Once every year or so, at work we have an “International Food Day” where people bring in a dish for whatever International cuisine they felt like making. Main or dessert doesn’t matter, as long as it’s easy to get to work and share.

In the past, I made galatoboureko and this year I wanted to make profiteroles. This shot is me whisking the creme patisserie (the filling inside the profiteroles).

Leaving for work this morning…

I bought a brand spanking new 500GB hard disk to accommodate all of the shots; since SATA disks are the way of the future and IDE (or PATA, take your pick) I opted for one. However, all my computers are IDE only. I bought a SATA-IDE adapter (which makes the new, fast hard disk run slower, but on old hardware) as well as a new wireless router.

The wireless router replaced my network switch, old wireless router and computer which routed the Internet. The unit works fantastically and worked first time; it is just as good as the old computer, except it takes less power, doesn’t have 50GB of cache and doesn’t randomly crash due to hard disk failures.

So, using the old computer, I connected the 500GB SATA disk and found I’d been sold the wrong adapter. The next day, I returned the adapter and had another one purchased from a different shop by a work colleague who was nearby. The salesperson sold him the wrong adapter, but the same type as the one I’d been sold. The next day, we both went to the shop and explained it was the wrong unit. The salesperson claimed it was the right unit and that we just didn’t know how to use it.

We returned to the office and I connected the adapter to a computer which has both SATA and IDE connectors, and has a SATA disk already working. Moving the disk from SATA to IDE it didn’t work. Big surprise! I took the whole computer back to the store and showed them it not working. They offered me another one, and when I told them it was the wrong adapter they told me they didn’t sell the right ones and gave me a refund. Back to square one.

On the way home, I took a detour to yet another computer shop and found they had the correct adapter. I bought one and spent much of Saturday morning attempting to get it to work. The computer could “see” the new hard disk but refused to begin booting after the initial device detection (known as the POST).

Sunday, I didn’t bother with all the frustration and instead went out on a photowalk.

After work Monday I returned the adapter and instead bit the bullet and bought a new motherboard, CPU and RAM which would work with the hard disk. Ironically, it was the cheapest of each I could buy, and it’s still better than my desktop. I set everything up at home and found out the power connector didn’t fit in the new type of motherboard.

It was at this point I realised that over the past week, I’d had nothing but failures in regards to computer equipment. My magical aura seemed to be failing me and instead I broke everything I touched. This is not the first time it’s happened.

Chris was kind enough to lend Justine a laptop which refused to connect to our wireless network. It worked when security was turned off but not when any type of security was enabled. The laptop, being Windows XP SP2, should have connected without issue. We swapped from a PCMCIA wireless card to an internal MiniPCI one and the problem continued.

Finally, the tide began to turn in the right direction.

I found that you can use a 20-pin connector on a 24-pin motherboard as long as the power requirements are not high (i.e. super-duper video cards). I plugged it in and finally my fancy-pants new hard disk (along with it’s new motherboard, CPU and RAM) worked! I was able to install Windows Home Server (another topic for another post) without any issue.

Next, I found a hotfix for the wireless issue I had, which enabled me to connect the new laptop at WPA2 — the highest wireless security on my router.

Yesterday at work, a computer which had — up until the day before — been working fine was emitting a high-pitched noise when the power was connected and wouldn’t turn on; the power light on the motherboard was on though, indicating power was reaching the board. Immediately I drove to a computer shop and bought a new hard disk. The salesperson there asked me what I would do if it was the motherboard and not the power supply. “Bah,” I replied, “it will be the power supply.”

And it was.

Finally, finally my mojo hath returned after a week hiatus. I know not why, but it’s good to be back.

For the past week or so, there have been a small but constant stream of ants crawling all over my desk at work. I’m constantly seeing an ant or two moving across my desk — even now as I type — and I’ll usually give them a flick or blow in their direction to fling them into something that’s on my desk.

My desk isn’t the only one with ants, and it’s not the only thing with ants in the office. The office pool cars also get ants occasionally which is not only annoying, but I’m sure incredibly dangerous. It might not sound dangerous, no, but when you are driving in traffic, and you see an ant crawling along the steering wheel, which takes your eyes off the road. Well, let’s just say it could be bad.

That’s my mini-vent for now, and I will try to get back into the habit of blogging as I will soon need to write a hell of a lot for our upcoming odyssey.

I intentionally made the level of the questions difficult for the sort of candidates I was expecting. As anticipated, no one got all of the questions correct. The better candidates managed to get around half correct and this was about the level that we wanted — too low and they were no good, too high and they probably didn’t really want this job anyway.

The reason for all of this blabbering is for me to link to the quiz for anyone interested to try. Print it out or whatever and see how you go.

Mike’s IT Quiz Exam Thing

So, over the past three weeks I have:

• Had two new IT staff start at work.
• Had ten days off from work (including weekends).
• Played an awful lot of Neverwinter Nights 2.
• Eaten at the Box Hill Kimchi Grandma with Trav and Ange.
• Eaten at Coyote Cafe with Trav and Ange.
• Gone on a day trip with Justine to Healesville Sanctuary (some photos are on Flickr).
• Spent an afternoon with Dad and Cheryl where we ate roast chicken and cake (not at the same time).
• and probably more that I forget.

I hope this satisfies everyone’s need to know what I have been doing in this apparent time of idleness. Should you wish to know more about any topic in depth, please click the “Comment on…” link and ask.

When searching for possible solutions, this patch seemed to fit all the criteria but we were surprised that the local SUS server (basically a Windows Update server) hadn’t patched our servers.

This is because the guys that ran the SUS server decided to roll out the new WSUS server without telling anyone, and thought it would be easier to leave the SUS server on but not download any updates. They also told me that it wouldn’t work with our servers, but I got it working anyway.

After reconfiguration, sure enough, 10-20 minutes later all but two of our servers had downloaded and were ready to install the patch. The virus has not appeared and the problem has not occurred since. So much for communication.

However, they only find it when the scan is run, not when the application runs. Since you can’t scan a machine every minute for viruses, it’s kind of useless. There is still very little information available on the web so it’s hard to know what we’re up against.

What I have seen though, is that it tries to connect to a website (not possible due to our network configuration) and download something, what I don’t know. Most likely a trojan of some kind which will allow a punk kid to take control of the computer for the purposes of sending out spam or taking down servers they don’t like.

So, we’re lucky that the virus isn’t actually doing anything other than being a nuisance, but it is a damned nuisance. Still, at least the past three days at work have gone by extremely quickly.

If you want to do it in the future, you can submit the files at www.webimmune.net and have them checked out there. Very useful if it’s a new thing that’s just been found.

And now I’m knackered.

It had happened on another of our servers (the “Server” service had stopped for some reason) and many of our servers had a file named u.exe in the root directory of their boot drive; this file was being run many times on some, bogging them down.

To cut a long story short, we still haven’t found the exact problem (there are numerous other files called wgeax.exe which appear in the “Temporary Internet Files” folder on each of the servers; after being deleted they reappear a while after.

For now, we are rejecting connections on our servers from any computer outside of our Division (with a couple of exceptions, which could become entry ways to it happening again, but they need to be available) to try and play it safe.

Googling for information on both of these files turns up very little (u.exe appears to either be spyware, a keylogger, or trojan, though the symptoms I’ve found don’t seem to match this at all) and to be honest I’m quite puzzled.

Due to our network setup, we can’t just have one firewall box protecting everything, and need to configure each machine. So, tomorrow we will be configuring Windows security policies to reject any unwanted connections — we’ve never done this in the past because the network has previously been well-secured by the central IT department. Obviously we can no longer rely on them.

If anyone has any information on these files I’d love to know more. It seems as though the computers are either downloading or being sent the wgeax.exe file and creating u.exe and then running it multiple times. There was a recent Internet Explorer update but installing this on one of our test machines didn’t fix the problem at all.

Wednesday morning my sore throat hurt but only for 20 minutes or so — it was OK after my shower. Except that now I had a headache and my sinuses hurt.

Thursday I decided to give up and spent the day at home. Wasn’t much of a “sick day” though, since I ended up writing a report, and taking 4 calls from people at work, as well as sending and receiving a bunch of emails. It still counts as a sick day, what a gyp.

Today I figured that I may as well go to work, and ended up feeling worse than I did yesterday. The whole day was spent in a cloudy state where I was sort of feeling half asleep, though I was wide awake. My sinuses weren’t running but I did have a headache for much of the day.

Looks like the weekend is going to be a quiet one.

I suppose the savings are there, but not really a lot is saved. With petrol we’d have to fill up every 3-5 trips whereas with LPG it’s pretty much every second trip. I drive the car in PEF mode (performance mode) since it’s so sluggish and annoying otherwise, so probably waste a heap more that way anyway.

I attached the nozzle to the car and rotated it to secure the connection. After trying 5 or 6 times to successfully connect the damned thing properly, I got a NOFLO message on the bowser’s readout. I tried another 4 or 5 times with the NOFLO message appearing each time. Each time I disconnected the nozzle the gas discharged so I know there much have been some sort of gas flow, no matter how small.

Annoyed, I wandered in and spoke to the attendant, who said “yeah they do that sometimes” and offered no more assistance. Fat lot of good you are, annoying old cow.

Of course, it worked the first time I tried after coming back outside. The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me thinks that she flicked some sort of switch in her megalomaniacal quest for glory. Either way, it worked and I was able to get out of Geelong. A lucky escape, indeed.

Today, my boss came up to me and told me I was having my interview right now and to come downstairs and meet with him and his boss. So, I was interviewed quick-smart and given the job then and there.

Huzzah.

Although I’ve been doing the job in an “acting” capacity for 18 months it’s good to have it made official. Now let my reign of terror begin!

The first strange happenstance involved a user who was unable to open a Microsoft Excel document and could open a Microsoft Word document but not print it. Printing was fine from other applications and when logged onto other computers. Reinstalling Office did not resolve the problem.

The second saw an application running all day at 99% usage causing the computer to be unusable. I did the regular thing and reinstalled the application but when logging back on the user’s local profile “blew up” (to put it nicely) and refused to use their settings. I tried many things, including logging on as the computer administrator and was unable to delete the local profile. Total and utter failure number two.

Finally, I put a standalone application I’ve written on a third computer today and it refused to run. When the application starts up it reads a configuration file and uses the settings contained within. The application was able to locate the file but when opening it fell flat on it’s face. When I renamed the file the application knew it wasn’t there and crapped out with the appropriate error message. Of course, it works perfectly fine on every other computer in the office.

Normally, I have an aura around me which causes computers to miraculously fix themselves whenever I happen to wander near; just a mere look from me will resolve even the harshest of problems. But not this week. Has my mojo vanished, now that I am no longer a nerdy bachelor?

And what do I see when I arrive early? My whole desk has been covered in some sort of multi-coloured weed. And now a picture of us has mysteriously appeared on the office screensaver (OK, so I provided that one).

A very nice gesture, though I’m not sure how exciting it is to sit around all day surrounded by co-worker spit…

I’m not certain whether it’s something that is unique to Australia, or whether it’s a popular method of warning other motorists, but it certainly seems Australian — letting others know that the police are around just so we can all get out of a fine.

It is, of course, expected that one will reciprocate when the tables are turned, though I have noticed a lot fewer cars on the road warning of this “menace” (that is, the police) in recent years.

Sure enough, a few hundred metres later, there was a speed camera waiting to catch the unwary drivers (down quite a long hill I might add — not cool).

Gotta love the Aussie “let’s all help each other” culture some times.

It comes as a surprise to me, then, that I keep misplacing my wallet. Whenever I drive, I take my wallet out of my pocket; whenever I sit down at work, I put the wallet on my desk; whenever I sit anywhere else, I usually take out my wallet and put it close by.

But I keep leaving it in the car and leaving it on the desk at work. The other morning I found it wedged in between my car’s seat and the door. I’ve left it at work overnight a number of times; once, in fact, I had to convince a security guard I hadn’t seen before (I know most of them) that I did indeed work in this building and I needed to get into get my ID to prove to him that I worked there.

But I still keep losing it.

This really irks me; although I’ve been doing the job for more than a year in an “acting” capacity, I’m not allowed to be “promoted” to the position as it has the word “manager” in the title. To be honest, what I’m doing now barely feels different to what I was doing prior, except I have to make sure a couple of other people are happy and I get to my my plans into action (though I always had a lot of say, so it’s not that much of a change).

Still, unless I want to have my pay cut (yes, technically it was “extra” money, but the net result is it would be less should I not continue in the role for whatever reason) I must jump through a number of hoops which consist of applying, waiting, hopefully being interviewed and so on. People seem convinced that I have it “in the bag”, but I don’t know all of the motives behind the advertising. They might be innocent and trying to do things “by the book”, or they might be attempting to remove me from the role, or I might just be paranoid (most likely).

The bigger difficulties occur if I don’t continue in the role; if someone else were hired what then? The role is based in Melbourne which would then make three IT people in and one in Geelong; hardly fair for the lone guy in Geelong, one would say.

I’m fairly confident, but there’s always lingering doubt of outcomes that could severely impact future goals being met.

This morning, I am the only person on the upper floor and have been for the past 25 minutes. I am waiting to see a tumbleweed roll past my desk at any minute.

Update (11:05): Someone from another building came upstairs, and put something in someone else’s intray. Then they went back downstairs without saying a word. Still no tumbleweeds in sight.

Update #2 (17:02): Two others came upstairs after lunch. One to borrow a camera and the other needed me to lock down a directory on the webserver (yay .htaccess). I managed to get quite a lot of work done due to no distractions, including figuring out why Oracle’s Instant Client drivers (version 10g) were screwing up our Oracle database (it was date-formatting issues; it always is with databases).

Every person who had one wanted another, which must say something about them (they were very good).

OK, so it may not make you super-popular for long but it will for a short while.

Phase 3: Profit!

Over the course of the next five hours we decommissioned two servers, changed the role on another, comissioned two new servers into production (one replacing one of the old ones and taking the other’s role, and a brand new one), as well as implement a new Division-wide software package, backup schedule and regime and new web server.

Completely knackered and tired, Lesly drove us back to Melbourne — we picked up Justine on the way home from her big night out — and we arrived back at around 12:00. The day was almost over, but I had to check on yet another server that appeared to have died while we were in Geelong. Luckily it didn’t take long to revive it; it had actually been shut down by someone from Geelong so there was not really a problem.

So, my work day yesterday lasted around sixteen or so hours. Definitely one of the longest ones I’ve worked in ages. We did manage to do quite a lot in five of those hours, and they were the result of a lot of planning beforehand which made things a hell of a lot easier.

Just before leaving work I noticed that and LP of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was left on the table (someone recently brought in a large pile of LPs for people to take if they wished), so I grabbed it (not that I have anything on which to play it!). Shortly after we arrived home, I was in bed and asleep.

For the past two hours I’ve been dealing with Macrovision’s “LMTOOLS” software which is designed to be a licensing server for quite a lot of software, but in this instance it’s for Autodesk’s rather well-known AutoCAD. The software interface is badly designed, doesn’t make sense, the labels are confusing and error messages are completely misleading.

I used their automated service to attempt to re-register the software — it’s not automated, you have to send an email — and rather than reply to me, it sent an email to two people, one of which doesn’t work here any more (and what if the other person had left?)!

I wasnt the first one here to attempt to get this running, either, but after two-and-a-half hours I finally, finally managed to get into AutoCAD. Oh the joy.

Actually, it was more like relief that my computer was still on the desk and not through the window. Terrible software makes Mike angry.

I had one today. While walking out of the office to get some lunch, all of a sudden I realised I had worn my slippers to work! This is probably one of the most embarrassing things I have ever done.

A moment later I looked down and sure enough, they weren’t there. My regular shoes were there. Now, a couple of times I have actually left the house wearing my slippers, but I always realise before I get to the car. What a strange experience.

The biggest difference is firstly that Wildfire uses the totally open source “Jabber” protocol (also called the XMPP Messaging protocol). There are many clients which can connect to the Jabber protocol — Miranda, Trillian, GAIM and many other clients designed specifically for Jabber.

I installed the server — which happens to be totally Java-based which means it’ll install on pretty much operating system — on one of our old, slow development servers and after a while configuring it, I managed to setup an account for myself to connect, but this method is pretty cumbersome and doesn’t really improve on our old method, which was simply using the external AIM service.

The reason I downloaded this software though, is that it supports LDAP and AD integration; this means that you can connect it to an existing network and — in many cases — it will use the already existing user accounts and groups!

I created a group on our Windows network of users I wanted to access the Wildfire server, and the added the already-existing user groups that they were in (i.e. “Finance”, “Human Resources”, etc) to the group with access to Wildfire and after a but of mucking around, all the users and the groups in which they reside is published to any user on our network the first time they connect.

What does all this mean? Any time a new user is created, we simply add them to their groups as normal, and then add them to the Wildfire-access group (if desired), then they can use their normal username and password to connect, and the first time they connect everyone else will appear in their contact list.

Another benefit is that since the server is internal, we aren’t relying on the external Internet to be working, and we have complete control on how everyone accesses it. With a server plugin, I have even been able to add “presence” views to our staff phone list, which means that there is an icon beside everyone’s name which shows whether their Instant Messaging client is offline, online or online but away. Assuming everyone uses it as they should, this is a really useful way to see if someone is available before calling.

I’ve gone on rambling for quite a while, but having enterprise-wide Instant Messaging service which requires very little extra effort to manage and maintain, is much faster and doesn’t require an external service is pretty exciting to me… which reminds me of those TXU ads.

I check, and it is indeed “funny”.

It appears that our 24,000 directories (folders to you newies) containing 136,000 files, and around 40GB of corporate data have been deleted overnight, before the two backups (one to another server on a different site, the other to tape) occurred. So, now we’re missing all our data after July 26th. Great.

It took all day from 9:00am until 4:00pm, but we managed to recover the data from 12:30pm on the 27th using the incredibly awesome Shadow Copy that comes with Windows Server 2003. We also restored the tape backup from the night of the 26th over the top, only creating files that were missing (under 200 out of 136,000 isn’t bad).

Half way through the day, I learn that today is Sysadmin Day. Amazingly convenient for such a data loss to occur!

Given that all our backups from last night were completely screwed, I’m impressed that we only lost a few hours of data (and most of a day where people couldn’t use that file share). Stressful but today has certainly gone fast. Maybe I’ll now have a lunch break!