I have been known to lose track of time every once in a while, but not 3 days. I just logged onto our monitoring server after noticing some oddness in time. When logging on, the server said it was the 29th of October. That was 3 days ago. So I execute ntpdate pool.ntp.org and everything was back in sync, but this was odd. I vaguely remembered having to do that shortly after rebuilding the box. So I ran the command again, and sure enough, in a span of about 10 minutes, the server had lost about 92 seconds. Time for some research!

After googling about a bit, I stumbled across this little gem. Apparently due to the nature of how linux keeps the clock in sync, and the fact that the host server is a little busy, this was causing a massive time loss. The article contains details on how to fix it.

After running with the suggested changes for a few hours, I’ve not seen much of a time loss (0.001 of a second) over the few hours. Much better.

As Bill put it “possibly not a million dollar project but…”. He’d had an idea. Like all ideas, it was spawned by necessity.

Not sure why, but the last few weeks, I’ve been on a bit of a creativity kick. More specifically with food. Not entirely sure why. I’ve watched more Food Network in the last 2 weeks than I have since I split up with my ex, who used to watch it religiously.

Chicken

On Thursday night, I got creative, and made a chicken dish from scraps in the cupboard. I should have taken some pics. It turned out quite tasty. So much so that Stephanie wants it again. It’s really simple too. Here is what I did:

• 3 Large Chicken Breasts
• Can of condensed Mushroom Soup + 1/2 can of milk
• Rice
• Fresh Green Beans
• Nature’s Seasons “Seasoning Blend”
• Grilled Chicken Seasoning
• Dipper - Sicilian Blend

Not sure where the last one came from, but I found it in my cupboard. I’d imagine you can use any seasoning you want. To cook, simple trim off the “interesting” bits off of the chicken breast, such as any fat. Put seasoning on one side. Heat a pan, I used an iron skillet, with a small drizzle of Olive oil, and put in the chicken, seasoned side down. Now season the top side. Every few minutes, flip.

When the chicken nearly cooked, pour the mushroom soup/milk into the pan with the chicken. Around this time, start cooking the rice, and green beans. While the rice and beans are cooking, flip the chicken, and make sure it is coated in mushroom soup. The soup should start to thicken.

When rice and beans are cooked, server onto a plate, and put the chicken on top of the rice. Add some of the cooked soup from the pan. If you are using an iron skillet like I did, I found that some of the soup had thickened more at the bottom, and tasted a lot like turkey gravy.

Banana Bread

Today, I got creative again. We have a couple of banana’s left from a bunch. They were getting to the “throw away” stage where they were just a little too ripe to eat, so I decided to make banana bread. This was an easy one. I found this recipe which I based it off of.

• 3 Ripe Bananas
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/3 cup of melted butter
• 1 egg, beaten

Pre-heat oven to 350F. Add bananas, and butter into a bowl, and mix. Then add the egg, sugar, vanilla, salt and mix. When nicely mixed, add the flour. If you are using a mixing machine, rather than a spoon, add the flour a bit at a time so it doesn’t spray up. I ended up tweaking it a little as I thought the mix was a little runny, so I added a little more flour. When all suitably mixed, add to a pan. The recipe I found said to use a 4x8 loaf pan, however after I started making this, I realized I didn’t have one of those, so I used a 9x13. The recipe calls for an hour in the oven, however because I’m using a larger dish, the bread spread a lot thinner, so it ended up only being about 35 minutes. To test, simply take a fork, or a knife, and pierce the top. If the fork comes out clean, it’s done. Should look a little like this.

Enjoy.

Back home, I used to work in a bar. This bar served mostly beers, and such, so my experience with mixes is a little limited, so I’ve decided to expand my horizons by looking about. I stumbled across this pretty nifty website called “Drink Nation” that allows you to looking drinks by ingredients. This is ideal if you have a bunch of bottles of alcohol laying about (just like I do).

Take this evening for example. I’m not a coffee drinker, but Kahlua is quite nice. I decided to look up what I have and see if I can make something. I ended up stumbling on The Chocolate Raspberry. I rather enjoyed it, however the wife pulled a funny face.

Just for Patrick’s sake, I’m a long way off of kicking the bucket due to my soda consumption. Energy Fiend has a “Death by Caffeine” calculator, and by all counts, I need to drink about 200 mountain dews in one sitting to be considered fatal. I’m only halfway there ;)

A week ago, I wrote how Avaya was getting their apps blocked off with DEP. It appears they aren’t the only ones. I just went to install Track-It 6.5 on a Windows 2003 server, and got the following error:

An error occured while launching the setup.
A remote procedure call failed.

It turns out this is a known issue, and is once again, caused by DEP.

Today started a new beginning in management. At least activity management anyway. Myself, and the new network admin, have been working on ways to better handle the sudden spawn of employees. Equipment purchases are becoming a nightmare. For example, we have 5 open POs with Dell alone at the moment.

So we’re going back to Track-It. It has PO tracking, ticket and inventory management, and user management. We’re working on a process that will work something along the lines of this:

• New user is hired, and equipment requested
• We check inventory to see if the we have equipment to cover, if not, a PO is generated.
• New user “ticket” is updated to include PO information, and scheduled delivery date.
• On delivery of equipment, it’s tagged with an asset tag, and software is loaded (a clone is reimaged onto the box).
• Inventory is then moved from “unassigned” to the new user.

Having a decent process in places is going to allow us to better manage our time, and resources, and not over order, or under stock. We had plans of using v7, however the management above us are pushing back telling us we should use the software the corporate office is using (which they aren’t), and to wait until they are. This at least gives us a handle on things to start with, and we can always review things later.

I’ve been a bad blogger. I’ve not blogged in several days. Mostly because my work schedule has started somewhere around 6am, and finished somewhere around 1am, with a short break for dinner. Or, like today, on the way in to the office for a conference call (it does suck having a corporate office in a different time zone), I get 4 calls about network issues. On getting into the office, I find out two things:

• VPN tunnel to corporate office has gone offline
• DHCP server is not releasing leases

Part one of my day isn’t a huge issue, and required a minor change to force it to restart… Part two took me about an hour to fix. Ended up with reducing VPN tunnel allowances, shutting down the VPN server for about 10 minutes, rebooting the DHCP server, and causing all kinds of other fun things… Only to be kicked about an hour later with the DHCP server generating 60 “ghost” hosts.

Oh well, we had the movers in yesterday guestimating what it’d cost to move all of the equipment. It should be interesting, that’s for sure. I think we estimated about $120k in the server room alone, and that’s what I could guess a price on for items on the racks.

Also adding to the fun is the huge influx of new employees. We cannot keep equipment in store for long enough. I ordered 5 new laptops last week, that should have left us with 2 spare based on the “predicted” head count we were given. I’ve just had to add another 5 desktops, and 4 laptops to the mix. Along with this, I’m having issues convincing people we need a proper asset and ticket management system, instead of having to wait for corporate to make their minds up on what they are going to use. I’m taking matters into my own hands, and deploying some old software that we used to use to at least give us a better handle on things.

I cannot imagine a huge team of moderators sitting behind the Slashdot site. Maybe 15-20, maybe a few more. I’m a little skeptical because more recently I’ve noticed a lot of double posts, and in a lot of cases, news that appears 2-3 days after they appear elsewhere. Slashdot used to be the technies news center, but it looks (from my perspective) to be a little overloaded now. Anybody else notice too? Or is it simple an observation of my overburdened state?

Windows 2003 comes with enhanced security for application in the way of Data Execution Prevention. This causes issues with some applications. One of them is Avaya IPOffice Call Status. When attempting to start the application, the following error is generated:

EAccessViolation

Nothing else is logged, so debugging is a little difficult. After digging around a bit, I stumbled across this little gem. It appears I’m not the only one, but this certainly resolves the issue.