11/14/2001

I would say that I have slacked off again, but man it seems they all start that way anymore. Of couse I am not as bad as my friend maxx yet and let my life go for a year with out writing in here, but I digress. Since I wrote last, there have been a few developments. First my new machine lives… built a system out of the SOYO Dragon motherboard. It is a sweet system. Unfortunately when I was getting ready to move my hardrive over to it… it crashed!!! 40 Gigs of data pretty much gone. Rebuilt the system in time to run the swim meet the next day and rebuilt the swim meet database for that meet. I have lost a little bit of luster for work now days. I get tired of the duality of the place. At one time they want me to be a “Smart little technician” and solve the problems that they can't or don't have time to do, but when it comes to something that they think is “Extremely Important” they want me to be a good little robot and click the buttons to run the stuff without asking “why?” or “what is this going to do?”. Recently one of the Domain Admins (who so far has had a lot of trouble getting his scripts to work correctly) sent us a link to a script he wrote. This script was located in a directory which everyone had full access to (meaning that they could have changed his script if they wanted to), which no one else had looked at and which didn't meet any of the parameters for what he was trying to do. I was talking to my boss about it and how I didn't think we should run it without more information since it could potentially screw up our image on the machines. My boss, which doesn't want us to do anything to the image without his say so, told us to run it and then ask tomorrow what it did. I said it would be too late then since it might have already screwed everything up. He didn't seem to care and told me to run it anyway. I told him I was clocking out and he could have the other tech (Jeremiah) run it if he wanted to. Maybe it wasn't the best thing to do, but I wasn't going to be the one to screw up the machines, since it WOULD be listed as my fault and not the domain admins who would have screwed up the script. I hate stuff like that. So today I went back to writing scripts. It seems to be the haven for my mind when I no longer am interested in the task at hand. Two new scripts are being born from this… SmbTable and SMess. SmbTable is a somewhat trivial smbstatus formater and organizer, while SMess might be a pretty cool system in the end. It will be a clean Linux based system to allow the AMs to send messages to the reps out on the floor. Hopefully I can get it all worked out rather quickly. Most of my work now is working with samba and trying to get diablonetwork.net off the ground. I am also working on a HOW-TO on SAMBA and Windows Domains. It is really a document on how to hide a linux machine inside a Windows network.