Friday, the light finally went on. I finally figured out how to get Yasser to join Lulu's domain. Embarrassing. But now, at least, I will be able to make some virtual servers, one for each department. Hopefully, people will accept the change once the new year begins.
I will have to go around to each user and introduce them to the change.

I will still have to maintain Lulu as a PDC, but hopefully sometime in the new year, I will learn how to phase it out.

Domo is still talking about the upgrade. I was kinda hoping it would die a natural death. Hell, if we can get it to the point where I don't have to deal with it, what the heck.

At least, my agenda of diskless workstations and virtual servers and web-based queries is being accepted. The speed is not the greatest, but if we can improve the functionality, people will live with it.

If we get Pat to come around to running the Sales Journal during the night, we can build summary reports for most of the stuff people need before they come in. I have to keep forcing the issue.

Next year, I have to do some real work. I didn't really do much this year. On to new projects!

Crap. Woke up before 4 again. As soon as my brain cleared, I knew I was never getting back to sleep. Coffee and turned on the computer.

Spent yesterday trying to figure out why qmail wasn't running on Intranet. Ended up that it was running, but was spitting out error messages anyhow. tcpserver kept dying. Eventually figured out that a parameter in the command line had capital U instead of lower case u. Which helped, but then it started spitting out a different message. Which eventually led me to /etc/inetd.conf, where there was a line enabling smtp. So it seemed that qmail was already running when tcpserver arrived on the scene. Commented out the inetd.conf line and tcpserver stopped complaining.

What pisses me off about this, is that the installation of qmail could be scripted. The whole damn thing could be in a make file. Something like "configure" could interact with the user to get the special differences of his particular system and then run those differences back into the Makefile or whatever.

Hell, even users can be added by a script. It's not impossible. Instead they had this LONG page that goes into endless details about crap nobody wants to read about. Hubris. Why do I need to read about this stuff just to get qmail running?

These guys seriously need an installation script. And what's all this crap about /package and /service? Why are they messing around with my root directory? Why are people still putting crap in a root directory? Isn't it the idea that we want read-only filesystems? Why can't they put all their stuff into one directory tree? That pisses me off.

Eventually got the thing working properly. It stopped pissing out errors. But the net was slow yesterday or something. Found out that some asshole had released SoBig version 2 and the net was getting hit with it. So my three target email accounts were taking forever. But I think it's all working now.

Later I went round the LAN and started checking IP addresses and hostnames. Trying to put some order into the thing. I'd just edited /etc/dhcp.conf and restarted the service, when the lights went. Waited for the generator to kick in. Did a few more PCs and then ended up in Pat's office. Started working on him wrt to locking users to specific workstations. He was expecting me to have a go at him about the UPSes. So we diverged into that for a while.

He left. I went back to the PCs. found that PBS's PC had never been given the "treatment". The thing was original from Dell. I tried setting it up to boot off the NIC, but ended up screwing the SYSTEM.INI file. Which causes the machine to power off. Re-booted into command line mode. Found a backup System.ini file and tried with that.

Realised that the BIOS had not been updated when the others were. Had to pull down the update from the DELL site. Eventually got the machine setup to boot off the NIC. Got fed up with how long it took to boot. Decided to run Defrag. That was a mistake. Bunch of errors on the disk. Had to go to DOS again to run Scandisk. Then back to Windows to run Defrag. The damned thing ran Scandisk again before running Defrag.

The wife arrived before it finished. Asshole has 2 Gigs of crap on the PC. Going to have to lay down the law on him in the morning. It's going to be a long day. Never finished the review of the hostnames.

On the bright side, Nessus is really good. It's given me about four weeks of work to find and fix everything that needs fixing though. Some of it will require late nights, I can tell. But say what? That's what they're paying me for.

Woke up much too early. Red figures on the clock said 3:58. Shit. Was hoping to sleep through to six o'clock.
I know what caused that. Worrying about how the upgrade will affect the users in the Accounts dept. Paranoia, the permanent disease of the system administrator. Still, it will be worth it if I can get all the databases over onto Bathsheba.
Check email. 3 messages. Doesn't this girl ever sleep? Sent reply. While I'm ironing my clothes for work, it beeps again. No, she never sleeps.
The wife is up. Make her tea. Today's the day she goes for her test. Hope to God everything's ok. Or our lives are about to take a complete turn here. Can't even think about it. Just have to take it one day at a time. One day at a time.
Get to work. Every asshole on the island manages to find himself in front of me in traffic this morning. Pick up Miss Dolly on the way down. She's going to the bank to get her cheque. God, she can hardly walk now. Poor bete. The meek will inherit the earth. Yeah, right.
Talk shit on the way down, about the kidnapping that's front page news today. Who do these idiots think they're playing with? Every sob in a jail cell must have been beaten last night. Somebody's going to talk. The police will not go easy this time.
Finally get to work. Everything's cool. At least, the users aren't bawling. It's eleven o'clock now and nobody's complained yet. Suppose all the data is in the right place.
Trying to set up a publication. Why the hell don't they just call it a transfer? Marketing again. For some unknown reason, it doesn't want to set up a publication from the converted database. What a piece of shit! It did it for the last database I brought over, but not for this one. Tried it twice. Same crap both times.
Ok, got it to work using a different option. No replication, however. Sexy, new features don't work. Back to scheduling an export. I run it manually just to get the data across.
Now why did I want to do that? Oh yeah, the collections spreadsheet. Why can't I pull data from three databases as though they were one? Maybe they've got a sexy, new feature for that?