Category: Work
Today is not being a very good day for me
I was stressed going to work this morning
The job i am working on is a pure bollox
I was supposed to be BBQ’in tonight but the english have stolen our weather
Im not a happy camper.
To expand i am working on restoring a server that died. It has been replaced, and the retoration has actually gone quite well except for the fact that the data is 30 days old! a fellow engineer suggests that perhaps a retention period was enabled! We cannot check as the old server is FUBAR! I am not a happy camper
This really highlights the over complexity of backup softwares. The differences in terms let alone approaches between backup software is crazy. What seems to be completely intuitive in say Arc Serve flies in the face of say Backup Exec. Backups, along with printers remain my pet hates in the world of IT. The errors both areas produce are complex at the best, down right ancient sumarian at worst!
What are your options in this crazy world? Very few. Backups are an absolute requirement unless you want to go down the pan! So get to grips with your backup, and keep it up to date! and test it, oh lord test it. And keep a monthly backup offsite!
I had myself a right little job yesterday.
A client was not able to do anything on the network. They had a valid IP that was assigned by the Server 2003 DHCP.
The machine would work for a while, then mysteriously drop off the network, though the ARP cache was populated. If i cleared the ARP table, then everything would work for another while.
My first thought was duplicate IP. So i logged into a few other machines and servers, pinged the appropriate IP and checked the ARP cache for the MAC address. All of them showed the MAC Address of the machine that was affected.
So i tried to remove and reinstall the network card drivers. No difference
I then tried using a USB NIC, a Linksys U200M, but this caused Blue Screens.
I moved it to a different network point, with a different cable, same issue. I moved it to a physically separate network, issue did not reoccur
For shits and giggles i assigned an IP to it in the DHCP server that was not it’s current IP.
one ipconfig /renew later and i could still ping the old IP and see a different MAC address on it. Some gimp had manually assigned some device with the same IP the machine i was working with was getting from DHCP
The real pain here was that Windows should have detected this and attempted to correct it.
I’ve yet to find the device, but when i do, it’s owner will have it inserted into their smallest most of orifices!
I recently was doing some css development, and ran into a right little head scratcher
I was having some positioning issues with a background image, and so i wanted to specify that in Internet Explorer, you use one image, in any other browser you use another
In my Css i had seperated it out into using a header element and a header_ie element
My first port of call was http://www.conditional-css.com/usage
Getting the [if IE] working was perfect, however getting the counter of it was more difficult
The suggested method is below
[if ! Opera] - Used if the browser is not Opera (for example)
However this did not work for me at all. After some poking around i found the answer, but for the life of me i cannot find the site again.
The below code works fine, note the additional exclamation marks
<!--[if !IE]><!--><div id="header"><!--<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE]><div id="header_ie"><![endif]-->

This last week ive been finding myself under stress. Thanks to a number of issues in work and at home, my stress levels have simply gotten the better of me.
Yesterday as soon as i got into my van i could feel tightness in my chest, and as i was going from job to job, i found that the tightness was dissipating as things went right, but the second there was a sniff of a problem, man that tightness was right back
Why am i this stressed? Well last week i had some major issues with a site and the Conficker worm. Long story short, it dragged on, and i began to question my technical skills. What was really needed on site was the ability to stand back and look at the overall situation. I did find the solution, but made some small errors while pushing to get the issue resolved made me really question my choice of career, like leaving a small desktop switch turned off, then pulling out hair trying to figure out why the owners pc wouldnt connect to the network!
So last night i had a dream. In it i deployed from start to finish 4 Windows XP Pro PC’s, straight from creating an unattend file to adding service pack 3 after the install! I mean i dreamt the entire thing like a freakin MS best practice webcast! Thats just not right!
Now that just isnt right!
Today was an amazingly shitty day in the Corporate Zombie world
Yesterday, after my lovely trip to Edinburgh with my better half, i found out that work is getting slack, and some people have to work three day weeks. Thats pretty shit
On the way home i was stuck behind a queue of traffic, and as i was about to overtake, my turbo unit in the van would not respond, and i had no power. It took me over an hour to get home. That was quite shit
While at home i managed to break a cup while stacking the dishwasher, that was fairly shit
I got up this morning and went to the bathroom. On the landing was a mouse. My house has mice. That is bloody shit
I got into work this morning and things were going ok. Then i went to check my bank balance, and Vodafone, the cunts, have screwed me for the second month running. A major review of their service is pending. That was fucking shit
Then at lunch time, while i was paying for my new mouse trap, i discovered that my laser card was missing. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camels back, killed his family in a freak straw related disaster, which in turn deprived a local community of its transportation across the desert, which destroyed said community, this in turn lead to a major depression in the country where this community was located, and many many more communities were lost due to lack of interest in their camels, or the straws on their backs
…..
My sister found my laser card
On the way back from the job i was just on, my turbo kicked in again
is that a herd of camels i hear making their way to a depressed and nearly suicidal country…
Well, my use of “eh?” here is well and truly justified!
Today for my lunch i enjoyed a Tim Horton’s Cappuccino and a Boston Cream donut. It was feckin lovely! I mean seriously lovely. The issue i always had with donuts was that they always felt too heavy. Not so these parties-in-my-mouth. Light and fluffy is the only way to describe it, and the topping, feckin grand it was!
Tim Hortons was first introduced to me by Fel (see his blog here: http://www.rodina.ca/ ), a mate of mine from my online Star Wars club, The Galactic Empire (ed: well, not my club as such, a club in which i am a member for over seven years now)
His description at the time was along the lines of “OMFG THEY ARE LIKE BAKED ANGELS!” or something similar
And they are…
the coffee was pretty good too!
Oh, they, and he (fel) are from Canada. Eh!
http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude.php

That was a nice rug, it brought the room together
Anyone who has ever wanted to map out their network, this tool is pretty sweet. It’ll allow you do just about everything you needed to do on a network from a lovely GUI. Its pretty sweet!
Also, the developer is a man after my own heart. When going out to get various resources on your network, it tells you “getting stuff”. Nice!
This was an issue for me on my work PC. The above link had the solution
FUN!!!
1 – Hardware – HP DL380 G5, 3 x 146GB SAS drives in RAID 5
2 – Partition Layout – 50GB System drive, rest for data
3 – How did it go: Very easy, getting it to its first boot is remarkably easy, almost 0 configuration, though i had the benefit of a HP Smart Start CD!
More Soon!

