In a weird case of “who designed this packaging”, it looks like Cisco is against the world. Or at least they agree with the government and immigrations, and against Taiwan.
This is a small image from one of the packages in our Pix box.
So we got approved on the PIX yesterday, and it was ordered. We also have just been sent the new IP addresses we’re getting with our new connection. 62 shinny new IPv4 addresses winging their way to my office care of a 10mbps fiber connection (upgradable to 1gbps).
In a sane environment, you set limits on the sizes of attachments you can both send, and receive. However I’m not in a sane environment. The corporate types complain when they cannot do what they want, and being just a meer Network Admin I have to follow their orders albeit with reluctance, and severe suffering of everybody else.
Art Wittmann over at Network Computing (a publication by CMP) wrote an article this week on “The fall of The IT Control Freak“. It basically goes on to mention the general trend that in most setups, the control of the IT team is slowly slipping. The reason is simple; the advance of technology. In his article he cites the early 80s with desktop computers costing $6,000 each. That’s a huge chunk of money for one person’s desktop. Compared to now, I have 2 laptops on my desk, 2 flat panel screens, and 2 desktops, combined is probably less than that one desktop back then.
Sunday afternoon, we received a call from building security reporting that they’ve had a power outage lasting 1.5 hours, and power has now been restored. This means hell for me. 1.5hours is quite a long time. Our UPSes are able to sustain the servers for approximately 30 minutes, and longer if we reduce the servers to critical load only.
So why didn’t I get a notification earlier that power was out?
Blah… that’s kinda how I feel at the moment. Not sure why. I’m unmotivated at work, and I get this feeling my productivity is slipping. I’m finding myself snipping a little more at people I work with because of stupid mistakes they make. Usually I’d joke about it, but this is different. What’s weird is that it’s not like I’m not getting stuff done.
Today was a little different, I really didn’t feel up to a huge amount of work, so took care of some niggling projects that I took upon myself to do. For example, there has been an open development request for auditing of user changes on our production services. This is, and always has been, something that should be there. But it’s not new functionality, and it’s not fixing a bug. This is more of an internal thing, and as most people know, internal projects always take the back burner over customer requests. So basically summarized, the open request is to add tracking of who changed what, on what user, and when. Fairly simply security auditing stuff. The current setup records who changed the record, and when, not what, just when. It also doesn’t keep a history, so a minor flaw there. Now this is where things get stupid. Our helpdesk staff cannot see who last modifed the user record. This in itself is retarded, I’m sure it’d take a developer all of 2 minutes to modify the current user management screen to add a “last modifed by:” field, and load the data, but nope.
Anyway, I digress slightly. So for them to find out who modified a record, they have to come see me and ask. This generally isn’t too bad, it’s a 2 second query. The problem is, it takes 30 seconds to connect to the SQL server, another 10 seconds loading the query window, and the few seconds to execute the query. Totally about a minute to find out 1 item. I do it on an almost daily basis, and in performing the operating, I get distracted from whatever project I was working on (see comment about snipping a little higher up), and I generally get quite frustrated. I know it’s not the helpdesk tech’s fault that they don’t have access to the information, it just gets under my skin that our developers aren’t fixing the issue for us.
I took about an hour of my day today, I dedicated it to resolving the above issue. Very simply web interface. So simply, all you need to do is type in the user id of the user, and hit go. This then talks to the SQL server, finds the user information, and displays it. I even went so far as to allow multiple options by using a , seperated list of values. Now the helpdesk don’t need to me try and figure out who modifed what, and when. So you see, it has been productive today, or at least in that regard.
So I decided to spent the better part of the afternoon looking at todo management. I honestly say, I suck at it. At any one time, I probably have a list longer than both my arms. So I should probably start better management of them. Especially as I’ve noticed my memory seems to slip from time to time. Better management of my time is what I need. A better outlook on what I have on my plate of things to do. So I start looking around, and somehow manage to stumble across David Seah’s blog (he’s done some work with EA, and other games over the years). He has a series called “The Printable CEO ™ Series“.
David’s series covers a handful of novel ideas on time management, project tracking, and the likes. He also has a little section on productivity. This is the section that caught my eye. Mostly because of his artical on Adult-Onset Productivity Responsibility Syndrome. Now he comments later on in the article (well in the comments) that his self-diagnosis is in jest, however some of the stuff he goes over seems to settle quiet well with myself as well. He covers little things like feeling inadequete, feeling left out, feeling behind. It’s well worth a read, along with his other stuff on productivity.
After reading his entry, I came to realize some things:
So this rambling bundle of blithering actually started off with a plan in my head, and about the 3rd line in, it went to rambling. This also goes well with other things I’ve noticed. I’m a terrible writer… I usually have some kind of plan, but about 3 lines in, the plan is gone, and I start to ramble… so on that note, I’m closing this one up, and trying again at some other point in time.
Yesterday Adobe officially announced that they will be distributing Google Toolbar. In the press release, Omid Kordestani of Adobe mentions:
Adobe customers are some of the most savvy, enthusiastic consumers of Web content, and we think they’ll love the fact that Google Toolbar will let them take the power of Google search with them anywhere on the Web
I wonder if they realzie those “savvy” will probably already have it installed, if not by themselves, I’m sure one of the many other bundled apps will probably do it. I vaguely remember seeing links for it bundled in several apps I’ve installed recently (all with the default to install). Lets just hope they [Adobe] go for a slightly better route, and don’t make it the default.
Okay, odd… I’ve just realized I’ve been on the SquirrelMail project now since about 2002, and in the 4 years I’ve been on the project, I don’t believe I’ve written a single plugin. Most unusual, however today I remedied that with a request in #squirrelmail for a new version of ip_user. I quickly knocked together ip_restrict which basically restricts users to certain IP addresses, or networks, depending on your configurations. You can download it here.
So I admit, I’m all for torturing the hell out of people that sexually assult children, but what parent would let their 14 year old daughter go to meet somebody they met online without being with them? Seriously? Any takers? No, didn’t think so… At least not the sane. But apparently somebody did. And for their incompetency as parents, they want to make somebody else pay.
After months and months of complaining about the state of the hardware in our servers, they’ve finally got around to approving new servers (bit by bit). One of the first servers I wanted to upgrade was our domain controllers. One of them has a BIOS issue that HP won’t fix (but acknowledge exists) and the other is having drive issues. The servers are both so old that:
So after finally getting approval for a new server, we got a nice shiney Dell ordered. PowerEdge 1850, mid-range, Windows 2003 R2. Our supplier is pretty good, they realized that purchasing a volume license for Windows is cheaper than purchasing a single license. And as we deal with a lot of servers, volume licensing certainly comes in handy.
