Friday, January 07, 2005

Being Geeky is Good I got another geeky thing to do today.  DaB had a slight problem with this blog today, and he asked me for some assistance.  See, being a geek is kind of nice from time to time.  Somtimes, we get to work on a particularly interesting problem.  We did not resolve the problem, but it looks like the problem was server-side.  I like doing stuff like this from time to time.  Just don't ask me where the "ANY" key is or why the cupholder no longer retracts into the front of your PC.  1:39:52 PM    comment []  trackback []

Slow Day at Work It is a slow day at work today.  I did a bunch of stuff early in the morning, so now I am futzing around with a couple of different things today.  Here is what I have done so far: Updated one of our NetWare 6.5 SP2 servers to address a problem with Macintosh and Native File Access for those clients.  My initial answer was to use an operating system that has a native client for it, but Mac users don't like that.  (To any Mac users out there reading this, don't crucify me.  I do not want to instigate the age-old Mac vs. PC debate).  I don't know if this will fix it, but I have something else in my bag of tricks to try if the same problem occurs.  If any of you sysadmin types run Tivoli Storage Manager as your backup system, please tell me you do reporting better than we do.  Currently, we are running Perl scripts on the hosts that run it to mail off the tail of the log file that is updated on the client when the backup completes.  Today, I spent most of the time commenting out the long-running cron job to mail this off to us.  Apparently, TSM has an option that one can place in the client option dile (DSM.OPT) to run any command upon completion of the scheduled job.  It worked when I tested it, so I implemented it on our NetWare servers that run it.  For our Windows servers, it will take a bit longer to do.  It apears to work for them as well.  The folks responsible for this need to come up with something that is much nicer than making sure every machine needs some scripting language to mail off the end of a log file.  I need to fix something with KDE 3.3 on my SuSE 9.1 laptop.  Apparently, the new version of aKregator refuses to work with it, whatever I did.  Time to investigate the Linux equivalent of "DLL Hell" in the Windows world.  4:00 PM arrives in just under 2 1/2 hours.  Then, the weekend begins.  1:32:58 PM    comment []  trackback []