Tsky Blog
Hacking away at the fabrick of the system since 1980

Wii? Oui!

2010-07-30 (20:08:47)
So the fantastic missis managed to find a second hand Wii for cheap money and the little lad had saved up enough pocket money to afford to purchase it. Bonus! Currently looking at the Wii homebrew information and searching for spare SD cards in my posession. Mwuahhaha
End of week 1 of the rebuild and a lot has been done - got rather wound up today trying to troubleshoot a new server that I'd tried to put WDS on first thing this morning. I noticed the network adapter was running at like 1.5% of it's 1Gbps capacity transferring data from the old server and once I tried to configure it, the damned thing kept on bombing out trying to deploy images. Very strange, my brain was fried and my body tired after lomping half a luton van of paper and books into the buiding (& all the other life things of this week) and I resorted to stripping and cleaning servers instead and moving hardware around.
Had the WDS problem coupled with SSH not operating from the site now the new Forefront security box is in (even though I put in rules to allow SSH) Urghh.. I hate days like these when the brain refuses to operate.

Still looking into cool things to get my head stuck into. Looking at lots of areas I've never really been involved in to see if there's something else that would be of benefit to get involved in.
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Tidy server room

2010-07-29 (16:48:53)
Today was a mixture of productivity. In one respect: we managed to start rolling machines out into areas where we need to replace units; We recreated the MS Forefront server and switched from virtual to physical with fairly minimal upset (once we found where everything is located in menus nowadays!); We started creating all the domain policy settings; Finished tidying the server room and moved the last big items from one site to the other. All these things are good happy-thought items.
In other respects, there's still so much to do and even though we're working hard, my brain is so tired at the minute, I just don't feel like I'm running anywhere near as fast as I should.

Installed some programming bits on the mac to start creating some new code chunks. Got the update service running nicely on the mac to for the mac network. That's kinda cool too.
Lots of shifting and moving to do tomorrow and WDS to install on a new 2008 server and replicate the XP image over to from the old one.
Must remember to parcel up the equipment for Aliz too that has been decomissioned. Sure he'll find good use for this old hardware with his new Fuzzer.
Nice to see Matthew's server room has had a makeover like mine too. Must be the season for network administrators to modify their territory!
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Hi, I'm a Mac AND a PC.

2010-07-28 (21:33:37)
So it seemed rather a waste to have the PowerPC which is running as a mac network server doing not a lot for most of it's working life. I thought, heck, I could really make use of that as my secondary machine - so I did. Nice PowerPC and a Dell workstation on my desk now purring away with more processing than you could shake an Indian call-centre worker at...(oh, get off your high-horse that's a joke you over-P.C. nutcase).
So, yeah the server room needed a good clearout and clean so I started that today and moved the comms cabinet around so that I could hoover it out properly and try and prolongue the lifespan of the ageing HP Procurve kit. The office is just about coplete, couple of other items we'll need to make use of the works van to move, but other than that, job's a good-un!

Interested by my mate Aliz' blog entry on a 'Knowledge and Sharing' event. I like that idea. I like free knowledge sharing, it's what got me to where I am today (don't you dare say "old, fat, boring geek").
I've been increasingly worried by the ever increasing charging of education. Yeah, like it's elite to want to further your understanding - what is this? "The shape of things to come" ?
So, yeah I'm all for that and any way I can help and input into that so much the better. I could really do with getting my head into something useful and cool that would be interesting and challenging to me. It's just getting a little harder the older I get to throw the time and resources at a project with so many other important aspects in every day life. What would be great is, some rich millionairre gives me a wage to do lots of cool research, that would be good. They could provide funding to aid a few of us like-minded tech-geeks to come up with something really cool.
On that note - the UK Cyber Security Challenge. Yeah, erm... levels of "ooh" and "euuurk" are in equal measure on that one - "The UK needs some high tech geeks with an attitude to provide the next line of defence for the UK" or similar waffle on the site. The worrying thing is that A> It's obviously a drive to weed out those that are would-be crackers and hacker geeks and B> is the UK really so desperate as to PUBLICALLY announce that it's own electronic defences are effectively not good enough?
The jury is out on that one. I'm staying well clear of the challenge, though it does throw up enticing "step into my gingerbread house little child" threads of thought in my cranium. NO NO NO EVIL WITCH!

Anyhow, tomorrow is another day and one that will be filled with replicating user data and finalising server rooms and moving computer systems.
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Moving day in the world of IT

2010-07-26 (17:36:46)
The start of the summer work begins it's period of intensity and the process began with stripping two of the laboratories today and moving (in part) into our new offices. The process of transition from a coridoor to a decent-enough sized room is proving tricky so far, but hopefully things will ease off after the benching is constructed completely tomorrow.
The new ISA box (sorry, Microsoft Forefront Security... gah! Name changes for the sake of it) is almost ready to go in and we're about to reconstruct all the new servers seeing as we don't trust the virgin ones we built a couple weeks ago after some viral lergy ran rampant through the network last week. Best be on the safe side, everything was disconnected and detonated.
Couple more labs to destroy and then we'll have to wait for them to be rebuilt by external companies before we can install the new gear.
Feeling drained at the moment.
Glad Aliz managed to move all the server gear back up north.
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Fourty Eight hours until nuke from orbit...

2010-07-21 (21:33:48)
Come on you piece of junk network.. hold yourself together for another fourty eight hours. Why must you try and become infected with a nasty worm right at this point in time when we're so close to destroying you from the planet!?!? Gah!
I hate Windows
To be fair, if it wasn't so damned prevelant there wouldn't be an issue, and if they'd only PUT IN DAMN FIXES INTO THE SERVICE PACK it wouldn't get infected with viruses.
Slash, Rant, Period, Slash, Workspace, Period, Slash, TRASH.
Man almighty my brain is getting lazy. I've been trying to destress from everything and rebuild myself again the past few months but that's lead me to end up with a brain that isn't as sharp as it was. The big twenty plus ten is arriving soon and I'm starting to worry a little I think, just signs of me slowing down a little bit, not having the bounce-back factor or the sharp "outside the box" nutcase mode I used to have when trying to come up with solutions. Still have my odd moment of genius though so maybe I'm just being too critical of myself and reading too much into it at a time when I've had my head in paperwork and not big iron. I need to do more , or maybe I need to do less and find something else to do. I don't know anymore.
Crisis of Career Warning!
I woke up this morning to realise I had turned into my old boss in my first job. My number one was me, but I hadn't moved on a great deal. Ten years have passed under the bridge and I haven't learnt enough. Time to move on, therefore, and make the consious decision to be a better geek tomorrow.
Maybe I need to talk geek a bit more with some research types.
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