Even the big boys make mistakes

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We have some Ricoh all-in-one printers at work. They’re nice, the service is great, and I have never had a complaint that I couldn’t solve.

Except one.

My users told me that they wanted to send themselves emails, with scanned images attached – in other words, they want to scan things and have the resulting .pdf file go to their inbox instead of to a public shared drive.

We used to have MS Exchange. It took the scans and sent them off, no problems. A year or so ago, we switched to Google Apps, and at some point the ability to email scanned files went away.

Google has a howto that tells guys like me what to use, and I tried it, and it didn’t work. I tried every combination I could think of, and even went so far as to generate an SSL certificate and attempt to use that to access the SMTP gateway on port 465.

No joy.

Today, Google Apps support sent m a new SMTP gateway to try. It didn’t work.

I decided to go back to fundamentals. I pulled out an email I had sent to myself, and looked in the headers for the SMTP gateway IP address, and I used telnet to key in a complete SMTP session, with HELO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, etc., and it took my test email with no trouble.

After lunch, I decided that I would just point the Ricoh boxes at the IP address I had used before, and (being in a hurry), I did a “dig” for the IP.

It didn’t look right. It didn’t ping.

I dug out the email again, and verified that the IP which was in Comcast’s DNS was different than the one Google had used for my test email. When I used Google’s DNS server for the dig, it came up with the IP I expected, but Comcast returned a different IP.

I told Google Apps support, and they took care of it, although they did warn me that it might take 48 hours for the change to propagate. I just put Google’s DNS IP in the Ricoh machines, and all of a sudden I could scan a document and email it.

I guess even the big boys make mistakes.

One of those days

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My wife said we should have gone out last night, and I told her “Don’t should on yourself”, and “sometimes, you need a down day”.

It was one of those, today. I just sat here and studied ways to do incremental backups with tar – it turned out to be simpler than I had expected – and how to add space to a logical volume without moving files around – which turns out to be a lot harder than I expected – and I skipped lunch until Susan asked me if I wanted something.

I forgot to listen to Prairie Home Companion, with my nose down in this laptop and my thoughts on how I’m going to have to hit my boss up for money to buy another disk drive. I have to replace my basement bulkhead door, but the though of working on it right now just didn’t interest me, and I’ll need help anyway, and so it was a down day.

I didn’t turn on any of the football games, or watch any sunday soap operas, but I did see the Sunday Morning program before I turned it off and switched on the FM receiver to a local folk station. I even wondered what the train schedule is for sundays, but I just shook my head and reminded myself that my boss already has me for five days a week and he always get more hours than anyone else puts in anyway.

Sometimes, you need to veg out.

 

 

Premium Service

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I have a problem. It’s small, it’s not going to endanger anyone’s life if I don’t solve it, and it’s becoming an obsession.

My VPN stopped working a couple of weeks ago.

I’m the guy people depend on to keep things running, and they come and get me every time anything doesn’t. Sometimes, a Friday just goes blazing by, and there’s nothing to do but log in from home and do my backups by remote control.

Now, I can’t.

The thing is, that I’m peculiar: when something doesn’t work, I always figure that it’s something I did that broke it, so I figure that I have to fix it. I tried everything, until a few days ago, when one of the executives sent me an email asking why her VPN wasn’t working, and I realized that maybe this one wasn’t on me.

I spent an hour talking to Comcast technical support, and finally got to a guy who was able to rearrange our cable modem so that it would pass port 443, which is all that’s needed for the “software” version of our VPN to work. My executive will now be able to use the VPN again.

I, however, am still cut off. I have a Cisco router set up, which is a twin to the one at work, and they have a “hardware VPN” option which I had used to good effect, so much so that I was amazed I had ever been able to do without one.

So, I figured, if Comcast had cleared as much as they could, it was time to talk to Verizon, and see if they could re-arrange my DSL line to allow ipsec again. I wondered what the phone number is, and then I realized that I had committed it to memory a long time ago, and then I thought to myself “That’s not a good sign …”, but I dialed it anyway.

The Verizon call-taker told me that I should restart my router and DSL modem. I asked for second tier support. He told me that they don’t deal with VPN’s, but that there was a premium service that would not charge me if they didn’t solve the problem.

I told my mother to use the “premium” service once, years ago, when she had a problem that I couldn’t spare the time to fix, and I have a vague memory that they were able to get her back online, but I don’t remember the details. This, however, was my problem, and I don’t like talking to script kiddies – yes, I know the phrase isn’t usually used that way – and I shook my head and rolled my eyes, but I told that Verizon call-taker that I would like to talk to the “premium” problem solvers, hopeful that someone might have endowed them with better tools and better training in the years since I found out that most jobs in the IT departments were reserved for daddy’s boys and momma’s girls who were put there to immunize them from layoffs.

The salesman who answers the “premium” line was very positive that they can help, and he assured me that his techs are “all over port numbers” and “would make sure my setup is top-notch”. He did not, however, have any idea why ipsec was working one day and off the next, and when I told him that I had hooked my home unit up to the one at work with a crossover cord, and gotten VPN connectivity within seconds, he told me that he was sure it was something that his techs could help me with, and that I  needed to spend “only” $39.95 for some great deal that would last eight months.

I told him “good night”.

This is getting worse as time goes by: not only am I less-and-less willing to waste my time, but I am more-and-more convinced that Verizon is buggering my service with a view toward prying my wallet further open.

Someone should tell them that I’m the one-in-a-hundred customer who won’t play that game. It would be me, except that there’s nobody listening at Verizon, and I doubt there ever has been.

 

 

There’s something unsaid here

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I told Zack that I’d drop him off after we visited the DPW, just because I’m cheap and I didn’t want to pay him for time he didn’t work.

We had a good day, and got a lot done, setting things in place for the winter. Still, it was going to be a half-hour short, so I told him to tag along.

There was nothing in the recycle trailer except an abandoned flat screen and a mystery box that might have a printer in it, just old TV’s and some fluorescent tubes, so I said, “Let’s go” and tried to leave, but a policeman pulled up in back of me and asked what I was doing there.

I gave him my license and my TWIC card, and then he asked for the car registration, and I showed him that, and he said I should revisit the idea of taking computers out of the recycle bin. He asked why I was there after dark, and I said “It’s a convenient time”, and he seemed satisfied with that – as if 5:30 at night on a Friday were the prime time for thievery – and he and his partner had a long conversation before I was allowed to leave.

Except, he didn’t really say why. He sort of advanced the idea that the DPW sells the old TV’s and whatever, and I asked him “Those old relics?”, but that’s what he was telling me, I guess. He told me, finally, that I had to get my registration changed, since my car had been in Massachusetts more than 30 days, and I told him I’d take care of it.

I’ve had maybe five people tell me not to take things out of the recycle bin, over the years, and none of them ever really said why. Some say it’s dangerous, but then I tell them that I’ve worked with electronics and high voltage all my life, and they stop telling me that. Some say that the town sells the stuff to recyclers, but I don’t think that’s very likely: there aren’t enough rare earths or gold in the average TV or computer to make any kind of recovery profitable. I asked one of the selectmen about it at a town meeting a while back, and he said not to worry about it, and I figured that was all the permission I needed, but it seems not.

I’m not sure if there is a reason, aside from lookout syndrome, or cops who think I may be sliding things past the recycling desk without paying the fee. I’m not sure if the reason is something that they want to tell me, but I wish they would: I’ve been rehabilitating and giving away old machines for at least a decade, and most I got from customers who told me to remove them from a business, and a few I got from the recycling, but I never got a dime for any of them and I’m getting the feeling like there’s a secret no one wants me to know. I’d give  them to the VFW if there were any worth giving, although there haven’t been any worth mentioning in the recycling for a while now, and (come to think of it) I didn’t even mention the new power supply I paid for last week, or the RAM that I have to buy, or any of the other out-of-pocket that I put into it without anything to show except some personal satisfaction.

I wish they’d just say it, you know? If it’s where the town’s employees get their PC’s, fine: I’m a big boy, and I’ll accept that, except that anyone who was diverting the recycled machines to their coworkers would be putting them aside before they got to the recycle bin. If it’s just that they don’t want me there because others who don’t know anything about electronics would think that they were entitled, I guess I’d take that too.

Only, don’t tell me it’s for safety or whatever. I dislike being treated like a rube.

 

It’s recoveries that are hard

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There are a lot of hoary one-liners in my profession. They start with acronyms such as “RTFM”, and move on to sage advice about never trusting anything but the last header in an email, and, after you’ve been at it for a few years, they get simpler and more insightful.

My favorite is something a guy at the M.I.T. AI lab said to me: “Backups are easy! It’s recoveries which are hard”!

Truer words were never spoken. Some users back up the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, in ever-increasing quantities, mostly because they can, and putting their old files “somewhere” is a bit of cognitive dissonance that allows them to think they’ll get their data and their lives organized “someday”, and in the meantime the IT guy can keep it all safe for them.

I shouldn’t complain so much: even the users who try to do it right get caught in Friday-afternoon squeezes where they have to choose between getting another bit of work done or pruning their online lives, and it took me a long time to accept that work had to come before me, and their families first, and that my disk allocations are somewhere way down the list.

Sorry, I’m cranky and wired, still, rebouding after I slept for about twelve hours last night. I spent the day giving out new ID’s and passwords for our new server, and trying to figure out why one of them wouldn’t work, and it went by in the blink of an eye, as if I was there for a few minutes.

It was another lost weekend.

On friday, a disk crash, except it was more like an electronic temper tantrum, with a Western Digital “Black” Caviar 1TB drive throwing a fit in the middle of my SAMBA shares and demanding that I change its diaper RIGHT NOW.

The superblock was corrupt. I rolled in the alternate, trued up the cylinder boundaries, and got it back – praise God – online.

Then, the fun started.

The 1.5 TB USB drive that looked like such a good deal in the store coughed up a hairball about a quarter of the way to its rated capacity and died with a corrupted partition table, possibly because Linux support for NTFS is still not-ready-for-prime-time, or maybe because it is so slow that even a computer got tired of waiting on it. Either way, I had to wait out an over-the-Ethernet copy from SAMBA to a Windoze Ate machine, the only one I could find with a USB 2.0 port that also wasn’t running Ubuntu. I could have formatted it as EXT4, of course, but I really want to have it handy for CPR on ischemic PC’s that are overdue for the last writes (sorry) and that wouldn’t work unless it still has NTFS on it.

So, I reformatted it with NTFS, and did the copy the only way I could think of that was likely to work. The slow way. The painful way.

I had bought a new drive on Friday, or (to be honest), my boss’s boss had bought it, after he was nice enough to let me eat pizza in his car on the way to Micro Center in Cambridge. It’s another “Black” Caviar drive, with the same 1TB capacity. I put it in our backup computer, which holds the weekly copies of the real SAMBA box, and I told it to RSYNC the existing backup drive so that I could just roll in new data from the SAMBA box right after it was done playing hide-and-seek (again, sorry) with the TCP window size. I didn’t want to use dd because the old drive was formatted for EXT3, and I like EXT4, but  It picked up only 17 GB out of about 587, with no explanation or reason other than a complaint about “can’t access protected file”, which didn’t make sense, but there it was: that’s the price of trying to kill two birds with one stone. I CHMOD’d every file on the old backup to read-everyone, and did a straight copy, which worked.

I wound up going home at about 2 pm yesterday, after I had verified that the new drive was doing everything the old thing had threatened to stop doing, suddenly feeling incredibly tired and wrung-out.

I chose this life. I knew, going in, that there would be a lot of 3 AM wake-up calls, and lots of after-hours and weekend work. I won’t complain about that part.

I just didn’t expect it to be such a comedy of errors.

 

I’m surprised it takes so much time

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Getting ready for a new server is a multi-step process. There are a variety of steps to go through, but the most important is convincing everyone in your company to back up their data.

I could have done it myself, but that’s not the way I’m supposed to do this. It wasn’t something I thought about a lot: it was what I was taught in a course that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts paid for after they realized that there’s very little market for a guy who knows the different between ground start and loop start phone lines when the phone company isn’t hiring.

There’s a procedure for everything, of course, and the procedure for getting ready includes collecting user id’s and passwords on a spreadsheet, so that it’s a one-step job to load them all into the server. I spent the day doing it, and talking people through adding the new private drives that I put on the samba box for them.

The problem is that Windows boxes won’t map multiple network drives unless you use the same credentials on all of them, and that meant that I had to keep disconnecting our “Z” drive so that I could map the private ones. It’s surprising how long that takes, and how much time it takes to explain to someone that password-complexity requirements are a routine part of Windows client-server setups.

I slogged through that day, with a ~2 hour break to find yet-another-piece-of-spyware in one of our labs, and I was (all of a sudden) fed up with getting this problem again and again on the same group of machines, and I just set the machine back to factory-fresh and went back to mapping drives upstairs.

There was a good part, by the way: I found out that someone is using a brand-new app that might-or-might-not be compatible with Windows 8, but which will definitely work with seven, so I went to the only user who had the “pro” version of Windows 7 on her machine, and asked if she would switch, and she said “sure” without a second’s dithering.

That was nice of her, and I owe her one.

The problem with PXE

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The problem with PXE is the same as the problem with open-source software in general, and it’s the Achilles’ Heel of Linux: the documentation.

I went to school to learn about Microsoft servers and software, and if I need to put together a new machine image for installation on a slew of new hardware, I can do that with Windows.It would take a different setup for each platform, but that’s not the typical situation in commercial settings: companies buy new machines for everyone at the same time, not only because it avoids CPU envy, but because the employees help each other to get over the transition.

Of course, as soon as you stray from the Microsoft world, things change.

I installed a PXE server on a Linux box last week, and yesterday, I used it to reinstall the operating system for a ProLiant server. It worked fine, with no surprises, except for the way the machine wouldn’t recognize the hard drives being part of the array. I just made do with a single drive, and I kept the rest for the future.

I suppose I’m like other IT people: I’ve had to learn that “good enough” is when I need to stop and go on to other things. I put the server up, and copied the students files over from the old machine before I shut it down.

It’s just that I want to go back and make it run the way it was supposed to, but I don’t have that kind of time.

 

There are lots of things I can’t control

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My brother-in-law, who is an Electrical Engineer, said “I used to test those things. I’d like to see a picture of it”!

I had called him to tell him the news about the printer. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t about the printer: it was about the transformer which had shorted out and lit the telephone pole in front of my house on fire.

I went out, early, and the fire chief was yelling at me to get back inside, and I was ignoring him: the electric poles are on the other side of the street, and I’ve been working with electricity my whole life, and  I wasn’t in the mood to be yelled at anyway.

He came bounding up, and I turned to him, half asleep still, and said “How long?”, like he would know, and he seemed startled, and said “Can you hear me?”, and of course I could but I didn’t feel like having that conversation either.

I went over and talked to my neighbor, and we both remarked on how nice it was that the power had failed during the day, and I told him that I would start my generator, so if he wanted to heat something up for the kids, our stove would be working. I have an old Coleman stove if needed, but the generator has spoiled me, so I went inside and pulled the plugs on the TV and stereo and the other delicate stuff, and then walked to the generator and cranked it over.

I came out again, after breakfast, and one of the policemen told me that the electric company man had pulled my electric meter to test the voltage, because they had seen the side light on the wall over my back door, which I hadn’t realized was on, but the electric lineman must have wondered if I had used a suicide cord and was back-feeding the pole and would kill him when he went up there, and I can sympathize, having been bitten a time or three myself, but they work with HV gloves and shoulder shields, so I guess they would have been OK, but no harm in him checking: there’s no need to have an arc-over at fifty feet in the air.

They took most of the day to get it fixed: the transformer hadn’t really exploded: it was the insulator on the crossarm which failed, and the 13,000 volt “high line” wire had found it’s most susceptible (that’s a pun) way to ground through the metal braces and into the sapwood in the middle of the pole.

They still use creosote on the poles, from what I hear, and that must help prevent termites, but I suspect it keeps the poles from drying out, too, so the arc had gone from the insulator, into the crossarm, into the metal brace, and then into the center of the pole, where it had caught fire. The cop told me the lineman had said we were lucky that it had happened that way, because if the wires had shorted out to the low triples, all our houses would have become death traps. I just smiled and made a joke about not being dead yet, even while I was mentally groaning and wondering just how much truth there was in that story.

Verizon came with a new pole, and put in in a few feet away from the original, and moved the phone cable over, and then the linemen hoisted the transformer back into place and put the high wires back up and had it all together after about six hours. They had done some backfeeding of their own, jumpering the low wires from the transformer down the street over to ours, and my neighbor Marge said that half her lights were on, and I told the electric guys, repeating “half” a few times so that they would realize that one of the 110 wires hadn’t been jumpered as well as the others, and they fixed it, and then I threw my transfer switch and killed the generator.

I didn’t think much about it, except that I smiled when I remembered the great deal I had gotten on the generator, but it wasn’t really a momentous affair, as far as I could tell, and I went about the chores of the day while they were working on the pole. I tried to print a letter, and found out that my Laserjet 4M Plus, which is the best printer ever made, would not turn on.

Oh, carp.

I loved that machine. It was as reliable as the sunrise and I had gotten it in trade for some work I had done, maybe ten years ago, and it would just chug along all day, and now it was dead.

I talked to Len Zandrow, who is my lawyer, and I told him how my brother told me that I could make a claim against the electric company and get paid for it, except that my brother lives in Maryland, where they have a government instead of a continuing criminal conspiracy, so I figured I would need to bother Len about it. He told me that there was no harm in placing a claim, although I got the impression he was really wondering how long I intended to live before collecting.

I left a voice mail for the person I was eventually transferred to at “En-Star”, and I realized that a ten-plus year old printer wasn’t going to fetch that much anyway.

On Tuesday, I drove in to work instead of taking the train, to drop off the all-in-one printer/fax/whatever and Dell something-or-other that I had gotten from Freecycle, and on the way home I stopped at Micro Center on Memorial Drive, and bought some stuff for work, and then, just wanting to get it done, a new “all purpose” HP Laserjet. It was on sale, for about $260, and I trust the brand, for obvious reasons, and I brought it home and put the box in the corner and went to bed. The Dell printer is inkjet, and I thought to myself that it was ironic that I’d spend for a new laserjet instead of keeping the old inkjet, but my boss can afford the ink cartridges and I can’t, and the new HP was on sale for $260, so I decided to splurge.

Yesterday, while my wife was out yard sailing, I opened it up and read the quick-start guide, and realized that the complete directions were on the CD, and so I upended the box the way that they say, and almost broke a paper-guide picking it up, and I put the new printer where the 4M Plus had been, and plugged in the Ethernet cord and the power.

Nothing.

It was dead. Brand new, right out of the box, but not working at all.

I cycled the circuit breaker on the outlet strip, making sure that the pilot light went off and came on again, but still nothing, and I thought that was a shame, and changed the electric cord, and it was still lifeless.

I unplugged it, and then I realized that the outlet strip was the same one that had been there before, where the 4M Plus was, and I turned it over and looked at the bottom and read where it said “Surge protection”.

“Sometime”, my brother-in-law told me, “they put a fast-acting fuse in the line, and the Em-Oh-Vees will blow the fuse when they fire. I used to test those”, he told me, “and I’d like to see the picture”.

I went and I got the 4M Plus back from the porch where I had put it, on it’s way to the recycling bin or maybe a Freecycle ad, and I plonked it down on the table next to the UPS where the computers used to be, and I plugged it in to the wall outlet next to the cord for the UPS.

It came on right away, with an electronic insouciance I found both anti-climactic and delightful, and I plugged in the spare Ethernet cord and it was back in business, printing the stuff my wife had piled up.

Once my wife’s printouts were done, I moved the cord to where it needed to be: I didn’t bother with the UPS outlets, but they’re all marked “Surge protection”, so I figured I would stay with a proven paradigm.

There are a lot of things in life that I can’t control: the weather, my wife’s moods, the price of gas, and En-star’s delinquent maintenance policies. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try: I now remember that I had, of course, bought an outlet strip which had a surge-protection module builtin, not only because I know that overvoltage spikes aren’t kind to either printers or pocketbooks, but because I couldn’t stand the thought of how foolish I would feel if a spike fried my favorite Laserjet and I hadn’t done anything to prevent it.

The surge-protected outlet strip is, of course, toasted badly, with burn marks all over the inside when I opened it up, and that’s OK: the Metal-Oxide-Varistors are supposed to expel their last breath of magic smoke after giving up their ghosts in service to their owners. There’s no way around that, other than to spend hundreds of dollars on gas-tube discharge units, and the MOV’s had proved that they were, if only once, up to the task.

My new machine is still sitting there. I’m going to hook it up now, but I’ve been enjoying the chance to use the 4M Plus again, and to marvel at how, sometimes, I get a break.

Treasures in the attic

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I’ve been working on a PXE server, off and on, for a couple of weeks.

Everyone I talked to warned me that they’re a pain in the butt to get going, although most also said “Once it’s going, it works great” or something like it.

On Friday, I got it going. Not perfect, not ready for prime time, but (finally!) able to answer BOOTP requests and to deliver up an OS for the PC to boot. I’ll have to fiddle with the vmlinuz files I have set, but that’s pretty tame stuff and I don’t think it’ll take anything near as long.

It took a lot of Google searches. It took a lot of trial and “Goddammit”, finding yet-another-mistake in the (Official!) documentation. It took a lot more patience than I usually have. Still, I stuck with it: I always wanted to do one on Linux, and now I have a valid reason for spending the time. We’re converting over to Windows 8, and I’m waiting for a new honest-to-ghod server that will mount in an honest-to-ghod rack instead of a couple of old desktops someone pressed into service ghod-knows-when. While I wait for the hardware, I’m going to be ready to tripwire every desktop into the new system in one weekend. Even if the new server isn’t ready and I have to build Windows 2012 in a virtual slice of my current machine, I won’t have to worry about getting 2012 Server into PXE mode at the last minute, and I don’t know if it’ll even deliver a Linux image.

There’s a side benefit: I have some antediluvian Proliant servers in my rack, and three of them are marked “Parts”, but one was still going until it started throwing sector hits last month, so I put another Dell Dimension in it’s place, but in order to rebuild it, I need to either open it up and mount a CD, or use a PXE boot, and I figured I’d kill three birds with one stone: I’ll have it set up so I can choose between Linux flavors, or Windows 8 for 32-bit machines versus 64-bit, and I’m going to dig out my old copy of DOS 6.21 and put that on there as well.

All of this boils down to me spending lots of time in my server room, sitting on a dead Dell that I’m keeping for parts. While I was in there Friday, I plugged in an IBM ThinkCentre which was in a corner, marked “Very Old”, hoping that I could use it for a replacement for the “Security” machine that we use to control the elevator and door entry, since the old box died and the maintenance company wanted $800 to replace it. I changed the power cord, and checked all the connections, and even moved the “240/120″ slider back and forth to clean the contacts, but the box was, I had to admit it, dead as a doornail.

It’s funny what you think of at times like that: I noticed that there was another old ThinkCentre being used to support our firewall/NAT box, and I realized that I had never checked it out. I plugged it in, and was pleasantly surprised to see it come up with “Windows 2003 Server” loaded. None of the standard passwords worked, but I can get around that, and on Monday I’ll find out if this was the original server that was moved to a slot in my virtual host: you’re not supposed to run two server on one license, of course, but there’s some latitude for back-up machines, and if it’s a separate license, so much the better.

I left in on over the weekend, hoping that it would auto-update and save me the trouble. I’ll have to dig into the registry and reset the password, although I’ll lose any Encrypted files, but since it hasn’t been online for quite a while, I doubt that’s a problem.

Anyway, back to the security machine: I was thinking, on the way home, that I’d have to use one of the other spare machines, even though I wanted to save them for Windows 8, and I’m loathe to waste the power on a single-app machine that’s turned off most of the time. Yesterday, while draining out the expansion tank on my furnace to get ready for winter, I noticed a whitebox PC that I had, way back when, stuck in the overhead between two joists. I had forgotten I even had it.

It came right up, no problem, not even a dead BIOS battery: still showing the current date and time. It runs Windows 98SE, but that’s OK in the “Security” machine, since there’s no connection to the outside world from that LAN. I don’t know if the security app needs Java or other mod cons, but I’m sure I can get it going one way or the other. It’s only got 128MB of ram, which I’ll probable raise just on general principles, and a Pentium III processor running at 450MHz, but the HD has 500 MB of space, and that’s way more than the security application needs. It’s amazing how many of my software customers asked me to dispose of hardware for them, but this time, it paid off.

All in all, it was a pretty good day: I can put the 2003 server to work in our labs, and maybe free my virtual host for other duties, and I’ll be able to get the security machine going without spending $800, and the PXE server is as good as done.

I’ve often wondered why I always keep copies of old operating systems around: I’ve got Windows for Workgroups on floppies somewhere, and everything before and after, and because of my packrat habits, I get to have DOS 6.21 on my PXE server, for those nothing-else-will-do moments when I’ve got to dig out the QWIC-80 tape drive to raise some old IRS files from the dead. Come to think of it, I get to sleep an extra hour on Saturday night. Nice!

The Eight-Fifteen

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I had this feeling all morning long, like there was something I was forgetting. I went through the ususal stuff, and even got to slap myself on the back for preparing a spare XP box, because one of the users had hers die, and I was ready and able to swap it out.

But I was still bothered about the classroom.

I had been in there yesterday, resetting things back to the way-they’re-supposed-to-be, and I had taken out some shared drives and nuked some music that didn’t belong to whomever had put it there. It still bothered me.

I went down there around Two, and tried to log in to one of the “problem” boxes. It took my password, and then immediately logged me off.

Keygrabber.

I changed the admin password on all the classroom machines, cursing myself for being so slow, for not thinking outside the box, for not anticipating that someone who would construct a file-sharing site might put a keygrabber in just for luck.

I made sure I reset the passwords after a full power cycle, so that there was no chance the thing was active. I made a bet with myself that it was a hacked screensaver, although Google indicated something called “Blinddove”. No matter: it’s just a matter of finding it.

It was obvious that I wouldn’t make the 6:50. I planned for the 8:15, and went about doing the rest of the machines, like an assembly line, with the chairs in the middle of the room and me going machine-to-machine, logging on, and then starting a full virus scan, and then locking the account before I turned off the monitors.

We have Microsoft Security Essentials on the Vista boxes, which is OK for what it is, but there’s nothing like that for the XP machines. No problem, though: we have a license for Avast. I had put it on the machines that use XP, and figured one virus scanner is as good as another.

Except, when I tried to start them, I found out that the “trial” period would expire tomorrow. They had never been “activated”, which is a complicated process that requires each client to have a chat with our “central” server.

That wasn’t working, because the classrooms are on a separate subnet than the admin areas, and the server only talks to the admin LAN, not the classroom one.

I wound up moving some Ethernet cables so that the server was talking to the classroom LAN, and with that, I could activate the Avast programs on the client machines.

I got out at Eight, on the dot, and decided that I would take the subway to the Back Bay Commuter Rail.

I found out the hard way that the lobby of the Tufts Hospital is locked after eight pm. I had to run around the building to get to the subway stop, and the train was pulling out as a went down the stairs.

I got to Back Bay at exactly 8:20, and that’s when the schedule says my train would be there, just before it blicked off as if the train had just left, but when I arrived, gasping for breath, there were only a lot of people and no train.

The announcement board said it wasn’t there, but the people said it hadn’t arrived. The PA system said that “The Eight-Twenty-Five train to Wickford Junction would be delayed”. I checked the schedule, and it still says 8:20, at least the online version.

I got on at Nineteen-to-Nine. I got home at nine-thirty.

Never question the gifts of the gods, that’s what I always say.