgetting about.. If you fill out in the product key field immediately the install with fail when it goes to check for a valid upgrade product. What you have to do is skip past the information fields and the install will compete with no problems. Then the first time you fire up FrontPage 2000 you will have to filling the user information and product key fields.
Well FrontPage seems to be publishing properly but I don't see the changes at the web site via IE5. I cleaned out all the cache from IE5 and still can't seem my updates. I can ftp to my site and see the latest version of this page.
Oops, a typo sent my update to a sub directory. Everything is fixed now.
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Sunday July 16, 2000
While out on the front porch today picking up the usual collection of flyers the kids throw on my front steps I found a 3 foot long piece of siding. I didn't think it matched any of mine but thought I had better check just to be sure. Well it is mine. The top row above the window to the spare bedroom is missing the chuck I found. I don't have a big extension ladder or the other tools to do the job, so I had best find a repair man to take a a look at the damage and give me an estimate on the repairs.
Brushed the cob webs of an Pentium 133 that I used to run Exchange 5.5 on. I want to do an install of Netware 4.11 on it so I can verify some things I saw one of the servers at work.
Copyright © 1999, 2000 John Doucette. All Rights Reserved