Everybody Staze...

Today really hasn’t been that eventful. More work on that lab that has been such a bitch. I spent most of the day by myself at work, one boss disappeared, and the other had class and took a long time to come back.

Things are really starting to come together this summer. when the summer first started, everyone felt that our job was just too difficult. We couldn’t do what we needed to do over the summer. Well, after 3 weeks, things are looking better. We should be meeting with Dale from Network Services soon, and getting parts of the network straightened out. The Print server is working well now, I managed to get the printer working well too. We just need to move the server to a faster network connection… that should come at the same time we meet with Dale. Auth. is getting better… we’ve created some accounts for testing and everything is looking good. We just need to get some more drives and probably another machine to be the file server.

For those that have been at the Jschool, we are going to try to have people’s user directory be on the logical server they are going to use. For the Video class, it’ll mount Vertov, for the Photo class, it’ll mount Rowell. Don’t ask about the names, it’s a long story.

Personally, I am doing better. I got a full nights sleep last night, and the general feeling of emptiness is fading. Still not quite sure what is up, but I’m happy that it’s leaving. Can’t say I really got to look at it much… eh, oh well.

Well, I can’t think of much else to say… ti’s almost midnight, so I better post this now before it turns to tomorrow and I miss a day.

So yeah, today so far is cool. forget about all that shit from before… I just scored big. Non-geeks or people who don’t like computers, feel free to ignore this post. Infact, for all your benifits, I’ll put it in the extended entry part.

So yeah, here at the jschool, we are auth-ing clients with a program called MacAdmin, and likewise watching print credits the same way. It’s janky, and it’s OS9.x only. Those of you who have seen our labs know we have a very high number of nice machines capable and wanting to run OSX. So, we want to switch. We’ve been trying and trying to get some sort of auth server up that would handle user directories, permissions, etc. We chose ldap, of course, but we just couldn’t get it to work. We thought, “f*cking apple… they produce something that doesn’t work”. Happened before… why not now?

Time goes by, and we want to kill one of our NT4 servers that is acting as a print/file server. So, we go to move that to an Xserve. I fiddle, nothing. Samba is hosed on the box. So I say “f*ck it” and reformat and reinstall the OS on the machine. Yesterday, I get print serving to work on the server… so now it can take over serving printers. We also are thinking of using this to offset the lab problems I was talking about in a previous post.

So today, I think to myself, “What if those ldap problems were another symptom of the OS being hosed on that server?” I go in, I create an account to test with, I set up our crashbox with the settings to auth against that server, reboot, and VIOLA!!! we authed. Oh god, I was so ready to cream myself (not really). So yeah… my major project for the summer has now started up again… which is getting the backend ready for migrating our labs to OSX. I CAN’T WAIT!!!! all that power unleashed (cliche). Plus, I think I’m going to be using the idle time of those machines for distributed.net. I’ve already regained control of the University of Oregon team, and I think I’m going to create an sojc (School of Journalism and Communication) account to take credit for the work. Way I figure it, we should be in the #2 or #3 spot (for the entire RC-72 project) easily by just using 2 of our labs. Not too shabby.

So lay back, have a beer, and cheers to ldap. Oh, and cheers to Apple for proving that generally, the stuff they make (or impliment), works. Oh, and last but not least… if all else fails… BURF (BackUp ReFormat)!

“I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it.”

I should have just walked to work… it would have been quicker. Got up late, went to get a bus that never showed, went back home, went to get next bus… completely full (due to previous bus not coming), wheelchair, arrives late at station, catch later connecting bus, get behind large group of people all walking such that I can’t get by them… *sighs* Hope the rest of the day isn’t like this.

I feel better today though. Not so hollow. Something still isn’t right, and I still can’t put my finger on it, but I do feel better. Yesterday was just bad. Between waking up in a rather empty way, the local shit lab decided to be shitty again today. It’s full of old Macs that everybody has to use for a specific class, so the lab fills up, and the network shits itself everytime the lab is full. So once again, students bitch at monitor, monitor has no idea, bitches at us, we tell them “sorry, that’s just the way it is”. Well, on the bright side, we might be able to stop-gap the issue until the money materializes to upgrade the lab with nice pretty 17-inch Flat-panel iMacs (how sexy would that be?).

Katharine Hepburn died 2 days ago. *sighs* One of the best… I’m just hoping the other 2 (since things like this seem to come in 3s) aren’t Jimmy Carter and Paul Newman. Then I think I’d have to go live in a cave for a while.

On a geek note, I’ve been spending the last few days remapping my network at home… I hope to make the switch (pun intended) next week sometime. I need to get another router going and monitoring traffic on an IP level… but that shouldn’t be difficult… not if the documentation for the software package is accurate. Little perl here, mrtg here, should be a snap (I hope).

I was hoping to get a response or two to my last post… I was hoping someone would say “yeah, I’ve had that feeling before… not sure what caused it though,” or even better, “yeah, I know the feeling exactly, this was what I think the problem was”. But alas, no such luck was to come to me. Heck, it was probably just a pipe dream… not even sure I could talk to anyone really. Those that asked I simply said “I really don’t know”. Ya, that’s helpful.

Well… as for today, I just hope it wasn’t like yesterday, and I’ll keep on going until I can’t go any more. Tonight, I’m going to go over to LIX, drink some beer, and finally bottle the Stout that’s been sitting in the Carboy for a relatively long time. Hopefully get some laughs, and cheer the f*ck up… cause this depressed shit is getting on my nerves.